On Saturday evening I attended a brilliant (but under-reported in the media and local blogosphere) culmination of viral marketing: The international showing of the documentary Zeitgeist at the Labia Theatre, Cape Town. I have never seen so many people entrancing and exiting this art nouveau theatre. It seems that these underground left-wing movements are great […]

Information Architects have created a smart and slick Web Trend Map 2008, overlaying the most powerful and connectible websites onto a train map of Tokyo. A clickable version is available here.

Ok the title is a bit misleading, but if someone could figure out how to sleep with your eyes open he or she would rake in billions.
The product or method would be sold to millions of office workers around the world, as well as students. Papers would say it would cause a loss of trillions […]

We’ve all heard about or read The Tipping Point  by Malcolm Gladwell, a book that popularizes the concept of highly connected people being the nodes in the spread of information. Read an interesting article from Fastcompany about how this popular view may be a myth.

In maths, two negatives multiplied together make a positive. In English, the double negative (that is two negations in a sentence)  do not make a positive, contrary to popular belief and English shmexperts.
For instance, the sentence It is not uncommon to find organic food in supermarkets has a different meaning to the sentence It is […]

Whether something is art or can be defined as ‘art’ or has artistic value is questionable and supposedly relative. It seems to me that the question of ‘artistic value’ is an economic and historical one. We could call this the historoeconomic theory of art (or the capitalist’s valuation of art).
An artwork always has an economic […]

Using our eyes and brains and senses we see a skewed and highly individualized version of the world. As of this moment there are roughly 6.65 billion realities (based on the human population and not taking into account animals, our imagination, dreams and dissociative identities). 6.65 billion versions of today, of our time, of this […]

An interesting linguistic phenomenon has been occurring at schools in Baltimore: the development of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. The neologism is the pronoun Yo. It can apparently be used to describe both a he and a she. For example I could use the sentence ‘Yo reads my blog‘ to mean, ‘She reads my blog’, but […]

The literature of stage directions is an interesting, and mostly disregarded, subject. Brecht, the German playwright, was perhaps the only person to make his actors say his stage directions out loud, in many ways to distance (or ‘alienate’) the performers from the play and setting. In all other circumstances, stage directions are a soft or […]

I awoke one morning several days ago, switched on my computer, and watched my Windows XP splash screen freeze. I then proceeded to do what all computer technicians do when encountering computer problems, and that consists of guesswork, restarting, and looking in forums for people who have experienced similar issues. I was ‘luckily’ (Windows users […]