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 […]


  • Docherty on BBCi

    David Docherty, until recently head of broadband content at Telewest, defends the ?200M invested in BBCi so far. From Media Guardian.

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  • Love and War

    Juliet’s worrying about the war (and Valentine’s Day) in her latest Planet Parent column at Tigerchild.

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  • Roger Needham

    A lovely tribute to Cambridge University’s Roger Needham from John Naughton in The Observer.

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  • Azhar on 3G

    Good piece by Azeem Azhar in The Guardian about the mobile operators’ perilous leap into 3G.

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  • A death examined

    I think this may be the most heartbreaking reporting to come out of the Columbia disaster: “The communication checks continue. So does the silence. A radar station near the Kennedy…

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  • Overdoing adaptation

    Steven Pinker is a Pub Darwinist. We all know at least one – the guy for whom there’s no greater pleasure than locating the long hidden adaptive explanation for this…

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  • Evolution

    My latest Guardian column is up today. It’s about the creeping reabsorption of the net by mainstream society and the end of our fantasies of living in a parallel world…

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  • From behind the firewall

    From the mind-boggling insight department. A weblog from within Saddam’s Iraq, kept in defiance of Government firewalls and intimidation by a young man possibly named Raed. I think a lot…

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  • This is how it starts

    Adam Wishart has written the best book about the dot.com lunacy yet and now Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing has picked up on it. He says it reads like “an…

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  • Napoleon

    Even if you’re pro-European like me it’s impossible to read Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s first draft of Articles 1 to 16 of the proposed European Constitutional Treaty without the word ‘Napoleonic’…

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  • Why should I bother?

    Bill Thompson, the

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  • asynchronous pulsation!

    Technorati provides evidence of my first ever French inbound link ? from Mario, a Head Teacher in Quebec (directeur d’?cole = Head Teacher?). Thrilling. Better still is Babelfish’s translation of…

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