fistful of links

Top: the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, shortly before it sunk. Bottom: visualisation showing the resuming of air traffic across Europe in the wake of the Volcano. Airspace Rebooted (related: Flightradar24 where you can see all flights in Europe in real-time).

When it rains it pours: some news.

What seems to be going on in the world? Volcanoes, oil spills, the economic bankruptcy of most of Europe, and now Britain has a hung parliament. It's like we're copping it from all angles (which is exactly what she said). Luckily the Royal Guards are still able to instil some sense of normality. Oh, wait, they're busy marching in Red Square to celebrate conquest of the Nazis...

Related, as a kind of cultural exchange programme: Lenin in London. Same theme: Verso's Marxism conference. It's coming back into fashion again, that old Marxism. Yes sir, Marx my words, it has yet to make its full Marx. Dad jokes. Of course, the popular conception that ex-KGB lurk around every Moscow street corner couldn't be farther from the truth. Possibly related, Orwell on the principles of Newspeak. Back to London, but on a sombre note: Ghost Bikes. I've seen two people die as a result of bike accidents since I arrived in London a year ago, and I see a new ghost bike every few weeks. If you cycle in the city, do take care. Last thing on the capital: "London's Poor now no different from slaves"...

Let's hop on over to the oil rig shindig: a professional engineer in the field explains how monumentally fucked up all that shit is, in a no doubt hastily named article: mother of all gushers. Related, workers describe the methane explosion. Apocalyptic scenario? Who knows. But I'll invoke the imagery of the sky before Katrina as a visual metaphor for the global condition. A political metaphor might be Kanellos, the Greek protest dog.

Let's keep it a bit positive shall we? I'm not bothered by the oil escaping, since we've now got a petrol producing bug. When you factor in declining fuel reserves and Icelandic tectonic activity (not to mention the fact that vacationing is now a human right, according to the UN) then it seems like the future in travel is airships. Ace. Here's MPs proposal.

To technology: the first ever non-latin web addresses have gone live (although it still displays in most browsers as a bunch of x--n, wgbii, characters). The reasoning behind creating non-english URLs was that otherwise the Internet was likely to split into multiple Internets (can you even imagine multiple Internets?), although I would have thought that it makes the web less unified, not more. A convincing ipad rival has been released, which of course now justifies the ipad's right to existence. Nice one, idiots. That said, what if I had bought apple stock instead of an apple product? Still Mac, Steve Jobs' thoughts on flash. My own: phase out that shit - I gots one acronym, one number for you buddy: HTML 5. It can do everything flash can do, and it's native to the browser. Sorry Adobe, but I still love your Creative Suite. Related, obsolete technology.

Few kickshaws for you: a cream designed to grow long lashes can permanently change eye colour (Brooke Shields is the product's figureface); DAYTUM, in case you didn't already have enough information about yourself. Comes from Nicholas Feltron, whose Annual Reports always cause such a stir; BLDGBLOG's theatre for one; radioactive toothpaste; 4,000 year old lentils grown from seeds; National Geographic got a Tumblr; BIG's Shanghai Pavilion (also check out Heatherwick's). Still China: the fantastically multifunctional Chinese army shovel. Those guys, what will they think of next?

They can't tell us though, Millennium People is blocked in China.

Finally,