Had an interesting back and forth this morning with my friend Natasja about best of versus prediction lists. I like being nostalgic, but my preference is for thinking forward. Natasja’s point about lists being based on the “now” and not saying anything new, is a good one. But still which trends are [...]
Posts under ‘society’
Things I talked about on twitter (TITAT)- Public Transport
Gonna try a new feature and blog about conversations I’m having on twitter (I’m @farhanlalji).
Yesterday Aziz mentioned that it was going to take him an hour and fifteen minutes to take public transport to get to work in Toronto. He tweeted repeatedly about how crazy his journey, suggested improvements (like mobile phone coverage) and you [...]
Why books won’t die, yet.
The Bee was telling me James Walcott’s article in Vanity Fair last month about the Kindle and how Book Snobbery was at danger of extinction. I was under strict instruction that she was going to blog about it and I wasn’t allowed. Fine. I waited… and waited and waited and then said [...]
Misinformation in reporting
I’m getting really tired of news outlets interpreting moves as significant when they’re not. I’m tired of sensationalist journalism when really, if people stopped being either lazy or stupid, they’d find simple explanations.
Two cases of this recently have set me off.
First a lot of noise around Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Bing’s [...]
Places to live
So Monocle released it’s most liveable cities list for this year (the list is behind a wall although there is a video recap, this site has the top line list). I keep trying to write about it and keep erasing my entire post. Let’s try one more time.
I hate this list.
I think everyone [...]
Play more
While going through the pictures of the Obama White House on Flickr I came across a number of pictures of the President at play.
With the new first puppy;
There’s a ton of others, Obama with a basketball tossing a football in the oval office etc. Lots of great pictures. I love this [...]
Internet speed
1 year ago, twitter had few users.
5 years ago, barely anyone was on facebook.
10 years ago, if someone told you they didn’t have an email address, you probably didn’t give it a second thought
10 years ago, AOL, Alta Vista and Yahoo! were the internet.
I used to be thankful that I was born in this age, [...]
Being an Ox
Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the year of the Ox! According to Wikipedia:
The Ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. This powerful sign is a born leader, being quite dependable and possessing an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm, [...]
Meme alert – 5 a day
I don’t usually participate in meme’s, but the meme Jim Byford tagged me with is a pretty good exercise. Not to mention the fact that I haven’t written a post in December yet, I needed to be inspired and Jim’s post did the trick.
A site called Mindapples has started a meme asking [...]
Poverty and conflict
A friend of mine asked me last night what I thought of the situation in Mumbai. I answered that I find it, like all terrorist attacks, crazy. It’s a sad reaction by desperate misguided individuals who don’t value other human lives as much as they should. After that I qualified my response [...]