Interviews with the bassist.
Experiencing War (The Art of War): Stories from the Veterans Histo ...
Penelope Trunk - Expert Financial Advice Columns on Yahoo! Persona ...
"Everybody has come from somewhere else and belongs somewhere else, and quite rightly so."
A journalist joins Steve O'Shea as he builds and deploys a Coke-bottle giant squid trap (to catch paralarvae; baby architeuthis). Excellent interview and history.
Gallery of Stephen Gill photos; people lost in London. Jon Ronson interviews. "He is standing outside the British Museum, just off Russell Square, but the look in his eyes takes me back to the Kalahari."
History of transport-related design; this week, roadsigns. The importance of a good font, the argument over upper/lower case, and an interview with Margaret Calvert, who designed many of the still-in-use symbols.
On MP3s:- "How can you love a record that arrives so easily? [...] Even if music was my only love, it was a permanent fight to get it into my arms."
Interview with the still-alive J P Donleavy. "I knew I had to write a book that was the best in the world. It was as simple as that."
Full transcripts of the recent NewScientist chat, with ALICE responses for comparison.
Ballard interview. "The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change."
"All trolley collectors have this dream that they're chasing them down the street." Interview with a lost-supermarket-trolley hunter. (Why are all Australian hunters called Steve?)
"I think that GAs are a terrific approach to searching large, ill-defined spaces, in this case the space of 'nice' melodic ideas."
"'There are transvestite parts, but they're all small cameo, weirdo, probably dies 20 minutes in. It used to be gay and lesbian people would kill themselves. Now they can survive, but transgender people are still hanging themselves 20 minutes in."
"What we need is to be told by one other human being with a pair of eyes what it's like to be at this place where things are happening. [...] We are deluging people with information, but no insight, no human connection. This is anti-communication."
"But the decline of paint by numbers also has to do with changing cultural values; eventually, our notion of "authenticity" totally rejected this kind of allegedly assembly line, cookie-cutter activity."
"I try to write about 1,000 words a day in longhand and then edit it very carefully later before I type if out. I have been known to stop in the middle of a sentence sometimes when I've reached my limit."
"When we cannot explain our unconscious desires, we simply make up a story, and the story has no necessary connection to the truth. It simply is the most plausible explanation we can come up with at the time."
Michael Pollan interview; the tentacles of GM corn in America. "If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn."
Mention of an eight-year attempt to build a deck of found cards. "The 7 of spades was folded and in the center of a sidewalk on a deserted street... I knew it was the final card before I touched it."