So, over Christmas I’ve been reading David Lough’s No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money. I can’t really recommend this book enough. Financial biography or rather biography by finance is a genre, I think, with quite a bit of potential. Money talks, but it rarely lies. Lough points out that Churchill’s switchback from the Tories,…
Read More Other People’s Yachts: Churchill and his Money, or Lack of ItI usually like Jim Pickard’s work for the FT, so I was a bit disappointed by this piece. We certainly do need some data journalism on the surge of Labour Party membership, an underreported fact of British politics and one that has been going on for some time. This mobilisation predates Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign…
Read More Lancashire Labour PLUMMETS to miniscule 50% GROWTHI imagine we’re going to be in for quite a few of these, so let’s get in quick. As Daniel Davies allegedly wrote: Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to…
Read More Why the floods mean you should support my politicsSo, #Cosmonauts at the Science Museum. Put it this way: they’ve got Valentina Tereshkova’s ship. More than that, they’ve got documents of Tsiolkovsky’s, an LK-3 lunar lander, an ejection seat for dogs, Vladimir Dzhanibekov’s strides. And that’s saying something. And the volunteers (I think) are really impressive, hopping out from behind artefacts to press information…
Read More #CosmonautsPeople occasionally wonder why there are still so many Republicans running for president. We can make a simple model of the situation to understand this. Any candidate who decides to drop out of the race will probably drop out in favour of some other candidate, throwing their support to that candidate. They can expect some…
Read More Why so many Republicans are still running for presidentOver at the Pol, I’ve been trying to answer the question: how long until robots take Brussels lobbyists’ expense accounts? Software. It’s eating the world, they say. You may already have guessed that this is a reprise of Project Lobster, and you’d be right. The inputs are the European Transparency Register, which lists lobbyists and…
Read More Eurolobster: a technical appendixThey’ve been whining about the Freedom of Information Act again. Which gave me an idea, as I read this fascinating thread. Someone has managed to get the Ministry of Defence lessons-learned report on the 2007 incident when the Iranians took a boat’s crew from HMS Cornwall prisoner. That was the one with the iPods, if…
Read More Best Of FOIAIt looks like the Biryani Project is back in the news. I’ve created a new blog category for my posts from March-April 2015 on the subject here. The news is this Huff story, which is driven by the fact Stephen Yaxley-Lennon needs another Stone Island jacket, and therefore he’s got a book out. The key…
Read More Reopening the #biryaniproject fileRemember Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s historical SF novel about the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a real-time planned economy using computers and the ideas of Oskar Lange and Leonid Kantorovich? Sure you do if you’re on this blog. Well, it turns out that it had a dark and twisted 1980s sequel. We already knew about…
Read More That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 yearsThis Rafael Behr piece about the Oldham by-election has been getting the bird, not surprisingly given the central prediction was hopelessly wrong. The really interesting bit, in my view, is that if we take a maximally charitable view and assume that there is nothing outside the text, so everyone he spoke to in Oldham who…
Read More Polar Behr wanders the frozen North