This point hasn’t been picked up an awful lot, but now we have as high a profile use of that idea as I’ve ever seen. Google has just launched a new browser, which looks pretty impressive. To explain it, they brought in the perfect choice for the job: Scott McCloud (who I happened to cover in the context of his great comic Zot! a few weeks back)(and he even responded!). I assume his Understanding Comics, a comic explanation of the medium, showed them how useful this approach was. He’s produced a lovely, clear and highly readable comic explaining and promoting it, explaining new features and elements of its internal architecture superbly. I have no idea if Chrome is as good as this makes it sound - new computer software is never bug free, and the potential problems from browser bugs can be huge, though it sounds as if they have taken sensible decisions to minimise the hazards - and this isn’t any kind of endorsement of the browser, which I haven’t tried, just an expression of delight that they chose this method, and the perfect person to execute it. I can’t imagine how many people will see this, but I hope it inspires others.

LARGEST FEMALE ON EARTH: “Across Europe, there has only ever been that Siebold sample. It is a female plant (the largest female on Earth, some argue) that has never had a mate and has spread by its underground stems – rhizomes – alone.”

So there is a desperate call for rarely found COBOL programmers to be employed by the California State Government to reduce the pay of all state employees (including one assumes the programmers themselves) to minimum wage. Good luck with that head-hunting job, Governator.

If in the meantime however you want to take our advice, Rob of FT has brushed up on his barely remembered COBOL and offers you, for free, this little programme while you are waiting.

“I think people need to be cautious,” warns Dr Roberta Ferrence, director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. “It’s an unknown.”

“The concern is that the product will probably be promoted as something that’s safer than smoking,” she adds. “What needs to happen to make the dangers of smoking clear is for the product to be fitted with an electronic voice, perhaps one possessed of a piercing Mexican accent and a series of warning phrases such as “No no Senor Slade! Thees ees madness!”"  .

It is remarkable that these insect have no match in the 28 million species horded in the British Museum** (Natural History Kensington), but the bug itself does look a bit unimpressive. And rather than being a case of a wholly new species, have the museum staff considered the more likely scenario. Namely that in the sixties, in some sort of hair brained caper, Derek Nimmo convinces Helen Hayes and Joan Simm (and her tiny chin) to steal the insect which he had hidden a particularly micro-microfilm in. Surely people remember the chase through London on a double decker bus pursuing a lorry which has a tiny insect poking prominently out of the back. Much mor elikely than a minor mutation of a red insect no-one noticing this relatively insignificant creature in the first place.

*Deadly if you are a plane tree.

**More proof that Noah’s Ark was a bit of a push space-wise.

Oh sure, the site boasts more than 22 million “comments, posts, plays and views”, but those comments and posts are all from OTHER sites like YouTube, last.fm, iTunes, myspace, and the like. Sound Index sent automated “robot” scripts to these sites looking for the names of bands, fed what it found into some kind of magic algorithm, and produced a constantly updated list of the 1000 buzziest bands on the planet. Or well, the English-speaking planet. Probably. Slap some shiny, gumdrop-like buttons on the results, organise things with a direct rip-off of the iTunes “Coverflow” feature and hey presto.. well, what exactly?

The subcontractors who made it, Nova Rising, had some heady early expectations that it could be “the chart to replace the Top 40″. And indeed, the TV show Sound (for it is that which the Index is named after) is the BBC’s attempt to make up for the lack of live chart music on television precipitated by the cancellation of Top of the Pops.

One could argue that the Top 40 was the original “web 2.0″ concept. The songs are all written, performed and recorded by other people; their order of presentation each week is determined by millions of people’s individual listening and buying habits; all you have to do is play the songs. Brilliant! For Top of the Pops you’d have to invite a smelly band or two, but even the dancing bits were “user generated”. Just turn on the cameras and away you go.

But Top 40 radio shows and Top of the Pops were popular, when they were popular, because we understood how things worked. If a band sold enough records, it would be - or should be, with ensuing debate - invited on the show. There was no mystery about why a song had reached number one - it had sold the most. But Sound - and even Top of the Pops near the end - introduced a nefarious editorial element. Why are these bands playing?

And with the Sound Index it’s even less clear. The algorithm Nova Rising used for trawling through other sites’ comments threads was developed by IBM and has apparently cost a fortune. IBM’s presentation of some of the challenges involved says that “online comments are absolutely the worst way to find out what is popular… except for all the other ways.”

So, is money really obsolete? Do sales really rate less than 10,000 variations on JAN47 from TAMPA, FL’s contention that “ONE NIGHT ONLY ROX”? I don’t think so. Ultimately the only people who care about this kind of popularity - i.e. aggregate internet buzz - are record labels, and it has been pointed out that they already have Music Week for that sort of thing already.

For those who do care about the pop music horserace of the charts, the Top 40 still exists. And in the absence of a real chart show you can do what my friend Josh and I did when we were seven or eight and had the use of a real cassette tape recorder all to ourselves. You can sing your own versions and play them back, collapsing in laughter. Hey, maybe we could YouTube it. Then we’d get in the Sound Index!

full size here

Next week: Isaac Asimov - “Segregationist”

1. It has an odd viscosity whereby it is harder to squeeze out of the tube (for obvious reasons) but then is bounced right off the brush by even the slightest most glancing stream of tap water.

2. It is incredibly sweet: since I ASSUME they’re not putting sugar in toothpaste they should totally be using whatever sweetener they do use in actual diet food.

3. It clings to your inner mouth and leaves your teeth feeling considerably less clean than they did before you start. My mouth felt k-horrible all morning until a cup of tea brought some palate normality back.

My conclusion: todays kids have got it bad. Bring back scrubbing yr mouth with moss and woad, or whatever our forefathers used.

Click on this tantalizing thumbnail for a full schematic. (Credit goes to goopymart.com)

For more on how this wormhole faff works, you know what to do. Just click here.

Tonight leading Moomin academic Dr Vick, Tom Ewing and Pete Baran, corralled into brilliance by the Atommick Brane herself halloo the return of the kid-lit husband list! (Ms Puddleduck come on down!) (PuddleDUMB more like!) We’ll tackle Tove Jansson, Raymond Briggs, Uncle (<— the Elephant in the Castle!) (he has a B.A.!), the general disjunction between morals and quality in children’s art and the horrific not-so-SUBtext of Toy Story II. Plus something SO SCARY even Beaver Hateman and Knobsman Carsmile will tremble in fear. Tune in and find out for yourself! 7pm GMT, 104.4 Resonance FM, online at www.resonancefm.com and follow-ups at freakytrigger.co.uk, wild surmise to ftlollards@gmail.com.

Journey: Stamford Hill Broadway to Brecknock Road
Bus: 253
Length of Journey: 19 minutes
Number of Stops: 18
Number of times announcement said ‘253. To.    Euston’: 20
Number of times bus stop was announced: 18
Total number of announcements: 38

The pattern of announcements was this - on approach to bus stop announce stop name, on arrival at bus stop announce destination before opening doors (why?!), then once doors are closed and bus is pulling away, announce it again, for the benefit of passengers who have got on the bus and immediately forgotten which bus they got onto. There were a couple of stops where the destination was announced only once, but most of them got 2 announcements per stop. With the bus stopping approximately every minute this gives an average of 2 announcements every minute.

I’m not saying that this system doesn’t have merit - it is clearly quite useful in a number of ways, but it is excessively intrusive. Buses are quieter than trains, on the whole, so the announcement is clearer, and harder to tune out. I am fully convinced of the value of announcing the stop name, but announcing the destination is surely not as important, especially this frequently. I know it benefits people with visual impairments, but it’s not like they get on random buses then sit there waiting for an announcement that will let them know whether they’ve got on the right bus or not.  And people getting off a bus have no real need to know what bus they are alighting from.

My experiment also suggests that no one will sit next to you if you have an open notepad into which you record a tally.

CONTRIBUTORS:
No matter how slapdash your general cooking method, or indeed how drunk you are while cooking, someone out there may follow your culinary Amundsen footprints. Thus if you use terms such “a handful”, we need to know if you have big hands. Ingredients may be particularly British, so think about how you would talk about - for example - cream where single and double is a UK only affectation. A good example of the problems in translation just across the Atlantic can be gained from this brave chef in the US, taking on Sarah’s admittedly avant garde spicy chocolate cupcakes.

READERS
Welcome brave traveller to our world of food. We are not professional chefs. Some of us are even afraid of making stock. Others believe that a bit of heat kills everything and have tried a project of a month long rolling stew in a big pot. Though we tend to style ourselves otherwise, we are sensualists rather than scientists. Therefore I advise you to take all recipes as mere guides, and use your own discretion when following them - to the extent of not following them if they seem wrong to you.

If this hasn’t put you off, here are a few great archived foody things: and coming soon I daresay Sarah’s recipe for Dirty Dirty Japanese Curry…
In Search Of Squirrel (Part II)
An excellent warming stew
Really Easy Fish Soup
Parsnip Chips (aka Parsnip Paradise)
Marmite Chicken

That said, not all elephants are bad as pets. Who can forget poor old Stampy in the Simpson?

*ie Linking is good enough for a story like this.

**OK, editorialised a bit. Blame where I work for that outburst.

Oh, and there were never any snakes in Ireland anyway.

I’m loving this game (about half way through I reckon), but if I have a complaint, it is that the visual resolution of where you are in all the magnificent 3D-ness is a little underdetermined by the graphics you see. Hence the shadow under your feet “as if light in Mario’s universe always falls directly toward the nearest source of gravity” is not only essential, but I find i spend more time fixing on the shadow than on Mario!

To be fair, the game designer recognises this as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview.

Admittedly products have been launched on flimsier grounds than this but the non-marketer in me is screaming at this particular straw man, “Just take the sodding tablets without it you gimp!”. The subset of consumers who are too precious to take capsules without water and yet unembarrassed enough to pour purple powder onto their tongues in semi-public is surely tiny. Or perhaps there is something darker at work…

Because as soon as I actually TRIED Lemsip Direct I realised their game: IT IS SPACE DUST. Space dust, the fabled pops-on-your-tongue sweet that was banned** from playgrounds in the 80s, creating an unslakable yearning in a generation of kids who are now weary 30something commuters buying cold and flu remedies. Only now it contains an actual drug too. Gotcha, Lemsip!

*NB the not-needing-water claim is a total lie - you will need water anyway as Lemsip Direct tastes disgusting.

**This is probably an urban myth.

JANUARY:
More Cheese That’s Good To Fry: useful and nutritious.
“Maggie May”: where’s the chorus?
Jamie T’s Album Cover: this is our truth tell me yrs.

FEBRUARY:
It’s Hot!: the sleb comic strip lives on.
The All New SI Units Of Measurement: year’s biggest spam magnet! But a great post.
Shared Universe Comics: I was completely wrong about all this but I still like my idea better than the dire reality.
Your Own Private Quatre Bras: aka A Dalek Make Of Light Part 2.

MARCH:
“Vincent”: Don gets a 1.
Pomp and Circumnavigation: Pointlessness exalted at Wembley.
Sci-Fi for Kids: Andre Norton: big retrospective!

APRIL::
The Sex Pistols at the Manchester Free Trade Hall: pathbreaking pop archaeology.
Take The Brain: stupid chess.

MAY:
This Is The Review That Goes Like This: please don’t go and see Spamalot.
Worlds In Collusion: the problems of RPG worldbuilding.

JUNE:
Let’s Make Glastonbury Better: a sensible proposal!
“Mouldy Old Dough”: the heart of one 70s.

JULY:
“Oliver’s Army”: we could talk all night.
Moaning about Black Snake: psychological complexity EXPOSED.

AUGUST:
IHM Health And Safety Watch: no, Mike Scott, no!
Diet Water / The Scandal of Skinny Water: consumer watchdog on the prowl..

SEPTEMBER:
“Think Of You”: Whigfield’s only proper song!
Food Science: Mars Planets: the second law of thermodynamics - DEFIED.

OCTOBER:
“Waterloo”: A milestone for Popular
Radio Wrong: the horror, the horror.
Confused by Cerveza?: a linguistic lesson.
Yo DJ Pump This Party: Kat’s first gig!

NOVEMBER:
Whodiddit? - the rules of crime fiction, explained. 
Overgrown doorways: woods between the words
Burial - “Untrue”: writable music and the joy of the 6AM twix 

DECEMBER:
Self-organising systems in the London Bridge Pret A Manger: social physics! with diagram!
Spicy chocolate curry cupcakes: tasty yet controversial recipe!

The London Bridge Pret A Manger is managed by a gentleman of boundless enthusiasm, both for his job and for the rules it requires him to enforce. I often see him upbraiding staff - in a friendly way, naturally - for incorrect cap position, insufficient service speed, etc. His main role in the customers’ lives, though - a thankless one - is to inform us that there are six open tills and can we please form six queues, instead of, as invariably happens, one big long queue which fills individual tills from the front. Is he right?

I have drawn an scientific DIAGRAM of the Pret a Manger London Bridge layout which I reproduce here. The black dots represent queueing individuals in the formation that they commonly (without prior planning) adopt. The red dots represent the queuing layout that the manager wants them to adopt.

The manager’s version is clearly more efficient when it comes to minimising queue length and from a management perspective it allows him a fairer assessment of the performances of individual workers. But the longer queue is in the collective interests, not only of current customers in the shop but also of prospective shop entrants (I’m assuming, and my own experience tallies with this, that neither method has a positive impact on the time it takes you to get served, though see below for more on this). The six short queues favoured by the manager would clearly make access to the tables, and to one end of the sandwich cabinet, more difficult. (Very importantly, this end of the cabinet has the Pret Chocolate Bars in). Whereas the one long queue allows better access to and from table areas and cabinets, with a minimum of queue crossing even at busy times. The crowd here have organised themselves into the most mutually beneficial system possible in terms of using the shop space.

But is this system unstable? Every individual beyond a certain distance in the queue will find their own utility maximised (i.e. will get their nosh faster) if they leave the queue and go immediately to one of the more empty tills. We now have a kind of prisoner’s dilemma in action - Ball in his book talks about the p.d. and game theory but it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet. Some people who are left behind in the main queue or do not redistribute fast enough will then find their utility lowered (i.e. it takes longer to get the sammich).

Left to its own devices the queue doesn’t collapse into sub-queues - whether it’s a spirit of mutual co-operation that drives this, or a kind of selfishness (the benefit created by quicker sandwiches is not equal to the disbenefit created by breaking the social convention) doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the manager’s encouragement to move from long queue to sub-queues creates this collapse, and therefore invariably causes an increase in queueing time for some customers. He really should leave well alone.

Fifteen years after first reading that book, and catching up with what has been going on with the extropian/transhumanist movement, I was surprised and slightly saddened (at first) to find it being tainted with a small dose of mainstream acceptance. Stanford University hosted a ‘Singularity Summit’ in 2006, and they even managed to pull in Douglas Hofstadter to give a talk. You can watch videos of speeches from last year’s Singularity Summit including Hofstadter’s diplomatic and slightly shambling appearance. Love him or hate him, his presence should be a reliable indicator that something interesting, and not 100% whacked out, is going on here.

If you want to click around on this subject, Wikipedia on Accelerating Change is a good kicking-off point exploring the ideas of Ray Kurzweil. On that and other related pages you’ll find these key illustrations of exponential changes:
paradigm shifts, moore’s law, canonical milestones, computing power/cost

Ray K’s large PPT presentation from the 2006 Summit is available but a little ditzy/full on. And you can get the gist from those linked graphs above.

See also the 2007 Richard Dimbleby Lecture by Dr Craig Venter which, while long and rambling, shares a central vision of accelerating change and technological transfomation on man and our environment.

key:
RSMB = residential mortgage-backed securities
CDO = collateralised debt obligations
transparency = the contraption has it (you can see why the system failed); the alphabet soup of acronyms precisely doesn’t <— just because you mastered the shorthand doesn’t mean you see where it’s going to crack
tranche = i love this word so much, it basically just means “slice”, but if you asked for a “tranche of cake” the cakecutter is certainly obligated to give you MORE
*yes yes rube goldberg

The Register reports that the system was designed by a student named Gail Knight and is dubbed Sat Lav. It uses the phone masts closest to the desperate SMSer’s mobile phone to triangulate her approximate location.

The system is run by Westminster Council, so its emissions are less than gratifying if one attempts to get directions outside the council’s boundaries. A text from Holborn, for instance, provoked suggestions to walk to Leicester Square, Covent Garden or the Strand, missing out the public toilets at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

No word yet if texting “lavatory” returns more upmarket results.