Well, how can you tell otherwise?
LATER: Lovely email from Ben Hammersley:
I know this! You spin them on their side, then lightly put your finger
on the top to stop them spinning. Take your finger off quickly. If it
remains stationary, it’s hard-boiled. If it keeps spinning, it’s raw.
It works because the raw yolk keeps moving inside the egg, so when you
take your finger off, the whole thing starts moving again.Finally, I have a use for that. Hurrah!
Hurrah! x 2. Isn’t the web wonderful?
Damaged stock?
During the recent snowy spell, we took to putting newspaper down in the hall to reduce the amount of snow brought into the house. As luck would have it, the Guardian G2 issue about Dave Cameron was the first periodical that came to hand. We noticed that people stamped their Wellingtons rather enthusiastically upon entering. But at least they were green. Poor Dave became progressively more disfigured over the week, so in the end we put him out of his misery. On the fire.
Snapped on our walk this afternoon near where we live. The lake was laid out by Capability Brown and a few years ago was restored to its original shape.
Flickr version here.
Today is Linus Torvalds’s birthday. In celebration, Glyn Moody has a lovely account of the first stirrings of Linux.
There’s a wonderful analysis by Secure Computing of the way an image in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue was tastefully PhotoShopped, probably by a graphic artist as a routine job. There’s nothing really sinister in the story (a missing handbag, eyes and teeth enhanced, a nipple removed). It’s really just a fascinating forensic analysis of how you can detect PhotoShopped alterations if you know how.
There’s good news and bad news here. On the one hand, the case study provides a cautionary tale about how untrustworthy digital images have become; on the other, it shows how someone with the right tools and forensic skills can detect alterations.
Update: To be fair to Victoria’s Secret, they responded well to the critique (unlike Ralph Lauren, which in a similar case resorted to the DMCA takedown tactic).
Conclusion of this morning’s Observer column.
What all this suggests is that the noughties were the years when the internet went from being exotic to mainstream – indeed, to being a utility. No child under the age of 11 knows there was once a world without Google. Most teenagers cannot imagine a world without Facebook or YouTube. And even the proportion of adults who can remember travel agents is declining fast. Almost without noticing, we have become dependent on the network. Our task in the next decade will be to make sure it remains free and open, rather than the captive of the corporations and governments who would love to control it. Happy New Year!
