Year: 2004

  • Water everywhere

    My kids – before they’re my age – will know Mars better than I know, say, Tasmania or Patagonia. They won’t have been there but they’ll feel like they have.…

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  • Reports reports reports

    In case you haven’t had enough reports lately, here are two really fascinating ones. One that got lots of press when it came out last week (including useful summaries from…

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  • The next Stella Vine

    The near-legendary Paul Murphy has a show opening on 3 April at the cheeky Transition Gallery in Hackney (London’s Brooklyn). Transition hit the headlines a few weeks ago as home…

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  • Following the wrong leader

    Peter Preston in The Observer on the ‘

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  • Tivo has landed

    We’ve adopted a second-hand Tivo (why don’t the cable companies launch their own PVR? What’s wrong with them? Do they like being kicked around by Sky?). PVRs are supposed to…

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  • Lovely money

    Lots of handsome Bulgarian paper money from a huge private collection of old bank notes, bonds and so on. Bank note design is a fascinating collision of authenticity (not a…

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  • A grim kind of hope

    Is it perverse to hope, as I do, that the Madrid attrocity is ETA and not Al-Qaeda? If it’s the former, we can expect electoral collapse for the separatists (the…

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  • Dyson, Diamond, Didion

    Two very good reviews from the New York Review. Cheeky polymath Freeman Dyson on the paranormal and trendy geographer Jared Diamond on Easter Island. Two beautifully-written excerpts (first, second) from…

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  • Defy orthodoxy. Buy something from my new sponsor

    You’ll have noticed (if you can see my right-hand nav at all, which some of you apparently can’t) that my weblog is now sponsored by an Apple dealer and an…

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  • Transport issues in post oil-crisis urban policing in the United States

    Important journalism from Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian (the paper that reliably tackles the big issues). I hate to quibble but, even when I was a kid, everybody knew that…

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