Новости за 21.08.2015

Half the Chinese population plays videogames; so gaming jargon quickly crosses over into everyday language. “开挂 or 开外挂 is the act of running an illegal plug-in on a game. Outside of gaming, it has become an expression of disbelief, as well as an adjective to mean exaggerated or enhanced. In English, you might say that a particularly beautiful sunset looks Photoshopped; in Chinese, you’d say it was running an illegal game plug-in”

The public burning of foreign cheese in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is strange but not absurd. “Cheese was and is hugely symbolic, and particularly symbolic of Russia’s relationship with Europe”. Strongly-flavoured foreign cheeses first came to Russia in the 18C as an acquired taste for the upper classes who identified with French culture. They disappeared under communism, and returned with its collapse. Now, they disappear again

How cars will change. The shift to electric will make manufacturing much simpler: Small firms will make competitive cars using standard modules. On-demand services will reduce individual ownership; most buyers will be fleet operators who want general robustness, not decorative flourish. Autonomous vehicles will speed the move towards on-demand use. In tech terms, road traffic is moving to a packet-switching model

And if I said I didn’t put it there would you believe me? But who else would register as eratliff@gmail.com? “The closest I’ve come to a working theory is that a lot of E. Ratliffs have addresses like eratliff75@gmail.com. They believe they can leave off the numbers and receive the messages anyway, or they simply forget. That, or the E. Ratliffs of the world just view eratliff@gmail.com as some kind of shared resource”

The BBC is suffering its toughest financial squeeze in sixty years at the hands of an unsympathetic Conservative government, and will have to cut the quality or the quantity of its output. Everybody loves something about the BBC, but almost everything it offers — from costume drama to music radio — can be done at least as well by a commercial rival. If there is an argument for keeping the BBC as it is, the BBC has yet to make it