Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist who seems to have given up on science but constantly appears in the media telling people that 'the internet can damage your brain,' now has a website and a YouTube channel.
A sense of irony, however, seems still to be on pre-order from Amazon.
Link to susangreenfield.com but DON'T RISK IT (via @vinwalsh)
One of the biggest mobile tech events officially kicked off this week in Barcelona, so we'll be collecting together some of the best bits from Mobile World Congress and regularly updating you on the quick and dirty details of the coolest handsets that are being unveiled.
We've tried to get hold of good photos, basic stats and availability details, but we'll be adding more and more as the week goes on.
First up is a projector phone from Samsung, a handset from Nokia especially for mobile photography geeks and an affordable Windows 7 device for teens.
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
One of the biggest mobile tech events officially kicked off this week in Barcelona, so we'll be collecting together some of the best bits from Mobile World Congress and regularly updating you on the quick and dirty details of the coolest handsets that are being unveiled.
We've tried to get hold of good photos, basic stats and availability details, but we'll be adding more and more as the week goes on.
After a few days of mobile madness we bring you LG's answer to the Samsung Galaxy Note, a crazy tablet/phone hybrid from Asus with an added stylus headset (?!) and a Sony Xperia P with WhiteMagic.
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Samizdatistas are:
Editors
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Samizdatistas are:
Editors
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Samizdatistas are:
Editors
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Samizdatistas are:
Editors
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
The Samizdatistas are:
Editors
A new Facebook application called PrivateString allows users to self destruct their messages moments later.
If you're prone to saying things that are a little mean, naughty or confidential then chances are Facebook isn't for you. Anything you write could be saved and forwarded on around the world by your 'friends' or stored on Facebook's servers until the end of time.
So, a new Facebook app called PrivateString could be just what you need, as it allows you to self destruct messages shortly after you've sent them, which seems handy but also a little creepy at the same time. Should we REALLY be saying things we have to wipe off the face of the earth moments later?
PrivateString is basically a kind of private wall app, allowing you to connect with friends and share all kinds of content with them. However, users can have everything set to self-destruct, or choose to self-destruct certain messages or photos at any given time.
Darin Myman, president and chief executive officer of BigString the company behind the app, tells All Facebook:
"Our status updates and comments on Facebook, pictures we post, political and social comments we make or the jokes we think are funny are all becoming part of our permanent social record. BigString, like many other companies, performs social networking searches of potential employees. We believe PrivateString gives our users a private place to be uncensored in the world of Big Brother."
He makes a good point. But although it's good to know everything we say isn't being watched and monitored, an app like PrivateString could also prove to be a place for bullying and lots of dodgy chat too.
Would you use a crazy, spy-like, self destructing app?
[Via All Facebook]
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
Common sense or 'folk psychology' is what your average person in the street uses to make sense of human behaviour. It says people have affairs because their relationship is unsatisfying, that people steal because they want money and that people give to charity because they want to help people.
Scientists tend to say 'well, it's a bit more complicated than that' but talk of conditional risk factors for behaviour won't get you very far in a dinner table discussion so 'folk psychology' is a culturally agreed form of psychology that is acceptable to use in everyday explanation.
I've just been alerted to a fascinating study in the journal Public Understanding of Science looks at how the enthusiasm for pop neuroscience has encroached on 'folk psychology' to create a form of 'folk neuropsychology' where brain-based explanations are now becoming acceptable in everyday explanation.
Talking brains: a cognitive semantic analysis of an emerging folk neuropsychology
Paul Rodriguez
Public Understanding of Science July 2006 vol. 15 no. 3 301-330
What is the influence of neuroscience on the common sense way we talk about behavior and mental experience? This article examines this influence and the diffusion of neuroscience terms as it appears in everyday language that reflects shared cultural knowledge. In an unsolicited collection of speech acts and metaphors I show that the word "brain" often substitutes for "mind" and brain states are often asserted as the cause of mental states. I also present several examples of visual depictions of the brain, including modern brain scans, which have become the basis for new cultural symbols that are identified with mental experience. Taken together, the linguistic and visual brain metaphors highlight the concrete nature of the brain in contrast to the abstract nature of the mind. This, in turn, provides a physical dimension to the way we conceptualize mental phenomena in ordinary language. Thus, a modern folk neuropsychology is emerging which provides an alternative, reductionist, and sometimes competing network of concepts for explaining the mind in comparison to conventional folk psychology.
The full study is available online as a pdf if you want the details.
Link to DOI entry for study (via @cfernyhough)
pdf of full text.
Damon Albarn, of Blur, Gorillaz, Monkey opera, The Good The Thingy The Dead And The Whatever, and whichever thing we've forgotten about, has yet another new project, this time, called Rocketjuice And The Moon.
Not that he's hugely indulgent these days, oh no.
And you can have a listen to a new track – which features Erykah Badu and Flea on bass – called 'Hey Shooter' if you click over the jump. Expect funk.
Of course, it is a rite of passage for any white musician to try his hand at funk at some point. It must be written in stone somewhere.
And Albarn is clearly having a stab at drawing on some of the Hi Life he's been listening to for all these years. Just don't call it World Music. He hates it when you call it World Music.
So, yeah, dabbling into World Music, Albarn's new track is a sneak preview of the new group and their forthcoming self-titled debut album.
Talking about the group, Albarn said:
"Someone in Lagos did the sleeve design and that's the name he gave it, which suits me because trying to find a name for another band is always tricky."
The tracklisting for Rocketjuice And The Moon is boring to read and tells you nothing.
1. '1-2-3-4-5-6?
2. 'Hey, Shooter'
3. 'Lolo'
4. 'Night Watch'
5. 'Forward Sweep'
6. 'Follow-Fashion'
7. 'Chop Up'
8. 'Poison'
9. 'Extinguished'
10. 'Rotary Connection'
11. 'Check Out'
12. 'There'
13. 'Worries'
14. 'Benko'
15. 'The Unfadable'
16. 'DAM(N)'
17. 'Fatherless'
18. 'Leave-Taking'
Here's the song.
A new version of the location app Forecast aims to connect us all with future check-ins and Facebook integration. It sounds promising, but will it work in practice?
Here at Shiny Shiny we seem to be over location-based sharing. There, we said it. We don't know what it is. We used to love Foursquare and Facebook Places, but something about sharing our whereabouts all the time just doesn't appeal to us as much anymore.
Sure we'll check-in now and again if we find ourselves somewhere pretty cool, unexpected or want to force a meeting with a business contact or potential love interest. But, the privacy concerns, issues of over-sharing and lack of 3G reception sometimes means it's just not worth the effort (unless it's alongside an Instagram photo, of course).
Well a new version of the location-based application Forecast aims to get us back into the swing of sharing our every movement, but the difference is you don't check-in as you visit places, you aim to predict where you're going to be later in the day or week so there's more chance you'll bump into those you know.
You begin by creating your own Forecast about where you're planning on going and what you're planning on doing there. This information will then be linked up to your Foursquare account so that your friends can receive notifications about what you're up to and when you do eventually check-in. Forecast's recent integration with Facebook also means your friends will be updated about your future Forecasts and your check-ins on your Timeline too.
One of the main aims of Forecast is to bring people together more, so if you like to think of yourself as a bit of a recluse, then don't bother sharing your location with anyone and everyone (although we'd like to think that's common sense).
Of course the basic premise of Forecast sounds appealing, but we do wonder whether people will stick to their plans and whether it'll seem like too much effort to "forecast" everything before you go ahead and even do it. However, the location-based app market really does need refreshing a little and rather than updating about present and past experiences, maybe looking into the future a little more is just what we all need to get us crazy about location again.
Forecast is available from iTunes for free.
[Via Digital Trends]
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
Jennifer Lawrence, you may not remember her at all from X-Men: First Class, has a face, functioning limbs and a mouth in which she can talk with. It's the latter we're interested in as she makes huge, sweeping generalisations for our amusement.
And it involves actors and the awful, pale citizens of Britain.
Basically, she doesn't think actors are attractive and that everyone in Britain talks funny, which is obviously endearing AND invariably means 'English people', rather than the whole of Britain (because no-one could possibly find anyone from Dundee or Belfast endearing).
See, Jennifer doesn't understand the appeal of dating a thespian. Full marks to anyone who immediately thought 'lesbian' when reading that previous sentence.
She said:
"I've never been into actors before. Seriously, I don't find myself attracted to them, which is a weird thing to say when you're dating one."
Wait. WHAT?
It doesn't matter what actor she's swapping spit with, fact is, like most people who live in Hollywood, Jennifer finds the allure of a Briton hard to resist.
It's the allure of wonky teeth, sarcasm, mild racism and nihilism that does it, obviously.
"Well, they have these wonderful manners, and everything they say is funnier, just because of the accent. I like the way that accent changes, too. There's the cute, 'I'm trying to be adorable because I know that you're mad at me' accent – and then the drunk accent where all the consonants have vanished."
Okay. She's been listening to someone who is a drunk, but also, someone who may play it cute while being infuriating. Who could she be talking about?
SILLY US! She clearly fancies Prince Phillip!
Kim Kardashian is a very private girl, remember? She doesn't like to share too much of her private life unless it's the day of her wedding or the rest of her life through her twitter account and reality TV programme.
Other than that, she's a very secretive, private girl.
And now, she's sending pictures of herself out online in a state of undress, without any makeup on and invariably fishing for compliments like those girls who pose in their bra, tweet it, and sigh "I'm so fat" or "I'm feeling pretty ugly today guys", only to be flooded with fished-for compliments from sad men and kindly, envious women. Anyway, shall we get on with looking at the picture?
As well you know, Kim K isn't best known for portraying herself as a natural beauty. We suspect that she doesn't leave the house without applying trowelfuls of makeup onto her, which leads us to think that her head may actually be roughly the same size as an woodlouse's fist.
Well, she's gone and tweeted a picture of herself, just as God intended (provided of course, you believe that there is a) A God and b) There's a God that could feasibly 'intend' the Kardashian family on us) in a bid to make saps coo about how pretty she is without all that slap and clothes on.
Not needy and calculating at all.
The star tweeted the photo with the caption:
"Sweatpants hair tie chillin with no make up on."
Its at this point you realise that you've been hoodwinked and that 'naked' actually means 'devoid of a lot of beauty products'.
Sorry. That's what us gossip-rags do. We word things in a titillating way in a bid to make you read us because, ironically enough, we're a thousand times needier than all the Kardashian family put together.
Apologies for that.
Dappy, that guy in the silly hat from that crap hip-pop lot that we've all forgotten about has opened his mouth again. This time he managed to form words rather than just a bubble of saliva.
The prat in the hat from N-Dubz has decided that Olly Murs' voice isn't up to the Dappy Gold Standard.
Dappy, who is probably not a classically trained musician with a pitch perfect ear for the human voice, summed up Olly Murs rise to mediocrity as less than pleasing to his particular tastes. We're not always able to understand Dappy's peculiar cockney-gangster-semi-literate ramblings but this one seems pretty damning of poor Olly; "Bloomin' hell, Olly Murs needs to learn how to sing, boy".
To be sure we understood this particular statement perfectly, hecklerspray engaged the services of absolutely no experts and took a wild guess. The conclusion is this, that Dappy believes himself to be a 'proper cockney geezer' much like Dick Van Dycke in Mary Poppins, hence the use of "bloomin' hell", which would instantly get you stabbed with a broken bottle anywhere south of Watford. The next thing we can guess is that Dappy has engaged the services of a Victorian street urchin, or possibly begun hallucinating him. The urchin, he rather unappreciatively calls "boy".
We happily look forward to watching Dappy's deranged descent into cockney rhyming slang fuelled lunacy and child slave trafficking. Mostly because it'll smarten him up a bit, he might swap the stupid very-top-of-the-head baseball cap for a tweed cloth cap.
Olly Murs doesn't seem to have given much of a toss about Dappy's musical opinion. Afterall, Olly is an X Factor winner, he's got to stay focussed on pleasing the Great Lord Cowell. And probably because it would run the danger of turning Olly into something interesting, which would be unfitting to a guy whose last name is basically "Meh".
Dappy also managed to string together enough coherent syllables to express that he was "happy" for Brit Award winners Adele and Ed Sheeran.
Although we do suspect that this communication may have been achieved with the use of flashcards and the sort of sign language chimps use to convey "give me a banana or I'll throw excrement at you".
After listening to his debut album, Labrinth felt "shit-scared and excited all at the same time", but is pretty confident that he's "delivered". (Daily Star)
'Apparently' Lady Gaga will follow in Michael Jackson's footsteps by appearing in the next Men In Black movie. (Contactmusic) If she doesn't come out of a giant egg, we'll be disappointed.
Footballer Ashley Cole offered £5000 for a date with Ellie Goulding at a charity auction last night, but was outbid by some rich businessman (is that what they're calling Skrillex these days etc etc). (Actually that's a fair description isn't it.) (The Sun) Meanwhile, John Terry spent £16 000 (!) to secure lunch with JLS. You'd at least expect them to throw in a handjob from JB for that price. A 'handJB', if you will. This is surely what all popstar/winner 'dates' should end?
If JoJo swallowed Britney Spears' 'Blackout' album and regurgitated it into one song, her extraordinary song 'Sexy To Me' is what it would sound like. (YouTube) Sadly it is not a rumpoid remake of Bryian McFadden's 'Real To Me', but imagine if it were.
Dev has tweeted a picture of herself with 'Experiencia Religiosa' hitmaker Enrique Iglesias, but neither of them look particular happy to be there. (Twitter)
Wanted tour 'banter' involves locking their manager in the toilet, sticking chocolate in his ear and force-feeding him spicy sweets, which apparently made Jay throw up when he tried one. (Daily Record) Nice one lads!
In 'Australian chart news', Adele's '21' has equalled 'I Can't Break It To My Heart' chanteuse Delta Goodrem's 'Innocent Eyes' for the most weeks at Number One. (Sydney Herald) Meanwhile in the UK, '21' has now sold more copies than Michael Jackson's 'Bad' which you can read all about here.
THE WAIT IS NEARLY OVER: Justin Bieber is expected to announce some "big news" regarding his new album campaign this week. (Capital FM)
And finally, in 'good deed of the day' news, Taylor Swift has invited Kevin McGuire - a fan battling with leukaemia - to be her date at the Academy Of Country Music Awards in April, after Kevin's sister set up a Facebook group inviting Taylor to be his prom date. (Billboard) Call us sentimental, but here's hoping Kevin's evening ends with a Swift handJB.
THAT WAS some of THE NEWS.
Remember when Slash was in a band? Then he wimped off because he was getting picked on by a man in cycling shorts, preferring to job it as a guitar slag for hire? Well, in addition to 'guitar solo for hire', he's now Jim Carrey's relationship advisor!
No, honestly he is.
Carrey got all heartbroken following the breakdown of a relationship, so for seemingly no reason at all, Slash decided he was the man to cheer him up, all the while, wearing his Papa Lazaru top-hat and afro combo! Awww!
Slash, putting his guitar down for two minutes and admiring his own fingers, recalled taking Rent A Gurn Carrey to a bar in Los Angeles after he split-up from his long term partner Jenny McCarthy.
Slash said:
"Guns 'n' Roses did a cameo in a movie called The Dead Pool and Jim Carey was in the movie and he lip-synced to our song Welcome To The Jungle – and that was our initial meeting. But I have been friends with him since.
"He broke up with [Jenny McCarthy] and he was having a moment and I took him down to a club in LA called Cozy's and he got up and sang. We did Black Betty and I think we did a Pink Floyd song and he was just venting. It was pretty cool."
Aww. You can take the boy out of Stoke, but you can't take the Stoke out of the boy. Advising a visit to the pub when someone is crying is a most British trait. Showing off with a guitar and Jim Carrey is America's fault and influence. Showy swines.
So what of him being a gigantic rock slag? Afterall, he's teamed up with people like Michael Jackson as well as acts such as The Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna.
Yes. The Black Eyed Peas. Credible huh? Apparently, these things happen by chance.
"The only time I've ever done something like this [asking musicians to work with him] was on my last album and I had all these great people on it, so I had to do some cold calling. The other collaborations are just things that happen by chance because you're both at the same pub and you're common language is music and next thing you're playing together – or sometimes I get calls saying, 'Can you come in and put something on a record.'"
You forgot the bit where they offer you huge sums of money and you don't care about whether they're any good or not, Slash. SLASH! BUDDY! YOU FORGOT THAT BIT! COME BACK!
The real winner at the weekend's Oscars wasn't that silent movie or Margaret Thatcher winning Best Monster, but rather, Angelina Jolie's various and assembled body parts. It appears that the Academy Awards were so boring, we need to talk about a leg.
That's what happens when Jennifer Lopez cruelly denies us a nipple-slip, the selfish cow.
So what in particular won our attention regarding Jolie? Well, her leg. Just her right leg, which has caused so much fuss that we assume is severed itself from her body and rampaged around the awards with a mind of its own, presumable getting off with other missing body parts like the arm from the drummer of Def Leppard and Tommy Iommi's fingertips. This left Angelina so thin, it was borderline offensive.
See, for some reason, everyone became fascinated by Jolie's leg. It peered out from an expensive dress and got the dumbasses of twitter in such a tizz that they invented a term for it – 'legbombing'.
As such, this leg now has its own twitter account and has spawned parodies from the winning writer team of The Descendants and in the poses of some people called Al Roker and Ann Curry.
And now, the right leg is a meme, riding tanks through Tiananmen Square and more. It's amazing how much a leg can influence popular culture.
We worship at the altar of the leg. The leg is Queen. We should kneel and kiss the toes of Jolie's severed right leg.
Of course, this just detracts from the real problem – Angelina Jolie is too thin. She's appallingly thin. She's disgusting in her thinness. She's sickeningly not fat. HOW DARE SHE? We're not judging her or anything because women are allowed to be any weight they want, provided that they fall between 'healthy thin and toned' and 'adorably curvy with a '50s frock on'.
Nothing outside of these is acceptable. Not that we're body fascists or anything. We'll even butter it up with concern if you like.
Suffice to say, Angelina Jolie – don't think we haven't focused entirely on you and your leg's appearance. That's all we do. We're a world obsessed by it. We're not judging you… WE'RE REALLY THOROUGHLY CONCERNED OKAY?
Now, if you don't mind, we need to go now and throw up our lunch, promote Adele's weight and try and bag an interview with Angelina's right leg. Failing that, we'll write a sad think-piece about the tribulations of Jolie's neglected left leg, using quotes from 'a source' and a 'concerned friend'.
Come on guys you know the Skins drill by now: Bristol, rich kids, drugs, drama, overwrought emotional turmoil, and sweat… buckets and buckets of filthy sweat dripping from practically every pore of every person.
And this week's Skins hasn't left us asking specific questions about it, rather, more of a pondering on an overarching issue. Basically, have you noticed that the entire world and all its inhabitants are based in Bristol? No matter how unlikely it is to find Moroccan drug lords and Russian gangsters in Bristol, there they all are.
We've been to Bristol, and multicultural it ain't.
This week, while you were giving yourself a pedicure, you missed Nick attempting to find shed loads of cash for some rather disconcerting Russian men. He was tasked with this by his brother who definitely couldn't go to The British Embassy to get himself a passport to travel back home and wreck some more lives, nope.
During all this Nick decided to instead go to a 40-hour rave spend £35 on a bottle of champers of which he would only drink one glass before copping off with some ugly girl, shagging the ugly girl and somehow spending about £600 in the process.
And you're about up to speed we reckon. How dull.
Nick won the award for Best Worst Brother Of The Year by successfully leaving his sibling stranded in Morocco, losing two grand, and stealing his girlfriend… but since he's now never going to see him again, it doesn't really matter does it? We vote for the episode where they hold a fake funeral for him and all get high on crystal meth. When we say, "All," we don't mean every single one of the characters because, at this point, the others have been demoted to the extra's salary.
Next week looks set to continue this seasons 'couple' theme by focusing on the side splittingly funny/heartbreakingly vomit inducing relationship (if you can call screaming at each other occasionally a relationship – which we do), between Minnie and Alo.
When we started reviewing Skins, we thought it would be funny, but week by week we are demoralised by the lack of cohesion between this and any facet of real life. Even the bedrooms have been hand-picked from Hipster Billionaires-R-Us as Nick perfectly demonstrated last night in his bed with the awesomely cool boom-box headboard; no wonder he's bedding all the women, even Frankie humped him when she saw that mother.
Christ it's bad.
We're going to go into our cold mediocre Ikea made bed and shiver ourselves to sleep dreaming neon dreams of cocaine hills and we suggest you just end it all now before you become this.
As far as adoptions go, the UK proudly house people of all colour and creed. Is it because we care? Or so we can steal their national culinary cuisines and make inferior versions of them? Just look at Nandos and Yo Sushi. Because the Brits don't like actual Germans, David Hasselhoff ticks our Vaterland criteria.
And with our Germanic Hoff substitute, we didn't get sausages and strong ale, we got Knight Rider – a programme so awful that the only realistic thing in it was a talking motor car called KITT.
After returning to his adopted homeland to flog power ballads, Hasselhoff returned to the UK and ironically got asked to judge Britain's Got Talent. Surely after that watching his poor German humour on primetime TV, he'd go away? Nope, he's still around pestering those who'll listen. Even shambolic bidding TV channel QVC isn't safe. They were treated to a performance from 'The Hoff' as he launched his new album. Der abschaum der menschlichen gesellschaft!
Fans of Britain's Got Talent shouldn't go looking David Hasselhoff's musical material up. It's the audio equivalent of Two Girls One Cup and depending on what sort of person you are, you'll listen to an entire song and pretend that it didn't bother you, or wince in fear immediately, breaking down like a child who's lost their parents in Tesco.
And when we say 'lost' and 'Tesco', we mean 'lost to a mass culling by a ferocious, clawed spectre floating through the aisles with a hatchet, in Tesco'. That's how bad Hasselhoff's music.
Aaaaanyway, you might laugh at the idea of people using QVC as a promotional launch tool, when there are equally appalling daytime shows out there such as Loose Women (QVC for the menopause). However, don't write off this shopping channel! The likes of Charlotte Church, Westlife, Dolly Parton, John Barrowman and Peter Andre have all whored their wares on QVC before. Big names, we're sure you'll agree.
And it appears that The Hoff is next in line to join the growing list of artists who feel their music appeals to bored housewives who buy all their shopping off a channel that's as fast paced as a hundred toddlers coming down off a sugar rush. According to the PR guff that accompanied the performance, this is what he was flogging:
"David Hasselhoff sings tracks from an LP, which sees him covering Broadway love songs including A Chorus Line's 'What I Did For Love', and 'Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head' from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
Looking at the calendar, we see that Mothers' Day is coming up and if you need a last minute gift, you might as well keep this album in mind. This is the sort of vile trash that mums like.
The dizzy heights of Bid Up TV await.
My book will be aimed at those who are dreaming of starting their own design business, or who have already started and are looking for some help to take them to the next level. It'll be the title I wish I'd read a few years ago (although I know I'm going to learn a lot writing it).
The title was going to be The Business of Design, but it's already published. Then Nikki suggested Business Designed to tie-in with Identity Designed. Great idea, but someone's sitting on the domain and my purchase request led to nowt.
Then Bernadette pitched in with these two ideas:
—
Update: 10 February 2011
The chat in the comment thread has ruled out The Design Startup, and there's now a third option in the mix: Work for Money — Design for Love.
—
I've registered both .coms, so it's down to one of those, along with the likely subtitle of, "Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Starting and Running a Successful Design Business."
I ran both names past Blair, who suggested that Working in Design may lead to confusion about the target market. It could imply design employment, as opposed to self-employment. Fair point. Nikki liked both, but thought The Design Startup could imply I had some unique product or service to sell, which wouldn't be ideal. Another fair point. She said Peachpit's salespeople would love Working in Design.
Which do you prefer?
Keep in mind they'll appear alongside the provisional subtitle.
1/ Working in Design: Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Starting and Running a Successful Design Business
2/ The Design Startup: Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Questions About Starting and Running a Successful Design Business
—
Update:
So it's down to number 1/ or number 3/ Work for Money — Design for Love.
—
Bernadette kindly pitched an alternative subtitle, too, with optional word in brackets: "Everything You Want to Know About Starting and Running a (Successful) Design Business."
Once again, it is time to peer into Uranus and decide what is happening with your future, based around the activities of the solar system.
Of course, the planets have a huge affect on our lives, farting their interstellar magic all over the fabric of time, determining which path we take as we edge closer to our inevitable, lonely death.
And so, by way of cheat-sheetery, read your hecklerspray horoscopes and find out if you want to push against what is deemed inevitable or, indeed, brace yourself and accept your miserable fate.
Aries (Mar 21-Apr 20)
For some inexplicable reason, you've decided to trust someone who stares at an unyielding, empty sky for answers, rather than look at more pressing problems in your life and acting accordingly.
Taurus (Apr 21-May 21)
Once more, a series of unfulfilling sexual encounters leaves you lacking in pleasure, but also, a profound understanding of the ingredients of Cystopurin. At some point, you decide to nickname yourself Sister Purin because it makes you laugh. This is precisely why you're alone.
Gemini (May 22-Jun 22)
Ah Gemini, you two-faced harridan! The bitchiest of all the signs! You've been passing time at work by being a supreme gossip-monger, which is all well and good, but this week sees you getting your just desserts when a tall, dark strangers hands you a mysterious letter. Call 0898-I-T-S-Y-O-U-R-P-4-5 for more details.
Cancer (Jun 23-Jul 23)
The love of your life is about to enter your life. Sadly for you, you were reading this horoscope and you didn't notice him. Fate is incredibly cruel isn't it?
Leo (Jul 24-Aug 23)
By Thursday you'll feel more positive about your career when your boss mysteriously disappears. You're welcome.
Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)
Hey Virgo! Leo didn't realise that they've been given a horoscope that was offered to them a few weeks ago. So what does that tell you? Correct. Go away.
Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)
Not all horoscopes detail exciting events, regrettably. With that, the coming month sees you hanging the washing up on more than one occasion.
Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)
Sometimes, a video can chronicle your future more succinctly than words. You are the donkey in this scenario.
Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)
This week, once again, you spend your entire time on social networking complaining about how miserable you are and how you can't find someone to have sex with yet, startlingly, you haven't worked out that this is precisely the reason why you're so unswervingly lonely and you've 'started to heal up'. Having read this, you will not change your habits because you assume this horoscope is talking about someone else, you deluded penis.
Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)
The Van Allen radiation belt is a torus of energetic charged particles around Earth, which is held in place by Earth's magnetic field. It is presumed that most of the particles that form the belts come from solar wind and other particles by cosmic rays. It is thought that the first astronauts in space would've died of radiation poisoning when travelling through the Van Allen belt because of inadequate equipment, leading many to believe the first lunar landings were fake. Why are you getting told this? Because frankly, you seem to think space is an important part of the thing that shapes your fate, so humans flying through radiation must have something to do with the fact that, next week, a dead satellite is going to land on your face and maim you. Then you'll die of slow, invisible radiation suffocation.
Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)
This week sees you reading the words "this week sees you reading the words without any satisfactory ending to the sentence" without any satisfactory ending to the sentence.
Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)
Birthdays are looming large in your legend at the moment, mainly because you've just had one or, indeed, are waiting for one. Either way, the barren card situation is doing nothing for your self-esteem, leaving you stood at your window, gently sobbing with a far-away look in your eye, much like a depressed colonel firing absent-mindedly into a towering pile of dead civilians.
This is a book that I've been wanting to write for a long time. Whenever I've looked for a book on this subject, the only available publications are reference guides that simply reproduce as many symbols as possible. Where books have gone into theory, they were published decades before desktop computers, and therefore miss the most relevant and active context of icon use. Sometimes the topic is covered as a part of a book about logo design, and amounts to little more than a page or two. So I've set out to create the manual, reference guide and coffee table book that I always desired.
It's aimed at designers who already have basic vector and bitmap drawing skills. It could be that you only have to create a simple favicon, or perhaps you've been asked to work on a website or mobile app that requires icons. You might usually rely on a resource like a royalty-free icon set, which may provide common icons but probably doesn't provide everything you need.
This book begins at the point when you need to create your own icons. Its purpose is to guide relatively inexperienced designers through an icon design workflow, starting with favicons and working up to application icons, as well as inspiring and providing a reference point for existing icon designers. It does not set out to teach you how to draw in a particular application. The aim is not to improve proficiency in particular applications but, rather, to show you how to create icons with the common toolset found in most of them, so you can be more versatile.
Here's what you can find in the Icon Handbook:
A short look at the history of icons, focussing on the the last century, and in particular how 'icon' came to mean more than religious painting.
Looking at the uses for icons beyond simple decoration, how they help us navigate, give us feedback and express our mood. It also looks how not to use icons!
Starting with the simplest form of icons, looking at how to get crisp artwork at small sizes and the various ways favicons are used.
Working through the process of discovering if a metaphor already exists, and how to decide on the right one if there isn't.
Walking through the drawing process, working with simple pictograms and small colour icons, and looking at the pitfalls on the way.
There are many different formats and deployment methods for icons, depending on the context, which can have a bearing on how we create the artwork. In particular I cover all the methods for displaying icons on websites.
We finish on the largest and most complex of all the icons, which are more often than not, photorealistic works of art.
Handy reference, including: Common icon badges, overview of drawing and creation tools and a comprehensive icon reference chart.
Along the way, I talk to icon designers such as Susan Kare, David Lanham and Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory and many more about their process behind well known icons.
On top of all that, there's some jolly nice eye candy in there!
Thanks must go to many people (the acknowledgments is 2 pages) but I must particularly thank the team that put this together at Five Simple Steps, including Emma, Nick and Mark Boulton, Colin Kersley and Sarah Morris. Also to the words team: my project manager Chris Mills, copy editor Owen Gregory, and technical editors Gedeon Maheux of The Iconfactory and inimitable Andy Clarke.
You can purchase the digital edition and/or pre-order the paperback which will ship around 30th Jan 2012. There will also be an accompanying website at iconhandbook.co.uk which will contain reference and code examples from the the book, as well as a blog with bits that didn't make it into the first edition!
Tagged: iconhandbook, icons
]]>One of the biggest mobile tech events officially kicked off this week in Barcelona, so we'll be collecting together some of the best bits from Mobile World Congress and regularly updating you on the quick and dirty details of the coolest handsets that are being unveiled.
We've tried to get hold of good photos, basic stats and availability details, but we'll be adding more and more as the week goes on.
First up is a projector phone from Samsung, a handset from Nokia especially for mobile photography geeks and an affordable Windows 7 device for teens.
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
I've just managed to watch a few editions of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, an online documentary series about mind altering drugs, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the programmes.
If you think hearing about other people's drug experiences is about as interesting as watching someone staring at the wallpaper, you'll be pleased to hear that the series also delves deeply into the cultural and scientific background of each psychoactive substance.
The presenter, Hamilton Morris, investigates a range of drug related topics – from a piece on the legendary 'zombie powder' of Haiti to an investigation into psychedelic truffles, to the story of an ex-Goth stripper who got involved with the biggest underground LSD laboratory ever built.
In fact, the series is so good it even attracted the attention of The New York Times who wrote an article on the offbeat investigations.
Well worth watching.
Link to series (autostarts video, scroll for other editions).
Link to NYT story on the series.
There's been a lot of debate over the past few weeks about whether Pinterest users are breaching any kind of copyright law by curating content from all over the web and adding it to their boards. Today it seems Flickr has taken matters into its own hands and has begun restricting Pinterest users from pinning any of its copyrighted photos.
Over the next few days you'll find that you won't be able to pin images on the popular photo sharing website that are copyrighted and instead you'll be greeted with a pop-up that tells you Flickr doesn't allow that kind of naughty behaviour.
According to VentureBeat, a spokesperson for Flickr has explained:
"Only content that is 'safe,' 'public' and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest."
Last week Pinterest published a piece of code on its blog, which could be added to any website in order to restrict people from pinning content. Although we wondered why any websites or businesses wouldn't want to take advantage of the huge phenomenon that is Pinterest, it's good to see that the site has made details publicly available.
[Via The Telegraph Image via psd]
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
Adobe has launched a new app called Photoshop Touch, which is specially designed to bring popular Photoshop functionality to iOS and Android tablet devices.
Photoshop Touch comes equipped with all kinds of tools you'd expect, like blurring, clone stamp, layers, cropping and much more. In this way it's very similar to the desktop version we've all come to know and love, but as you'd expect from a super modern tablet application, it also allows you to take advantage of touch gestures and controls in a big way.
A few of the features that stand out include being able to use the tablet's camera to create a new layer, there's a scribble select tool, which allows you to do just that, scribble and there are all kinds of sharing and syncing options, like being able to save projects to Adobe Creative Cloud so you can work on them on your PC later.
We imagine it'll be a very handy application for those who like to play around with photos in their spare time, but could very well prove to be a professional on-the-go resource for those working in the creative industries too.
Photoshop Touch is available for iPad 2 devices from the iTunes store and Android tablets from the Android Market for £6.99, which may seem a bit pricey for an app but considering how powerful Photoshop Touch is, it's actually really good value for money.
Into fitness and health gadgets? Check out our new site, Connected Health
The quite lovely BBC Future has launched ('the home of new trends in the worlds of Science, Technology, Environment and Health') and yours truly has a column there: Neurohacks ('Neuroscience and the psychology of the everyday'). You can find it in the 'Brain' section.
At this point any UK-based surfers who have followed the above links will be staring in frustration at a corporate holding page. BBC Future is only visible outside of the UK, due to it being funded by advertisements rather than our licence fee. Non-UK readers – hello! UK readers – despair not, there are workarounds.
At BBC Future I'll be recruiting neuroscience and experimental psychology to help us understand conundrums and curiosities of everyday life. Things such as Why recalling names is so vexing (UK readers, try here) and questions like Do we all see the same colours?' (UK readers).
Those are the topics of my first two columns, at least. I do take requests, incidentally, so if there is some phenomenon that has always bugged, or that you think neuroscience or psychology should be able to help with, get in touch (by email or twitter – see the right bar for details). I may be able to provide you with an entertaining and evidence-based answer.
Link: Neurohacks column at BBC Future
Check out the rest of BBC Future while you're there. It's a great clear site with a stellar cast of columnists.
The New York Times has an obituary for the founder of cognitive psychology, Ulric Neisser. As with most of his obituaries it glosses over the fact that Neisser later rejected cognitive psychology as a means to fully understand the human mind.
Ulric Neisser is widely regarded as having founded the field with his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology. Although the principles of the science existed before – experimental methods, information processing theories, artificial intelligence modelling – Neisser was the first to combine them into a coherent whole.
The book was hugely influential to the point where cognitive psychology has become the de facto scientific psychology and the has at least partially integrated into virtually every theory of the mind.
But less known is that Neisser wrote a 1976 book called Cognition and Reality that criticised cognitive science for being unable to capture the richness of human psychology through lab-based methods and reducing lived experience to what were essentially computer models of the mind.
The New York Times describes it like this:
His contrariness extended to his own work. In 1976, he wrote "Cognition and Reality," a book that challenged much of the field of cognitive psychology, arguing that it ignored the real world in favor of the laboratory.
This was certainly no 'contrariness'. The book is a cutting critique and insightfully captures many of the problems with cognitive psychology, most of which were only 'rediscovered' in the 90s and 2000s as embodied cognition and network analysis started to look beyond the 'disembodied mind is made of computer modules' idea.
Later Neisser began to believe that while cognitive psychology had developed some useful tools, we have to apply them to the real world to understand ourselves, and he began to argue for the necessity of ecological psychology that stresses the importance of understanding what our environment demands of us in terms of behaviour and perception.
Link to NYT obituary for Ulric Neisser.
Gerard Butler and his nose have 'returned home and is in good health' following his visit to rehab, where he was apparently getting treatment for substance abuse issues… not that anyone actually knew he'd gone to rehab.
Or even vaguely cared for that matter.
Being a celeb, he didn't go to any old rehab. He went to the most famous one - the Betty Ford Clinic in California. Apparently, he became overly reliant on perscription drugs, which, if we're being honest, is the lamest addiction you can have. Heroin is fine, but medicine? That's wimpish! It's like getting hooked on Rennie!
Gerard's rep, Rupert Fowler said:
"Gerard has completed a successful course of treatment and has returned home in good health. We will not be making any further comment at this time."
He then didn't add:
"Tixilix is a terrible and tastily addictive thing."
Not mucking about, Butler was straight back on it, attending the Weinstein Company (who?) pre-Oscars party on Saturday, just one day after his release.
He then attended the Vanity Fair Oscar party because there's absolutely nothing wrong with him.
Thankfully for Butler, stints in rehab are good PR because, as well you know, a stint in a treatment facility gives the vague impression of danger (addiction to something) as well as a wholesome ideal (willing to get help and redeem oneself into a better person).
So bully for him… the big, soft shite.
Even though she's apparently holed-up in some rehab or other, whacked off laughing gas and a potential eating disorder, that doesn't mean Demi Moore hasn't got the time to be a raving, controlling lunatic as well.
See, even though she wasn't ever going to attend any Oscar parties this year, that didn't stop her from reportedly banning Cameron Diaz from Madonna's annual Oscars soiree.
And why on Earth would she want to ban Cameron Diaz from a party she's not attending? Well, ladies and gentleladies, it is all based around jealousy.
Raging in bed like some kind of modern-day Regan MacNeil, vomiting and cursing everywhere, Demi is not pleased with Diaz because it was reported somewhere that she was flirting with Ashton Kutcher at the Golden Globes in January.
That'd be Kutcher who slowly slid his long, thin penis into a young woman on the night of his wedding anniversary to Moore, leading to their split.
Apparently, Madge's party is co-hosted with Demi and despite a cheery stint in a treatment facility meaning that she wouldn't be revelling with the revels, she called in a favour from Madonna.
An insider says:
"Demi was instrumental in the guest list and told Madonna that there was no way in hell Cameron should be allowed over the threshold"
"As a result she has been blackballed, and security informed not to let her in under any circumstance."
That'd be Cameron Diaz, not invited to one party, but still incredibly famous enough to be able to attend other equally exclusive parties and not lie in a bed, swearing at the Oscars coverage or being cheated on by one of Hollywood's most vapid stars.
When they're not taking babies from Africa or flaunting their vast wealth while pretending to care about the Middle East, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are actually reasonably good-looking actors.
No, honestly they are. They may not have done anything of note for a while, but they are card-carrying thespians away from their holier-than-thou lives.
Troublingly, Jolie is threatening to make another movie with Pitt… when they've finished talking about their 40,000 children and how they're too cool to get married. You've all seen Mr & Mrs Smith right? This is not good news.
Jolie, talking at someone's face, revealed that she Brad Pitt are planning to tag-team for another movie.
Apparently, the world hasn't suffered enough lately and they now believe that, now we're all ostensibly living on our knees, the time is right to subject us to even more misery.
Talking to E! News, Jolie (real name Elton John) says:
"We're talking about it. We have an idea."
For fans of pointless fashion and gawping at people wearing an incredibly expensive dress once, before throwing it away, Jolie spoke these fascinating words while wearing a black custom-made strapless Atelier Versace velvet gown with a thigh high slit, Salvatore Ferragamo heels and platinum Neil Lane jewellery.
Aren't you thrilled at that knowledge? This is a world away from the shared soiled dungarees and sanitary towel shoes that are worn by hecklerspray scribes.
Anyway, Pitt and Jolie don't know if they're funny or not.
"We don't know how funny we are. And you never know what you want to see an actual couple do. Sometimes it's better if they're not a couple"
Yeah. Split up and then make a film together. The tension will be terrific!
We are often told, even by so-called "left libertarians" who claim to be in favour of markets but not corporatism, that modern corporations, with their evil limited liability protections, favours from the state and so on, can roll over a democratic government and shaft the general public. Up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact, the situation is far more complicated. Some firms seem remarkably weak when confronted with some pressures, which makes me wonder why Hollywood movies still insist on portraying corporate executives as flinty-eyed, heartless bastards on the take. (The irony is, of course, that some of the most ruthless corporations are in the film business).
As evidence, Brendan O'Neill has this excellent piece in the Telegraph about Tesco's, workfare, and the influence of the "Twitterati":
"What could be worse than the government's workfare programme?", almost every columnist in the land is currently asking. I can think of one thing worse: the awesome and terrifying power of the commentariat and its slavish groupies amongst the Twitterati to strike down initiatives like workfare and almost any other government project that they don't like. That's the real story here. Forget the historically illiterate wailing about young people being forced into "slave labour" or the idea that getting yoof to work in return for money is the Worst Thing Ever. The ins and outs of workfare itself pale into insignificance when compared with the new power of tiny cliques of cut-off people to override public opinion and reshape modern Britain.
The speed with which first Tesco, that supposedly arrogant monolith of the high street, and then others withdrew from the workfare scheme was alarming. It was a testament both to the sheepishness of modern corporations (remember this next time someone starts banging on about "free-market fundamentalism") and to the authority of the therapeutic, suspicious-of-wealth, pro-state, anti-big-business sections of the well-fed media classes, who can now put powerful institutions on the spot simply by penning a few ill-thought-through articles with the word "SLAVE" in them.
One possible quibble: has this not been the case for decades, even centuries? Consider that the opinion-forming classes have tended to be concentrated in the London area, have tended to have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers? This is hardly new. What has changed, clearly, is that in the age of the internet, the speed with which this class can make its voice heard accelerates.
I always thought it was a bit optimistic to imagine that blogging, the internet and so on would massively shift the balance of forces in terms of who gets to influence debate in a country like the UK. The mainstream media still carries big influence, especially television. And our political class, drawn as it is from a relatively shallow pool of talent, is as susceptible to the influence of such opinions as it ever was. However, what I think has changed for the better is that more of us, such as O'Neill and so on, can attack the conventional wisdom through the medium of the internet rather than hope that our letters get printed in some corner of a newspaper.
There is also more of what we might call a "swarm effect" these days with certain issues; I think the internet definitely magnifies this phenomenon. Another consequence is that memory of certain events gets ever shorter as the news cycle spins faster and faster. The Singularity is near!!!.
