Blog of Ade

Copyblogger has posted a great overview of the problems with SOPA:

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, written with the intent of more vigorously protecting copyright around the web. The entertainment industry wants to come down harder on file sharing and the theft of copyrighted material, so it lobbied for a draconian law to add to the many anti-piracy laws that are already on the books.

SOPA would be a sweet deal for giant music and entertainment companies. That’s why the law got written in the first place.

But it’s not a good deal for countless small businesses in the U.S., including yours.

Go and read the full thing at www.copyblogger.com/sopa

The BBC News website has today posted a great little tool for contextualising the world’s population growth. Based on UN Population figures, being born in 1977 I was the 4,251,107,985th (4.2 billionth) person alive at the time. As you’ll have seen in the news this week, the population has very recently reached seven billion. This is troubling.

It’s a controversial and complicated subject but I’m firmly of the opinion that we’re in big trouble unless we quickly stem this level of growth (through education and healthcare initiatives, for example). Nine billion is already an inevitability. This is surely the biggest single factor in the battle for environmental sustainability, yet few seem willing to discuss it.

If you’ve not seen it, Hans Rosling’s TED talk on the subject is well worth watching.

From my trip to Croatia in August.

Lush tune by Lepumpernic.

A few of us at Pirata recently went to see Chris Cunningham’s live audio and video show at the Roundhouse. For the most part it was predictably challenging and entertainingly unsettling, and all in all a brilliant show.

However the highlight for me was the above video / remix of the late Gil Scott Heron’s New York Is Killing Me which was (like the rest of the show) projected across three screens and formed the intro to the show. Don’t watch it here, pop over to YouTube and watch it full screen in HD.

I friend of mine recently went to see this live. I gather it was pretty amazing.

@wavish just shared a link to this wonderful set of 1960s futurist illustrations on Flickr.

And the drawing above is from a Syd Mead Flickr group which I found a couple of clicks away, and is also worth a perusal.

I just got back from a week away “in the sun”, as they say, which was incredibly relaxing and refreshing and all that. I even had time to read a whole book, something I’ve not managed to do in under a week for a few years. Normally the only reading slot I have in my schedule is nine minutes standing up on a train each morning. Often the train is so crowded that reading at all is actually physically impractical. And—at best in that environment—I find it hard to concentrate long enough not to have to re-read every other paragraph, especially since my noise-cancelling headphones stopped cancelling noise.

Currently the prospect of diving back into the white water rapids of my London work-life on Tuesday is almost daunting.

A few days before going away, I saw my brother play at ’Round Midnight in Islington. I should point out here that I make no excuses for regularly abusing social media channels to promote his gigs and stuff. He deserves a bigger audience. And he’s my brother.

Anyway, at that gig the trio played a jazzy adaptation of Fall-N-Love from Fantastic, Vol. 2 by Slum Village. Al has since recorded a solo piano version and posted it to SoundCloud. Here it is, courtesy of SoundCloud’s Share button: