Remember this post? Well, Geoff Forden at Arms Control Wonk has a brilliant series on the system that Stanislav Petrov was monitoring, how it worked, what went wrong, and how to draw conclusions from pictures of a missile launch with Google Earth. And why you should worry now.
Read More be your own Stanislas PetrovJames Wimberley has a good post regarding changing the electricity grid to support dynamic demand-response, where things like Dutch cold-stores or your fridge over-cool when electricity is plentiful and cut out when the grid is under strain. It’s hugely important in adapting the electrical system to use stuff like gigawatt-size wind farms; essentially, it’s a…
Read More premature optimisation, the root of all sinsMeanwhile, this is good news. As more and more ships from various parts of the world – like China and Iran – arrive in pirate country, somebody’s made vaguely sensible arrangements to put them on trial in Kenya, which is what has been done with the ones captured by Northumberland. This is a much better…
Read More business in great watersThis week we’ve had the Piccadilly bunglebombers’ convictions, but more importantly the first conviction for “directing terrorism”. This was the case in which the suspect’s fingernails were torn out by the Pakistani intelligence service; he claims, and I see no reason whatsoever to doubt this, that he was questioned between bouts of torture by British…
Read More fruit of the poisoned treeAjay takes the cake again. Back in 2007, discussing the Piccadilly bomb plot, he made the important point that the difficult bit in arranging a fuel-air explosion is getting your timing right. You don’t want to let the fuel disperse too much, but if you fire it too early there will be too much fuel…
Read More why don’t you just get a blog?Vexation about the publication on Wikileaks of some US Army documents with details of the counter-IED radio jammers. Well, you can see why they’re concerned; but I very much doubt this is particularly important. Recap: the New-Old Iraqi Army was in the habit of using command-detonated IEDs to blow up Coalition and Iraqi government road…
Read More wikileaks in a jamSomebody really ought to make a table cross-referencing the police statements from the IPCC, HSE, and Coroner’s investigations in the Menezes case. This should probably be me, but I’ll need to consult the documents first.
Read More target for tonight…Well, very cool. Yahoo has an API that’s meant to let you do database-like read operations on anything web – you just pass your SELECT… statement and the URL and a few other arguments, and it chucks back a JSON document with your information. I haven’t managed to make it do anything interesting yet, but…
Read More a cloud of reinforced concreteReader Chris “Chris” Williams recently came up with an interesting idea regarding the unnerving incident during the Mumbai terrorist assault when somebody called Mr 10%’s office and, posing as the Indian foreign minister, threatened war. Chris reckons that not only are the two linked, but the phone call was actually the main effort; in fact,…
Read More HOWTO spoof the Pakistani Foreign MinistryOK, so yer lie detector. It’s been something of a blogosphere hit. And in the comments, we have Nigel, who appears to know something about acoustic signal processing – in the sense of “makes speech recognition systems for Eurofighters”. It seems that rather than being a signal at a frequency between 8 and 12Hz, the…
Read More voice stress clarity