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  1. Aw I forgot that it was Eurovision tonight so instead spent the evening recording me reading weird WP pages aloud for WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. Hard to pick a favourite quote but “Bacon, with the help of a Friar Bungy or Bungay was said to have spent seven years building one of the devices in order to discover whether it would be possible to render Britain impregnable by ringing it with a wall of brass” was particularly fun.

  3. “Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I,
    To mourn, murmur and repine,
    To see the wicked placed on high,
    In pride and robes of honour shine.

    But oh their end, their dreadful end,
    Thy sanctuary taught me so,
    On slippery rocks I see them stand,
    And fiery billows roll below.”

    — Isaac Watts, 1719, still relevant 300 years later :/

    It’s number 183 in the 1991 Sacred Harp, if you feel like singing it to suitably epic music.

  6. From Pokemon and Star Wars JSON APIs: “There are hundreds of websites about Pokémon but none of the data they had was consumable through an API.” Problem has never been lack of APIs but discrepancy between human-readable hypertext pages and otherwise hidden machine-readable data. Rethink your assumptions!

  7. "…yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts ran into me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing"

    - Gerrard Winstanley, "a Watch-Word to the City of London", 1649

  8. “[Whilst] rational actor models are, in themselves, morally blameless… …the use of such models to change the world is not morally neutral. Rational-actor models are metaphorical human constructions humanly imposed. They are not a feature of the world in itself. They can be used insightfully or not, fruitfully or not. How we choose to use them is not a “rational choice” as defined in the models. Not to understand this is truly irrational” — Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

  13. Favourite quote from Shaping Things by @bruces so far:

    “What is a “brand”? It’s a mark seared into the surface of something. Is that the best you can do in the way of establishing a relationship between us?”

  14. EEEEVIL:

    “Council can now steal instruments from . civil disobedience campaign begins” [1] — @indyrikki via Jovian Salak

    As reported by: Ham&High News Change org

    Threatening to fine someone £1000 is bad enough, but for musicians, confiscating instruments is much more than theft — an instrument is an extremely personal extension of your body.

    Of course, no-one wants excessive noise pollution, but charging buskers a yearly fee and holding legal threats above them is going to achieve the exact opposite goal, by putting acoustically playing children and amateurs off, leaving more room for the serious buskers - the ones who can make troublesome noises with all their amps and equipment.

    As a long-time busker in the UK I’ve always found the police to be supportive and helpful (once memorably dragging a drunkard off me at Christmas late night shopping). Hopefully the police in Camden are equally reasonable and won’t strut around intimidating children.

  19. “…disruptive technologies don’t start out better than established technologies, as would seem intuitive, they start out worse. But for all their faults in comparison with entrenched, established competitors, there’s something radically different that opens whole new opportunities, and makes them disruptive.”

    — para-meta-quoted from Not Real Programming

    I’m aware the d-word is taboo, but I can’t help but think this perfectly describes and , as well as the reactions many people have to them.