The upside-down signs are inexcusable but the painted ‘chicanes’ are an interesting feature – much like ‘fake’ (paint-only) speed humps.

“The manufacturer had insisted that their best-selling product was not similar to potato crisps, because of their…’regular shape’ which ‘is not found in nature’.” Auric Goldfingeresque phrasing!

“[Adrian Bowyer] doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in court trying to prevent people from doing with the machine the one thing it was designed to do. “You are brought to the point where you have to say ‘this is a self-replicating machine, the onl

“When the reporter went to check out the new age-verifying machines… he soon discovered that the machines equipped with face-recognition cameras would let him buy cigarettes when he held up a 15-centimeter (6-in) wide magazine photo of a man who looked

Old but still very, very pertinent.

Some debate in the comments about the incandescent-bulbs-as-electric-heating effect. All I’d say is, grid-powered electric room heating is, of course, much less efficient than gas or oil, but there are plenty of houses that do only have electric heating.

Thorough review. Some criticism of Dan Ariely’s ‘Predictably Irrational’.

“He realizes, with a sense of overwhelming purpose bordering on religious epiphany, that he must use his new-found funds to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the moment to which that déjà vu referred… It’s a “forensic procedure.” This sounds like

“I think it would be more accurate to regard Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity as a kind of Rorschach test. The fact that it is widely regarded as pointing the way to 1984 is, perhaps, a suggestive indication of certain tendencies in modern industrial

“We believe that the idea that 95% of content on the net is free is not sustainable. We don’t believe that society can allow the free consumption of content to persist.” The BPI’s chief executive. He doesn’t really understand the world he lives in, does he?

Amazing stylised rant about ‘other people’s incompetence’ interacting with a ticket machine in the Paris Metro…

…inspiring this wonderful riposte. I have some sympathy with both points of view, but fundamentally, I’d rather design a system that people can use, than make them feel stupid for not understanding it.

So this results in a prison sentence. What would be the legality of using a mirror against the kind of temporary blindness-inducing helicopter-borne light mentioned here http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2006/09/28/countercontrol-blind-pilots/ ?

“The person calling in is a person, a customer, potentially a blogger, potentially the CEO of a company you might want to sell to tomorrow, and yes, the person you’ve spent all that time and money marketing to.”

Incisive review by John Ozimek of the arbitrary, FUD-laden approach to public photography in Britain today.

A well-thought-out, realistically doublespoken 1st April story linked from the Register article, with (unfortunately) more than a little scent of truth about it.

From one of the comments: “Any system, like Oyster, can only hope to have a finite life. They need to expect to have to do a thorough review every couple of years to see whether the system needs to be replaced. Obviously this review needs to be independen

“While I’m perfectly happy with incentivising customers to achieve required behaviours, I’m not sure I’m so keen on FUD being used to achieve lower costs.”

This is (I think) a perfect example of Fred Reichheld’s ‘bad profits’ concept (http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter/bad-profits.php ). In the short-term, Luton airport will extract more value from their customers. In the long term, their customers will

Successful Shared Space implementation: “Officials wanted to test the theory that the 13,000 drivers who use the town every day would take extra care and show each other greater consideration if they were not told what to do.”

Some interesting readers’ comments, many fundamentally opposed to the idea of ‘nudges’, at least in the government-led way suggested by the article.