BookCrossing

BookCrossing sounds like a really neat idea. Basically you buy a book, read it, and then register it with BookCrossing. They provide you with a unique BookCrossing identification number (a BCID) and let you write a little review of the book on their site. You then write the BCID and the BookCrossing URL somewhere in your book, and leave it somewhere for some random person to find. Starbucks, Waterloo Station, on the Tube, anywhere is fine. The person who finds your book is then supposed to read it, log into BookCrossing, enter the BCID and enter their own thoughts about it. They then leave it somewhere for someone else to find and the cycle (the epicycle?) repeats. Neat, eh?

I have a heap of books I need to get rid of from my bookshelves, and I think BookCrossing will be alot more fun and interesting then giving the books away to charity, friends or eBay addicts.

So if you find my handwriting scrawled in a copy of Lawrence Krauss's Quintessence that you picked up randomly on the tube, go to BookCrossing and let me know what you think.

What does this button do?

I suck at this bloggin' malarky. It's been over a year since my last post. Opps. So much has happened in the last year I don't know where to begin... The beginning would probably be the best place to start, but as with all cycles (and epicycles!) the beginning is ill defined. Ack.

I'm currently in a state of flux, severing ties with my Yahoo! email account and moving over to GMail. Being the deligent type I was going through my message archive, filtering out all the mailing lists and websites that I'd subscribed to over the past 3 years as a Yahoo! netizen, when I came upon a "Welcome to Blogger!" email. So I logged in and lo and behold it's all changed. The entire face of the Blogger system has been refitted and repainted. It's as if they called in the guys from "Changing Rooms" or something. Wowsers.

So I began reading my friend's blogs, which I hadn't visited in a while. That was good. Sharifa is in Dubai; Zahra is all married, has travelled most of the parallels between the tropics and is just about to head for Thailand; Maria is the usual refreshing and insightful Maria; and Aziz's "Unmedia" is still causing sleepless nights for a state full of liberals ;). Good stuff.

I feel bad for not staying up-to-date... now what does this button do?

No more drinking stupid

Abdul Taiyab sent me the graphic below. Apparently it's from a Coke advert being shown in Israel (can anyone confirm this?). Time to boycott coke, me thinks. Anyone for Mecca Cola?

Lazarus

Where is Raed? is back! Woo-hoo! Yay!:)

Market forces

I just registered myself to Blogshares, a fantasy stock market for weblogs. When you register you are awarded $500 of fictional capital to invest in "blogshares." These are shares in a particular blog, whose value corresponds to the number of links to that blog.

It's a neat concept because blog linking is probably more determinant upon social and cultural forces rather than macroeconomic ones. So it'll be interesting to analyse how this stock market will differ in operation from the usual capitalist markets. Perhaps regular blogs might even be influenced by the Blogshares market and begin behaving like normal free market commodities?

I can't wait to try and make my first $10⁹. Buy, buy, buy Epicycle! :)

Iraq Body Count

Whilst googling the web this morning, I found this "alternative" to all those webcounters you find dotted around the net: the Iraq Body Counter.

I have a huge distrust for the statistics that are presented by normal webcounters, and no doubt the results of the Iraq Body Counter are questionable too, but I have more faith in it simply because maximum and minimum limits are provided, as opposed to hard numbers.

And just look at those numbers! Call me cynical, but I wonder if the war will stop once the number of Iraqi civilians killed exceeds the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks? :P

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates.

There's a great article by Arundhati Roy in today's Guardian, where she brings together alot of anti-war sentiment.

I didn't much like Roy's God Of Small Things because her prose was so embelished, and this made it hard for me to follow. So I never finished it. But her emotion (and sarcasm!) comes through graphically in this article, which makes it thought provoking and readable, whatever frequency of the war-spectrum you happen to be tuned to. I highly recommend it.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
[ Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. -- Arundhati Roy ]