Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Food and Drink Blogs

    Here’s a huge list of blogs devoted to the topics of food and drink. I intend to spend many hours browsing around…
     
    (hat tip to the Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog for the link)

  • Taste – #2

    Having just slammed the modern architecture of Gianni Botsford, I now find that I have nothing but praise for something that looks very similar – steel boxes designed as student accommodation. The story behind them is here. Having lived in a one-room bedsit that was not much bigger, the design of these micro-houses is brilliant, and if I was a student again, I could see myself living in one quite happily.

  • Taste…

    …it’s an individual thing. There’s a story in today’s Guardian about the design of a new town house that’s been built in Notting Hill. The story is very positive: "quite remarkable family house", "one of the finest new city homes to be found anywhere in the world", "a thing of architectural sorcery".
     
    Intrigued, I did a Google, and found pictures of the house on the architect’s website. To my eyes it looks truly awful – like having to live in an inside version of London’s South Bank – all blank concrete and hard-faced steel. There’s also more whan a whiff of pretension about the description of the design process: "Our starting point was to represent the empty volume of the site as a three dimensional grid of voxel data points (3d pixels) each consisting of a range of varying attributes… a detailed environmental analysis for each individual voxel was carried out. This analysis produced a database of solar and daylight conditions throughout the year,taking into account weather patterns specific to London".
     
    I assume the architect’s clients are delighted with the result. To me it looks as though they have just elected to live in a set of bare prison cells. Chacun à son goût.

  • One Born Every Minute

    Pseudoscience seems to have found an inexhaustible spring when it comes to new ways of selling water to suckers. The latest is apparently Hydra Beverages Inc. with its Concentrated High-Energy H2O – "just add two capfuls to a gallon of clean drinking water to make one gallon of super-hydrating Hydra Hi-Energy H2O".
     
    The Hydra website is a hoot. From it we learn that "most Americans are chronically dehydrated". This is obviously a new definition of the phrase "chronically dehydrated" that I am unfamiliar with. "Widespread deforestation and pollution has robbed water of its natural energy". "Hydra utilizes a proprietary technology that duplicates the natural imprinting of energetic properties onto water as it flows through a perfect alpine forest water cycle". Clearly, there are people out there who believe this rubbish; as I say, there’s one born every minute. As a healthy antidote to all this claptrap, I can recommend a visit to H2OdotCon – a website devoted to exposing water-related pseudoscience fantasy and quackery.

  • Teasmade Trivia

    When I was growing up, one of the "better living" gadgets that intrigued me was the Teasmade – a combination of an alarm clock and tea-making device. It was intended to wake you up each morning with a nice cup of tea. As so often is the case, the theory was better than the practice – our teasmade got relegated to the back of the cupboard fairly quickly.
     
    Now there’s a website devoted to the glorious history of the Teasmade in all its wondrous forms. From it I discover that it was a Goblin Teasmade model D25 that we had. Wonder where it went?

  • The Stable Door

    The news that George W Bush has ordered all his senior staff in the White House to take a "refresher course in ethics" smacks seriously of attempting to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. There’s also the delicious irony of that word "refresher". It presumes that the current denizens of the White House had any ethics to start with.

  • How Scary Are You?

    You Are a Little Scary
    You’ve got a nice edge to you. Use it.

  • Taurids

    It’s the time of year when the Taurid meteor shower comes around. There seem to be indications that this could be a good year, producing a higher number of fireball meteors than usual. Watch the skies!

  • Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

    Here’s a turnup for the books, as it were. Amazon has just announced its Mechanical Turk – what it defines as artificial artificial intelligence. It’s a brilliant idea – but I’ll bet that its network of humans inside the mechanical Turk are outsourced to low cost countries such as India faster than you can say Wolfgang von Kempelen.

  • Allan Glenn

    I never got to know this young man, and now it’s too late. Life is a lottery, and some draw the short straw through no fault of their own. If life was fair, there would be a special circle of Hell reserved for his health insurance company.

  • Vapid Beliefs

    Nice article from the ever-dependable Marina Hyde in The Guardian today. She takes aim at idiotic celebrities and their idiotic beliefs. OK, deriding celebrities who are full of themselves is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, but she does it with great panache.

  • Perceptual Illusion – #2

    Another interesting perceptual illusion. Don’t always think you see what you think you see…

  • Pieces of Eight!

    My pirate name is:
    Black Tom Flint
    Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Like the rock flint, you’re hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you’re easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

    Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

  • AskPhilosophers

    You ask. Philosophers answer. What a good idea – and it has an RSS feed as well. Philosophy enters the 21st century.

  • Google Earth

    I mentioned the user community that has grown up around the Google Earth application earlier today. As an example of how Google Earth is being used, Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog, writes about how the spread of avian flu around the globe is being tracked by a member of the Google Earth Community. Here’s a screenshot showing a sample of the data (click to go to the original on Flickr, where you can choose higher resolution versions of the shot for greater clarity).
     
     Google Earth Snapshot
     
    Update: Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog reports that Declan Butler, a senior reporter at Nature Magazine, has published a new version of the avian flu outbreak map. He advises this new map be used for accuracy.
     

  • Blurring The Lines…

    …between reality and virtual reality. This story, about someone who has bought a virtual space station inside of an online game, simply proves to me that I was born in another age, where fantasy was fantasy, reality was reality, and never the twain should meet.

  • Yahoo Maps

    A new version of Yahoo Maps was launched yesterday. It uses Flash technology, instead of Ajax (which is used by its rivals, Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.
     
    It’s a good thing it’s a beta, because it crashed on me within seconds when I tried to use my mouse’s scroll-wheel to zoom.
     
    By the way, one thing that I find supremely irritating is that Google’s use of the scroll wheel to zoom is the exact opposite of the way in which Microsoft and Yahoo use it. Google wins the Donald A. Norman award for piss-poor user interface consistency in my view. They don’t even give you the option to reverse it. 
     
    Google Maps (despite the user interface cock-up) works the best for me. Microsoft’s offering returns blank map tiles too often for my liking. And all of them are either sketchy or non-existent when it comes to showing maps outside of North America.
     
    But my favourite map application is still Google Earth. The combination of the PC application fed by data from Google’s map servers is still a far richer user experience than any browser-based map application that I’ve yet seen. There’s a really vibrant user community adding data to the maps. I’ve recently been visiting all of the locations mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays. All added by enthusiastic users.

  • Coffee-Beer

    A story in the New Scientist this week about a patent that has been applied for by the Swiss company Nestlé. It’s apparently for a non-alcoholic drink that is a cross between coffee and beer. It doesn’t sound very appetising. Let’s see, the Swiss record on inventions: swiss chocolate – a hit; the swiss army knife – also a hit. The cuckoo clock – a definite miss (although as a child, I desperately wanted one – but now that I’ve grown up, I’ve put away childish things). Coffee-beer – a hit or a miss? Place your bets now.

  • Thin? – It’s Anorexic

    Thin-client computers were all the rage a few years ago, with some vendors claiming huge savings over the costs of infrastructures built with traditional PCs. Thankfully, the hype has been exposed for what it was, and thin-client technologies have settled in alongside PCs as a useful and sensible alternative in particular situations.
     
    Now Chip PC have announced the Jack-PC – a thin client so thin that it’s actually installed inside the wall socket. This is not thin – this is anorexic.

  • The Homocaust

    Through a chance posting on Usenet, I came across a site that I had not seen before: the Homocaust. It’s a site that collects together the history of the gay victims of the Holocaust. It’s a good site, full of information and links to further resources, and appears to have been a labour of love by Lewis Oswald, who has his own site here.