Saturday 13 September, 2008 
The Other Room
Wednesday 1st October, 7.00pm
Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, on Manchester Science Park, M15 6AY, UK
Admission is free.
Readers: David Annwn, Caroline Bergvall, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism
Friday 12 September, 2008 [gallery] In order: Jean Pierre Raynard - Container; A bit of Bacon (Female Nude Standing in Doorway); Dada juice (found in the cafe); [unknown]; Joseph Kusuth - The First Investigation. If anyone knows the unknown one please let me know.
Friday 29 August, 2008 'Dear Mr Raworth Copyright infringement I am writing in relation to your website http://tomraworth.com (”the Website”), which has recently been brought to my attention. Independent News and Media Ltd (“INM”), registered in the UK, is the publisher of The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers. Your web page http://tomraworth.com/bindy.html currently displays, in full, the obituary of Bill Griffin which was written by Nicholas Johnson, and originally published in The Independent on 20 September 2007. In addition, this webpage page includes advertisement tags and other content owned by INM.' 'Dear Legal Department, I’ll reply to this piffle in the morning, hoping that sleep will have stifled my laughter. Do you have many teacups in your office to hold the tiny storms? Goodnight, TR' Link
Wednesday 27 August, 2008 'The start of your search is typing in a query. A common cause of frustration is if you don't know the correct spelling of a word! Spell correction - which seems like a simple and obvious feature - hides many technical challenges. No common English dictionaries would ever include the correct spelling of Britney Spears, for instance (who, probably completely unbeknownst to her, has become the poster child example for this feature). We do a huge amount of analysis of the billions of pages on the web and our query logs to determine what are 'real words' on the web, and what are likely to be misspellings. The system that gives you the spell correction has to, in a fraction of a second, consider a huge number of possible words you might have meant (vastly greater than any dictionary ever manually constructed) and determine if there is a more likely query you meant to type. When we are confident that you actually meant to type something else, we take a rare liberty with our search results: we try to distract you from looking at the top result on the page. The spelling correction is in your line of sight and colored a bright must-see red. Furthermore, we now make sure that nothing else on the page is red, unless it is as important to you as spelling! (so far, nothing is). The algorithms involved in spell correction are constantly getting better. They now work in a large number of languages and are even better at detecting when you have made a spelling mistake. Getting the spelling of your query right is so important that we are considering showing you the results of the spell-corrected query in the middle of the page (just in case you missed our bright red text at the top and bottom!).' Link
Tuesday 26 August, 2008 'Suppose that you are trying to decide whether to read some poems by Robert Creeley or Stephen Rodefer. It’s a difficult decision in this scenario, because neither is obviously better than the other, and because they write very different sorts of poetry. Further, you know that your choice will in a sense be automatically right: if you read Creeley, you will learn to like Creeley, Rodefer likewise. So we’re dealing with meta-preferences – not what you'd like, but what you'd like to like – with nested and dynamically-linked preferences.' Link
Sunday 24 August, 2008 Artists' Books Online is simple and beautiful. It respects the work and presents it in a way that makes you want to spend time in front of a screen, reading. It's a multitudinous a achievement and worthy contemporary with other must-visit sites like UBUWEB and PennSound. Read more about the project here.
Tuesday 19 August, 2008 From Itch Away: 'Aya Karpinska has finally had her iPhone / iTouch app - the children’s story “Shadows Never Sleep” accepted in the Apple apps directory. This, to my knowledge, is the first piece of interactive fiction which makes use of the iPhone’s multitouch technology in a non-trivial way - i.e. it relies on the technology to produce readings and experiences in terms of the device’s capabilities, rather than being a case solely of remediation from what would then be a more practical paper-page.' It will be interesting as technology and print intersect more and more to see where this leads to. Imagine, for instance, a computer screen in the shape of a sphere too big to wrap your arms around. Now imagine a poem that covers the sphere, but every time you move the sphere the poem moves relative to it, so no one person can ever read the entire poem from one position because they are always seeing the same part of the poem. So now it becomes a spatial interaction where the body moves around the sphere. Now imagine that the the sphere is hollow, and when you climb inside the sphere you see what the person on the corresponding adjacent point of the sphere is seeing. Suddenly reading is a social activity, and the voice is a conducting mechanism for completeness. Imagine having to perform for each other to appreciate the work fully.