The latest is this unofficial one for that warmly regarded “AeroPress” coffee syringe:

It’s of note that, like an animal, his kettle is not electric – rather, it operates by being sat on the stove. Clearly, it’s prettier than a typical electric one, and I don’t object to that superficiality or anything. But it turns out that, there in North America, they aren’t so unusual anyway:

An “average” [electric] kettle in the UK runs at about 2800 W and in the US at about 1500 W; if we assume that both kettles are 100% effi­cient then a UK kettle sup­plying 2800 joules per second will take 127 seconds to boil and a US kettle sup­plying 1500 J/s will take 237 seconds, more than a minute and a half longer. This is such a problem that many house­holds in the US still use an old-fashioned stove-top kettle.

Well, now you know.

That is part one; parts two and three should be watched afterwards in succession.

It has ruined my plan for the evening, which was to position myself into a position of understanding exactly why some solvents are more effective than others for polar molecules such as atenolol, but it is no real disaster. The online movie clip is surely worth one half of anyone’s hour.

Meanwhile, on the national alternative entertainment and informative channel BBC Two, a man is listing some things that happened between the years 1970 and 1979. It is often his disembodied voice, which I somehow hate with the fury of ten thousand burning suns, but upon bursting out of the bath I discover that it is also his big face-like face, poking out to just beyond the blurriness of a blurry room, contorting itself to produce the sounds, with his truncated yet jaunty eyebrows growing out of the top of it. Even his surname conjures nightmarish Proustish nightmares concerned with ruined crinkle-cut crisps by the seaside.

And up and down the country, people must be watching, listening. Good for them. I don’t know if you caught any of the trailers – they were quite creative and things, I suppose.

You might point out that I am surely not being forced to watch this under any kind of duress, so have no right to complain. But I tell you, really I am. And what makes the thing all so much worse is that nobody will believe me, just as you aren’t now. Woe unto me, oh, woe unto me.

Like a baboon, Google doesn’t allow the rearrangement of its black upper bar of links, which smells because I never use “Google Play” but frequently have to burrow deeply towards the insignificant Google Reader. But I think the article makes a different point.

This question has been viewed 17128 times; it has 1 monitor with 495 topic followers and 0 aliases exist.

I don’t understand the world any more.

Of course, a question on its own is just a question, and what use is that? Because I’m all wonderful and humble, I can recognise that the answers are just as important. They are mostly too heavily visual to reprint here, so if you don’t have any sense you will follow the links to read them, but here is one:

It looks exactly like the inside of the empty brain of someone who clearly has no life.

Maybe you know the story of the blind men and an elephant. (Proving yet again that everything is a remix, there are many different versions of it in several different cultures.)

For the uninitiated, it usually goes like this: some blind men come across an elephant, only being blind they can’t tell that it’s an elephant.

“It’s the elephant in the room!”

Nope, that’s a different analogy. Far from ignoring it, as one would the proverbial one in the room, each blind man goes and bravely touches one part of the mystery object, in order to find out what it is.

One touches the tail, and decides that it must be a rope. Another touches the legs, and identifies a pillar. And so on and so forth, via the winnowing basket ears and the wall-like belly. The details vary between each variation – the important thing is that each man comes away with an entirely different, and equally wrong, idea of what the elephant is.

Facebook is that elephant.

Here are some choice descriptions of Facebook from Paul Ford’s piece “Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out”:

[…] Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes […]

In terms of user experience […], Facebook is […] a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.

That’s Facebook, and that’s where the difficulty lies in understanding Facebook. It’s different things to different people. Is it for toddlers or older people? It an instant messaging service, or something like Friends Reunited? Is it a blog engine, a microblogging site, or for sharing photographs or videos? Is it a business directory? A means of recording one’s marital status? A social bookmarking tool?

Of course, it’s all of those things – and more. Above all, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s a for-profit company, a means of farting money towards its owners, and that advertising is a bit uncomfortable. Nothing revolutionary about those notions.

And now, as has been widely reported, another thing that it is – or at least, that it owns – is a means of making usually inane digital photographs look all strange, and sharing them with one’s followers. What enormous pricks! But of course, I wish them all the very best.

Let me zoom in some more on some of Paul Ford’s article:

[Facebook] is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

As others have must have also twigged by now, what a coincidence that this should coincide with someone elses’s epic “PHP: a fractal of bad design”. Pretty damming stuff, all, and now I am rethinking a lot of my life choices. (I have bought a new technical book, and I will be disappointed if none of the assertions ring true.)

(Elephants are probably better-, uh, designed than both PHP and Facebook.)

People often say to me, they say, “oh, it must be so nice to have such soft hair,” but it has its downsides, because how the leopard can I get any work done if all I want to do is rumple my hair all day?

Well, I can’t. The answer is that I can’t. I can’t achieve anything. Woe unto me, oh, woe unto me.

I haven’t even finished Lauren Collins’s “How the Daily Mail Conquered England” from out of off of the New Yorker yet, but it shows some signs of adequacy. (Piped to the Kindle through Instapaper, of course – I warmly recommend it for reading all sorts of things.)

Black ink, of course. Been using it for a few years now, nothing else comes close. (Well, the Uni-ball Signo RT 0.38mm comes close.) Anyway, if you’re not buying pens from JetPens, your pen probably sucks.

In that case, I just had to try one. Although, being ever keen to avoid unnecessary international shipping malarkey, I ignored Gruber’s aggressive zealotry about the American website JetPens in favour of some perfectly good local equivalents.

I bought a red one, a black one, and a blue one, each with a 0.5mm point. They arrived quickly. This all happened so long ago now that only one has any ink left.¹ And perhaps it’s enough to say no more than that I’ve already gone and replenished my supply with some more of the same. That’s my review, right there. Goodbye.

Wait, I have further points. It is a “gel rollerball” pen, and it is clickily retractable. Clearly, the man was right: it is good. In fact, to someone who’s for years subsisted on terrible Paper Mate ballpoints pens stolen from greasy stationery cupboards, it’s downright amazing. I am pleased to report even when using thin, papery recycled paper, ink does not soak through to the other side. (I’m looking at you, the Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint and the Uniball Eye.)

I was a bit upset when I realised that I’d bought the plain Zebra Sarasa, while Gruber had linked to the “push clip” version, which differs from its cousin in a few ways, not least of which is the different and unusual clip. I think it’s also available in a few more different point sizes – such as Gruber’s 0.4mm – and is made from a higher percentage of recycled materials. All harrowing to learn.

(It’s a shame that in these pictures, which I didn’t provide so don’t blame me, there are too many different variables changing – the colour and the tip size. Please don’t let this distract or confuse you, and please don’t tell Ben Goldacre.)

But even if I had noticed the subtle distinction between the two types of Zebra Sarasa beforehand, I would come up against the difficulty of coming by a Sarasa Clip outside of America. Someone must have decided that the ability to clip a pen to a hamburger would only be required in that country, right? For me, it’s not a deal-breaker – my aversion to international shipping overpowers any longing for a pen that’s only slightly different to the one I can buy locally.

It’s nice that the Sarasa is refillable, and as far as I can tell, they have not adopted the inkjet printer/Gillette razorblade/Amazon Kindle business model, whereby the initial thing is cheap and the subsequent refills are obnoxiously expensive. But why, when the time came to replenish my supply, did I not take advantage of this?

See, here’s the thing. To allow the removal and subsequent replacement of the inner plastic ink capsule, one end of the Sarasa – the end that’s nearest the paper during use – can be unscrewed. This is an important feature, but it’s also crack cocaine for people like me, because I am powerless over the forces willing me to repeatedly unscrew and then re-screw whatever I can. And one day, being a ripply beast of some considerable strength, I screwed the end back on with such force that it lurched all the way past the end of the thread, producing a small crack that weakened the screw thread fastening. This introduced an element of jeopardy to the simple act of extending the retracted tip of the pen – now, the end was wont to shoot off, firing pieces in every direction.

Let me tell you, to have all the components of a Zebra Sarasa shoot across the out of the blue is an embarrasment of the highest order, very nearly quite as embarrassing as accidentally spraying a cherry tomato in the direction of a pretty girl sat opposite you. In a Struwwelpeter sort of way, it could train me to stop this unseemly behaviour and sit on my hands like a civilised adult, but I object to this conditioning.

The Pilot BPS-GP is one example of a pen more embracive of restless tics. Both ends of it unscrew, but are strong enough to withstand my even my powerful overtightening; even if this were not so, the absence of any springy retraction mechanism removes the risk of pieces catapulting across the room.

Sadly, that is a ballpoint pen, and years of exposure to those has had a bad effect on me. Another time, from the tip of another Zebra Sarasa began to protrude a millimetre or so of metal wire, evidently sprung from the inner workings of the gel rollerball system. It brought to mind the beginnings of a cheese-wire. When I pretended to ignore it and continued to write, it cut clean through the paper. (I don’t have a picture, because I scurried straight away to the dustbin, too terrified to remember about the throwaway culture and that.) The ballpoint pens have trained me to apply so much pressure as to wear completely away at a necessary layer of metal, like a monster. “The force is strong with this one”, or something? I don’t know.

1. That’s the red, inevitably, for it is the toasted sandwich juicer of ink colours.

If you go visit xkcd it may appear to be just a normal, though perhaps surprisingly relevant comic. But in fact, there’s a massive set of comics that appears based on your location, browser, and other unknown variables.

Profound, for a Sunday. (Nice of them to put April-Foolery Day on a weekend for once, wasn’t it? One of the ones on which I did wake before noon, but yes. Not sure if there’s someone who decides, or it’s determined on the thread of happenstance by the distance between the moon and Jesus – but even if it is the moon, there’s someone on the end who decides where it shall be, right?)

Here’s the thing: I don’t frequent these websites, so I don’t know anything. For one thing, I don’t know if linking to this is like that album, “The Best of the Beatles”, is it? Old news by now. Say, did you know the one about the smell of burning coffee when you’re selling your house? It’s just, there’s so much novelty here for me, and yet fake small caps is the meat and potatoes of you people. Strange. This is what it must be like to be Greek.

God spede.

We shouldn’t have to shorten urls. It’s only because of a fairly selfish and unwise company in San Francisco that we’re adding an extra layer of fragility to an already loosely-coupled network. Introducing another point of failure.

OK.

But with all that disclaimed, we still need url-shorteners

Or do we? I’m going to come right out and say that the shortening of URLs solves nothing about the internet site Twitter. Let me explain.

Here, I compose a tweet containing a long, unshortened URL. Obviously, it’s longer than 20 characters, but Twitter actually pretends that it’s just 20 characters long, leaving room for 120 (that’s the number on the right above the keyboard) more before I reach the limit of 140 characters:

Here, I instead use that URL in a shortened form – one of the Dave Winer’s very clever new ones, announced in the aforelinked post. It is even shorter than 20 characters, but guess what:

Again, Twitter pretends that it’s 20 characters long, even though it isn’t. Try it at home if you don’t believe me. (Some Twitter clients’ character counting mechanisms might not be up-to-date.) Shortened or not, any URL is now worth exactly 20 characters in Twitter’s eyes. It is weird and confusing, but doesn’t it at least mean we don’t need URL shorteners after all?

Update: 20 seemed like a very specific number of characters – to be clear, it is because the t.co URLs that are now wrapped around every link are currently all themselves 20 characters long. (They will presumably get gradually longer over time.) Sometimes the shorter original URLs do slip through the t.co net, but it seems to be a bug not a feature.

Update: Apparently Dave Winer’s particular URL shortener “returns hitcounts”, enabling a slightly useful “top 40″ chart. But I don’t believe that all the people pre-shortening URLs are in it for the analytics.