Well, ha ha. But I’d like to flag another case of Really Bad Data Visualisation from the Murdoch world. It’s in this story from the Scum; mysteriously, the famous paywall still doesn’t seem to be functioning, but the paper isn’t in the habit of publishing any of its graphics online. This is possibly because they…
Read More making the pie higherPhil Carter quits; more here. I rather wonder if it had some connection to this. Is it any consolation that the Obama administration has a better class of resignations? I think not. Meanwhile, another voice of sense is silenced by trolls. I said a while ago somewhere that CNAS was likely to be to this…
Read More Good luck, Phil. AgainIll-coordinated links. Great news in RepRapping – South Korean scientists have succeeded in getting bacteria to make polylactic acid. PLA is the RepRap project’s favourite feedstock because it’s a reasonably tractable, general purpose plastic that can be synthesised from starch. The synthesis is not exactly simple, which is why outsourcing the job to germs is…
Read More links, the light alternative to writingSo how’s that ContentFree Comment doing? Rather well in the last week or so. Here’s Melanie Phillips: If this is from a legitimately constituted country… And again: Jewish leadership organizations have sold out to rubbish and Tom Gross…British Jews controlling the Labour government, and Israel’s Climatic Research Unit at the material is a world Jewish…
Read More content is free, feet cost extraSomething else. This week saw the Tories deploy yet another inflatable thinktank – rightly mocked here, here, here, and essentially everywhere blog is sold. Clearly “ResPublica” is hilariously vacuous, and where it’s not vacuous, it’s fucking frightening, as well as being weirdly reminiscent of Iranian revolutionary political thought according to Alistair Crooke. But it’s far…
Read More If the seagulls follow the Tory, it is because they expect thinktanks will be thrown in the waterThe affair of the stolen HadCRU e-mail should tell us a couple of things. The first is that this is why you should worry about privacy. If you do enough naive traffic analysis, not only will you find a pattern – people communicate in patterns – but you’ll be able to find something that you…
Read More Links And TiesAfter this post, I thought it might be useful to provide a visualisation of the data involved. I then realised I ought to do it rather better, so I collated the figures for all 47 names from the paper accounts into a spreadsheet and graphed them. This chart shows average monthly spending on mobile and…
Read More do you want me to draw a bloody diagram?We saw Rachid Taha and Vieux Farka Toure on Friday night, one of the few occasions when something held in the Royal Festival Hall actually felt like a proper gig. Taha’s shtick is somewhere between a Clash-influenced dub/punk mix and North African things like rai (it sez here – I wouldn’t really know to be…
Read More we love dancing and…Alex de Waal has an interesting post on the role of satellite phones, and specifically the Arabic and more importantly cheap Thurayas, in the wars of the Sahara today. He argues, in essence, that the capital requirements of being a warlord are coming down; if you don’t have a Toyota, you’re cannon fodder, if you…
Read More long distance information, give me Goma, DRCOver at James Nicoll’s blog: Cellphones don’t require landlines to be strung before they can be used and apparently people have been rather cunning about coming up with ways to use them to replace services they otherwise would not have access to: Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed. Safaricom,…
Read More what M-PESA is not