what this mit student has done presses all my pleasure buttons at once: my love of metro systems, admiration for the technical competence of geeky people, and my delight in data visualisation in and as art, and satisfaction at the free availability of that very information itself, and that the data comes from one of my very favourite cities in the world.

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and this, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that sends my inner ocd into panic mode.

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last night john d (to whom i turn for all cultural knowledge about the u.s. of a., he is better than wikipedia, and of course more colourfully cynical about it) explained to me that the iowa’s writers’ workshop is brought to us in part by the cia and that books have been written about this, were i not such an ignoramus i would have known this too. i have not yet decided if i should believe him.

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to add to my list of “don’t quite knows” what does one think of larry lessig’s presidential bid? but it is one of the most interesting things that has happened this season, and i am inwardly rather thrilled and hoping he goes rather farther than any of the major papers seem to think he will. certainly if i were american his is the only campaign i would bother giving any money to (i can’t, can i? i have an inkling that american electoral laws prohibit the acceptance of contributions from foreign nationals…)

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vetinari: “taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. the task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. and i am afraid to say that these days all i get is moo.”

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also francis in america this week: impressive. afterwards i asked the minz-father (who watched most of the visit as live-cast on cnn) if a pope had ever visited singapore. he said yes, pope john paul ii was here in 1986, but the visit was ruined by torrential rain throughout, so that years later when asked about his trip to the east he had said - ah singapore, that place where it rained a lot.

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where it doesn’t rain a lot is talinn, where students from the estonia academy of art have installed gigantic wooden megaphones in a forest to amplify natural sounds. not as cool as aeolian harps but not so very far off either.

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finally (i say this with more diffidence than i’m wont) i am slightly dotty about this house and the man (do i get to say domicilium virumque!) who built it. i expect, she says wistfully, i shall never get to see it for myself.