At the Telco 2.0 conference today, one of the delegates mentioned they just received a robocall from the John McCain campaign. In London. On an Irish GSM handset, I think. 00 1 353 isn’t the same thing as 00 353…
Read More towards accuracy in PLMN caller line identificationIt seems that Andrew Gilligan has been stung by the phrase “Bendy Jihad”. So much so that he has devoted a whole column to moaning about it, or rather to moaning about anyone having the cheek to disagree with him. It’s a pity, then, that he couldn’t see his way to attributing his attack correctly,…
Read More Gilligan’s “Ibogaine Frenzy”; Assaults Wrong Man, Screaming NonsenseI grinned at this comment at the Stiftung: “Joan Walsh, are you telling me, really telling me here, now, on TV, that because Charlie Black worked with this Savimbi guy, this so-called Reagan ‘freedom fighter’ in Africa who is alleged to have been a cannibal, are you really telling me that this means Team McCain…
Read More the crucial cannibal voteYou are unlikely to find anything much better to read than Nir Rosen‘s report from Afghanistan. It’s the journalism we’ve been yelling at the professionals to do for years. There’s far too much to summarise, but one thing that strikes me is the sense of a world of tiny, hyperlocal, byzantine conflicts, with sudden interventions…
Read More Superior Quality RecordingsZombies march on Sarah Palin campaign event, as they do in Halting State (although this seems to have been planned well in advance, and that was a flashmob). Charlie couldn’t predict Sarah Palin, however; politics can always outweird science fiction. Relatedly, the BT 21CN network upgrade always promised to unearth a ton of weird things…
Read More World of Charlie Stross WatchThe true genius of our society: we invented a drug that turns fat people thin but then makes them depressed.
Read More vanity of vanities, all is plain vanityYer ORGANISE project. Right. There’s been some activity lately; specifically, there’s a new and more detailed spec (available here), a separate and improved section on the design philosophy (here), and some embryonic requirements/notes on implementation (here). Thanks to contributors. Meanwhile, something interesting; you look at stories like this and this with suitable awe. As Mark…
Read More Organise, and pissing off the right peopleI was reading the various Boris Johnson blogs earlier this week when something struck me. It was the combination of the Boriswatch story about the basis of the whole obsession with Routemaster buses falling apart, and the news that Boris Johnson’s crazyarse idea about building an airport in the Thames Estuary was being examined “in-house”…
Read More DKEIt all started with this Making Light thread; Bill Higgins was musing about improvising a radiation detector, which led him to this deeply cool device – scroll down for the cunning methodology that goes with it. But James MacDonald beat him, I think, with this cloud chamber implementation: Field-expedient cloud chamber:Needed: shot glass. High-proof vodka…
Read More Homemade particle physics