Eguchi Aimi: The Really Not Real Girl

"This is Eguchi Aimi. She's the latest member of Japanese pop band AKB48 and a very lovely girl. But Eguchi Aimi is not what she seems. This Sunday, she shocked all her fans revealing her dark secret. "

She's not real. She's effectively a composite of the other band members, and her fans in Japan only found out last Sunday.

Check out the video in the Gizmodo link below.

My take? Where are the others? Bring 'em on!

from Gizmodo

see Can You Fall In Love with This Beautiful Girl?

London: Hole in Ground Drinking - The Mayor Of Scaredy Cat Town

"Set underneath the new Breakfast Club in Spitalfields, (The) Mayor's actually accessed via a fridge hidden at the back of the cafe; pull open the door, then climb inside and down some stairs, and find a brick-walled, moodily candlelit space that patrons (again, actually) are told to eventually exit via secret-doored toilets, "nonchalantly as if you've just had a pee", perhaps even "leaving your fly down"...

from Thrillist

see  The Mayor Of Scaredy Cat Town


The Mayor Of Scaredy Cat Town
Inside the fridge at the back of The Breakfast Club: 
12-16 Artillery Lane; E1 7LS
0207 078 9639 

The Arctic Ice Cap: Depth Mapping

The first map of Arctic sea-ice thickness has been produced using data from CryoSat-2 satellite launched last year by The European Space Agency.

"The first map, shown below, shows the average thickness of the sea-ice in January and February this year, as the ice approached its annual maximum. But the real value of the project will be the ability to map changes in the thickness of the sea ice over time, as further maps are produced."

from The Economist blog Daily Chart

Epicerie A Loghja - C'est la fête!

"On fait la fête à la bonne franquette, au cours de soirées baptisées "Electro Coppa". Coppa, comme le nom du fameux jambon."

ou ça? Epicerie A Loghja
            58, rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, 75005 Paris
            Tel : 01 44 07 05 74

            Soirée Électro Coppa le jeudi, à partir de 20h
            Soirée guitare le lundi, à partir de 20h

            Planche de charcuterie : 12 €
            Verre de vin rouge : 5 €


from Merci Alfred


voir Faites la fête dans une épicerie corse

American Prisons: Flog 'Em Instead.

Mandy van Deven, in Salon.com interviews Peter Moskos, author of the book "In Defense of Flogging".

see Could flogging solve our prison crisis?

It is important to note her interview article title, and mine, and the title book itself are deliberate provocations to raise the bar in the American prison over-population debate.

We are not actually advocating the use of flogging, even if some think it's a great idea.

One must also consider the following facts (from the interview):

• "Since the declaration of a war on drugs 40 years ago, (The United States) has amassed the largest prison population the world has ever seen."
• "The U.S. has more prisoners than China, and they have a billion more people than we do."
• "The War on Drugs...(is)...how we went from having normal levels of incarceration to seven times the normal rate."

More Time Inside the App.

"People are spending more time inside mobile applications on average than they are on the web, according to an analysis from Flurry, a mobile analytics firm."

from SAI Business Insider Chart of the Day

see People Are Spending More Time In Mobile Apps Than On The Web

The UK's Guardian Looks to go "digital-first".

Image by Getty Images via @daylife"The worsening state of the printed news and advertising market has prompted The Guardian to downsize in print and become “digital-first” earlier than previously expected..."

In an interview with paidContent:UK, Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller says:

"We now have a financial imperative we didn’t have before,” said Miller, who was upped from finance chief a year ago. “The financial pressure all newspapers are facing through the shift is such that our losses are increasing and I can’t see a way of those not decreasing without first making ourselves digital-first"

They are getting it right and none of the other old 'broadsheet' newspapers are, as they are trying to imitate the success of niche financial market digital news providers, such as: the Financial Times, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal.

Those financial digital news providers of course do cover non-financial news, and in depth.

However, they have a huge subscription advantage over the old daily broadsheets: financial market professional subscribers. The cost of that subscription for those guy is quite frankly peanuts relative to their disposable income. So easy money.

Not so in the real world's newspapers.

see Interview: Guardian Aims To Double Digital Revenue In Five Years, CEO Says

Drive Too Much: Get Fat.

"Academics at the University of Illinois have found a striking correlation...between obesity and driving"

The more you drive the fatter you get. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Start walking guys!

see Road hogs from The Economist blog Daily Chart

Best Album Covers (Remember Them?)

To continue a trend: Rolling Stone Magazine has now published a reader survey driven or rather reader nominated, top album covers of all time list.

This is spite of the fact that most people these days have never seen a proper album cover seeing as they down load their music, with the cover 'cover' being a separate file to be barely glanced at. Or their music is streamed onto a device that renders the album art work a tiny picture, again just barley glanced at.

Of course lets not forget those terrible pull out CD inserts: did they make them so you could not get them out of those crappy palstic cases without ripping them apart? A great way to look at the album cover.

And no, we do not have Pandora.com outside the US, so all that great music discovery online with  the album covers is denied the rest of the world.

Music business = bunch of wasters.

see Readers Poll: The Best Album Covers of All Time

Back to the collection: they are fine enough collection in themselves but not one of them would make it in my list.

Where's the original 1969 Santana cover? For example...

Web Sites: The Biggest Sites Analysed

An Infographic from the excellant US Credit Loan site via MakeUseOf.com

link The Six Biggest Websites On The Internet Compared

Chinese Growth is Well Balanced: A Contrarian View.

Yukon Huang, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and a former country director for the World Bank in China has some very interesting comments in a recent article published in The Financial Times today.

Taken at face value, these have important implications for economies such as Australia and New Zealand whose exporters that are riding the tiger of the Chinese commodities boom.

China’s announcement today that inflation in May hit a three-year high of 5.5 per cent and industrial expansion exceeded expectations will buttress those who see an inevitable economic crash coming. But even those who remain confident that a soft landing is possible seem to agree that China’s economic growth is unbalanced, with these imbalances widely blamed for trade surpluses with the west. This view, however, is much exaggerated.

see The myth of China’s unbalanced growth 

Greece in the Dumps

Image via Wikipedia'Greece has just seen its long-term debt rating downgraded to CCC by Standard & Poor's, which cheerfully remarks that the country is now "the lowest rated sovereign in the world - fallen below Ecuador, Jamaica, Pakistan and Grenada, "'

from Buttonwood's Notebook - an Economist Blog

see Bottom of the world, Ma

Neil Young and Rolling Stone Magazine's Greatest Songs

Rolling Stone Magazine has done yest another reader poll of the greatest hits for a great musician: Neil Young.

see Readers Poll: The Best Neil Young Songs

Do I have a favorite in this?

Surprisingly, even to me, it's Needle and the Damage Done

One to Watch: Super 8

Yea! A review not from The New York Times.

(Super 8)...'It's an expertly constructed thrill ride with wonderful atmosphere and tremendous good humor; if its heart of gold is artificial, that won't stop you from enjoying the heck out of it. This much-hyped collaboration between writer-director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg, who have known each other since Abrams was a child, is such a meta-conscious movie-movie fugue state that it goes well beyond concepts like homage or tribute into realms like "demonic possession" or "priestly ritual."'

see "Super 8": J.J. Abrams' fake Spielberg movie is real fun

from Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir

Steak Tatare: the Best à Paris

"La viande fraîche, en provenance directe de chez Desnoyer, est hachée minute au couteau et parfaitement assaisonnée. Déposée dans un grand bol et simplement nappée de câpres entières. Blottie à ses côtés, une sauce à la composition secrète garnie d’oignons crus. Pour parfaire le tout, des pommes grenailles fondantes, coupées main et dorées en cuisine. C'est LE meilleur. Ne cherchez pas."

Ou mieux: Ne cherchez plus.

see Resto Le Charivari : le meilleur tartare de Paris

from Merci Alfred


Bistrot le Charivari 
143 boulevard Raspail, 75006 


Tél. : 01 46 33 82 02 
Ouvert tous les jours de 7h30 à 23h30. 


Steak tartare à 15 euros.

Northern City Nights

The New York Times recently ran two articles in their Travel section highlighting two cities in European countries that I consider to be in the Far North.

Most go there places. In summer of course!

Stockholm in Sweden  see 36 Hours in Stockholm

"STOCKHOLMERS revel in the long days of summer when the sun rises as early as 3:30 a.m. and doesn’t set until after 10 p.m. Many locals escape to their country houses, but those who remain in the city spend as much time as possible outdoors — an easy feat since water and parkland make up almost two-thirds of Stockholm."

And in St Petersburg in Russia see White Nights of St. Petersburg, Russia 

"In St. Petersburg, the grand city of the czars, they call them the “White Nights”: those 80 or so evenings, running from May to the end of July, when the city emerges from long months of cold and darkness and celebrates the brief return of nearly round-the-clock daylight."

Spear Phishing or How to Get into a Gmail Account

"Most people know to ignore the e-mail overture from a Nigerian prince offering riches in exchange for a bank account number. That is a scam, plain to the eye.

But what if the e-mail appears to come from a colleague down the hall? And all he asks is that you add some personal information to a company database?"

It's a tough one this.

How would you know? Just make sure you are not a whale.

from The New York Times

see E-Mail Fraud Hides Behind Friendly Face

The Paul Ceglia Facebook Claim's a Fraud: Yea!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeWhy anyone took this Paul Ceglia's claims of a 50% ownership seriously is a mystery to me.

In any case, SAI Business Insider's now convinced it was fraud.

Fantastic! Let's move on....

see OKAY, WE'RE CONVINCED: The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Is A Fraud

Twitter for Idiots or Dummies or Whatever.

from BuySellAdds.com via Techi

Game of Thrones eReader Companion

Image via WikipediaHave recently got hooked on the fantasy series of books collectively known as "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R.R. Martin that starts with the Game of Thrones.

The reading of the first, and now second book is being done on an iPhone via the Amazon Kindle app. As any reader of this series knows, there are an immense number of characters and places to keep track of. Difficult enough in book form and harder still on iPhone.

Just when I was going to give in and print off the maps associated with the books, a search of the Apple Apps store revealed the "Game of Thrones Companion" by Jason S. Rosenblum App.

Game of Thrones fans get this app, I can highly recommend it.

Stuck on those "Ser Who?!" type questions? Or on "where is THAT place" problems? Just fire up the app and you have easy access to a large data base of characters, the maps from the books, places, houses and the regions.

Easy stuff!

Gigabytes Per Month per Person

"Reliable data about internet traffic is hard to come by. One of the better sources is Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, which was published on June 1st. Internet traffic, the world's biggest maker of networking gear predicts, will quadruple and reach 80.5 exabytes per month (80 exabytes would fill 20 billion DVDs) by 2015."

Chart from The Economist blog Daily Charts

original article link and titles 

Consumer internet traffic: Data guzzlers -  How the world will use the internet in 2015

The Beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuel

Image by New America Foundation via Flickr"Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation."

So writes Michael Lind, Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.

The one thing really galling about the whole climate debate is that it is impossible to have just that: a debate. A debate means that both sides, and the middle, get a chance to put forward their respective points of view.

In the climate debate chamber, the other side or climate skeptics do not seem to be allowed to air their points of view without being denounced as some sort of heretics.

Michael Lind puts forward a perfectly reasonable pint of view that needs to be listened to for a balanced debate.

from Salon.com

see Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong

And please note:

"Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world’s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one percent of global final energy consumption."