Status-Q

This very carefully-constructed artistic piece is entitled:
Going into the middle of the street to photograph the Christmas lights on the promenade and then having to jump out of the way of an approaching car while on a longer-than-expected exposure.

Snappy, eh? (Click for a larger version)

Here's something it would be fascinating to know, but I can't think of any way of coming up with even a wild estimate. Can you?

• How much data does the average user create, themselves? (Documents, photos, emails, social network posts, etc)
• How much data is generated about the average user? (Web logs, surveillance,marketing data, medical records, credit ratings, utility bills...)

and what's the ratio of the two?

Or, more briefly, what' s the ratio of data created by you, to data created about you?

Of data created intentionally and knowingly, to that created unknowingly as a side-effect of living in the modern connected world?

And does it vary significantly, in the developed world, by country, and by demographics...?

Any ideas? (Conspiracy theorists need not apply!)

I've always thought these old radio telescopes, just down the road from us, were rather beautiful.

A New Scientist piece about vegetable farming in a very space-efficient way. Interesting – I hadn't thought before about what the efficiency of LED lighting meant for chlorophyll.

And if you try searching Google images for 'vertical farming', you get some intriguing pics.

Thanks to Tom Standage for the link.

In late October, Apple released new versions of its iWork office suite - Pages, Keynote and Numbers - which had all been rewritten from scratch. Upgrading was easy, the new versions were free, and so lots of people hit the download button, myself included. The apps are pretty, with a nice simplified layout, and are designed to match the iOS versions very closely - with full document compatibility.

Now, I've been a big fan of iWork for a while. It's been years since I used Microsoft Word voluntarily, because for most documents I prefer Pages. Keynote leaves Powerpoint way behind - haven't used that for years either. Excel, though, is still definitely superior to Numbers, if you're a power-user, but for simple stuff I prefer Numbers too.

However, with these new versions, there were issues, basically because many features had not yet been rewritten, and hence were just left out. Uproar ensued. The first thing I missed was the ability to customise the 'presenter display' on Keynote. Rose has just found out how inferior the 'Export to Word' functionality is in the new Pages. And a quick glance at the ratings on the Mac app store will give you a whole list of other things that have caused distress to others.

Fortunately, none of this is fatal. If you have iWork'09, the upgrade process doesn't remove it, and the two versions will coexist quite happily. I fairly soon just put the old versions back in my Dock, and carried on. If you have created any documents in the new packages, you can export them back to the older formats. I guess it may become more tricky over time to buy iWork'09, but it's not hard to find it on Amazon at present. And finally, Apple have admitted that these new apps weren't quite fully-formed at birth, and have produced a list of all the bits they're going to fix in the next few months. Remember, these new apps are not at all bad, and they are free. Many new Mac owners won't need anything else. It's just that the old versions were already cheap, and much better. As Joni said, don't it always seem to be that you don't know what you've got till it's gone...

This has been quite a publicity disaster. So much of the good will that might have been associated with a high-quality and completely-free office suite has been squandered because Apple didn't admit beforehand that this was a cut-down version to get started. And you'd have thought they would have learned their lesson by now, because the last thing they did this to was the video-editing package Final Cut Pro - another complete rewrite - which was one of the biggest launch disasters for some time, losing huge numbers of loyal users in the film industry to Adobe's competing package, Premiere.

But Final Cut is also the thing that gives me hope for the future of iWork. Because over the next couple of years, Apple quietly pushed out update after update - 10 in all - to the point where Final Cut Pro X is now a very fine piece of software, which I've enjoyed using extensively in recent weeks.

Rewriting or replacing a major software package is an enormous task, and many companies just don't have the guts to attempt it. I suspect that, in future, we'll see that what Apple can do with both FCPX and iWork -- because their underlying chassis has been modernised -- will give them big competitive advantages. But they need to learn, when they introduce such radical changes, to make it clear that this is not the same as the previous version and to show a development roadmap so users can feel confident about hanging on, rather than jumping ship.

Sadly, it's not in Apple's nature to admit, in advance at least, that anything is not perfect. But it's better to do that than to be forced to admit it in retrospect. The first implies confidence, planning, and honesty. The second implies that you were either dishonest, unprepared or foolish. I wonder if the marketing guys can understand the distinction.

A friend took me to this wonderful little cafe yesterday, just off Regent Street in London.

It's called 'Attendant', and is a recently-restored Victorian public convenience. Very cosy inside, it has space for just one table, but there are several little booths made from, well... I'll let you work it out.

You'll be pleased to hear that it's clean and cheery, and the attendants are friendly. Coffee and cakes were delicious. Definitely recommended. More info here.

The Returning Soldier war memorial is a much-loved Cambridge landmark. He used to stride confidently up the middle of one of our main streets, but was moved onto the pavement recently, poor chap, to make more room for turning buses. A great pity, but perhaps it's just as well. You wouldn't want to make it back from the trenches in one piece only to be knocked off your pedestal by the number 14.

It struck me, as I cycled past tonight, how different his life must have been from that of the people in the cubicles behind him...

(Click to enlarge)

From VectorBelly.

Rose and Tilly this afternoon

Not sure of the origin of this - a cousin sent it to me...

If there was a shred of doubt the world is totally insane, this will remove it. Only Divine intervention can restore us to sanity.

Pythagoras' Theorem: .........................24 words.
Lord's Prayer: .......................................... 66 words.
Archimedes' Principle: .................................67 words.
Ten Commandments: ........................................179 words.
Gettysburg Address: ................................................286 words.
US Declaration of Independence : ..............................1,300 words.
US Constitution with all 27 Amendments: ......................7,818 words.
EU Regulations on the sale of cabbages: ...........................26,911 words