Adding velcro to the back of an iPad and stick it anywhere! Although, I can’t personally imagine placing that much trust in velcro when it comes to my own iPad.
Alexander's blog
I'm Alexander Trafford, and I blog here. I have a website at alexander.io and post titbits at traff.me.
Steve Jobs
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We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.
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Venez comme vous êtes
A rough translation (feel free to email me to correct it):
“Yes, I was thinking of you, I’m looking at the class photo, and I miss you,”
“I have to go,” he says as his father approaches with their meal.
Dad asks, “Is that your class photo?”
“I looked just like you when I was your age,” says nostalgic papa, “I did quite well with the girls.”
…
“It’s too bad there are only boys in your class… You have all the luck.”
Thanks to Carnal Nation.
A fantastically enjoyable article, looking into the work of several specialist professionals from various fields and how it is uncovering the mysterious realm of female sexual desire.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I have recently become increasingly disillusioned with Facebook.
Why Facebook is becoming useless for me
There are two key factors behind the decreasing value which I can find in Facebook. Firstly - and much more easily solved - is the seemingly endless barrage of pointless information from various applications on the Facebook ‘platform’. These - despite my best effort to prevent them - alert me to every detail of various people’s fictional farms, zoos, lemonade stand, and racist views.
Secondly, and potentially more troublingly, is the sheer amount of total idiocy that Facebook shows me on a daily basis. Its’ the misspellings, thoughtless comments, the aforementioned bigoted and moronic views, and awful photographs of various horrific escapades.
I believe this itself is down to two factors. Firstly, people believe that they needn’t be careful about what they write - or how they write it - because “it’s a website”, and it isn’t thought to matter. I disagree, but this isn’t an important point, for now at least.
Secondly; in general, people tend to take the view that Facebook is ‘private’. I want address this in another post, but in short: due to their expectation of privacy, people feel as if they aren’t really “publishing” any more than sharing with a select group of ‘friends’.
Are the people the problem?
However, whatever reasoning may lie behind this kind of behaviour, it certainly isn’t everybody. As I said, the solution to this kind of content problem on Facebook isn’t as easy as blanket-blocking particular applications - but it’s similar.
I’ve always had a fairly modest ‘friend count’ on Facebook, my most ever hovering around 330 or so, and I imagine this solution would be less tenable for those with much larger numbers of contacts. But for me, the solution I tried was to delete a fair number of my own contacts - about 70 in all - based on a short list of practical criteria. One of these criterion: do they frequently post things of the nature which I’ve described above?
The result
This method - although perhaps not ideal for everybody - has certainly proved effective for me. Of course it hasn’t eliminated every stupid post that crops up on Facebook, but it has meant that I can actually use my newsfeed again, and not feel irritated and upset with people in general every time I use Facebook.
ReclaimPrivacy is a bookmarklet that will scan your Facebook account for privacy settings that may be unexpectedly set to public, and inform you of specifically which settings these may be. Check your account at ReclaimPrivacy.org.
Sam Harris, ‘The End of Faith’ - The Nature of Belief, p67
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The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith - perfect faith, as it turns out - and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
”
Sam Harris, ‘The End Of Faith’.
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We must finally realise the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
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Another little peak at what I’m up to with data visualisations of the Sunday Times Rich List: visualising wealth with Ford Fiestas!
