If you’ve got 104 spare minutes, I can’t recommend this highly enough. Eric “Winkle” Brown, legendary test pilot, gives a lecture to the Yeovilton branch of the RAeS. There are encounters with Winston Churchill, Frank Whittle, Wernher von Braun, Hermann Göring, Hanna Reitsch, and Heinrich Himmler. There are aircraft as wonderful as the Spitfire IX,…
Read More 104 great minutesKantel makes a point I’ve tried to make before about Green politics. He’s having a go about the German Green party leader, Renate Künast, who’s decided it would be cool to order all public service canteens to observe a vegetarian day every week. He remarks that the party is a mixture of “neoliberalism dyed green,…
Read More Austerity with organic cupcakesPaul Klee’s students apparently celebrated his 50th birthday by dropping presents through his (flat) roof at the Bauhaus from a Junkers aircraft. An interesting story, although Mark Brown doesn’t pick up on it (Rowan Moore does here but only superficially). Junkers was the home-town industry of Dessau by then, which is probably why the students…
Read More Birthday present bomberI recently had the opportunity to look round the Stasi’s old head office (as visitors to my photo blog will be bored beyond belief by). A couple of things – first of all, here’s something in the spirit of the last post. That – as you may be able to make out from the brass…
Read More Sunday Stasi HQ Bloggin’Further, after the last post, BT futurologist says we’re living in science fiction. And what particular works does she mention? Blade Runner, Judge Dredd and Solyent Green. Well. In the world of Halting State, meanwhile, the Germans have had a wee probby with their electronic health cards. Partly it’s due to a reasonably sensible design;…
Read More i’ve got the key, i’ve got the secret…whoopsFrom the always wonderful, Satin Pajama shortlisted, Where the money is…, the rock band who stage guerrilla gigs in banks. Bursting out of a white van, the men in balaclavas from the power trio Caracho (as in “Ni karasho!”, I presume) charge into the bank, assemble their specially hacked backline amps, and hit it. This…
Read More probably a robberyGenius. Not only can the Chaos Computer Club tell you how to fool a fingerprint reader, but they’ve got Wolfgang Schauble’s dabs.
Read More ID Cards will make us safer!Why must you record my phone calls? Are you planning a bootleg EP? (thnx, derausqed!) So said the Specials.Laura Rozen points us to a New York Times story regarding the wider telecoms surveillance effort that led to the great AT&T whistleblower case; it seems as good as certain that they got cracking the moment Bush…
Read More Datenschutz in AmerikaOK, then; remember the beef I had with the Indy about THE RAYS!! and THE BEES! ? Well, we now know what the problem is with the bees; they caught a virus. Interestingly, Australian bees are immune to it; I recall beekeepers on the Web back in February suggesting that this might be so. So,…
Read More Independent of FactsFollowing an unexpected referral to this blog, I came to this discussion of Theodor Adorno. Well, that takes me back. I remember having reams of him stuffed down my neck at Vienna University in the winter of 2001, which I didn’t like in the least. I certainly didn’t like the cult of personality some people…
Read More The enemies of embittered freedom come in unexpected forms