links for 2009-09-02

Eighty percent of Cyprus’s tourists come for the sun, but the rest are here for weddings.

When Alexei Pajitnov first ordered a load of bricks from Karpov Abramtsevo's workshop, workers there were wondering who could be interested in all those right-angled blocks. No one in 1985 could have imagined those concrete Tetriminos would become world famous and constitute Russia's deadliest weapon against Reagan's America.

Now, in the previous economic paradigm, it was possible to do work that you would have done for less or for free and still be paid well for it, because it was too much trouble for your employers/clients to find someone who could do the work as well and for free. But the internet drastically reduces that barrier. Imagine trying to find people to write a computer operating system and all the associated applications without expecting payment before the internet – now look at Linux. I wonder if we're heading toward an economy where, to put it bluntly, people don't get paid for doing fun things. If something is fun – for someone in the world who finds it fun enough to become good at it, and to do it without expecting pay – it will no longer pay.

"The difference in the UK is the high level of risk taking,"

To designers, who care for their type and fonts like policemen care for doughnuts*, IKEA swapping Futura for Verdana is an exceedingly dumb thing. Futura (or IKEA’s own cut of it), along with the Swedish names, was ‘IKEA’, it signified ‘IKEA-ness’, and IKEA had successfully embedded their unique Swedishy visual language into our collective psyche (and a suburb or two in each state). Brand-wise, moving away from it is especially brave and/or crazy. The font now chosen to represent ‘Swedish flatpackingness’ is Verdana, which was designed solely for the web/screen, not the printed page. Using Verdana in print is like using your underpants as a hat. Not the done thing to do in polite society, or in suburban über-malls. People will point.

"Displaying humour means taking control of the situation from those higher up the hierarchy and this is risky for people of lower status, which before the 1960s meant women rarely made other people laugh – they couldn't afford to.

"Comedy and satire are based on aggressiveness and not being nice," she said. "Until the 1960s it was seen as unladylike to be funny. But even now women tend to prefer telling jokes at their own expense and men tend to prefer telling jokes at other people's expense."