BLOG OFF!

What will you be doing this time next week? Saturday 24 March, 2007? If you're reading this, it's pretty much certain that you'll be on-line at your computer at some point or other during the day. Unless, that is, you decided to join in with SHUTDOWN DAY!


Consider the following statistic: in the region of ONE BILLION people have a computer and spend at least ONE HOUR A DAY on the internet which adds up to 372,609,004,374 HOURS EVERY YEAR.

So, here's the premise behind Shutdown Day:

It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

I'm going to give it try --- apart from anything else, it will save having to write a blog!

STATE BRITAIN

Did you know...

Short-term “jails” are planned for supermarkets and town centres to deal with yobs and shoplifters under Home Office proposals to ease the burden on police. Discussions have already started about building a “retail jail” inside the Selfridges store in Oxford Street, London.

Suspects would be held for up to four hours in a small room with a clear plastic front so they were visible to custody officers at all times during their detention.

Ministers are also proposing a huge expansion of police powers to take fingerprints, DNA and other samples from offenders and store them on national databases. People caught speeding, failing to wear a seat belt, allowing their dog to foul the footpath and dropping litter could be forced to give fingerprints or DNA to police for checking against other databases.

Winston Smith suggests you might care to read the full story...

NIGHT LIGHTS

Street lamps, house lights and neon signs; lights in stores and office blocks; floodlights at sporting venues and on historic buildings. If the entire world were in darkness at the same time this is how the villages, towns and cities of Planet Earth would light up the night sky.


This striking image (click to enlarge) comes courtesy of NASA and was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS).

Originally the OLS was designed in order to be able to view clouds by moonlight, but it is also used to map the locations of permanent lights on the Earth’s surface.

The earliest cities sprang up along coastlines and, across the millennia, their growth followed transportation networks of rivers, canals, roads and railways. Even if the underlying map were missing from this image, it would still be possible to trace the outlines of most of the world’s continents.

The interstate highways of the USA form an intersecting maze joining one city centre to another; while in Russia, the Trans-Siberian railroad is a brilliant dot-to-dot line that runs from Moscow through the centre of Asia to Vladivostok.

And yet there are still whole swathes of land where electricity has yet to shed any illumination: the Arctic and Antarctica; the jungles of Africa and South America; the forests of Canada and Russia; the towering mountain ranges of the Himalaya and the desert lands of Africa, Arabia, Australia, Mongolia, and the United States.

The result is a complex portrait of both the reach and the limit of man's presence on the blue planet...

You can read more about this photograph in a three-page NASA article Bright Lights Big City and download your own copy (it makes an impressive desktop picture) at Visible Earth.

[Image credits: Data courtesy Marc Imhoff of NASA GSFC and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA NGDC. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC.]

SIMPLE SIMON

A curious encounter...

Passing through the arches under London Bridge Station the other day, I noticed a beggar sitting by the wall with his upturned hat on the ground in front of him and a cardboard notice which read:

HUNGRY
and
HOMELESS

PLEASE HELP

Maybe it was being currently broke that moved me to want to help ("There but for the grace of God, go I SOON!") but, for whatever reason, I felt driven to extend the hand of charity.

Noticing a stall selling a range of mouth-watering, nose-teasing, home-made pies, I decided that rather than throw money in his hat that might end up being spent on booze or drugs, I'd offer to buy him something to eat.

"Would you like a pie?" I asked.

Then came the totally unexpected response...

"No, thanks," he replied, "I've just eaten."

Oh, well, maybe he was already aquainted with Mrs Lovett's pies...

[Image: 'Simple Simon' from Mother Goose illustrated by W W Denslow]

STOLEN PROPERTY

Monday evening in a nice little Italian restaurant in London where we eat every week with members of The Magic Circle, I had my much loved, world-travelled Tumi bag stolen…

How did it happen? I hung it on the back of my chair.. Yes, I know! An act of rank stupidity that I’ve cautioned so many others about…

But what is most disturbing is that it had to have been taken by someone who was dining at one of the nearby tables.

Lots of late night calls to police, credit card companies etc were a tiring addition to the distress of losing the bag and its contents.

Then, Tuesday morning comes a phone call from a chirpy young lady at Holloway Bus Garage in north London. “Have you lost anything?” she asked, presumably thinking that I had carelessly left my possessions on a bus.

“Well, I had a bag stolen last night,” I told her to which, in a rather more sober voice, she told me that she had it safe and sound in Lost Property…

A two-hour round trip to Holloway Road reunited me with my Tumi and, miraculously, some of the contents...

The thief’s choice of what to steal and what to dump is bizarre but interesting…

LOST

* Folding umbrella (It was raining)

* Oyster card (Stopped, so of no use)

* A rather nice, new pink silk tie (Stylish selection on the thief’s part!)

* Small bottle of Hermés Concentré D’Orange Verte eau de toilette (Excellent choice!)

* Nokia mobile phone (Old but still serviceable but, with the sim card stopped, no use to them or me)

* Canon ixus 5 mp digital camera (* Sigh * Sob!)

* Packet of Halter sugar free Apple bonbons (Well, they were sugar-free)

* Packet of Germoloid Tissues (Hurrah! At least the thief’s got piles!)

FOUND

* Tumi bag (Worn, but still desirable)

* Ventolin inhalers (So the thief doesn't have asthma as well as piles; pity!)

* Oyster card folder (Thoughtful!)

* Leather credit-card wallet (A 50th birthday gift, so I’m glad to have that back)

* Entire contents of wallet: Membership cards to The Magic Circle, Equity and NUJ; PRESS card; NHS Pre-paid prescription card; Clapham Picture House and Dulwich Picture Gallery membership cards; Boots, W H Smith and Co-operative cards and a Steroid-users card.

* Silver, hallmarked pill box (Huh??)

* 3 credit cards (Doh!)

What was a Very Lucky Escape was that Buttons wasn’t along for the ride as he quite often is (see below); although he says that if he had been in the bag, then he would have Made a Loud Noise Enabling the Thief to be Apprehended!

A SHOW OF FEELINGS

Blogs fulfil many functions: you can use it (interestingly or boringly) as a daily "Dear Diary..." or as a Commonplace Book; as a forum or debating chamber; as an entertainment and diversion for an audience considerably wider than the lone readership of the author; or, under the cloak of anonymity, as an electronic confessional...

What is common to many blogs is 'feelings': on one level they focus on the things about which bloggers feel passionate; on another, they provide a page of cyberspace on which to write about love, loneliness, happiness, sadness and anger.

My friend John van der Put (who's blog Being John van der Put is often concerned with feelings) told me about www.wefeelfine.org one the most exhilerating and existential websites dedicated to capturing the feelings of bloggers throughout the world...

The 'mission' of Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar's We Feel Fine is, as you will see, both simple and complex:

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion...


The color of each particle corresponds to the tone of the feeling inside – happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green, and so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

If you've never visited WFF, this may be the beginning of an addiction...

However, a word of warning - go there at your liesure because this is no quick-fit web-site; it requires time: time to discover the different ways in which you can explore the feelings (there are six formal "movements" titled Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds) and time to immerse yourself in these various expressions of emotion, just as you might spend time in wandering from picture to picture in an art gallery or in browsing through the pages of a volume of poetry...