� July 2004 | Main | September 2004 �
August 28, 2004
Tiffin carriers of Bombay
7. The "tiffin carriers" of Bombay, who deliver home-cooked lunches to office workers, are so good at delivering to the right person on time that Forbes Magazine has given them an accuracy and precision rating of 99.99% - one error per eight million deliveries.
BBC NEWS | Magazine | The Magazine Monitor
Posted by thdyck at August 28, 2004 | Comments (0)
Sunday life in Britain
Sociologist Michael Willmott acknowledges there has been a "dramatic change in the way we spend our Sundays".
"For many people who didn't go to church, Sundays used to be felt as an oppressive day, when they were forbidden from living the life they had for the rest of the week," says Mr Willmott, a founder of the Future Foundation consultancy.
"The constraints have gone now and people see it more as a sort of mini-Saturday."
But not everyone embraces these new, consumer-led Sundays. After all, shoppers demand shop assistants, diners demand waiting staff.
Although the Church of England says Sunday attendances are holding relatively steady at about a million, many Christians feel society is poorer for losing this enforced day of relaxation and contemplation.
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Remember what Sundays used to be like?
Posted by thdyck at August 28, 2004 | Comments (0)
August 25, 2004
First person account of the liberation of Paris 60 years ago
After the surrender, there was the triumph through central Paris. With Mr Kriegel-Valrimont and General Choltitz on the half-track were: General Philippe Leclerc, Jacques Chaban-Delmas - Mr de Gaulle's link-man with the Resistance - and Henri Rol-Tanguy, who commanded the FFI in Paris.
"To say it was unforgettable is meaningless. It was phenomenal. Everyone should have a day like that once in their lifetime.
"When we got to Montparnasse, Rol and I looked at each other. We didn't speak a word, but we both knew what the other was thinking: yes - it was worth it all for this! Paris is free, the enemy is our prisoner, the war is going to be won. Not a bad job!"
BBC NEWS | Europe | Eyewitness: How Paris was liberated
Posted by thdyck at August 25, 2004 | Comments (0)
August 23, 2004
BBC: People eat because of boredom, loneliness and stress
Almost half of adults turn to food to stifle feelings of boredom, loneliness and stress, research suggests.
A survey by the Priory Clinic found 43% of adults across the UK eat to change a negative mood.
BBC NEWS | Health | Comfort and 'boredom' eating rife
Posted by thdyck at August 23, 2004 | Comments (0)
August 13, 2004
John Perry Barlow interview
John Perry Barlow is one of the most articulate people around on intellectual property and media.
[Barlow:] Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don't have something that assures fair use, then you don't have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.
...
Barlow: You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment -- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
Reason: John Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents his body -- and his politics. (from BoingBoing)
Posted by thdyck at August 13, 2004 | Comments (0)
August 3, 2004
Most comparative and informed Doom 3 review
I'll get it out of the way right now: DOOM 3 is gorgeous. It doesn't have the tropical paradise charm of Far Cry or the highly unique theme for each level that Painkiller has, but this game just oozes style - or, should I say, bleeds it. This game is downright dingy, dirty, and evil, much like the subject matter it depicts. It's also one of the darkest games I've ever seen, so make sure to play it at night with the lights out for best effect.
Posted by thdyck at August 3, 2004 | Comments (0)