Today I took receipt of a new passport. I will get my next one in ten years. I’ll be 47.
Ten years ago, I had yet to get my first writing job. I had just finished a six-month postgraduate course in periodical journalism at the London College Of Printing, during which I stood in front of my class and said I wanted to write for Edge.
This is Bradbury Landing in Gale crater, where Curiosity touched down.
Isn’t it one of the most incredible pictures you’ve ever seen? Tracks that start out of nowhere; something fully formed simply landing here, having had no connection with this place - this planet - in any sense ever before. Something extraterrestrial, and made by us.
One morning last September, my dad found my grandma lying semi-conscious in a pool of her own blood in the downstairs hallway of her home. She’d fallen the previous night, perhaps having tripped over her elderly dog, and hit her head on a door frame. For my parents, it was the final straw. She’d been living alone with dementia - fiercely independently - for nearly ten years. Clearly, she couldn’t any more.
Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts.
Last month, documentary-making colossus Errol Morris wrote a piece on the New York Times site called Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist. About the idea of a meteor hitting Earth, it featured at its end a questionnaire which seemed to ask readers whether they think it’s true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”. I responded, too, faintly hoping, I suppose, that I might end up on an Errol Morris documentary about meteors and paranoia. Because I love meteors and paranoia.
David Hepworth on comments and web communities:
You only have to look at the comments on the Guardian site to see how the ownership of an internet connection has turned us into a nation of preening know-alls dispensing redundant advice at the scene of traffic accidents.
Long-time programmer Bruce Lawson on why he hates computers, but loves what you can do on them.
I think of non-GUI programs in the same way as I do about going camping. Some people love sleeping in a tent and getting up in the night to walk in the rain to poo in a hole they’ve dug behind a tree. Not me. I spend a considerable portion of my income on a house with a central heating system and three flushing toilets, so there’s no bloody way I’m going camping. You may think it a badge of honour that you can do “sudo dpkg -i –force-all cupswrapperHL2270DW-2.0.4-2a.i386.deb” from memory. I think you’re burying your turds with a trowel in a thunderstorm.
It takes a airline with Japanese social sensitivities to turn the externality of knee reclines (you recline, the person sitting behind you has less leg-room) into an internality. Don’t shit where you sleep.
Jan Chipchase on the Japanese airliner with seats that don’t recline back onto the passenger behind you. Rather, reclining your seat reduces your own legroom. This is a far more civilised seating design indeed.
Seems Vernal, Utah, is something of a centre for indeterminate saurians on highways, as this photo series by excellent dino-blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs shows.
Like most sauropods you see on the side of the road, the sculptor likely had no specific taxon in mind. Just a long neck, long tail, and some pillar legs, and you’ve got what springs to 90% of folks’ minds when they hear the word “dinosaur.”
This is an account of some wonderfully subtle 1950s and 60s public housing in Norfolk:
Tayler and Green, two architects who uprooted themselves from the demi-monde of the Architectural Association and London in the late 1940’s and settled in Lowestoft of all places. From here, their practice developed an impressively consistent body of work, some 700 houses for a single client - Loddon District Council. These houses, unremarkable in some ways, still stand as an exemplary way to build sensitively and well in the countryside. What’s more they represent an itinerant strain of modernism that embraced decoration and ornamentation as well as an interest in everyday life. Built largely in the 1950’s and 1960’s you could call them an architectural equivalent of the kitchen sink realism prevalent at the time in British films and literature.
