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Weekend notes: Live 8
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Live 8: Normally I would be cynical, or at least pessimistic of the prospect of change, but then Geldof, after showing a film of the poverty-stricken children of Ethiopia in the 80s, brought out one of the starving infants we had just seen, Birhan Woldu, grown up into a beautiful, healthy and well-educated twenty-four-year-old. My…
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Stood up, got counted
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(The server is back up; they say this is the last time… Stay tuned for a whole bunch of posts saved up over the weekend.)
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Down, again
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The power will be out to the server again this weekend, Friday evening through Monday morning (UK time). Get some fresh air! The song for the weekend is the bittersweet “Fourth of July”, written by Dave Alvin, performed by X on See How We Are (which seem to come up a lot around here).
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Satellite Maps in the UK
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Google now has satellite maps of the UK! (But the level of detail seems to depend on where you are.) Here’s where I work. The strange round thing just above is the Royal Albert Hall.
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Academics: blogs and publishing
The Village Voice has an article about academic blogs. And BlogScholar is attempting to organize the joyous but chaotic noise we make (but I’ll wait to see how serious it is before I sign up). Meanwhile, after a discussion of various models for academic publishing over on CosmoCoffee, moderator Antony Lewis has set up a…
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Blog spam
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I’ve noticed a scary trend in the spam I’ve been receiving in the comments and trackbacks of this blog: they’ve started using plausible non-spam domains (businesses, organizations — I’m not going to do their work for them by mentioning the names here) for obvious spam content (poker, drugs). This makes it hard to tell if…
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Sense of irony
Nancy Ellman’s review of A Changed Man by Francine Prose opens with this charming summation of American culture: American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it’s just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world…
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Slow down
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Here‘s a sort-of advertisement from Jem Finer to give you the opportunity to support his Longplayer project (and possibly win a trip to Brisbane). Vote early and often! Update: I placed my bet on 3 hours, 7 minutes and 12 seconds… And here are some movies and photos from Jem of his Centre of the…
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Down time
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A quick warning that the server on which this blog lives will be down from Friday evening through Monday morning (UK time). Have a nice weekend!
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Intellectual Property redux
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In her comment on this post, Gia asks I’ve got a domain name all ready to go, but I’m not sure my server at the University of Manc is the right place to host it… What is the deal at Imperial regarding ‘personal’ things on their servers…? At what point could your blog become an…