This LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…
Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expectThis LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…
Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expectThis post brings several things to mind. Apparently, eastern Libya was a hugely overrepresented area among the international jihadis who went to Iraq and there exploded. Clearly, this means that you can’t assume that they’re fighting for democracy, whiskey, sexy. However, it’s also very likely that this represented a deliberate policy on the part of…
Read More status: it’s complicatedIf you need anything to read this week, don’t stick around here. Nick Davies for, as they say, the win. Follow the links – it gets better. There’s much more detail here. This is a truly amazing story of crypto-politics, journalism, police corruption, and general depravity. Do you prefer the police/Murdoch spy who went to…
Read More If these are the compromises, the power better be goodSo OpenSUSE11.4 was out this week. As the Jedi said here: gah! suse is never totally easy Indeed. I thought I’d do an online upgrade, so I scheduled this to happen when I was in the office and therefore had a fast Internet link available. I applied all the remaining 11.3 updates, configured the three…
Read More Specified technical incidentJohn Band links to very likely the worst recording in the history of music, ever. Imagine that George Michael, many years after anyone cared, decided to do an impossibly portentous version of New Order True Faith ’94, through a vocoder (many years after everyone got sick of those), and worst of all, to not play…
Read More non-Thursday music link, on Thursday due to exceptional circumstancesDo I notice a common style between Nasr City Security Crisis Management Centre and Erich Mielke’s office? Lots of blonde panelling, display walls of spook stars. Of course, Egypt’s secret police had both Soviet and East German advisors in the Nasser years, but you wouldn’t have expected that to include an interior designer.
Read More get the lookSupermarkets are getting smaller. I wonder if the productivity numbers that famously put the 90s down to big box retail will ever be revised? Of course, they didn’t really – the UK imposed planning restrictions on big out-of-town developments and didn’t notice any trouble, and the real point was the logistics rather than the shops…
Read More Inverse BOGOFThings to get out of the data in this scraper of mine: for each lobby, the monthly meeting counts, degrees in the weighted multigraph, impact factor (i.e. graph degree/meetings to give an idea of productivity), most met ministers, most met departments, topics. For each ministry, meeting counts, most met lobbies, most discussed topics. For each…
Read More Self-binding note: lobby metricsRemember this post? Climate Progress has some answers as to how the Grauniad lost it so badly about the UEA e-mail hack.
Read More Looking back on the Guardian’s MannFAIL