2005

Well, after an intense squabble, a wedge of Treasury files on the 1992 sterling crisis, “Black Wednesday”, have been released. The most interesting feature, though, would seem to be the incredible psychological rationalisations of the participants. Let us recap. At the time the pound sterling was under a fixed exchange rate with respect to the…

Right, I’ve decided to have more structure in day-to-day bloggage here, so we’ll begin today with a short briefing. G-1 (Admin/Personnel): Work begins today on another new Ranter template option. When complete it will be on my testblog for user comments. The first one has now been definitively junked after unfavourable feedback. G-2 (Intelligence): Is…

Soj appears very pleased that the government of Romania has taken the step of permitting foreigners to hold bank accounts denominated in local currency. The reason is instructive: because otherwise, Soj’s US dollars were depreciating in real terms. Strange days, these, when the Romanian lei is a safer bet than greenbacks…remember this post?

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…