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 […]


  • Reporter/cyborg

    On Tuesday, in The Guardian, before the war began, I wrote: “Our proximity to the fighting is unarguable. The collision of network-era news gathering tools, weblogs and interconnected internet communities…

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  • A natural blogger

    My friend Paul Murphy’s blogging properly now and it’s excellent. Just the right balance of the personal and the public. Self-conscious but not pompous. Ironic but not sarcastic. Textbook blogging…

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  • Blogrolled by DeLong

    Brad DeLong is a Berkeley economist and a member of the blogging elite. He’s a living (blogging) reminder that sometimes brevity sucks. One of these days I’m going to have…

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  • Libeskind in New York

    Choosing an architect to replace the twin towers was always going to be a pretty high stakes game. The fact that it was happening in New York City, one of…

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  • Fantasy social classes

    Got this link to a review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life from the Demos Greenhouse. “The Creative…

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  • A quiet city

    2023 UPDATE: I’d forgotten that the invasion of Iraq, which, when it began, had been so well-telegraphed, filled us all with such dread. I mean we all knew the exact…

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  • Essential

    As the bombing begins, Azeem reminds me to revisit Where’s Raed, a blog kept, apparently, by a young Iraqi from within Iraq – from Baghdad itself, in fact.

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  • Digital cinema

    This feature about digital cinema is mostly about the production end (George Lucas has made his last non-digital film and so on) but I think it supports my thesis that…

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  • It’s been ten years

    Thanks to Neil McIntosh for linking to this piece about Mosaic’s tenth birthday. It is my fervent ambition that one day I will be required, like Jim Clark, to say…

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  • Guardian.jpgWars, real and virtual

    This week, in my column for The Guardian’s web site, I finally caved in and wrote about the war. We can’t take it for granted that our increasing interconnectedness and…

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  • Dyke kicks Sky into touch

    A great rift has opened up between the BBC and Sky and more than a decade of servitude is over. The BBC will, from the end of May, broadcast its…

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  • Cheer up, it might never happen…

    Dave Birch, who should know, on the coming collision of wireless networks, GPS and RFID tags in The Guardian. Dave’s pretty level headed about the implications but I’m sure that…

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