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Things to read. James Meek on housing in Britain as part of a wider project to declare the basic fabric of life an illegitimate subject of political debate. Inside Housing‘s review of the year, mostly of interest for the way it paints the Coalition as a culture not just uninterested in facts but actively hostile…

A reader recommended Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. This book is a survey of the British tradition in cybernetics, which it argues is a third, distinct strand of thinking that differs from the characteristic MIT and Soviet schools of thought. Where the US cyberneticians were inspired by engineering problems and saw it as a science…

They called me a crazy radical. They said my methods were unsound. But now they beg me not to unleash my robots. Not quite. But now, the Chief Economist of the Bank of England agrees with me about the UK’s transition to a low-trust society. “the reluctance today of some companies to borrow from their…

I’m getting referrals from inside OKCupid to this post. I really hope this means two of my readers are falling in love. “Hey! I read Yorkshire Ranter too!”

(from here If I started a Hoxton Startups blog, that would certainly be the header image. Go home roundabout, you’re drunk. Christian Wolmar wants to break up the Met if elected. He should change his voicemail PIN. Here’s a blog of data visualisations that didn’t go as expected. Reminds me of some posts of mine.…

This blog has to move, apparently. Bytemark, Beasts, Squid, Linode, or somewhere else? Jesus what an autumn. First e2fsprogs ate my HDD. I still have to go back and hack on that. Then we migrated the work e-mail, with the result thanks to Microsoft that although a load of archive e-mail has the right headers…

The Royal African Society’s African Arguments blog is superb. Being Burundi’s chief inspector of taxation. Why are there riots in Sudan, and what’s likely to happen? Nigerian jihadis attack schools. Rwanda doesn’t like the ICC very much but did recently help it arrest Bosco Ntaganda. Why? “That something will try to discuss the nuclear dimension…

This here is quality from Agata Pyzik. The minor detail that there is no evidence any central bank actually uses the famous Taylor rule, and the somewhat less minor one that using it requires making a priori decisions about two of its parameters as well as the inflation target itself. I occasionally wondered precisely what…

I just needed to look up something in Wikipedia. My last six Wikipedia articles were: Peter Hook. Cockroach. Madagascan hissing cockroach. Jimmy Carter. Linus Pauling. List of pigs. The possibilities are endless.