Pretty vacant
How did anyone miss this one?
Read More Pretty vacantJanuary 2010
blogging will protect you from the terrible secret of David Cameron
Metafilter! I love you all. I needed a crowd, and you brought me a mob. It’s been a four-figure day for the blog by 10 a.m., and more importantly created a truly superb boom in Dave from PR remixes. Looking at the detailed server log from TYR Classic, loads of people are googling for things…
Read More blogging will protect you from the terrible secret of David CameronCameron: Cinema: Camera
Ah, the David Cameron poster machine is on line. And it’s gold dust. Somehow, that poster seems almost designed for satire. There are excellent reasons why it works so well; it’s possibly the most stylised example of a political advert I can think of. In a sense, it’s a movie – not at all original,…
Read More Cameron: Cinema: Camerathe all purpose al-Qa’ida argument applied to aviation
There’s quite a lot of buzz about this story, in which a DHS report into criminal use of aircraft over the South Atlantic gets rehashed. The “Air Cocaine” case in Mali has given the whole thing another layer of sexy, of course, and it’s good to know that the problem is recognised – even better…
Read More the all purpose al-Qa’ida argument applied to aviationyou may turn your papers over now!
Sean McFate has an interesting piece about organising the army of post-Charles Taylor Liberia in Foreign Policy. Here’s a quote: We formed investigative teams composed of one international and one Liberian investigator. Together they handled individual cases, traveling to a recruit’s home village to verify data and garner character references. We compiled and assessed existing…
Read More you may turn your papers over now!SQUINing like the proverbial 747
OK, so I did two things – I upgraded to OpenSUSE 11.2/KDE 4.3, which is great, and I’ve installed SQUIN, the semantic Web query server, on my laptop in order to work on WhoseKidAreYou. The concept of SQUIN is that it provides a SPARQL end point to do queries over the various, interlinked sets of…
Read More SQUINing like the proverbial 747which can eternal lie…
An interesting question. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were survivors of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Which crawling horrors from the Bush years will be around to plague us in the future? With a year’s hindsight, it ought to be fairly clear who’s recovering. For example, a lot of the senior posts in the current…
Read More which can eternal lie…Profiles in Wanktankery: Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens
How could I forget this? The Obscurer‘s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is: Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists. Awlaki had contacts with Major…
Read More Profiles in Wanktankery: Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchenswe’re building robotic creatures – we decided to start with the rat
Dan Lockton would probably be interested in this… The robot is this Bristol Robotics Lab project; both people in the thread at Jamie Zawinski’s I saw it in, and everyone I’ve shown it to, immediately think it looks like a cat. In fact, in a sense, they do recognise it as a cat – it’s…
Read More we’re building robotic creatures – we decided to start with the rata modest proposal
Everyone’s taking the piss out of the Tories’ proposed £1m prize for a…something or other…ah, an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges Of course, it might be possible to make statements about this if only it was better specified. So everyone’s contented themselves with…
Read More a modest proposal