1. : the music and sound effects heard in The Clangers are audible interpretations of how the Clangers themselves perceive their surroundings — similar to the way bat detectors turn sonar into human-audible tones.

  2. John Nye: @BarnabyWalters last time I used mozilla it was poor experience (2011), but validation of extensions was a manual process by someone.

    .@john_nye all the stores I’ve submitted extensions to do manual reviews. Mozilla:

    • gives two review options (fast and slow),
    • runs loads of automated tests in a web interface to suggest things to fix,
    • gives you the choice of which review to use, and creates a public URL from which the extension can be installed while the review’s in process

    Safari and Opera have fairly basic, boring forms for uploading stuff, and are extremely picky and unclear about exact image sizes for screenshots and icons. There’s also no “review in progress” page, but otherwise acceptable.

    Obviously I’ve not been able to actually submit an extension to the Chrome store, but I’d hope that it’s a damned good experience for $5. If they are doing automatic reviews, then the price becomes even more counter-intuitve. If they’ve automated it, surely it’s cheaper and quicker for them?

  3. Jack Way: @BarnabyWalters I think it's to authenticate devs and reduce spam.

    .Jack Way no other extension store (mozilla, apple, opera) demands payment, or requires it for verification. Also, Mozilla offers a far superior extension upload experience. Google has no excuse :)

  4. Physics of emotions — some convert easily between each other (e.g. frustration is easy to turn into positive creative energy), others are much harder to change and require significant outside energy (e.g. jadedness)

    Are those even emotions, in the strictest sense? More thought patterns or alignments?

  5. Charles Stanhope: @BarnabyWalters Is Facebook's behavior different from Twitter's t.co in this regard? (I don't use Facebook, so genuinely curious.)

    @cstanhope Twitter do indeed shorten all links, they’re just a little bit more honest about it. But I’m certainly going to make the extension unshorten them all too (there’s enough info in the HTML do to that without extra HTTP requests).

  6. Facebook use shady javascript to replace legit-looking link URLs with their own tracking endpoint.

    I made a browser extension which removes this: facebook-anticlickjack.

    It uses javascript to remove javascript from what should just be HTML. I call it “aggressive degredation”.

  7. What good fiction is available about dealing with emergent systems and behaviour?

    Most of our culture teaches us to look at figureheads and individuals — cut off the villain’s head and the story ends happily. But life is too complex to be reasoned about like this.

    Off the top of my head, the only non scifi work of fiction I can think of which talks about this is Grapes of Wrath. Any others spring to mind?

  8. Found this interesting piece of from my GCSE Geography project whilst digging through site archives whilst trying to fix some dead URLs:

    Apart from the obvious flaw of hard-to-read text, and the more subtle distortion of the results due to them being overlaid onto a contoured 3D landscape, it’s actually not that bad.