If he was a tiger, why was he so skinny?

Samuel Bradley Photography

Geheimnisvollen Gebäuden und Denkmälern aus dem ehemaligen Jugoslawien.

Mysterious buildings and monuments from the former Yugoslavia.

Miss Lotion illustrates her skills.

Raymond Lemstra is brilliant.

The future of libraries and research will be decided by Google?

In the 1990’s I wrote often about information dystopias. In 1994 I said:

It’s clear to me that the information highway isn’t much about information. It’s about trying to find a new basis for our economy. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like the way information is treated in that economy. We know what kind of information sells, and what doesn’t.

How much design is too much design?

As we await the launch of Apple’s latest attempt at creating a crediblecloud computing service, an editorial at Ars Technica asks whether Apple can really succeed at this game. Writer Timothy B. Lee argues that Apple’s “centralized, designer-driven culture can be a serious weakness when building scalable network services,” and that analysis and iteration is what is truly necessary to make these things work.

This may or may not be an accurate assessment of Apple’s predicament, but I think the debate about whether designer-driven network products — not just cloud services, but social networks too — can succeed is an interesting one. I wouldn’t say that a strongly designer-led corporate culture makes it impossible for a company to create network products that people really want to use. But it does seem to me that, as much as we talk about the cruciality of design to the success of software that it’s also true that having too much design is often counter-productive.

The Genius of Robert Walser

On Christmas Day, 1956, the police of the town of Herisau in eastern Switzerland were called out: children had stumbled upon the body of a man, frozen to death, in a snowy field. Arriving at the scene, the police took photographs and had the body removed.

The dead man was easily identified: Robert Walser, aged seventy-eight, missing from a local mental hospital. In his earlier years Walser had won something of a reputation, in Switzerland and even in Germany, as a writer. Some of his books were still in print; there had even been a biography of him published. During a quarter of a century in mental institutions, however, his own writing had dried up. Long country walks—like the one on which he had died—had been his main recreation.

Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals?

Derek and Jean Robinson were a kindly couple who lived in a neat house in Heslington, York. He was a doctor and she worked for Christian Aid. It was the early 1970s; I was a student at the university, and my father, who knew them, had urged me to make contact. I spent a pleasant hour in their kitchen, chatting over coffee, and then took my leave, promising, as one does, to see them again soon. I never did. The next I heard, more than 30 years later, was that they had been murdered by a man with a psychopathic personality disorder who told police he wanted to become Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

How to spot a psychopath

It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated sweatpants. There probably wasn’t much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

As a site that I visit on many occasions in one day I have only recently thought deeply about why I like the Guardian homepage so much.

I have identified that the reason for my love of the page is simply its beautiful layout. The page is designed in such a way that I can scroll down to see new information, but I can also scroll back up and see new information too. This is achieved by a 4 column layout that allows me to read the text based first column in a downward scroll, then scroll back whilst taking in the image heavy second column and finally read the text and video third column in another downward scroll. I never look at the fourth column as it is holds no interest for me.

I love the way the content changes with columns too, the first contains news stories, the second features and the third comment, film, music art and culture. This reflects the way the newspaper is structured when read on paper, this combination means that I get a similar experience on and off line, which is probably the main reason I love the page or even site so much.