Writing is often described as a craft, and usually in counterposition to art. In the Romantic Era, art was seen as the precinct of special, sensitive people, who were inspired by a Muse. Craft, on the other hand, involved practice, tradition, and the perfection of skills. Today, professional writers are almost a single mind—writing is a craft, not an art.
That woudn’t be me though. Oh no, I’m going in by the Females entrance.
I’m at Victoria Baths and I forgot to bring my camera.
New nanosensor sniffs bombs, one molecule at a time (Wired UK)
Imagine a piece of metal 30,000 times thinner than one of the hairs on your head. Mixed with a little protein from bee venom, that microscopic filament becomes the most powerful explosives-detection system in history, able to detect a single molecule of dangerous chemicals.
Now imagine having that in an airport. No need for taking a pornographic photograph or having your genitals massaged by the Transportation Security Agency. And a nanotechnology specialist may have hastened that happy day for homeland security.
Why ‘green’ doesn’t have to mean expensive (Wired UK)
“Greener” products don’t have to be more expensive for consumers, according to industrial designer Yves Béhar.
At a meeting this week with Wired.co.uk, he explained that there is a big misconception that it costs more to create products with a lower carbon footprint. He says: “We have been told that doing things in a green way will cost more. This doesn’t work. People don’t want to pay more for something just because it’s green.”
The Vidocq Society: Solving Murders Over Lunch : NPR
The Vidocq Society sounds like something straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel.
Once a month, the members of the 20-year-old club — mostly detectives and forensic experts — meet at an old Victorian dining room in the middle of Philadelphia to eat lunch and solve crimes that have perplexed investigators for decades.
That was my thought just before going to bed last night. An odd one, I know, but somehow my brain had worked its way around to packaging.
I seem to remember that wooden crates of a standardised size, generically or accurately- my memory’s a little fuzzy- described as “tea crates”, used to be the default packaging medium for moves. Nowadays there are any number of plastic boxes or origami cardboard constructions available and it seems the old fashioned tea crate has been consigned to history. They have been relegated to collectors’ items and subjects of nostalgia tinged blog posts.
(A little digging revealed that you can still buy “tea crates“, but these are not the old fashioned, recycled kind. Rather, they are modern plywood boxes with a similar construction to their namesakes.)
dailycheapreads.co.uk does exactly what it says in its url and points people to cheap, and occasionally free, ebooks. This month they’re highlighting British indie authors, and today it’s my turn. Bookmark the site and buy some of the bargains from other authors as they come up (because you’ve all bought all my books by now, haven’t you).
I wonder if Scene of Crime officers have all been lobbying to have their job titles redefined? And which Who song would be the theme tune to CSI Withington?
Recent Immobilise News & Press :: Immobilise
Student cyclists across Greater Manchester are being urged to saddle up and beat the bike thieves by taking advantage of free bike security schemes, following the theft of more than 5,200 pedal bikes last year.
Between 1 April 2010 and 31 March 2011, 5,265 bikes were stolen from across Greater Manchester – a nine per cent increase compared to the same period in the previous year.
Victoria Advocate | Edna elementary student builds custom hot rods
Wearing a gray mechanic-style jumpsuit with the nickname “Lulu” embroidered on the lapel, 9-year-old Emma Ganem lowered an orange welding helmet over her small freckled face and fired up a blow torch.
Blue sparks flew behind her red ponytail as she welded the frame of a rusted 1931 Ford sedan parked inside her father’s garage.
I’ve been wanting to make a single speed bike for a while. So when a batch of old school road bikes came in I grabbed one to experiment on.
Love the old school graphics. I’ll either keep them or reproduce them.
Being lazy, I took the one nearest the gate, which may be too small for me. Nonetheless, I set about stripping the components.
After stripping the bike I washed it and cleaned the head tube and bottom bracket before repacking them with copious grease. The bits which were staying on the bike then went back on.
The new handle bar is one of the parts box bits which this project uses. For proper hipster cred it shouldn’t be tapered, ought to be narrower and needs to be anodised in some pretty colour. But I’m not a hipster, so it’s okay.
Apart from a new chain, the only bought component I plan to use on this build is a single speed conversion kit. I got mine from a company called Superstar Components, who have a competitively priced shop on eBay. I need to get myself a torque wrench so that the everything goes together properly. Once I have that the bike should go together quickly.
Last year I drew a comic about the oil spill in which Michael Bay spun an over-the-top worst-case disaster scenario. One of the panels was actually slightly more plausible than the others. It was based on a real disaster which almost happened in 1973, and in two weeks it may come closer to happening than ever before.
Robots develop altruism, just as biology predicts (Wired UK)
Robots in a Swiss laboratory have evolved to help each other, just as predicted by a classic analysis of how self-sacrifice might emerge in the biological world.
“Over hundreds of generations…we show that Hamilton’s rule always accurately predicts the minimum relatedness necessary for altruism to evolve,” wrote researchers led by evolutionary biologist
Magnetic ‘Throwbot’ joins the fight against piracy (Wired UK)
The dumbbell-sized bot can be fired from a cannon in five seconds, and can survive throws of 120 feet. Then it uses its magnetic wheels to scale up a (metallic) ship’s hull, before leaping on deck.
Everything you need to know about bacon.
Until well into the sixteenth century, bacon or bacoun was a Middle English term used to refer to all pork in general. The term bacon comes from various Germanic and French dialects. It derives from the French bako, Common Germanic bakkon and Old Teutonic backe, all of which refer to the back. There are breeds of pigs particularly grown for bacon, notably the Yorkshire and Tamworth.
The phrase “bring home the bacon” comes from the 12th century when a church in Dunmow, England offered a side of bacon to any man who could swear before God and the congregation that he had not fought or quarreled with his wife for a year and a day. Any man that could “bring home the bacon” was highly respected in his community.
What the Secret Bin Laden Raid Helo Might Look Like | Defense Tech
Here you have it; the artists’ renderings of what the secret helicopter that crased during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden might look like have begun to surface. Since the only photos of the beast to emerge so far show only the tail section, the drawings are pretty much based on imagination and educated guesswork, but they’re still entertaining.
Havocscope is the authoritative information platform tracking the global black market. Utilizing publicly available sources, Havocscope displays credible and relevant data regarding illicit activities to users worldwide.
All data listed within Havocscope has been collected from publicly available sources such as newspapers, government reports and academic journals. Every single data point listed within Havocscope is listed with the source. When aggregate totals are displayed, each figure that is calculated is included with the original source.
This site contains two fully searchable databases.
The Information Database contains information and documentation from forty nine countries, including laws and policies, reports and publications, archival records and resources, current cases and relevant websites.
The Object Database contains details of over 25,000 objects of all kinds – paintings, drawings, antiquities, Judaica, etc – looted, missing and/or identified from over fifteen countries.
Diplomats and art smuggling / Safe havens / articles / Magazine / Home – Broker
The abuse of the diplomatic pouch by diplomats, UN peacekeepers, other foreign soldiers and aid workers to smuggle of art and antiquities is a public secret, 1 officially denied by most authorities but unofficially admitted by others. 2 Because of their diplomatic status, smuggling is extremely difficult to prove. To what extent can this claim be substantiated?
Patrick O’Keefe and Lyndell Prott of the Australian National University argue that the involvement of diplomats in the illicit art trade is ‘of considerable concern’. 3 Enamul Haque, director of the International Centre for the Study of Bengal Art and retired director of the Bangladesh National Museum, agrees. ‘Yes, diplomats cause a lot of damage and abuse the diplomatic pouch’. 4 As an example, Haque describes a case in the 1970s, when an American doctor abused his position as a foreigner to smuggle many ancient objects out of Bangladesh, which he then sold to museums and private collectors in the United States. A Japanese and an Italian diplomat had also purchased and exported a number of stone statues.
BBC News | ARTS | Art smuggler reveals trade secrets
An art smuggler has told a jury how he smuggled a $1m (£700,000) sculpture out of Egypt, and allegedly sold it on to a New York art dealer.
Jonathan Tokeley-Parry said he smuggled the sculpture of the head of Amenhotep III – who died in 1375 BC – out of Egypt by dipping it in plastic and painting it black to make it look like a cheap tourist souvenir.
Surveillance, Not Waterboarding, Led to bin Laden | Danger Room | Wired.com
Smashwords books are coming to an app store near you.
Today we announced an agreement with ScrollMotion that will transform over 33,000 Smashwords Premium Catalog ebooks into individual mobile apps for distribution to the largest app marketplaces for smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices.
The relationship will gain Smashwords authors and publishers free entry into the app marketplaces for Apple, Android, Windows Phone 7 and WebOS.
SCALE MODEL NEWS: WUNDERLAND AIRPORT OPENS IN HAMBURG, GERMANY
The world’s largest model airport opened yesterday at the Miniatur Wunderland model rail attraction in Hamburg, Germany. Miniatur Wunderland is the world’s largest H0 scale model rail landscape, and its airport has finally opened to operations, after six years of design and construction.
So, this is the timeline for the characters The Doctor and River Song as seen in Doctor Who. A couple experiencing their relationship backwards. The Doctor meets Professor River Song is flummoxed by her knowledge of him, that he has his sonic screwdriver in the future and that she dies. The next time he meets her, she is only Doctor River Song, and so on. Something like this.
Scooterotica – Lambretta Vespa Spares & Tuning P200 T5 TS1 RB22 GP200 – Home Page
Welcome to the Scooterotica Forum, Tuning Pages, Scooter Garage and Dyno Centre!
In pictures: Britain’s most vandalised cars – Telegraph
Insurer Swiftcover has unveiled its ‘Vehicle Vadalism Index’, listing the most frequently vadalised cars in Britain. Topping the list is the Lexus IS
I worked at the Sellafield site for a while, though it was over a half life ago, in the year before I went to University. It wasn’t all awful, but it did put me off going back and making a career there. Almost everyone who has spent any time in that part of West Cumbria has at least one picture of Sellafield somewhere in there collection. However, when five Londoners- who may be of Bangladeshi origin, do it, they get arrested.
Maybe the nuclear tourists sneaked up close to get pictures through the fence of nondescript buildings in the non active zone, hoping they could somehow score atomic secrets from photos of office blocks. We got our shots from up on Cald Fell or down the coast on Drigg Beach whilst setting up for a barbecue or wandering the dunes looking for naked sunbathers.
Of course the irony about people trying to get photos of Sellafield is that they’re all illustrated with photos of Sellafield. The media does concentrate on the icons of the plant’s skyline, the two chimneys and the golfball, which are no longer in use. The chimneys haven’t been used since the 1957 fire and the golf ball was an experimental Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, which was shut down in 1981. (I think I went into the WAGR, or at least one of its ancillary buildings, during my orientation tour of the many sites of what was then BNFL.)
I may still have my Sellafield pictures, but please don’t send the anti-terror unit around, I can’t remember where they are.
Bidding for Dark Knight Returns Art Hits $100,000 | Underwire | Wired.com
Bidding has hit $100,000 for an original splash page from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, one of many highly collectible comics in a New York auction.
Sohaib Athar Unknowingly Live Tweets Raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Compound – ABC News
When 33-year-old Sohaib Athar began sending out live Twitter messages detailing a mysterious blast, shaking windows, and a helicopter hovering above Abbottabad, Pakistan, he had no idea he was apparently documenting the U.S. military attack that took down al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
BBC News – In pictures: Brixton windmill reopens to the public
Brixton windmill reopens on 2 May 2011 following a £581,000 restoration programme that began in October 2010. It was funded by a Heritage Lottery grant with additional funds from Lambeth Council and the Friends of Windmill Gardens .
Which makes everything okay.