Look what he’s up to now. It’s amazing how common the “that hillside is full of warbirds/jeeps/whatever” story is, and how geographically widespread. I worked on a north-west Australian cattle station that included an abandoned WW2 airfield, and more than a couple of people had wasted time and money digging into bits of it looking…
Read More magic beans, Spitfires, etcIt strikes me that much of today’s blog could be summarised as “gut truth, simple message, shout, get cracking”. Anyway, I found this ironic: Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback. Furthermore, a dynamical adaptive system with feedback is challenging ordinarily, but this one is also strategic. A flight…
Read More linksI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurOK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when…
Read More optimise your social isolation more efficientlyReader “Ajay” has a theory that aviators are uniquely unfitted for government. There are a considerable number of data points in his favour. However, here’s a possible counter-example. Ernest Millington has died; he was one of three MPs for the brief Common Wealth Party, a radical leftist group that emerged during the second world war,…
Read More party of oneThe Rude Pundit has a very good point. You can’t even picture Obama pardoning a fucking turkey. Sure, he’ll probably do it. But unlike Bush, who approached such obligations with dunce-like glee, for Obama it’ll be like a kick in the groin. As usual with Rude, there’s a serious point here, sneaking past the guards…
Read More a short film about killing turkeysthink I’ve said before that I find public sector accounts incredibly weird. Here’s a great example; it’s a very good FT story on the bank nationalisation plan and how it affects the national finances. Bizarrely, the £25-50bn of government bond issuance required to raise the money probably won’t count towards the public sector net cash…
Read More HOWTO: remove giant statue of Sir Fred GoodwinSo I took my stupid damn idea off to the stupid ideas club. When we got there, guess who? Spyblog was waiting at the rendezvous with some Dutchmen and an Argentine documentarist and half the No2ID members not currently in hospital. And after we made our way through Jock McZanu’s EU Maddie monsoon (GOOD HERE…
Read More Organise, and a very wet 2600Via Calculated Risk, galleries of repossessed houses in Los Angeles. This one can stand for a common theme. It’s hardly got any windows on the street side at all! Just two huge garage doors. Those doors are a common feature throughout the show – houses whose outward appearance is totally dominated by monster garages, like…
Read More The Opposite of Architecture