a Christmas gift for you: UK Wired edition

December 27, 2010 in press

I think I’m going to cut the UK Wired out of my diet. They recently got an award, and the mag is usually a handsome book, but it’s not good enough. Typically there’s a bit less than one genuinely interesting piece per issue, which is nowhere near enough to make the cover price worthwhile. The [...]

a Christmas gift for you

December 27, 2010 in fail

I approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn’t even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality. Airport documentaries: might have been funny, in 1998. Stelios hasn’t actually been in charge of EasyJet in years, and IIRC he doesn’t own it any more [...]

an infallible scheme for redesigning Britain

December 19, 2010 in demographics, maps, networks

This paper in PLoS One is fascinating (if heavily blogged already). Basically, BT let some researchers from MIT, Cornell, UCL, and their own R&D division have an anonymised slice through their call-detail record (CDR) pile, the database from which phone bills are calculated. The scientists filtered out all the numbers that only made or accepted [...]

a glimpse of imagery diplomacy

December 19, 2010 in diplomacy, space, special relationships

This is one of the most interesting stories in the Wikileaks cable dump. The Saudis use the existence of the French national imagery satellite capability, and David Ignatius’s column in the Washington Post, to resist efforts by the Americans to stop them using US arms and satellite data provided for use on Al-Qa’ida for other [...]

Back to 2006

December 19, 2010 in mastur/metablogging

Bérube sez: So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the [...]

Quoted without comment

December 19, 2010 in fail, fascists, funny ha ha

“Richard sent me photos of his private parts before I’d even met him,” says the redhead. “I thought this was very odd for a politician.”

dis.gustin.ng

December 18, 2010 in Internet

Yahoo! might be going to shut down del.icio.us, the link-sharing and bookmarking website it bought back in 2005 or thereabouts. (They might sell it, too.) This is awful – it’s one of the most useful things on the Web and it’s a key link in the production chain for everything I’ve written in the last [...]

repetition, repetition, repetition

December 12, 2010 in memes, politics

This would do as a HOWTO start a war. The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including “critics like the Guardian”. Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: “Our argument should be narrow, and put [...]

psa

December 12, 2010 in admin, music

Anyone going?

lobby

December 12, 2010 in hacker, networks, politics, Python, special relationships

Oh yes, so the IBM ManyEyes people fixed their computer. I’ve got much more data now – I still need to do the four (key) departments that release in PDF format, and flush the existing stuff to replace the records with ones with standardised dates, but that should give you an idea. Hit the button [...]