There’s a double standard that has always confused me. Society is contemptuous of people who make their money using their looks – the celebrities and glamour models and reality TV show winners and so on – but impressed by people who make money using their brains. And yet the people who make money with their…
Month: November 2013
Let’s hear from scientists, not politicians, on plain packs for cigarettes
In July, the Government made a few headlines by suggesting that they were dropping the plan to impose generic packs for cigarettes. Now they’ve made a few more, by suggesting they’re picking it back up again. Thus, when you carry out two U-turns, it forms a perfect circle. Of course, the Government deny this –…
SHOUTY ALL CAPS and pass-agg full stops: how instant messaging has created a new English
There’s a lovely Ben Crair piece in the New Republic this morning, about how instant messaging and texts are changing our use of punctuation: it seems that a full stop at the end of a chat message can be seen as aggressive or final. So see you at home later is happy and friendly, while…
Is the stigma of mental illness lifting? Jonathan Trott’s Ashes exit hints that it may be
A few weeks ago, a row broke out among NFL players and commentators about the nature of masculinity. Jonathan Martin, a Miami Dolphins “left tackle” – I don’t know American football at all, but I assume that’s a man who stands on the left and makes tackles – quit the team to seek help for…
Boris: don’t ban cycling with headphones. You’ll make people die younger
David Spiegelhalter, the Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, has spent some time looking into the risks and benefits of cycling. Speaking on Radio 4’s marvellous More or Less programme a couple of months ago, he said that for someone of average fitness, roughly speaking, for every hour…
No, skyscrapers are not phallic symbols
Unintentional (OR IS IT???? Yes) hilarity over in Qatar, where they’ve designed a new stadium for the 2022 World Cup – and yes, it is ridiculous that Qatar have got the 2022 World Cup. Anyway, the Al-Wakrah stadium, as designed, looks not unlike a vagina. Apparently it’s actually “based upon the design of a traditional…
Robots: do we want to give them a licence to kill?
The UN is discussing whether ‘fully autonomous weapons’ – battle robots – should be allowed. Tom Chivers separates fact from fiction [ooyala id=”Z1Z2M3ZDqQKEqpGW14Of3n5lA7fC7RS5″ ] Every discussion of robots and warfare will always come back to one, or both, of two science fiction touchstones: Skynet and Asimov. “Skynet”, the artificial intelligence defence system described in the…
Nature sent a cyclone – man made it worse
We can’t say whether climate change led to Typhoon Haiyan, but we can help nations at risk [ooyala id=”50NGY1aDrVlsE1sIC-BssCYkN2KEnPxI” ] Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands made homeless. Parents holding the broken corpses of their children, churches used as makeshift morgues, bodies lying unburied in the street, aid efforts blocked by debris. The reports from the…
Internships, social mobility and entrenched privilege: how can we make unpaid work pay?
Sir John Major has been talking about social mobility, and it’s sparked a conversation about unpaid internships; on the Today programme this morning Owen Jones and our own Harry Mount were discussing whether or not they weight the game even further in favour of the well-off. Whenever the conversation turns to unpaid work, I think…
Twitter and Silicon Valley: in a world of their own
As the Twitter flotation raises billions, one biotech entrepreneur has suggested Silicon Valley should break away from the US and form a separate country. Tom Chivers reports [ooyala id=”owY2J4ZzoqNRbwzj5cUniYlUc8p9c3uP” ] We live in a world built, in part, by the Silicon Valley internet giants. Now Silicon Valley wants a part of that world to itself….
Tim Berners-Lee’s internet utopia has been covered in skyscrapers and spyware
You’ve got to admire Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He’s the last true great, really, of a generation of internet pioneers who were in it to build a sort of gleaming free utopia. He made a tool which everyone uses, the World Wide Web protocols, and just gave it away for free. Like Doug Engelbart and the…
Seriously, Russell Brand, if you want socialism, vote for a socialist party. There are lots
It’s the second week of Russell Brand’s Politics Month. After his guest editorship of the New Statesman last week, the Huffington Post ran an interview with him the other day, under the only faintly emetic slogan “Brand New Politics“. And he’s popped up again on the front page of today’s Grauniad, for God’s sake. Oh…
Tom Chivers 