We’ve lost the ‘Watch, also known as BorisWatch, also known as Tom Barry. That would be the guy who brought you the link between neo-conservatism and the war on bendy buses, who counted the number of the Dangleway and found that basically no-one ever used it, who measured the heat in the Borisbuses (as well…
Read More Wait ‘Til I Tell BoriswatchI’ve been reading J.G. Ballard on and off for years. The first thing I read of his was the short story My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, which was included in an anthology edited by (of all people) Frederick Forsyth. I remember vividly the weird, inspiring force of it. Much later I got into…
Read More Ballard, appreciatedRIP. Gilliard was a master of the snark element, Chris Lightfoot of the hacker element, Tanta of the policy element of great blogging. Together it’s the blogging triathlon. (Yes, I agree this sounds a bit chilly.) More broadly, folk like “Black Swan” Taleb have to deal with the fact that their great unpredictable validating event…
Read More Mortgage Pig vs Black Swan25 years ago today I was a three year old boy, living in a village in the Yorkshire Dales, from where you could see the golfball aerials at the NSA’s Menwith Hill base. Later, people I knew well would protest it for ages, and a man who was supposedly an engineer for LockMart there lived…
Read More Petrov DayI liked this comment from Chris “Chris” Williams regarding Arthur C. Clarke: What future? A better one than we’ve got: a worse on than we’d have had without him. Several million fanboys and girls grew up exposed to clear prose, opposition to nationalism, scepticism about organised religion, faith in technology, faith in humanity, and some…
Read More Appreciating ClarkeHe 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 cowsOur regular reader, MySociety prime mover, pythonmeister, sysadmin, hammer of government mainframe psychosis, Chris “Chris” Lightfoot has died, at a terribly young age. I never met him, but I saw and used enough of his projects, and shared enough blog, to respect his good sense, campaigning venom, and technical chops greatly. In fact, Chris was…
Read More Chris LightfootOne of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/Gap