Michelin’s Tweel – the future of transport? Quite possibly…
In the future, Tweel may reinvent the way that vehicles move. Checking tyre pressure, fixing flats, highway blow-outs and balancing between traction and comfort could all fade into memory.
[Via BoingBoing]
Eels are gearing up for the release of their new album, and there’s a new biography on the site. As ever, it includes some gems:
Of course, we’re talking about an artist who, when asked to give a quote for the dust jacket to Kurt Cobain’s posthumously published diaries submitted this quote: “Please don’t do this to me after I kill myself.” (The publishers opted not to use the quote.)
Expect constant fanboy slavering from me until the album finally gets released in April :-)
The Chris Morris / Charlie Brooker collaboration Nathan Barley comes to Channel 4 on the 11th February, and its web site gives you a flavour of what you can expect. Here’s hoping the programme isn’t crap…
And you thought a transaction fee of £1.75 was bad; The Sunday Times has found one machine charging a ridiculous £10 for the privilege of accessing your own money. The article’s worth reading: apparently the cost of transactions is around 31p, so even a £1.75 charge is taking the piss.
The article also demonstrates the scale of the problem:
Tintagel in Cornwall, for example, used to have branches of Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest and a van containing a mobile HSBC cashpoint, which made regular visits. NatWest and Barclays have closed, Lloyds is open just four hours a week and has no cash machine, and the HSBC mobile unit paid its last visit on Friday. All five machines available in Tintagel and the villages of Boscastle and Delabole charge fees.
“I refuse on principle to pay £1.50 to withdraw my own money,” said Myrna Lester, an artist who lives in Boscastle and says she faces a 34-mile round trip to Wadebridge to use a free machine.
Not only remote areas are suffering. In Speke, a poor suburb of south Liverpool, the last bank branch closed in 1998. There are no free cash machines but seven charging ones in and around the shopping parade.
Mark at BoingBoing is rapidly becoming my favourite blogger. Fresh from the earlier triumph of shocked curtain-twitchers, he now brings us this little beauty:
Supper with the Stars is a UK-based company that lets you book former celebrities to come to your house and have a little chat… The only other celeb I recognize is Limahl, lead singer from Kajagoogoo (“Too shy”). “Limahl will talk extensively about his experiences in the music industry and perform many of hit hits in a karaoke style. He will also take part in after dinner party games.”
The list of available stars is brilliant: Syd Little, Keith Harris (it’s not clear whether Orville is part of the deal or needs to be negotiated separately), Schnorbitz (he’d eat you!) and even Brotherhood of Man. Best of all, the site tells you which celebrity (their term, not mine) “suffers from a deadly nut allergy” or can’t stand the thought of eating meat.
The terms and conditions state: “Any endeavour to coax a guest into performing when they do not wish to do so will be considered a breach of contract and the guest may leave immediately with full payment.” And my mental image is complete: a pissed-off Limahl in my front room, trying to escape, while I shout “Sing, fat boy! Sing!” and pelt him with raw meat. Money can’t buy that sort of thing – but now, it can!
According to this BBC news report, anyway.
A forensic psychologist spoke about the dangers of online journals, or blogs, and pictures posted directly online.
Rachel O’Connell said adults could use weblogs to learn about children.
Dr O’Connell said that the emergence of moblogs – mobile weblogs – allowed even faster transfer of pictures to the internet using mobile telephones with cameras.
She said: “This is just a paedophile’s dream because you have children uploading pictures, giving out details of their everyday life because it’s an online journal.”
The psychologist, whose research and work with police and other agencies has included posing as a child on internet newsgroups, said predatory adults could use an RSS feeder program – a syndication tool – to be instantly e-mailed any picture when it was added to a blogging site.
Well yes, they *could*. But will they, or is this yet another example of hysteria? This time last year, we were worried about kiddie-fiddlers with camera phones, and a number of places banned cameraphones altogether. As I wrote at the time:
The issue of child protection is behind many cameraphone bans. In December, the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA) demanded a ban on such phones in all Scottish schools. General secretary David Eaglesham told the BBC: “There is a huge risk to the personal safety of pupils and staff and to the human rights of the individual to privacy… new technology would allow a simple photograph to be broadcast to a wide range of malevolent users and we cannot tolerate this. Enough recent high profile cases have shown just how great this risk is.”
At the time of writing there hadn’t been a single high-profile case involving cameraphones; a year on, there still hasn’t been one (if you know different, please let me know). I’m also amused that the SSTA is worried about the “human rights of the individual to privacy” – have you seen the number of CCTV cameras dotted around schools these days?
While there’s invariably a small nugget of truth behind media scare stories – for example, there are dodgy voyeuristic sites of the “upskirt” variety that rely on cameraphone images – there’s a bigger proportion of bullshit. We were told that phones were being used for “digital shoplifting”, photographing entire magazines in newsagents so they could be read later on a computer screen; at the time, the technology wasn’t capable of such things. Don’t believe me? Try photographing a page from a magazine with a standard cameraphone. I bet the results are illegible. Same with other big scares. Cameraphones being used for credit card fraud? Bollocks!
So: is it possible that kiddie fiddlers might read weblogs? Sure. It’s also possible that kiddie fiddlers might take to the skies in hangliders or jet-packs, or that they might build giant drilling machines that enable them to burst through playground tarmac without warning. But it isn’t very likely.
Of course, we need to protect children – but we also need to stop working ourselves into a frenzy about things that may or may not be possible at a time when there are very real problems to address. Despite the media portrayal of child abusers as mysterious strangers hanging around playgrounds, the overwhelming majority of child abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the victim – usually a relative or step-parent. According to the Scottish Office’s figures for 1997 and 1998, 70% of child protection cases involved the child’s natural parent(s) and nobody else; a further one-sixth of cases involved a step-parent. Children’s charities report that in 95% of cases, the abuse is by a relative, family friend or other adult known and trusted by the child.
Let’s do something about the real monsters before we start inventing more.
It’s posts such as this BoingBoing story that make the internet worthwhile. Mark Frauenfelder points to two stories where people were shocked to their very foundations – a couple who recieved a porn movie by accident, and a couple who saw a neighbour fiddling with himself. In the first case:
“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.
“The film became progressively more graphic, there was no plot to it, it was just sex.”
My god – porn film in “no plot” shocker!
But it’s the second story that made me spit out my coffee:
The pair watched Clark for up to 15 minutes from the privacy of their darkened bedroom…they took care to avoid being seen by Clark, peering out from underneath their partially lowered blinds. Later, the woman’s husband fetched a pair of binoculars and a telescope. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to videotape Clark in action, says the judgment.
I’m in tears here :-)
As if Wikipedia wasn’t useful enough, there’s a new offshoot of the technology: Wikipes.
Wikipes is a community-contributed recipe database. In other words, we allow anyone to contribute recipes. Our feeling is that this will create a more diverse collection of unique and delicious recipes and in the long run you’ll be able to choose from a vast archive of drinks, appetizers, main dishes, desserts; the possibilities are endless!
This post from MetaFilter describes an awful situation better than I can:
Yesterday in Los Angeles a suicidal local man stabbed himself in the chest, slit his wrists, and drove his car up onto train tracks, lost his nerve and hopped out at the last minute, to watch in anguish as not one but two trains collided with his car and with each other, killing 11 people (so far) and injuring almost 200 others.
The first few replies in the MetaFilter thread make some interesting – and scary – points.
I received an automated call a few minutes ago from Palm Travel – despite being on the Telephone Preference Service, which means I shouldn’t get marketing calls – and they had some good news for me. They’ve been trying to get hold of me for ages, because someone in my household entered a prize draw last year, and won! So I’ve definitely got a holiday in Florida or £5K in cash. Just call this number!
Of course, it’s a load of crap; the number is an 0906 number, which means it’s likely to cost around £1.50 per minute and last for some time. It’s a particularly unpleasant stunt because people obviously *do* call the premium rate numbers; if they didn’t, nobody would bother with the scams.
The thing is, you can fight back. The telecoms watchdogs can and do fine companies that do this kind of stuff, and you can click here to file a complaint online. Firms have been fined tens of thousands of pounds for phone spam, so it’s definitely worth doing.
The next time you get one of these calls, take a note of the company name and the number it wants you to call, then follow the above link to grass them up. If you can find out more with a quick Google then by all means do so – the more information you can provide, the easier the investigation will be; then, if you’re a member of the Telephone Preference Service, you can grass them up again, which could lead to a further £5,000 fine.
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