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Amazingly detailed discussion of how to label legal dope, at Mark Kleiman’s. He’s binned the Torah discussion group posts, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. The Social Market Foundation graphs the economic debate or rather the respectable and therefore uninteresting bits of it. You can save your effort by putting your hand over the entire…

Oh, do you like maps? Do you like data visualisation? Roll in Richard Edes Harrison’s 1940s work for Fortune. Being me, I especially love The World of ITT – beautiful colour, network visualisation, weird globe projections, and it’s horribly clear why supporting dictators in Madrid and Rio was so important to them. You can’t see…

You think Liam Fox and whatever “G3” is stopped? Think again.

Grim, gripping reportage from northern Mexico. A giant, 1980s West German wheel-dragline excavator abandoned in a swamp in southern Sudan the size of France, crippled by rebel ATGWs, as part of a very unwise geoengineering scheme. At last you can have a full-motion David Cameron mask projected on your backside. I am struggling to work…

This is the post Tim Montgomerie wouldn’t have In London alone, the annual flow of Local Housing Allowance into landlords’ pockets is over two billion pounds. The taxpayer is forking out with no expectation of getting anything for it. But the policy of radically reducing the LHA valuations, from the 80th to the 30th percentile…

Have we talked about James Reason? I don’t think we have. So he’s a Manchester University cognitive psychologist, best known for the Swiss-cheese model of accidents, which he developed in the context of aviation human factors research. Imagine a block of Swiss cheese. To get to an accident, we need to pass through it; the…

Unexpected issues with China’s new aircraft carrier: Therefore, China’s first aircraft carrier will inevitably pose a new challenge to the Navy of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on how to provide food support for the large surface ship. From the point of view of cooking, western food is relatively easier to make and highly…

Views on the new design, please. I especially want to know how many people are seeing which fonts. You should, ideally, be getting traditional Helvetica for titles, headings, and such, and Open Sans Book 300 for Harrowell Typed Entertainment content. You may be getting nowt but Open Sans, or some other thing Windows blecched over…

Why is Donal Blaney’s unsold property named after Rupert Murdoch’s yacht? (via here). Seems an odd kind of coincidence. “Do you have McAfee antivirus on your computer?” He looked at me and put down his cigarette. “I take it off,” he said. “It’s too annoying.” “A Christmas Carol and Nineteen Eighty-Four are actually disturbingly similar…

What did I mean in this series about the politics of the call centre? Here’s an example from the Reddit tech support sub-r. H/t Robin Green, who has a good point: I feel like an outlier on Reddit sometimes. I am the ONLY ONE who recognises this issue as a Health&Safety issue http://t.co/3M6ZeqJk — Robin…