Swinging off my Stable & Principled contributions, this is ridiculously great. Who the hell is this menacing new competitor at the intersection of naval shipbuilding, MoD criticism, and obsession with mobile computing devices? Oddly enough, I keep adding new blogs to my RSS queue at the moment. The scene burns on. On which theme, time…
Read More new emerging threatsI have mostly been blogging the cuts at Stable & Principled this week. Somebody had to. How the Government produced a comprehensive spending review without mentioning the monster housing bubble or using the word recession more than once. Smoke and mirrors, and housing benefit cuts. Has Dave from PR got his jets mixed up? Why…
Read More all around the world I’ve been supporting team blogging proposalsSuddenly the Afghanistan news is full of talking. Petraeus says that ISAF provided one or more significant Taliban leaders with safe conduct to Kabul in order to take part in what sound like “talks-about-talks”. The Grauniad was ahead of the story on this one, confirming that contact had been made with the Haqqani network in…
Read More two related stories on AfghanistanDoes anyone have any idea why I’m banned from reading ForeignPolicy.com? For the last few days, the three FP blogs I subscribe to haven’t been updating, and trying to read this I had to use an anonymous SSL-proxy server. Just for that “test your practical circumvention skills” feeling! I can ping and traceroute to their…
Read More RSTSo, the raids on NATO trucks held up when Pakistan suspended the border crossing. A good point is made in comments at Adam Elkus’s blog – what about the people who own the trucks? What indeed. The so-called “transport mafia” played a critical role in the creation of the Taliban in the early 1990s, according…
Read More Logistics!I do worry that a lot of the continued drive for government data release is really about the hope that the public will find useful sunday-for-monday press release fodder that will help spin the cuts. (By comparison, you try finding a full list of cuts.) Did you know New Labour was spending your money on…
Read More two links about freedom of information(Via here.) Apparently the interesting bit is: the extent to which the public vastly overestimates the prosperity of lower-income Americans. The public thinks the 4th quintile has more money than the median quintile actually has. And the public thinks the 5th quintile has vastly more wealth than it really has…You can easily see how this…
Read More learning the wrong lessons from an interesting chartNow that I’m on last.fm I can have one of these! I can’t help thinking of this in Gini/Lorenz terms – am I right in thinking there’s interesting information to be had in how the line-of-best-fit of the plot skews around the 45 degree mark?
Read More the participatory panopticon strikes backHere’s a question. Having seen the Google’s new “Priority Inbox” feature and also John Graham-Cumming’s POPFile application, both ways of using a Bayesian classifier to guess which e-mail you will want to read first and to file it automatically, I was wondering if anyone had applied the same idea to RSS. I’ve recently started to…
Read More replacing myself with a rather complicated PHP web application, it seemsThursday music link on Sunday didn’t happen because I was out of the country and offline for 2.5 whole days. So here goes, and thanks for contributions so far. They said they wanted to make the girls dance, but that was widely considered unsuccessful. This suggests there’s been some progress.
Read More Thursday music link…on Monday