French bloggers, Scud missiles, etc

April 25, 2010 in 4GW, Hezbollah, mastur/metablogging, rockets

There’s a new strategy blog about, this time a French one. They have an interesting discussion about the suggestion/rumour/story that Hezbollah might be trying to acquire Scud missiles. They’re dubious about it, although open to the suggestion that the organisation might be developing its own inter-service politics, with the big rocket people perhaps constituting the [...]

project failure

April 25, 2010 in architecture, bad science, communism, France, history, Internet, networks, programming

I’ve been reading Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology, a postmodernist account of the failure of a massive French project to develop a Personal Rapid Transit system. Latour’s book contains chunks of fiction, interviews, historical documents, and authorial comment, broken out by the typography – the experience is more like reading a long [...]

self-compulsion notice: diplomats

April 25, 2010 in hacker

I have been scraping things with Scraperwiki this weekend. Which made me wonder about this post on Spyblog about that Israeli diplomat who one of the Milibands told to pack his bags. Mark quotes from the official London Diplomatic List, which turns out to be issued every month as a PDF by the Foreign Office [...]

Further adventures in globalisation

April 25, 2010 in 4GW, action, aviation, sci-fi

So you might remember that Thai demonstrators invaded the brand-new airport there a while ago, establishing a huge Ballardian protest-camp among the glass walls and retail space and soft-xray terrorist detectors. Their movement went on to spray the prime minister’s house with their own blood, collected in buckets by their medical wing. Clearly, they have [...]

thuds and screams in Wapping

April 25, 2010 in elections, LibDems, politics, press, Tories

So, that election. I should be out delivering leaflets; but my leaflets haven’t turned up. Such is life in the sinister Lib-Dem election machine. More interestingly, it’s been a week of truth. We kicked off with David Yelland‘s and Michael Wolff‘s pieces about the likely panic in the Murdoch world about the Lib Dem surge [...]

oh dear

April 10, 2010 in Tories

The Tories’ iPhone app (‘cos they’re modern and stuff) works by sending a plaintext e-mail to callafriend@myconservatives.com, it turns out.

bubbles

April 10, 2010 in economics

Everyone’s reviewing Dean Baker’s False Profits. I contribute. I strongly recommend the book, agreeing with D^2 that it’s important that he names the guilty men, reminds you that they’re guilty, and keeps on naming them. (In fact, if anything, he drowns the fish – if you weren’t sure if there had been a housing bubble, [...]

Kursk

April 10, 2010 in sci-fi, ship, space

Kursk was a bit of a disappointment. A submarine control room as the setting of a play isn’t a bad idea – the movies worked that out many years ago – and putting it on as promenade theatre through the simulated sub is a cracking one. But, not quite. It did remind me to check [...]

better than it is

April 10, 2010 in can you believe we don't have a "science" tag?, programming

An interesting isotope is detected in the CRU report fall-out plume. Apart from the very high concentrations of concern-troll, tone-troll, and pure drivel, there is something worth learning from. For this reason, many software professionals encountering science software for the first time may be horrified. How, they ask, can we rely on this crude software, [...]

actual Iranian music news

April 10, 2010 in censorship, Iran, music

I was needling Spencer Ackerman about this but didn’t get a rise. It’s applicable to Noel Maurer too. No-One Knows About Persian Cats is a cracking little film; it’s a pseudo-documentary about Iran’s music underground, by the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi and a small who’s who of Iranian music. As a result, it could almost [...]