The Register: Gatwick reduced to anarchy by ‘computer glitch’

What, so all of Gatwick’s managers walked out, leaving the rest of the staff to run the Airport themselves? Sounds like this glitch did everyone a favour.

Anil Dash on the smugness of Apple

When browsing your network in Leopard, machines running windows appear as beige monitors showing the Blue Screen of Death. Anil Dash takes issue with this:

The disdain here isn’t for the unfortunate unwashed who have to suffer through Windows because they’re so clueless — it’s a snide shot at the other computers you own, or of your family’s other machines around the house, or of the computers of the peers you work with. In short, the derision is likely aimed at people who care a hell of a lot more about you and your boundless Mac-enhanced creativity than, say, the OS X team does.

Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds

An interesting article in which the author uses Wikipedia as an example of an ‘Evolution-like’ system:

There is no question that there is something unsettling about the idea of a resource that can be edited by anonymous internet users. We would expect that many, if not most, of the edits will be of poor quality. The natural assumption might be that the quality of the end result will be the average quality of all the edits — but nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been much in the way of speculation over Radiohead’s earnings from their pay-what-you-like release of In Rainbows. What seems to be overlooked is the fact that in the coming months, Radiohead will be signing to a label for a worldwide release of the album in CD format.

It’s an interesting business model: those unfamiliar with Radiohead’s music may download the album in exchange for little or no money just to try it; most Radiohead fans will download the album for any amount of money to get the album upon its release; a smaller number of fans will buy the

For those of you experience BST via an RSS news reader, of which there are many, well about 5 – you may be interested to know its design is now rather ‘Gorey-esque’, i.e., in the style of the work of Edward Gorey, whose books I love. Dame Hex’s TrueType font based on Gorey’s hand lettering made the job very easy.

I was looking up at St Mary’s Church in the town of Nantwich, England, thinking how its sandstone structure must be difficult to maintain, when an elderly lady asked me if I was local.

Yes, I replied.

She called her husband and prompted to him to tell us his story about the Church. So, not begrudgingly, he told me, and expecting some factual information about the history of the building, I listened with interest. After some amount of back-story…

We came out of the pub, he said, and there was smoke rising at the back of the church… and it was in the shape of three angels!

I stared at him and it was obvious that he noticed my disappointment at the sheer inanity of his story.

You wanted to know that didn’t you, he said.

Yes, very interesting, I replied trying to be polite, and walked away.

Dawkins: Theology has no place in a university

From the article:

… as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

Radiohead lets fans pick price for new album

Xeni Jardin writes:

This is major, and it’s such a slap in the record industry’s face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves — what a revolutionary concept.

Now I like Radiohead, and this is indeed great news, but why is the ordering site so hard to navigate around and understand?

I know Radiohead like to be ‘post-everything’, but they shouldn’t be applying this to their ordering system. Seems like the wrong way to go about selling albums online.