This is incredibly great, and will instantly catapult you into the top 3% of the information distribution on top-level Chinese politics. One for the RSS queue, even if his views on economics are very much what you might expect.
Read More no matter who the government votes for…the people still get in(Alt. title: Look, it’s like a society but smaller!) OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the…
Read More Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent personHere’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 computersFollowing 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 ErrrIt 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 updateI have recently been reading David McKittrick (et al)’s Making Sense of the Troubles. An interesting point, which I wasn’t aware of before, is their contention that the late 70s and Roy Mason’s tenure as Northern Ireland secretary was an important turning point. In fact, you could make an interesting comparison with Iraq in 2007-2008.…
Read More Callaghan-era surgeThis 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 bloggersOwning 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 factsAlliance 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 meDoing 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