Day One Premium and the Future

[T]he invisible hand is usually just giving you the finger if you care about what you makeThis downbeat summary does seem to be on the mark, at least for good software. I didn’t upgrade to Day One Premium, because Classic does all I need. Does that make me part of the problem? I don’t believe it does, any more than darning my socks (which I don’t do) or patching my trousers (which I do) makes me a bad consumer. Definitely, the people who make beautiful software need a better way to sell their creations, and no, I don’t know what that might be.

A Million Squandered: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

No idea what happened to the million. But the page is an interesting artefact that, in its current state is, I venture, a more accurate keep[sake of the internet than it would be had it all stayed up and running.The article suggests that:Given the existence of powerful and widely accessible tools such as the Wayback machine, this kind of restorative curation may well be within reach.To which I would be fairly vehemently opposed

Site deaths where you least expect them

Language Log – a useful site I really enjoy – recently wrote again about the big debate on whether language shapes, constrains or otherwise has any effect on thought. But that’s not why I’m noting it here. Instead, there’s the reason why they’re talking about it again.In 2010 The Econonomist hosted a big debate on Language and Thought. It used a very spiffy web-enabled platform to host the debate, and a language academic thought it would make a dandy introduction to some readings she is poutting together on the topic. Alas …[T]he Economist’s intro page on this debate leads only to an debate archive site that doesn’t include this one; and the links in old LLOG posts are now redirected to the same unhelpful location.A source at the magazine explained:We vastly over-designed the debate platform (and over-thought it generally, in various ways), and when we stopped running the debates that way, we stopped running that bit of the website. The old debates are now unavailable online.Fortunately for all concerned Language Log was able to find copies in the Internet Archive. But if it hadn’t …#indieweb

Vatican says bread for Eucharist cannot be gluten-free

Marion Nestle summarises the status of gluten-free hosts and usefully links to the Vatican’s circular on the matter. I actually went to look, wondering whether, maybe, there’s some reason why the host cannot be gluten free. And there is, up to a point.The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat …But that’s not really a reason, is it. It’s just a historical tradition. Obey, or else.