Happy Friday

22 Jan
2010

Nearly three hours and fifty reasons why 80s music rocked. Click here to play.

No. You can’t have a track listing. Just listen to it like you would a radio station. And no skipping tracks. It’s one. Big. Track.

If you like it, why not donate to the DEC Haiti appeal or Shelterbox?

Text “GIVE” to 70077 to donate £5 to the DEC for Haiti.

My My David Cameron

21 Jan
2010

*Blows dust off long-neglected blog*

See more at www.mydavidcameron.com

UPDATE: You can now vote for the posters – VOTE KITTEH.

The man who showed me what spaceships look like

23 Sep
2009


Spice leaking from a ruptured pirate ship by Chris Foss

Have you heard of Chris Foss? If you've seen any of the major science fiction films of the last thirty years, you may have seen the influence of his work. He worked on visualisations for a never-produced film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (no, not the David Lynch one), Superman, Alien, and Flash Gordon. He created conceptual art for the movie A.I for Stanley Kubrick – nearly ten years before the film actually came out.

The book 21st Century Foss was in my mum's library when I grew up. Chris Foss showed me what spaceships looked like. I am now looking for the book again.

If that's not enough, Foss did the illustrations for the original The Joy Of Sex.

Posted via email from Natmandu’s Campervan of Internet Wonders

Human perception – what’s your reality?

23 Sep
2009
via boingboing.net

This Boing Boing video got me thinking about my psychology studies, and just what a fascinating thing perception is. People with synesthesia involuntarily associate colours with objects, days, letters and numbers, but they’re just perceiving things in a slightly different way from everyone else, which is no less amazing.

When I got excited about perception was when I came to appreciate that, when you look at something, that image isn’t just being played to you like a video – your mind processes everything you see, runs it up against your memories, your library of experience, and even against simple geometric icons, all to present a picture of the world that makes sense.

Babies are effectively blind for a short while after they’re born – partly as their eyes are still developing, but mainly because nothing makes sense – it’s all meaningless lines, circles, squares and colours. The first time a baby smiles at its mother is probably because the baby just realised ‘hey, you’re the cool thing that cuddles me and gives me milk’. You see bunny rabbits in clouds because your brain is trying to interpret everything you see. You find someone attractive because their nose, their eyes or their lips resemble someone familiar. The way you see things is inextricably linked to what you’ve seen before, to who you are.

So give yourself a pat on the back, because your brain is really quite clever.

Posted via web from Natmandu’s posterous

How not to run a business

19 Aug
2009

It’s a beautiful day. Amazing what blue sky and sunshine does for the soul. That’s until about two o’clock this afternoon when the sun starts shining in the living room window and slowly heating the flat up until I’m sat here sweating like a Swede in a sauna. But that’s a short way away still.

I’m closing down my company after eight years. Nothing to do with the recession – it has been withering away for the last few years by itself. I started my own business because no-one would give me the job I wanted, so I decided to give it to myself. After about a year, having accumulated a huge personal debt, it turns out I shouldn’t have given myself the job either. I started off doing web design work for small businesses, became a reseller for Actinic selling e-commerce software, and ended up with a modest portfolio of very modest websites – a school here, a florist there. Nothing big. The main problem I had was that I don’t have a commercial bone in my body – when people asked me how much something was likely to cost, I found the question embarrassing and didn’t like to say. That’s no way to run a business. It all felt like doing people favours.

There’s also the nagging feeling that I just wasn’t very good at what I did.

Fortunately, contract work in London came along, saved my bacon, and after a few disjointed years of travel, volunteering and whatever work has been available, the company has wasted away to nothing. That said, even if you don’t do anything with it, you still get letters from Companies House, VAT returns, accounts and other paperwork. With the company in its death throes as I write, final returns being sent off, the paperwork will die off too, and thank goodness.

The original idea was to start a business, try it for a year and see what happened, and eight years later it has proven to be an interesting experiment. I might do it again, but I’d do it very differently, not least because my ambitions and interests are very different. A lot of people have companies that allow them to do small contract jobs, and I could have kept mine going for such a purpose, but if I need that I’ll start again – for the time being, closing this one down feels like hoovering up the fluff behind the fridge or having a good spring clean. I’m in the mood for a bit of life laundry.

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