It’s Petrov weekend. Apparently by chance, Wired has a story about the Soviet Union’s Perimetr command-and-control system, which it gives a completely misleading headline to. As the story itself makes clear, the last thing Perimetr was designed to do was to act as the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove; in fact, it was designed to…
Read More Petrov weekend bloggingI’d like to introduce you to a new project. The other day, I was reading an imbecilic union-bashing editorial by one “Hugo Rifkind”, and I wondered….whose kid are you? Wikipedia informed me that diary columnist (it’s like a journalist but not quite) Rifkind is indeed the former Defence and Foreign Secretary’s son, and he’s “written”…
Read More Introducing WhoseKidAreYouHere’s an interesting example of modern thinking. Appropriately enough, it’s one drawn from sport, which seems to play a special role in the whole phenomenon. The Government wants to force the FA to change its internal structures. Progress on reforming the FA Council and its endless list of committees has also stalled. As part of…
Read More the FA: a case study in modern thinkingHere’s a ManyEyes visualisation of the top 40 airlines on the Viktorfeed, after a bit more than a year’s data logging. The old gang has shrunk a lot; British Gulf is still in there, but only because of their dominance before the end of February, when they cut off never to speak again. Eastern Express…
Read More reviewing the resultsBack in September, 2006, we were talking illegal immigrants and artisanal shipbuilding in West Africa, over at the Fistful. one of the curious economic details you could notice was how the process was in fact exhibiting an increasing returns type feature, in that the increased demand for boats increasingly meant that a number of would-be…
Read More a questionI see the MG Rover report is out. The document is here. We blogged. I like the detail that one of the four was caught having bought something off the interwebs to clear his hard disk, and that the investigators were able to tell which folders he’d run through the l33t gadget. Just the people…
Read More I told you soIt’s fascinating how Tories manage to pollute an otherwise sensible idea. Consider Barnet Council, fief of comedy food mountain Brian Coleman, and its so-called Easyjet model. I’m going to get at the lo-co fetish, but first, the substance. Among much else, they want to offer people who receive social care an individual budget, which they…
Read More the extra cost societyCharlie Stross wants to know what the future holds in terms of ideology – what the killer memes of tomorrow are likely to be. He’s working from the position that the huge ideological systems of the 20th century were all ways of coping with, or seeking, modernity; thus you have the big two, communism and…
Read More modern thinkingHow did I miss this? A Sikh who thinks he’s a native American shaman? In Bradford? Where else? Weird religion is a Bradford thing, and it’s in our best tradition that it should go all syncretic like.
Read More featheredGoes especially for Antonov-32s. They seem to attract trouble, or the other way around. We’ve been seeing a few AYK Avia flights to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere lately. Based in Armenia; ICAO AYK. Here’s a cracking detail about one of their Antonov-32s, EK-32500 (Kyrgyz registry), serial number 2009 in its past guise as 9L-LFP (i.e.…
Read More some like to go out dancing, some others like us, we gotta work