Goodbye Blogger

I am in the process of moving my blog. Let's see how much I can break in along the way.



 

Sir Terry Pratchett's Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Terry Pratchett's lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in London was shown on BBC One last night, and is still available here (though you may have to be in the UK to view). Sir Terry's talk – which he couldn't deliver himself for the most part due to his early-onset Alzheimer's – was mainly about attitudes to death, assisted death, and our choice of a dignified death that this far has been almost categorically denied.

I too find the thought that assisted death should be viewed as a questionable practice entirely alien, inhumane and medieval. But beyond that discussion, it was Sir Terry's treatment of his own humanistic worldview that really moved me: "We are rising apes, not fallen angels," which to me is a beautiful way to describe the difference between the nature of humanist morality and that of a a theistic morality.


 

One-liners

1) Witty, funny or obscure (mostly the latter in my case) sayings or thoughts.
2) Drawings made with a one single line without lifting the pen from the paper (and occasionally following other rules such as no crossing, or loops only, etc.)

"We will need morality as long as we continue to misunderstand ourselves."

"Let me look at that cavity. I even cut my own hair."

(That's me there. Hello.)

"I drove my therapist to suicide."

(Well, I never have, but that guy there might have.)

"God hides in cracks of knowledge."

(I've always liked that thought: there's no other place to hide, and even those cracks are getting smaller and smaller by the day.)

Special Christmas message from The Economy

from artrepublic

Some links on shopping:
British consumers spent a total of £33 million online during the Monday lunch hour and £1.4 million was spent at 13:43 alone, making it the busiest online shopping minute ever. http://tinyurl.com/yckcbvb

More than two thirds of UK shoppers (70%) plan to spend an average of £220 of their Christmas shopping budget online. http://tinyurl.com/yc7959n

Deloitte estimates that spending on gifts this year in Britain alone will top £16.9 billion ($33 billion), while the average European household will rack up $872 in Christmas-related expenditures. BusinessWeek 2006.

Only buy what you need. Oh, that's just not interesting to anyone, it seems..

The Animated Google Homepage

Who would've thought a couple of years ago? With bells and whistles abound on high-traffic sites the world around, good old Google stayed true to the perfectly static search homepage. Remembering the adventures we had with simple one-liners shorter than your average tweets, an animated effect on the homepage would've been unheard of.

Official Google Blog: Now you see it, now you don't

The new update is small in terms of dynamism or flashiness, but that's what it must be - simple and effective. It's good to see simplicity doesn't have to exclude dynamism, even in the hardest core of simplicity. Very nice.



 

Don't count on our help: What Google's suggestions can do to your message

Here is an interesting example of how Google's search suggestions can wreak havoc on your brand message - without you having any control over it, really. The examples in the case are in Finnish, but they are translated.
Nordea is the largest bank in the Nordics, and in Finland their catchphrase for many products such as loans is "Teemme sen mahdolliseksi" ("We make it possible" - the most boring and innocuous slogan a bank can have, to be sure).

Googling that with an English-language setting (used by many even in Finland) gets you the below suggestion: "Teemme se mahdollisesti" ("We might do it, possibly"), which you'll know to be a fair statement if you have ever negotiated loans, cards or accounts with them for that matter (especially if you are a small business).



And what can you do if you are the company in question? Do your research - in this case searches in relevant and related languages, misspellings and misunderstandings, and take findings into account in your PR, which you can use to organically steer the results in the right direction (I like calling in steering instead of optimization: there is so much snake oil sold in search engine optimization). Of course, in some cases a suggestion like this may only be triggered after you have composed your messaging, so review rounds are important as well.

Affordable Art Fair in London

This weekend in London the annual Affordable Art Fair takes place in Battersea Park. The affordable bit in the name simply means that all pieces are under £3,000. I had a thorough browse through today, picked up a beautiful etching by Jo Riddell, and was quite enlightened. Especially the recent graduates area of the exhibition was extremely engaging. Great art, great new forms of expression. I highly recommend it. The photo above is from the entrance to the exhibition.