A shortage of fishermen means that neglected Pacific oysters now grow too big. “They weigh an average of two kilos,” says West. “Who in a restaurant wants to eat six of these as a starter?” Only the smaller ones are saleable, and then at just 70p each. And now there is herpes to deal with, which typically kills 60 per cent of young oysters and which has already affected large parts of Europe.
Looks fantastic.
- On sale directly in UK for first time.
- Now has wi-fi as well as 3G/GPRS/EDGE
- Reduced price (£109 wi-fi only, £149 wi-fi + 3G)
- 21% smaller, same screen size
- 15% lighter
- Battery life now 1 month with wireless off
- Storage doubled
- 20% faster page turns
- Quieter buttons
- Reading light built into Amazon’s own cover
- Improved contrast
- Better PDF reader
- Twitter/Facebook integration
UPDATE (Thu 6pm) - reply to my question to Amazon about what happens to people like me who already have an international Kindle:
Once the Kindle Store opens on Amazon.co.uk, existing Amazon.com customers with the UK as their country of residence will be given the option to switch to the Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store for future purchases. If you’re eligible, you’ll receive a letter sent directly to your Kindle with details on how to make the switch.
All Kindle content in the Kindle Store will be priced in Pounds Sterling (GBP) so there will be no conversion charges on your credit card.
Also, Amazon.co.uk Kindle customers will be able to subscribe to blogs from the Kindle Store which are updated automatically on your Kindle.
For ease of use, all your Kindle order history will be accessible in one place on your Amazon.co.uk account.
Amazon continue to handle customer service for this product brilliantly - I received that within 6 hours of my email. (Although they didn’t confirm if the whispernet fees would be removed if you chose to download books over wi-fi.)
Stuart Jeffries is going on a silent retreat. But there’s a train journey to endure first.
Trying to achieve silence in a quiet carriage is like trying to catch water. They were not invented to provide sanctuary; they were invented to cause rows that distract passengers’ attention from the train’s other shortcomings – the fact that there is no soap in the soap dispenser, the tap doesn’t work and you can’t flush the toilet.
I saw Pixar’s The Incredibles for the first time last weekend and naturally loved it (despite BBC Vision butchering the end credits.) Of course I was able to recognise the scene inspired by Speed, but this is a great summary of those more philosophical references you may have missed.
There is an immediate visual cue — when the movie’s protaganist, Mr. Incredible, returns to his forsaken life of crime-fighting in the public square, he is seen fighting a giant orb-shaped robot. At one point, he is on one knee, with the robot’s body across his broad shoulders, barely held up by his hands. The throwback to Atlas’s classic pose with the globe — also used as the cover for Rand’s novel — is undeniable. But the film’s ties to Objectivism are much more than skin-deep.
“Let me think about that.”
These days, it’s possible to find accurate performance data for most of the major purchases we make in our lives. If you’re shopping for a car, you can find out its gas mileage. If you’re shopping for a plane ticket, you can look up each airline’s on-time rate. When you go looking for a new cell phone, though, you enter a data-free zone in which every company is free to claim that its devices offer spectacular service. If customers or the media disagree, the companies can argue—as Apple did last week—that the critics are just carping, because nobody has any definitive data that can prove them wrong.
Gemma Arrowsmith (‘Agatha’) writes at length about the work that went into making this CBBC series.
There’s a great deal of editorial policy that you don’t even consider as a viewer. If the contestants are eating leeches, you must make it clear that it’s really just licorice dipped in treacle and no-one at home should try eating leeches. It’s called “copyable behaviour”. We usually covered the rather dry disclaimer with a gag, something along the lines of “you should only take leeches if you are accompanied by a dead tour guide.” That type of thing.
Looking back, it’s clear that the cracks in the Apple-AT&T relationship began forming as soon as Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007. It was the first time the public got to see the long-rumored device — and, shockingly, the first time AT&T’s board of directors saw it as well. (Apple refused to show the phone to all but a handful of top AT&T execs before the launch.) The split only deepened from there. Apple and AT&T have bickered about how the iPhone was to be displayed in AT&T’s stores: Apple insisted the phone be presented on its own display stand, away from other models. They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”
I have worked with someone who is very good at the promising part. She enjoys it. And when the promises don’t work out, she’s always ready with the perfect excuse. This is a great strategy if you have a regular job and the excuses are really terrific, but if you need internal or external clients, it gets old pretty fast.
If you only read one article about iPhone reception - and I really would encourage you to read one or fewer - then Anandtech have spent all day driving one with one trying to calculate the signal strength needed to show different numbers of bars..
There lurks on the London Underground network a tube station that wont appear on any tube map, past, present or indeed future. In use on most days, yet no trains ever call there and no passengers ever use it. Fully fitted out with Oyster card readers, signalling and display boards, it isn’t an old abandoned station.
This is in fact a fully fitted out fake tube station built by London Underground on the 3rd floor of an office block in West Kensington and is used to teach new employees what goes where and when.
A lot more exciting than Walford East…
Name a huge national news story of little or zero national importance… Chances are that I know the broad strokes of the story (a little girl was brutally murdered in her home; apparently she used to participate in beauty pageants) but little else.
Why? Because I made it a priority … to try very hard to know next to nothing about stories like that one. This story doesn’t affect my life in any way and that’s never, ever going to change. It involves the personal lives of complete strangers, and, as the media outlets get more desperate to keep the story in play, an ever-widening circle of peripheral individuals.
And in a followup post worthy of Merlin Mann:
There are certain stories … that somehow start off as news stories and become news products… I think segment producers at CNN and FOX are just as sick of the latest Lindsay Lohan story as anybody else. But they know that if they don’t spend six minutes of every hour talking about it, viewers are going to turn to another channel that will.
The amount of background data noise that surrounds us has increased and intensified … can you remember a moment in the past 24 hours when you were completely free from outside stimulation?
Redefine all of this unnecessary information as “distraction” and then ask yourself the question again. If you’re spending every waking moment distracting yourself…what are you distracting yourself from? What is your brain clamoring to tell you, if it were ever to get your full and complete attention?
An experiment: The next time you have a little time to kill and you instinctively go to your phone to launch your email client or your Twitter app or the web browser, launch the Clock app instead. Set a countdown timer for the amount of time you were going to spend in any of those activities (or ten minutes, whichever is shorter).
And then, put the phone in your pocket and do nothing until you hear the chime.
Cameron has not just taken to the realities of coalition better than any other Tory. He has also done it infinitely less condescendingly than Brown or any Labour leader would have done. He recognises that he is delivering a deal, not a sell-out. Yet in doing so, he has pulled the Tory party further towards both the centre ground and an acceptance of coalition politics – and pushed Labour off both – than many would have believed possible.
Consumer relationships are focused on the momentary present. It is what brings immediate pleasure that matters. Entrepreneurial relationships have more to do with the future. How I act toward others is determined by what they might do for me down the road. Friendships, although lived in the present and assumed to continue into the future, also have a deeper tie to the past than either of these. Past time is sedimented in a friendship. It accretes over the hours and days friends spend together, forming the foundation upon which the character of a relationship is built. This sedimentation need not be a happy one. Shared experience, not just common amusement or advancement, is the ground of friendship.
Can the science of deception detection help to catch terrorists?
[Spoiler] No.
