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Blinks

Sunday, 09 December, 2007

• The flu virus likes cold dry weather (which is why it thrives in winter);
• “The filthy, stinking truth”: A history of cleanliness which makes the interesting point that “to smell like a human being has become such a taboo”:

  We've never needed to wash less in the developed Western countries, and we've never had more pressure to wash more. If your job is in front of your computer, and if you have a house full of labor-saving devices, you're not scrubbing floors too often, and if you have access to a car or public transit where you live, you're just not sweating the way that people did 50 years ago. But I think the daily bath is almost becoming the minimum. I'm hearing about more and more people who take two showers a day.

  One argument I'm not hearing yet in the general trend to becoming more environmentally friendly is taking less showers. People say shorten your shower time, but they're not saying take less of them. At the risk of being ostracised by all my friends, I think it's possible to remain unoffensive to your work colleagues and still shower less—for example, by showering every one and a half days (e.g. Monday morning, Tuesday evening, Thursday morning), instead of once a day;

• Making Sydney a more child-friendly city: I'm all for this;
• How mobile phones are affecting polling and phone surveys: mostly because they're not bound by geography;
• “In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage”: A nursery school teacher in Japan is selling as many copies of her novel (typed out on her mobile) as a new translation of a Dostoyevsky novel. It may not reach the literary heights of Dostoyevsky but
  

  “It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they've already read the story on their mobile. Often it's because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they've contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it.”

• Airlines may soon be offering internet access on all flights (though you probably won't be able to use Skype; as the article says, “Onboard phone calls are ‘one of those “just because you can doesn't mean you should” types of technologies ... The last thing you want is to be in a crowded tube at 35,000 feet for two or three hours with some guy going on and on about his trip to Vegas.’” *Shudder*);
• “Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking”: article which asks the question, “Are Facebook users being hypocritical?”

  The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

  “We know we don't have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

  Well, to me, it's all about control—what people can and can't know about me;
• Social networking—for dogs. I'm so not a pet-lover; I don't get this at all. Even if the article says this:
  

  “There's something about the relationship we have with animals that is magical and brings out a side of people that's softer and more vulnerable than we might otherwise see, ... My guess is that on Dogster, people are really bonding with each other, but in the voices of the dogs. Tongue-in-cheek.”

  Is there something wrong with animal-lovers which means they feel the need to connect with other people by pretending to be their pets? Am I the only one asking this question?;
• “Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You're Just a Perfectionist”: This article makes the point that perfectionism is highly valued and even encouraged in our culture—but that may not be a good thing because it can lead to further mental health problems;
• “Meteorologists Shape Fashion Trends”—because it's not cold enough to make people want to buy the coats on the racks at Target;
• Design your own shoes online: This article makes me wish that all aspects of fashion were just as customisable. Oh for a summer dress that wasn't cut too low and didn't feature some hideous print from the 1970s!;
• Salon.com review of Shortcomings, a graphic novel by Adrine Tomine which I can't help finding fascinating because it deals with Asian and western identity;
• Ghost in the Shell Australian site. I wonder how they got it to flicker like that;
• Salon.com review of the movie adaptation of Atonement by Ian McEwan. I love this bit which quotes Joe Wright, the director (who also did the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice):

  A book is symbols and words on the pages; it happens in your head. As on ‘Pride & Prejudice,’ I sought to make a film adaptation of the book that happened in my head as I read it

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