Fire in the Hole!

A stunning NASA image of the fires that ranged above LA this week. Nothing more to add than that - just satellite porn basically.

August went where exactly?

So, another summer sacrificed on the altar that is IBC. Can't complain too much financially, but one moment it's July, the next it's autumn, and all that's happened in the interim is that it's rained a bit and England have somehow contrived to win the Ashes.

Still, in that period we've done over 500 new stories for the show, as well as numerous other bits and pieces such as the Resellers piece that's finally out in this week's Broadcast (which you can read here).

IBC itself starts in a week exactly. Will be Tweeting from the show via the IBCDaily09 account. See you at the RAI...

A history lesson

A nice one from the Daily Telegraph:How 20 popular websites looked when they launched.

All brings back fond memories from back in the early days of all this interweb malarkey of giving up and going to another site whenever you'd see a jpeg loading...

Naming metal bands

Presenting the rather wonderful etymology of heavy metal band names...

flow_heavymetal.jpg (JPEG Image, 1700x1100 pixels) - Scaled (72%)

Left behind...

Interesting one from the Grauniad.

Has the left missed its moment? The radical American writer Rebecca Solnit fears so. 'It felt like last October [the peak of the banking panic] was the golden moment to put forward an alternative vision,' she says. 'What's been dismaying is that there has been so little coherent response from the left since.'

Has the left blown its big chance of success? | Politics | The Guardian:

Hmmmmmm

Scientists Track Down Source of Earth’s Hum | Wired Science | Wired.com: "After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor. Now, researchers have pinpointed the source of the Earth’s “background noise,” and it looks like it’s coming primarily from the Pacific coast of North America."

Kill or cure? Sell papers either way

Mind boggling. There is a technical term in the newspaper business for the moment when a newspaper, having reported an event with great conviction one week, says the opposite the following week with equal conviction. It is called a “reverse ferret”.

This site is a veritable index of ferretology as, in its own words, it "Help[s] to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it," - and often discovering that they do both at some point or other.

Warning: reading this site could affect house prices...

Kill or cure?: