OK, so I’ve been off line quite a bit due to a weird perversion called “moving house”. This means that my constituency MP is no longer Philip Hammond, which almost makes it all worthwhile by itself. Hammond was one of the most annoying features of living in wonderful Runnymede & Weybridge; an immensely self-satisfied and…
Read More I heard a rumour that someone got Philled in…Via Calculated Risk, galleries of repossessed houses in Los Angeles. This one can stand for a common theme. It’s hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show – houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like…
Read More The Opposite of ArchitectureKing’s College London’s terribly smart and not at all sinister Insurgency Research Group have some relevant facts about a controversy between Daniel Davies and I. Recap: Dan apparently believes that it’s better to let jihadis advertise on the Internet, on the principle that they will attract lots of idiots, self-dramatising teens, and committee fetishists, who…
Read More Human Capital Saving in a Terrorist CellDespite the title, this is not a post about Boris Johnson. Can anyone trace this story, one of my favourite tech war stories, to an original source? It’s the early days of semiconductor fabbing at Texas Instruments; the process is still a bit of an art, both in the sense of a science with more…
Read More My God, it’s full of chips!He imagined that satellite broadcasting might help a hundred Indian villages save two cows a year and understood what an impact that might have. Says a commenter at PZ Myers’ place, on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke’s death. Two cows a year; now that’s genius. I can’t presume to say whether this came true;…
Read More Two cowsLast week: Two-thirds of Israelis want talks with Hamas. Not just that, but former secret-service chiefs were in the press arguing for it. Here’s Efraim Halevy talking to old-school TYR ally Laura Rozen. And here’s the data: ;not only did 64 per cent of Israelis support direct talks, and a majority of Labour and Kadima…
Read More Send – the envoy!John Band has some thoughts about Northern Rock. So do I; more precisely, I have some thoughts about the Tories’ performance in the crisis. It’s been appallingly silly, irresponsible, and sometimes plain ignorant. For example, last autumn the Tories seem to have thought that the Bank of England’s loan to the Rock was taxpayers’ money.…
Read More Tories: UnseriousI thought it was Felix Salmon who made a very good argument for a carbon dioxide tax rather than a cap-and-trade system, referring to British Columbia’s decision to introduce a progressively increasing levy on fossil fuels and make a matching cut in general taxation. But it wasn’t; anyway here goes. If you read this blog…
Read More The Gobbles Have ItIt appears that the defence procurement stories we’ve been tracking are coming to a head. Recently, it emerged that the Astute SSN, Nimrod MRA4, and T-45 destroyer projects are going significantly overbudget again; the first two of these are, of course, the ones that were already £800 million over budget and several years later. The…
Read More The Defence Crisis; BAE Are Still HopelessThis PPRuNE thread reminds me of something from the archives. During a meeting we had not long ago, the increasing sophistication and cost of the Unpersonned Aircraft was raised – because by becoming too sophisticated and HVAA in nature, they were in some danger of becoming too valuable to risk in certain scenarios. Rather defeating…
Read More Some are expendable; others are just expensive