2011

Here’s an interesting story about a successful response to the seizure of a ship, MV Full City, by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Indian, Chinese, and Turkish (NATO) ships responded, and the pirates abandoned the prize after an Indian Navy aircraft (slightly ironically, a Tupolev Bear) overflew the ship. But the really interesting thing isn’t…

Read More A control room full of computers

Following up this post, here’s a really interesting piece in Dawn on the Indian-Pakistani nuclear balance and the implications of the COLD START doctrine. It’s an especially good point that if India really wanted to punish Pakistan after a “Mumbai II” terrorist attack, they could do so very effectively and much less dangerously through economic…

Read More Errr

It has just come to my attention that both Dubai and Sharjah airports have redesigned their websites. Also, I’ve added 395 more meetings to the scraper this weekend, but for some weird reason the DFID disclosure isn’t actually being treated as a csv file by the csv module. Scraping, scraping, scraping, always bloody well scraping.…

Read More technical update

This came up in my twitter feed recently. Charmingly 90s-ish, but I did like the point that it’s very difficult to get decent bass out of a mobile device/laptop/whatever, and this probably has consequences for the kind of music people will make with them. Come to think of it, there’s an interesting economic angle. The…

Read More links, the last refuge of really bored bloggers

Owning the walls of a building separately may seem eccentric and ill-advised, but perhaps it will make a comeback in the light of stories like these? Deutsche Bank “Stuffed Mortgage Reviews In a Closet”. They’re also accused of being a slum-lord and a public menace. More slums, via Felix Salmon. And there’s a slightly unnerving…

Read More Economic facts

Alliance Géostrategique is having an interesting-sounding meetup on the theme of walls, borders, and checkpoints. Here’s a little contribution. In my home village in the Yorkshire Dales, there lived two men, who both owned a large shed they used for their business. Somehow, one of them owned the roof and two walls, and one of…

Read More I’m looking over the wall and they’re looking at me

Doing real-time PCR in unusual conditions. Just how Obama watched the raid in real time. Hoping for the end of the war in Afghanistan. After weeks of debate among civilian and military leaders, the National Security Council recently endorsed key elements of the State Department’s reconciliation strategy. Starting peace talks has now become the top…

Read More OBL links

There’s a good debate in Jamie Kenny’s comments about the political upshot of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. For what it’s worth, I’m with Dan Hardie on this – it’s a very important political fact that the intelligence hierarchy a) couldn’t or wouldn’t catch bin Laden and b) couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him any longer.…

Read More obl isi faq

How did the Americans make sure their raid on Osama bin Laden wasn’t misidentified as Pakistan’s real enemy? This was surely a major planning constraint. It’s been suggested, plausibly, that the bulk of their radar assets are positioned along the international border and the LOC, but once you get to Abbottabad you’re not that far…

Read More A question