February 2005

Oh man, sometimes I feel that big, big rock’s rolling back on me.Can you believe this? (Kos) A school in California has decided to make all the kiddies wear badges containing RFID chips so they can follow them everywhere. What a good idea! According to this AP story, the detectors are placed in the entrances…

It’s surely been suggested somewhere that newspaper diarists were perhaps the first bloggers. Well, The Guardian’s Marina Hyde managed to demonstrate that yesterday when her column, Britain’s leading source for gossip about Labour Party PR flacks, ran an item substantially identical to a post of Nosemonkey’s, without attribution… Meanwhile, we are forced to call Tory…

Can anyone explain why over the weekend the Ranter posted 250+ unique hits a day? My stats provider was down for several days and now they’re back up it’s clear there was a hell of a lot of traffic. Any ideas?

Information Week reports on the approaching European directive on RFIDs. There’s a public consultation going until the 31st of March, so if you don’t like the idea of being tagged – write to this address and tell ’em so.

There’s a new UN Security Council report out on West Africa! An event of sheer joy for fans of mystery gun-runners, diamonds and such. (You can get the document here (pdf).) As well as much interesting information on a wide range of subjects, the report includes a detailed description of one particular flight, which might…

The New Yorker has a long article on “extraordinary rendition”, the secret transfer of CIA detainees to countries where torture is common. It’s worth reading, especially for the degree of nonchalance displayed by some persons, and also for this horror-nugget: “According to Margulies, Habib was held and interrogated for six months. “Never, to my knowledge,…

Over in the shabbily luxurious senior common room that is Crooked Timber, they’re discussing the role of search engines (the internet’s swiss army knife) in economics, society and culture. Not only that, but one of them’s been asked to edit an issue of a scholarly journal devoted to the topic. A suggested topic is the…

Hear that? That’s the sound of Professor Mark Grimsley and friends interrogating the project of military history. They’ve dragged it into a windowless seminar room to slap it around, maybe turn on the white noise. Goddamn projects – it’s all they deserve. It’s certainly an interesting blog, even though the curious structure makes it a…

With the announcement of Labour’s new immigration policy, we can at last be entirely sure that the extended election campaign has gripped home. And it’s ugly, dammit. Both big parties are now committed to a policy of dramatic cuts in immigration and of a whole new philosophy on this issue. Crucially, the proposals Charles Clarke…

Here we have the site of some Swedes and their football-shaped robot, designed for planetary exploration and being commercialised for security patrolling. There’s an interesting video. Via Schockwellenreiter. Also check out this (German) report on a similar NASA project, a large white sphere blown by the wind across Antarctica…does anyone feel that they watch The…