Marking Time

• Great Design -Joel Spolsky
  Series of articles on what makes great design.
  (tags: design software)

Certain words have the power to destroy a person. They label the accused as beyond the boundaries of social and moral acceptance. Often they are used with just cause. But when these words are abused, misused, or misapplied and casually tossed out then they lose their power. Their meanings are debased, corrupted, and trivialised, the revulsion they provoke is diluted. Soon we are left with no words to accurately describe these abhorrent things. All that remains is incoherence and silence, and a fog on the edge of our consciousness.

• The Strength of Internet Ties - Pew Study
  (tags: culture SocialSoftware)
• Understanding how Google.cn filters
  (tags: search Politics culture China censorship)

We may cry about losing our language: we lost as much again when we lost the meitheal. Yet in Dublin today we are experiencing newer and more powerful technologies and we are, in our economist-dominated society, admiring their potential and measuring their possible applications in economic terms only. We have not yet learned to appraise them for the social consequences they may have for what’s left of rural society, to see how we can be masters of the technology rather than slaves dragged unthinkingly behind it.

John Healy, Nineteen Acres, 1978

A survey on trends in rural Ireland … shows that one-quarter of rural dwellers commute more than 40 miles a day to work, and that over 40% of all non-farm rural households have no involvement in any community, voluntary or sporting organisation and have little or no contact with their neighbours.

Many commuters are simply ’sleeping’ in their rural homes. This disconnectivity and lack of neighbourliness is creating concern for the social fabric of many rural areas.

RTÉ News, 23 January 2006

As a nation we are in denial. Our dreams reflect that we are a rural people. We plan our cities, towns, villages, and houses as if we were all farmers. Our cities are no more than collections of villages sprawling into each other. Our low-density housing estates and one-off houses echo the small holdings of the past. Everywhere we look we see the potential for our society diminished or destroyed by the refusal to face up to the reality that we are a post-agriculture society.

The old meitheal was based on the principle of economies of scale - even if it was on a small scale. The old meitheal is dead and gone. The society that sustained it and made it a necessity no longer exists. We need new kinds of meitheals now, the kinds that take advantage of the economies of scale that large urban centres provide, the kinds that make public transport workable, the kinds that make sports and arts facilities viable, the kinds that make interesting and diverse social interactions possible - in short, the kind of things that enhance our quality of life and give us the potential to live in a proper functioning society.

Despite our affluence our need for others still remains. Money may give us the feeling of independence but no matter how big our car we’re all stuck in the same traffic jam.

• Beautiful China
  Beautiful photos of China (via Making Light).

• Through the city at nearly the speed of light
  (tags: cool science)
• The Monkey’s Typewriter: We read so you don’t have to
  Shane Barry on the future (or lack of) for newspapers. Those lifestyle supplements leave me unsatisfied as well. It’s as if the articles are written for people with no interest in the subjects.
  (tags: culture)

Around the time of the Good Friday Agreement and for a few years after, I developed an unhealthy interest in the politics of Northern Ireland. I followed all the news stories, the sub-plots, the sideshows, and the distractions. I bought obscure books on the subject, explored imaginative and fanciful solutions, and learned several different versions of history.

Whatever your opinion on the merits of the Good Friday Agreement and its potential to solve the problem you have to admit that it’s a curious and unique beast and - in the early days at least - it was a very interesting subject to throw your two cents at.

And throw them I did. Sometime in 1999 I started following the Peace In Northern Ireland discussion forum hosted on the CNN website. It was a reasonably civilised forum, and probably one of the most balanced given the dominance of pro-Nationalist and pro-Sinn Féin opinion on the internet at the time. It was mainly made up of Irish-Americans who were for the most part sympathetic to Sinn Féin but there was a sprinkling of Northern Ireland ex-pats, the odd Briton poking a stick in the hornets nest, and a few native Irish too, representing a diversity of the political spectrum. In fact the debates between the native Irish were most enlightening given that it was they who were bringing their real experience of the situation to the forum.

After a year or two of lurking I started contributing under a pseudonym. My contributions weren’t exactly earth shattering, more closer to the ‘why can’t we all just get on with real life and stop the fantasy politics’ line than the more popular Mopery line . (An aside: MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. Mopery = The act of indulging yourself in the fantasy that you and ‘your people’ are the MOPE).

One of the more reasonable and thoughtful contributors to the CNN board was Mick Fealty, now the main man behind Ireland’s best known political blog, Slugger O’Toole. Most people think of Mick as ‘Slugger’. But he’s not. And Slugger’s not the character from The Irish Rover either (at least not directly) as the Wikipedia entry incorrectly states.

Slugger O’ Toole (or if I recall correctly “slugger o’toole” - no caps) was actually another poster on the CNN Discussion Forum. In fact, slugger was the pseudonym of Tim Murphy, an Irish-American nationalist/republican who posted regularly under his own name. But slugger was no republican fellow-traveller. Not by a long shot. He was a caricature of the most unrepentant, unreconstructed, Orange bigot you could find, a cross between Twenty Major and Ian Paisley, if you can imagine.

The original title of the Slugger O’Toole blog was Letter to Slugger O’Toole. I think it also had a sub-heading “from an idea by Tim Murphy” or something like that. I liked the idea of the blog being a letter to slugger. I imagined poor lonely slugger in his alternative Ulster receiving strange correspondence from Mick Fealty describing what was going on in this foreign place; the real Ulster. I don’t know why Mick changed the title. I suppose it’s too much of an in-joke given that only a handful of people knew the real slugger.

As for my own interest in Northern politics, it seemed the more I learned the less interesting the subject became. The tragedy is that so much pain and suffering and squandered potential has resulted from a fight over national allegiances that have no real relevance or usefulness anymore.

• Science’s 10 most beautiful experiments
  (tags: science)

New job, new town, new home, new routines and new plans. I’m looking forward to the changes but it’ll take me a while to get my bearings.

I can still see the North Atlantic Skyline, so that’s something.