Soho’s on fire at the moment. No casualties thankfully but this is astonishing… a real time live update of twitter pictures from the event… plus a few other randoms. This is the future of reporting surely? Great stuff and really useful.

From the Guardian

In Chris’ words; “This is a wicked ad”

I concur… it is rather beautiful indeed. With sound, with sound - go on and treat yourself!

The incredibly functionally titled Spam Visualization tool is a student project by Kim Asendorf. It visualizes spam but is rather nice to watch…

in Bb 2.0 is an incredibly simple idea - youtube videos all in the same key ready for you to start and stop at your desire. Fans of Sigur Ros, BoC, Múm and so on will feel right at home!

Via BBH labs

A brilliant googlemaps streetview type thing…

When I was a nipper, 11 to be precise, I was singled out as my form’s Basketball Captain. This was purely based on me scoring once from the halfway mark with a chest pass during a PE lesson. Don’t get me wrong. It was a remarkable shot but after a few games and many attempts to replicate that golden shot it transpired that my glory as a player was possibly based on a single, small, but utterly incredible fluke.

It seems the younger generation have got this ball slinging from a distance lark down to a fine art though…

My word…

And to neutralise the previous needless rant… here’s a gorgeous set of pics from the Cooper Union on Flickr

My goodness…

It will never be my first choice for coffee but owing to it’s staggering ubiquity throughout the City of London I often find myself seeking sanctuary from the morning gauntlet run by dropping into a Pret a Manger for a quick fix.

Coffee is an interesting substance because it has such a massive culture surrounding it, much more universal it seems than the humble milky cuppa. There’s a huge amount of chains dealing only in selling this caffeine charged comestible, not to mention thousands of independant coffee shops like the glorious Monmouth. 

The bizarre thing about coffee chains though is that they all appear to want to use a different nomenclature to sell with. The cynic amongst us may claim that this is to snare us in to the specific culture of that brand so that we feel all warm and cosy there by speaking in a common language but it’s probably just pretension. The most evident of these appear to be in those wallet shattering supertanker portions… Costa has Massimo, Starbucks has Venti and so on… not that we need bother with these over-diluted juggernauts; the officianado tends to opt for a short, punchier brew which tends to carry a similar language accross all types of outlet.

Apart from Pret. Pret have their own call on this. What the clever bods at Pret HQ have done is identify that people who drink coffee but don’t like coffee, the grande decaf skinny latte crowd, tend to buy their lacotse treats in terms of potency; regular or strong appears to be what the crowd are after.

This is all very well for something which is served as a dilution. As a latte is composed of espresso and steamed milk it follows that the coffee strength will increase as more espresso is added - incresing its percentage in the cup. So regular and strong lattes kind of make sense.

What bothers me though is they’ve carried this over to just espress. When I order a double I get instantly corrected by one of the Pretatiers (or can I call them Prats?) with ‘Stong Espresso’. I don’t like this. I don’t like it because it makes no sense… and because I’m a pedant.

When you dilute espresso with the same volume of milk it becomes 50% espresso. 2x the volume of milk is 33% and so on. However. When you dilute espresso with the same volume of espresso it’s still 100% espresso… because something can’t dilute itself. The coffee hasn’t become stronger… it’s become larger… there’s just more of it. I drew a diagram…

So why on earth it’s company policy for Pret to make their Prats coarsely correct their customers with nonsense jargon instead of just using the terms we’re all familiar with is beyond me. Being twattish with your brand doesn’t work anymore… that’s why everyone’s pissed off away from Vodafone’s mega restrictive Live! service to have the freedom of the web on an iPhone. Because behaviorally, people no longer respond to forced commercial content. Brands have to work for us now.

Sabrage is the not so mystical art of lobbing the top off a bottle of champagne, cork ‘n’ all. Read more about it on the wikipedia entry should you wish but essentially a French revolutionist takes his saber and slides it up the bottle of fizz to take the collar off in one swift motion in order to celebrate victory and or defeat it would seem.

During these hard times of economic austerity however, we must curb our excesses and look for more practical applications of beverage liberation. The people’s tipple, the humble bottled beer is an ideal applicant for nifty opening techniques as it is increasingly unlikely to find public bottle openers and nor do people carry a corkscrew in their trousers no more.It is with great pleasure then, that I introduce the removal of a beer bottle cap with a compact disc technique. Catchy… here’s Gui;

Come to think of it though… not many people carry a CD around with them either… bloody obsolete technology.