Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • How to write about science

    This has been doing the rounds on Twitter, but just in case you missed it: Martin Robbins shows how to write a newspaper article about science-related topics.

    In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.

    “The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”

    If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public “controversy” exists.

  • Some articles about Apple and Google Android

    Some more articles by me have made their way to the Internet. First, has Apple sold out?

    It seems that Apple can’t do anything right nowadays. It has been accused of censorship and bullying, and implicated in subcontractor suicides and heavyhanded policing. Despite creating the most impressive, most popular products in its entire history in the form of the iPad and the iPhone 4, Apple is seen by many as a company that’s losing the plot.

    And then, a piece about Apple’s telecoms rival, Google. Android is very good, but are Google’s partners messing it up? Here’s a clue: yes. Yes, they are.

    When Google announced its Nexus One phone, it threw away the rulebook. Instead of selling phones with contracts attached, it would sell them directly to us.

    Instead of letting manufacturers decide what features to include, Google would control the experience.

    Instead of letting networks stuff the phones with proprietary software, Google would keep it clean.

    Unfortunately it seems that the manufacturers and networks promptly found the rulebook and beat Google around the head with it, because the Nexus One is no more and Google’s partners are doing their very best to do what they’ve always done – that is, make mobile phones as confusing and as closed as possible.

  • Self-publishing isn’t that great

    Jane Smith’s How Publishing Really Works is worth a read at the best of times (if you’re interested in publishing, of course), but her five-part demolition of a “self-publishing is the future” screed is particularly delicious. Part five has just gone up; here are parts one, two, three and four.

    But the people that you perceive as barriers—agents, editors, publishers—are, in fact, there to help good writers get published well, and to ensure that the reading public has access to good books, professionally produced. There’s nothing stopping anyone from putting their work on the internet if they want, or from self-publishing in print or electronic format: the technology has been there for years. The real problem for writers who can’t get published isn’t that barriers to publication exist, but that their writing just isn’t good enough.

    In the comments Dan Holloway quibbles with the word “good” – he reckons “saleable” would be better, and I think he’s right; whether it’s good isn’t as important as whether it’ll sell – but you get the idea, I’m sure.

  • “People Who Do Not Like Muse are annoying”

    I think Wendy Roby enjoyed the gig.

  • The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench

    …and Google’s the latest tech firm to jump into it. A wee op/ed piece by me:

    One of my favourite TV programmes was Casualty. I didn’t like it for the acting, though. I liked it because of the hilariously protracted accidents in each episode. “I’ll just hammer this nail in with an UNEXPLODED BOMB!” this week’s trolley fodder would announce, with the inevitable explosion following shortly afterwards.

    “I think I’ll leave this really sharp kitchen knife sticking out of the steering wheel as I drink and drive!” another would say. “I think I’ll attempt to combine the worlds of TV and computers!” a third would offer.

    Oops. That last one wasn’t Casualty. That was Google.

    Naturally, writing about the television business means I’m going to take the opportunity to quote Hunter S Thomson properly:

    The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

  • Waterhouse on Newspaper Style is out again

    Great news for journalists and anyone else interested in newspapers and language: Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, by the late Keith Waterhouse, is back in print.

    This is a typical Waterhouse quote:

    When Sam Goldwyn advised that cliches should be avoided like the plague, he forgot that the plague, by its very nature, is almost impossible to avoid. That is what gave the Black Death such a bad name.

  • Simon Heffer on exaggeration

    If you care about language you might like this: Simon Heffer on the dangers of exaggerated language.

    If somebody is devastated because his football team has lost a match, how does he feel when he gets home and finds his wife and children have been killed in a fire? If a woman is brave because of her reaction to the way in which her philandering husband embarrasses her publicly, how are we to describe her if she endures with courage and fortitude a horrible and potentially fatal illness? How can the ordeal of one experience compare with that of the other?

  • Your iPhone 3G will probably work properly two days from now

    Apple’s iOS update, due on 8 September, will apparently fix the problem that made iOS 4 unusable on many iPhone 3G devices.

    Apparently.

  • A couple of things about Apple products

    As you may have noticed, Apple unveiled some new goodies yesterday. As you may not have noticed, I’ve written about two of them.

    First up, FaceTime video calling in the iPod touch:

    The big question is whether people want to see one another on the phone. I think the older generation hate the idea. I certainly do, but that’s because I have what’s best described as a face for radio and some really ugly friends.

    And then, the sad tale of the UK Apple TV.

    Badly dubbed adverts really annoy me. Faintly sinister firms make an advert for shoes or yoghurts or incomprehensible children’s toys in Germany, and instead of filming a new version for the UK they just do a half-arsed bit of dubbing that doesn’t even attempt to match the mouths to the sounds they’re supposed to be making. “Oh, who cares,” the advertisers think. “It’s only the UK.”

    The Apple TV is a bit like that.

  • Windows 95’s fifteenth anniversary

    Doesn’t time fly? As you may recall, Windows 95 was a good operating system surrounded by some bad behaviour.

    In 1998 consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote a devastating critique that accused Microsoft of “suffocating” the PC industry and argued that “the victims of Microsoft’s monopolistic activities aren’t just the companies that go belly-up; they are the consumers who pay high prices to use mediocre and unreliable products.”

    It’s bleakly amusing to note that when the (then) Microsoft-owned Slate magazine responded to Nader, it argued that “in the browser wars, Microsoft faces a formidable array of opponents–Sun and Oracle, to name just two–and, after two years, it still lags behind Netscape even though IE generally gets better reviews than Navigator.”