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 […]


  • Lovely prints

    Thanks to the excellent Kookymojo for this link to a fascinating site about Iris fine art (‘giclee‘) printers. I have one of Michael Light’s gorgeous black & white moon prints…

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  • For the record…

    You’ll have read this in dozens of places already (like, for instance, The Hollywood Reporter and The Bristol Evening Post) but I thought I ought to mark the really quite…

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  • Business idea

    Movies are distributed to cinemas via satellite (or even the Internet) these days, right? I mean, I assume trucking cans of celluloid around the country is more or less finished…

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  • Beats ‘win a year’s supply of Lion Bars’

    You can enter a competition in this week’s New Scientist to have your mitochondrial DNA sequenced. This is one of those mind-bogglingly 21st Century things that we now take utterly…

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  • Butterfly about to emerge

    I learn from The Guardian that Richard Wilson’s Butterfly is nearly finished and this Sunday evening at 7.00 he’ll be talking about it (among other things) in a panel discussion…

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  • Thompson grills Lessig

    Bill Thompson’s interview with Lawrence Lessig in The Guardian. Weirdly, I watched Bill record this interview and here’s a pic to prove it… Bill is on the left.

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  • Domestic dilemma

    Billie is painting, Olly is at a friend’s house for tea, Juliet is waiting in an interminable queue at Watford General Hospital to see her consultant (our third baby is…

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  • POD at HUP

    I’ll say this slowly. You may now buy print-on-demand books from Harvard University Press. They’ve made a list of 100 out-of-print classics available to be bought one at a time.…

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  • Guardian.jpgTotal Information Washout

    This week’s Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about the broken dreams of the Internet advertising business. For about ten minutes back in what we’ll one day remember as…

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  • Alien!

    Juliet’s latest column at Tigerchild is up. This week, with seven weeks until the birth of our third child, she’s having a G.E. Kane moment.

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  • Wonks on the BBC’s future

    Policy wonks (what is a wonk exactly?) Damian Tambini and Jamie Cowling survey the increasingly obstacle-strewn path to charter renewal for the BBC in FT Creative Business (you’ll need to…

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  • Digital radio’s revenge

    Top media analyst Mathew Horsman says Cinderella media technology DAB may yet thrive but it could do so at the cost of the 3G operators. You need to subscribe to…

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