A reader recommended Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. This book is a survey of the British tradition in cybernetics, which it argues is a third, distinct strand of thinking that differs from the characteristic MIT and Soviet schools of thought. Where the US cyberneticians were inspired by engineering problems and saw it as a science…
Read More Cyber Brain!This is only one of the reasons why squatting in other people’s netblocks is a bad idea. To understand the point, you’ve got to go back to the BT 21CN project, which was one of those “the Internet is just another service over our private network” ideas telcos tend to love. Although a lot of…
Read More daft IP addressing choicesOK, consider this country: its monetary policy is controlled by someone else’s central bank, and therefore so is much of its financial and bank regulation policy. Despite this, it has a full set of national symbols. It’s located somewhere on the periphery of Europe, and there’s every reason to think it might experience an inflow…
Read More Welcome to Tartania. Set your economic policy to 2011So I bought the New Statesman‘s 100 years archive edition for the schlep back to Yorkshire – actually I wanted the Flight International Christmas quiz but I was too embarrassed to be seen buying it without an excuse – and damn, was I disappointed. In fact, I made brief notes on each piece. Unsurprisingly, Kingsley…
Read More In which I contribute to the New Statesman, to the tune of £10A new crisis for Ed Miliband, as Edward Snowden discloses that GCHQ’s secret laser spectrometer detected horse DNA in Iain Duncan Smith as long ago as 2002. But does Nicolas Anelka really speak for all women?
Read More 2013 if you read it on Twitter