29 Jul 2025

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn — This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. […]

13 Jan 2025

Where is my patriotism?

Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]

6 Sep 2024

Some bullet-points about regulation

In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about […]


  • Distressed information architect

    Matt Jones is the subject of a long and quite serious interview about information architecture for news at Online Journalism Review. This is all very interesting but the best thing…

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  • Problems with Azeem’s BPL idea

    Azeem’s BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream: 1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed…

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  • Redefining ‘Public Service’ at BBCi

    Azeem thinks we should try to apply open source thinking to the BBC. He thinks the Beeb’s online content and code should be freely published under the GPL – the…

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  • W3C Web Services standards

    Werbach links to the W3C’s draft web services standards.

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  • Motorists out of control

    Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks “who dares to stand up to the motorists?” The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that…

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  • Making of the Macintosh

    I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase…

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  • Bioinformatics links

    From an overview in last week’s New Scientist:Cytoscape, National Center for Biotechnology Information (US), European Bioinformatics Institute, Gene Ontology Consortium, Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium, The Center for Advancement of Genomics

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  • Proof for posterity

    Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Gutenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It’s got to be worth a few minutes of your day to…

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  • Mememap

    Er… Something tells me I’m a bit slow off the mark here but this mindmap of current memes looks pretty useful. I was just struggling to name the ‘space’ described…

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  • Grocery heroes

    The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they’ve built a home delivery service that doesn’t require you…

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  • Better Booth

    Thanks to Quinquireme, for a much better and more searchable Charles Booth site at the LSE (I mean better than the one I used the other day)

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  • The Economist on migration

    I’ve just finished reading The Economist’s blockbuster survey on migration. More very good work developing the newspaper’s line on the liberalisation of migration as a benefit to both nations (receiving…

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