As Above
Curriculum vitae. Oh yes.
HTML format or Word
Throw me a job, someone.
Brain children. Those that overlap the Internet.
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
The Foldover Game
Blind communal prose.
The Surrealist Link
You are the spikiest moth.
Back on the Orion Express
Interactive fiction.
Generic Nomic Data Tracker
It's a Nomic thing.
Two-Word Guestbook
Sign it.
Online cliques. Trespassers may be welcome.
Upsideclone
Stem-cell fiction.
Hate the Stupid
Because we do.
Mornington Crescent
In outer space.
In the bookpile. About to read, or currently reading, or meaning to take back to the library.
Imaginary Magnitude
Stanislaw Lem
Trilobite!
Richard Fortey
Darwin Among The Machines
George Dyson
Incidental music. Ohrwurmen or otherwise.
Wallpaper
My Life Story
Ten or Eleven Drink Clown
The Whitlams
Other weblogs. The ones I make a point of reading, at least.
AngryBlog The Blast Blue Ruin Bullet Through the Brain Digital Trickery Epiblogue Found Groke HumanLint Inside Joke Interconnected Life as it Happens LinkMachineGo Orbyn Qwertyuiop RavenBlog Sore Eyes Venusberg The View from Here Wherever You Are Yao's DOT.Home

(Updated UK Blogs)

Supporting cast. That have Web pages. In alphabetical order.
Alice Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Tyrethali Yao
Weeks beginning. All having ended.
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12 18.12 25.12 01.01 08.01 15.01 22.01 29.01 05.02 12.02 19.02 26.02 05.03 12.03 19.03 26.03 02.04 09.04 16.04 23.04 30.04 07.05 14.05 21.05 28.05 04.06 11.06 18.06 25.06 02.07 09.07 16.07 23.07 30.07 06.08
Archive search. You never know.

19.08.01
A sterling, elegant and thoroughly addictive 3D Pong game. Shockwave games are the new thief of time. [via Nik]
18.08.01
Berry Berry Nice muesli - twisted pranksterism, or had nobody in the entire company heard of beriberi? (A deficiency of a vitamin which can be found in, yes, muesli oats.)
Hugely speculative documentary about Sodom and Gomorrah on BBC2 the other night; such over-dramatic telly-science always makes entertaining deductive brain exercise. "We found three skeletons with shattered bones, so there could have been an earthquake which everyone escaped except these three." Or a single building could have fallen down by itself. Cough.

Of course, you have to go a very long way to trump Erich von Däniken:-

"Let us imagine for a moment that Sodom and Gomorrha were destroyed according to plan, i.e. deliberately, by a nuclear explosion. Perhaps - let us speculate a little further - the 'angels' simply wanted to destroy some dangerous fissionable material and at the same time to make sure of wiping out a human brood they found unpleasant."
17.08.01
Upsideclone, an earthing rod for those stubborn Clownlike discharges, finally begins to regurgitate submissions to the world. First up is one of my own; Collector's Item.
The label "non-lethal" doesn't mean quite what it seems. NATO policy says that "non-lethal weapons shall not be required to have a zero probability of causing fatalities".
So says a NewScientist article on the things. Which is fair enough from a strict probabilistic angle - a determined security officer could get a decent fatality with a a bit of string and a smiley helium balloon - but I doubt it's how the arms manufacturers are interpreting it, with the British authorities mumbling evasively about plastic-bullet ricochets in Northern Ireland, and nobody really knowing the effects of getting a Taser in the eye.

The solution from a victim viewpoint seems to be pregnancy, since any of the favoured non-lethal weapons have a fair chance of affecting your child and creating bad, bad publicity (killing adults; feh - killing children; evil). So I guess it's just a matter of time before activists start stuffing pillows up their shirts. Alright, they say we're only two or three years away from robot sentry turrets, firing rubber bullets at human-shaped heat sources with cheerful indifference to pregnancy or surrender, but we've all seen the director's cut of Aliens. We know what to do.

13.08.01
I was tinkering boldly with the security settings on my mobile phone earlier - we technical interface gurus can intuit these things, and are happy to leave manuals in bottoms of drawers in other houses - and managed to completely lock myself out of it.

It began quizzing me for acronyms I'd never even heard of before, convinced I'd stolen it, and I only managed to placate the thing after a few calls to Vodafone and plentiful faffing around ("What's your mobile's number?" "Er, I don't know, it's in my mobile's address book."). God help us when technology brings laser-toting household security robots.

Nik gripes at Friends Reunited for blanking email addresses from profiles, since they demand a fiver to use their secret messaging service for a year. Pricey for what might just be a single email, yes, but it's far more than that - how much time and effort would it take you to track these people down otherwise?

I guess there's an element of game-theory to it - that most people won't sneak a cryptic email address in, that the company will get enough payments to keep going without the fivers of a cunning few, but it still seems a bit disrespectful. Besides, you only need to find one schoolfriend who owes you more than a fiver.

More or less everything by Kevan Davis.
As Above is part of the Uncertain Organisation.


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