All posts made the week commencing Sunday 14 Dec., 2003:

22:27, Friday 19 Dec., 2003 Link

Flags Of The World "is the Internet's largest site devoted to vexillology (the study of flags). Here you can read more than 20,000 pages about flags and view more than 38,000 images of flags." There's more: clipart, flag-flying days and startling amounts of background information (not just nations but organisations and more). The origin of the European Union flag is pretty entertaining.

22:16 Link

Rulers "contains lists of heads of state and heads of government (and, in certain cases, de facto leaders not occupying either of those formal positions) of all countries and territories, going back to about 1700 in most cases. Also included are the subdivisions of various countries (the links are at the bottom of the respective country entries), as well as a selection of international organizations. Recent foreign ministers of all countries are listed separately." This is vast. Be sure to check out the chronicle of relevant events, eg December 2003, leadership changes from all over the world.

And on that subject: Electionworld lists the results of, what else, elections around the world.

(This is what the internet is about. Great stuff. But next, at a certain point you want to give these guys a CMS, get them producing structured data that can be syndicated outwards wherever it needs to be, and just see what happens.)

22:08 Link

In The Image of the City, on how people understand and wayfind in cities, Kevin Lynch introduces the concept of imageability (how easy it is for a dialogue between the person and the environment to build into a good mental image) [notes], and five basic elements of these images: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks [notes]. The book is brilliant; Lynch introduces a whole vocabulary for those emergent properties of human wiring and social habitation, then applies and explains. It's going to be enormously useful in thinking about how people learn to find their way around websites (and semantic spaces of all kinds), how we relate to space in general, and, more, how that space is collaboratively created and moulded. This is a modest book, self assured but not declarative or over-confident, quiet. A joy to read. (I also have notes on the book design.)

21:49 Link

The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia [pdf; via Cluster] -- fantastic paper summarising Ramachandran and Hubbard's research into how synaesthesia manifests: how the font affects letters being seen as colours; on martian tints and more. I love this sort of stuff. My notes.

12:22 Link

Four found alphabets:

• An Astronomical Alphabet
• BodyType
• Brain Alphabet (neuroscience for kids)
• Textism's Found Alphabet

[all via boingboing]

22:48, Sunday 14 Dec. Link

The other day I added a line showing the number of stars in my light cone to Interconnected (the light cone being that ever-expanding volume of the universe that I could have affected or could have affected me during my time alive). Said LaughingMeme: "Can I get an RSS feed of celestial objects in my light cone please?" Your wish, sir: subscribe to your personal sphere of potential causality here.

21:12 Link

I've had a few responses to my comments about the two M6s - two motorways with common origin and endpoint, and the same length, one being tolled and 45 minutes faster to drive - and spent some time trying to put a finger on the source of my discomfort. The result is some notes, M6 Toll unease, trying to figure out a little of my own folk (gut) politics.