Uncategorised links

Michel Goya is outstanding among the otherwise excellent French military blogs.

The Chakrabortty points out that if the economists have learned nothing from hte crisis, this is as nothing to the absence of anything original about it from sociology or political science.

Fission fragments: another person drops off the coalition project, making it possible to draw conclusions about the reactions going on inside it. Of course, you didn’t have to join, did you?

A policeman complains that the newspapers don’t care about terrorists when they are the wrong kind of terrorists.

OK, so who makes sure the American, Russian, and European mission control centres for the ISS understand each other? A very special group of technical translators and interpreters.

Do your own genetics research without needing anything but a computer.

James Plunkett points out that the minimum wage works:

Here’s how the UK minimum wage transformed pay—the wage distribution in 1997 and in 2012: pic.twitter.com/HwFDGh7Hjn

— James Plunkett (@jamestplunkett) July 31, 2013

Indeed, but what strikes me about that chart is the epic money-fart at the other end….

Andrew Gelman tells an interesting story about a scientific discovery that lasted just as long as it took to try to replicate the results.

This is fascinating – kids in Tower Hamlets discover that it’s surprisingly cheap to rent a hilarious sports car and chaffeur for a few hours. I especially like the photo outside PC World.

Tory vampires sold your blood! No. Actually they didn’t. I do wonder who it is who’s decided that MAXIMUM HYPERBOLE ALL THE TIME is the key to effective campaigning.

Actually, until I was about 21 I thought the word “hyperbole” was pronounced “hyperbowl”, that it was quite amusingly ironic that it sounded like some sort of ridiculous American sporting event, and that the numerous people who didn’t get the joke were being thick. Anyway, just because you win the Hyperbowl doesn’t mean that you win the election.

And here’s a serious German business magazine explaining to children how everyone in northern Europe is serious, hardworking, and blonde, while everyone in the South is lazy, untrustworthy, and swarthy. Really. It reminds me of this photo I took in Hamburg, which struck me as being a picture of Germany from the South.

Speaking of which, did you hear about the time we planned a massive development of Corbusier unités d’habitation in the same district near enough as the potential headquarters of occupied Germany, before the Americans nixed that, and it ended up getting built as superb council housing?

FT gets to the summer of 1995 and Blur vs Oasis. I remember both wanting our kid to win, and the creeping sense of really? is this it? that came off both efforts. I still bought the next album and saw them play in Sheffield, with a giant burst pustule on my face folk thought was a punch, but it was more in hope than expectation.

Iain’s political views were, by and large, what you’d expect from an Old Labour supporter and Guardian reader with an informed interest in the analyses of the radical left.

The stories remain.