Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
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 […]
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Sarcastic link title of the month award
Via demented (in a nice way) Snackpot and branding newsletter LucJam I learn from Food Navigator that targeting kids is getting more difficult. The article is interesting (lifestage vs. demographic…
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Hacking networked reality
I think Google Hacks is an important book. It’s important because our lives are increasingly dependent on the Internet and because the fabric of our networked lives – from the…
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Making homes smart
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and top researcher at Intel, was star turn at a fascinating seminar run by the iSociety research group at the Work Foundation. The topic was ‘the smart…
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Tait on Puttnam’s rebellion
Richard Tait in FT Creative Business on the likely parliamentary clash over media ownership rules and the so called ‘Murdoch Clause’. Written before Lord Puttnam announced his intention to oppose…
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I like this guy a lot
UPDATE: another broken link 🙁 Interviewed by the estimable Wendy Grossman in New Scientist, a geek who uses statistical methods and clever database code to skewer torturers and dictators.
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Sleight’s hands
Lunch today at Blacks with Ross Sleight. Ross has been doing important things in the digital departments of various ad agencies since 1994 – apart from the obligatory (and exhausting)…
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Enlightened old men
I wonder if there’s a generation of scientists, artists and technocrats ready to succeed Freeman Dyson, Arthur C Clarke and all those other admirable, enlightened, imaginative old men who came…
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Early-onset adolescence
My son Oliver, who is four, has just learnt the word ‘private’. He spontaneously created this sign for his bedroom door. We suspect early-onset adolescence.
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You’ve got hate mail!
I’ve had lots of email in response to my latest Guardian article, which is a pretty unremarkable slice of nostalgia, but it’s not the nostalgia that’s got people going, it’s…
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Blame WaldmanSimon Waldman, the big boss at Guardian Unlimited, thinks we should start to assemble a kind of community history of the UK Internet business on the occasion of its sort-of-tenth…
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BBCi cuts deep. Nobody notices
Unlike the rest of the media, Owen Gibson in The Guardian has noticed that the BBC has trimmed the size of its interactive division (BBCi) by a third and frozen…