The Bulletin magazine is no more. After 128 years, this agenda-setting weekly has just published its last issue. The Bulletin‘s fate was “somehow symptomatic” of the impact of the Internet on news magazines, says the publisher. I reckon it’s more about failing to publish information and commentary that you couldn’t find elsewhere. Apart from The Sphere of Influence, that is. Who needs yet more movie and wine reviews?
Your career as a “Timeline of Understanding”
My good friend and colleague Zern Liew has updated the website for his business, Eicolab. It’s glorious. And one of the most glorious parts is this visually stunning timeline of his career — presented not as a list of employers and projects, but as a record of his evolving professional thoughts.
If you click through to the full-size graphic, you’ll see how it begins in 1998 with observations like “Flash is bad” and variations on “Appropriate technology” through to current observations like “markets are conversations” and “business is personal” — things I happen to agree on.
What would your career look like in this format? What were the observations, tools and guiding principles which shaped your career path?
Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, Day 1
[Update 30 January 2008: More analysis of this has been posted since this article was written. Look for items tagged “heath ledger”.]
Just 24 hours ago, actor Heath Ledger died. Before most people even knew he was dead, I’d set up a web page asking for jokes about his death and I placed an advertisement (pictured) on Google. Tasteless. But there was a porpoise. This was Science!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. If you have any questions as you read this, please ask them. I’ll be exploring the data more deeply over the next few days.
Continue reading “Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, Day 1”
Virgin unveils first commercial spaceliner
OK, it’s not really a spaceliner, ‘cos it won’t be making any leisurely cruises to Mars or even the Moon. It just goes up and then comes down again. But it looks so goddam sexy.
Virgin Galactic has presented the world with this sexy design for SpaceShipTwo, which will start taking paying passengers on a sub-orbital trip in 2010, eight people at a time.
Sir Richard Branson reckons it’s important that the project is a genuine commercial success.
If we do [this], I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.
This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.
Virgin Galactic reckons the carrier vehicle — White Knight Two — is very nearly finished and will start flight tests later this year. SpaceShipTwo is about 60% complete.
They’ll look rather spiffy parked outside the Foster+Partners spaceport they showed us in October.
Gaydar exists!
The mythical “gaydar” exists! Research shows we can pick someone’s sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time after seeing their photo for just 100 milliseconds. Hat-tip to 3 quarks daily.
Quote of the Day, 23 January 2008
“The [stock] market in the short run is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.†So said Benjamin Graham (1894-1976), economist, professional investor and mentor of Warren Buffett. Hat-tip to Memex 1.1.