Link Banana

A very cool short video from “the Beeb.” My favorite is probably the view of London taxis during a day, but they’re all pretty good visualizations.

(via Gems Sty)

This list of lists of of “The Cases that Changed Britain” is rather interesting. I’d be even more interested in seeing a similar thing compiled for the US.

• Part one: 1785-1869
• Part two: 1870-1916
• Part three: 1917-1954
• Part four: 1955-1971
• Part five: 1972-2006

(via Lone Gunman)

Far more variable than you might think. The comparison of various renderings is well worth a look.

(via kottke)

Perhaps the most absurd part of the High Court’s ruling that Pringles are exempted from the VAT on crisps is that Proctor & Gamble happily pointed out how completely unnatural and unfoodlike their product is.

“It has a shape not found in nature, being designed and manufactured for stacking, and giving a pleasing and regular undulating appearance which permits comfortable eating.

“In this respect, it is unlike a potato crisp and, I would add, a potato stick or puff.”

He added: “A Pringle does not taste like a crisp or otherwise behave like one. Crisps give a sharply crunchy sensation under the tooth and have to be broken down into jagged pieces when chewed.

(via Slashfood)

Ronald Hutton’s summary of some recent book on the monument is rather good. I was rather struck by his beginning:

Why is Stonehenge the most famous prehistoric monument in the world? A large part of the answer lies in the domination of modernity by Western nations, and the supremacy of Britain among them, both in military and economic terms, as that modernity was being developed. In that sense Stonehenge was simply the top antiquity of the top nation at a critical moment in history.

Calling to mind this story, a British website paid people to stand on the street with “If you ask me for a £5 note you can have it” sandwich boards. They report surprisingly low acceptance of the offer.

(via Boing Boing)

Yoni Brenner offers a playful imagining of a meeting at which Stonehenge, now thought to have been a memorial to the dead, was discussed.

Now, me well aware of controversy surrounding new Og Memorial Complex, also known as Massive-Rocks-Arranged-in-Mysterious-Circle. Some say it eyesore. Some say it waste of massive rocks. Some like concept of mysterious circle but find execution pedestrian. On behalf of Memorial Committee for Remembering of Og, me want to take opportunity to address concerns directly, and unpack some of artistic decisions involved in approving project like Massive-Rocks-Arranged-in-Mysterious-Circle.

Another reason to love Wikipedia.

The Economist is sounding the alarm about the troubling ease with which the extremely wealthy are stifling free speech worldwide by pressing cases in the most friendly countries. A few cases that have taken of Britian’s libel laws:

That followed a similar judgment last year against Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York-based American author who has written about the support of some Saudis for Islamist terrorism. She was successfully sued in London by a Saudi for a book she had published in America that had sold only a handful of copies in Britain.

Obozrevatel (Observer), an internet news site that does not even publish in English. Like Ms Ehrenfeld, the defendants did not appear in court and judgment was entered against them in default. Damages will be set in a compensation hearing later this year. Schillings declined to comment, but a statement on its website reads: “By seeking redress in the courts of England, Mr Akhmetov will ensure that there will be a fair legal process.”

The records of the central criminal court of London from 1674 to 1913 are now online. It’s not exactly the most user-friendly interface, but you can find some interesting tidbits. The Economist’s story has some interesting bits, like this:

Henry Williams, who in 1886 was sentenced to four months’ hard labour for “attempting an abominable crime with a mare”.

Another interesting — and sometimes ghastly — thing to do is see what crimes merited what punishment. Some truly gruesome punishments are on display, like John Morgan who was drawn and quatered in 1679 for “having received Orders from the See of Rome.”

There’s been a fair bit of coverage of London’s maybe-important mayoral election, which is tomorrow. Anne Applebaum offers the best, and most entertaining primer I’ve seen.

The candidates haven’t exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary. Though he’s been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can’t stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of “drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”).

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—”Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3”—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. “Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon,” he once remarked, “there lurks a blithering buffoon.”

Ken, by contrast, isn’t funny or self-deprecating at all. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro’s dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a “chiseling little crook” and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving “like a concentration camp guard.”

The UK’s Royal Mint does it right:

As you can see [by clicking the title link], the Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

(via kottke)

The Economist did a recent survey about political positions in the two countries with a number of interesting results.

The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion: no surprise there, as Britain is famously a post-Christian society and Americans are, if anything, rediscovering the faith of their fathers. But the difference in views is so wide that even British Conservatives are a great deal more secular than American Democrats are. The two are a bit closer on social values (abortion, homosexuality and so forth), and they overlap on ideology (mainly, how active the state should be), with Britain’s Tories to the right of America’s Democrats.

They overlap again on how free their countries should be to intervene militarily (both the Tories and Labour are more hawkish than the Democrats). Britons are more international than the Americans, keener on free trade and globalisation. Views coincide most nearly on climate change—ironically, the area where the two governments have been least in step.

It worth giving the first graph in that article a look (as it summarizes the findings well), the more comprehensive second graph is here.

Ms. Mills got unusually little, especially considering English divorce law:

England is reputed to have the most generous divorce laws in the world. Not only are the couple’s assets supposed to be divided roughly equally, but also—rare in a rich country—everything gets thrown into the pot, including wealth acquired before the marriage. And prenuptial agreements are not recognised under English law.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote a pretty interesting Op-Ed in this morning’s LA Times. Though ostensibly about Britishness, he’s also got an important point that’s relevant here:

The more diverse your society becomes, the more important it is to spell out what you all have in common. In any nation defined by civic rather than ethnic belonging, citizenship is the key term, and in Britain, unlike in France or the United States, our explicit notions of citizenship are underdeveloped.

I’ve long thought this would be a great idea, but I think designing it especially for people over 60 was a mistake. You got it half right, Manchester.

Instead of slides and roundabouts, it is equipped with machines specially designed to provide gentle exercise for different parts of the body such as hips, legs and torso.

The Massage offers upper body exercise, the Skate trains leg muscles, the Ski works the hips, while the Press tones the stomach and legs.

There are also stations for pull-ups, push-ups and pedalling and, to stretch the mind as well as the body, engravings of quotes from famous philosophers dotted around the park.

(via Neatorama)