public service announcement

November 21, 2010 in protest

Sometimes, somebody does a web site listing protests against the cuts so you don’t have to.

fail

November 21, 2010 in networks, politics

Odd thought, working on NetworkX visualisations of lobbying activity. So much of whether the finished image is any use or not is an aesthetic decision, nothing to do with the actual graph metrics in any formal or programmatic way. Randomly fiddle with the scaling factor, or increase the multiplier you apply to the nodes’ link [...]

An interview with Radio Free Europe

November 21, 2010 in press, Viktor

So Viktor Bout got extradited at last. As a result, I was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Irina Lagunina. They wanted to hear about how the whole Viktor-blogging project got started – I told them about the Defence Energy Support Center files and the T-DODAACs and the like, and the plane spotter websites, and the [...]

Recombination

November 14, 2010 in mastur/metablogging

In the last month or so I’ve begun adding blogs to my RSS queue again. I’m surprised by this; I didn’t expect to find that the form still had so much energy. Perhaps this isn’t so optimistic after all. Meanwhile, watch this space.

le bateau ivre, port of call: Mogadishu

November 14, 2010 in Uncategorized

I wrote about this piece about brewing beer in southern Sudan, and incidentally creating a power station and a water works and a tiny industrial working class. Well, SAB-Miller did a scenario-planning exercise about this sort of thing and came up with some truly odd answers. In the worst-case scenario: a market with limited access [...]

local news: power cuts

November 14, 2010 in energy, engineering, London

We keep having power cuts. In eight days, we had three, all of them between 5.30am and 6am, which all lasted most of the morning. I know exactly when they happen, because the smoke alarms start beeping and wake me up. My partner claims she was warmer on a demo than she was in the [...]

hoisted from comments

November 14, 2010 in Viktor

From comments on this post, Against Viktorfeed: *sigh* When is it going to get recognised that you can’t spot an arms flight just by who used to own the aircraft. Jubba Airways isn’t some unknown cargo entity – it’s one of the main commercial passenger carriers into Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia. Are they [...]

killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphere

November 14, 2010 in can you believe we don't have a "science" tag?, hacker, intelligence and stupidity, Internet, maps, networks, Tories

So the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which [...]

CSM: a useful tip-off

November 14, 2010 in Tories

Following up on this post, I get e-mail from Matthew Turner, who points to an explanation. Communications & Strategy Management Ltd. does indeed have a web site of sorts, at csm-limited.com. It appears to be a political consulting/lobbying firm that does the Tories’ demographics/voter-database work, which basically consists of the Richard Murphy mentioned in the [...]

I didn’t think I’d still be blogging this six years later

November 7, 2010 in Iraq, special relationships, torture

Well, this looks pretty ugly. I have a question. We know that unofficial, non-doctrinal training material was being circulated around the joint services intelligence centre in Chicksands in 2003-2005 – there’s an interesting quote about it in the Guardian piece here: Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine [...]