The Grauniad Dabatlog has produced a rather fancy network visualisation of the sources cited in Anders Behring Breivik’s personal manifesto/horse-shit compendium. This is great as I now don’t need to worry that I perhaps should have made one. It’s very pretty and you can click on stuff, and see that some of the sources are…
Read More discovering the axis of barkingSo the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which…
Read More killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphereSo we’ve discussed GCHQ and broad politics and GCHQ and technology. Now, what about a case study? Following a link from Richard Aldrich’s Warwick University homepage, here’s a nice article on FISH, the project to break the German high-grade cypher network codenamed TUNNY. You may not be surprised to know that key links in the…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case studyHere is a really fascinating interview with David Dunning, of Dunning-Kruger Effect fame. As a taste, the incident that inspired Dunning: Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key…
Read More how Dunning met KrugerOne outcome of all the MySociety work for this election was the survey administered by DemocracyClub volunteers to all candidates. The results by party are graphed here, with standard deviations and error bars. Some immediate conclusions: Surprising egalitarianism. Look at question 1, which asks if the budget deficit should be reduced by taxing the rich.…
Read More a centre-left nation needs what kind of government?An interesting isotope is detected in the CRU report fall-out plume. Apart from the very high concentrations of concern-troll, tone-troll, and pure drivel, there is something worth learning from. For this reason, many software professionals encountering science software for the first time may be horrified. How, they ask, can we rely on this crude software,…
Read More better than it isIf you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone’s esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again. Here’s some science, via Lou Grinzo’s blog. We’ve been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the…
Read More a reminder that things happen quicklyWhile we’re kicking the remains of Superfreakonomics around the car park, here’s something else. Via Kevin Drum, it seems that John Meriwether, the chap whose hedge fund LTCM nearly killed the banking sector in 1998, has started another hedge fund, a few months after his come-back ended up being crushed under the financial panic of…
Read More the new Soviet manOne consequence of the whole Superfreakonomics fiasco, which has been thoroughly reported elsewhere in the blogosphere, is that I’ve changed my mind about geoengineering ideas. Up until now, I was of the opinion that the various proposals to check climate change by doing various things to the atmosphere or the oceans were no substitute for…
Read More scary monsters and super freaks keep me runningI love the fact the phrase “snake palaeothermometry” exists, and even more that it defines an actual scientific experiment. (I should probably have a “reptiles” tag, seeing as I just blogged about David Miliband and I’m about to mention Sir Nicholas Winterton.)
Read More weather: around 10cm maximum diameter