Boris Johnson is opposed to more congestion charging, but not quite yet; however, he is also keen on “road pricing”. I can see a couple of explanations for this. One is that there’s no “there” there – he’s an unstable personality without intellectual substance and with a practised TV clown act, like George W. Bush,…
Read More fake sheikhsLibertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker’s, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let’s define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based…
Read More that’s not noise, that’s the sound of freedom – oh, by the way, I voted LibertarianNo blogging this weekend, due to engineering work. Specifically, it’s quite incredible the difference between the amount of blog I can produce in an afternoon and the amount of code, which sort of bears out all the misgivings you might have about the whole blogging project. (Not that those wouldn’t have been better raised in…
Read More WKAY progress, this weekendI think we’ve just seen the Sistine Chapel of trolling built.
Read More nobeltrolletWish us luck at 3.05 this afternoon. Keighley are in their first final since 1996, against Oldham, for the right to be refused promotion out of the second division (sorry, Co-Op Championship One – we’ve got title inflation, too). Update: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. 28-26, after 4-6 at half time Now watch us…
Read More 99% of readers will find this entirely meaninglessDonal Blaney has apparently taken legal action by posting this link to Twitter in reply to a second, allegedly fake “Donal Blaney” Twitter account. As you will see if you click it, however, the link actually goes to this entry on his blog. So does a further bit.ly link he posted. The post does not…
Read More a curious caseOK, we’re getting somewhere with WhoseKidAreYou. 865 hits off Hacker News. Thanks to comments, it looks like DBpedia already has a ton of data we can use – their data class Person includes a subclass Relatives, and their API uses SPARQL, so a lot of WKAY might just be a frontend to that, probably with…
Read More WhoseKidAreYou: Day TwoIt’s Petrov weekend. Apparently by chance, Wired has a story about the Soviet Union’s Perimetr command-and-control system, which it gives a completely misleading headline to. As the story itself makes clear, the last thing Perimetr was designed to do was to act as the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove; in fact, it was designed to…
Read More Petrov weekend bloggingI’d like to introduce you to a new project. The other day, I was reading an imbecilic union-bashing editorial by one “Hugo Rifkind”, and I wondered….whose kid are you? Wikipedia informed me that diary columnist (it’s like a journalist but not quite) Rifkind is indeed the former Defence and Foreign Secretary’s son, and he’s “written”…
Read More Introducing WhoseKidAreYouHere’s an interesting example of modern thinking. Appropriately enough, it’s one drawn from sport, which seems to play a special role in the whole phenomenon. The Government wants to force the FA to change its internal structures. Progress on reforming the FA Council and its endless list of committees has also stalled. As part of…
Read More the FA: a case study in modern thinking