- Blog
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‘Bible codes’ recycled
The very human desire to find pattern in random data – meaning in a cold, unmeaning world – is alive and well. The pop media have decided it’s time to recycle the not-particularly-urban myth – straight from the pages of ‘Puzzler‘ Magazine, in fact – of premonitory codes ‘hidden’ in foundation texts like the bible.…
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Essential broadband reading
The clever people at The Work Foundation have done some ethnographic research (the first in Britain, they think) into the use of broadband. Their conclusions are fascinating. In summary, pretty much everything that the access industry has been saying in its broadband marketing is wrong. I urge you to read the PDF file referenced here.…
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Wi-Fi in the park
Steve Johnson’s excellent weblog links to a great story in the NY Times about the free Wi-Fi network in Bryant Park. I remember the park as a gorgeous place to have Sunday brunch and read the papers, but that was before 802.11b. Bryant Park (right behind the NY Public Library if I remember rightly) was…
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Resource wars
John Gray in the New Statesman says we’re entering the era of ‘resource wars’ and that our starry-eyed faith in technology or in central planning has blinded us to the huge risks: The belief that resource scarcity can be transcended by industrialism unites many seemingly antagonistic political standpoints. When neoliberals announced that the collapse of…
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Migration Watch UK – not much think, mostly tank
Migration Watch UK is a shabby pressure group masquerading as a think tank. The group’s neutral-sounding name masks its real concern with immigration. The group’s founder, Sir Andrew Green – a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, quoted at BBC News Online – isn’t trying very hard: “You get on the Tube and you can barely…
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3G auctions revisionism
Paul Klemperer, auction guru and advisor to the Government on the 3G bids, mounts a point-by-point defence of the much criticised 3G spectrum auctions: In retrospect, of course, the licences look expensive. But in retrospect, shares or houses sometimes look expensive. Like any other market, an auction simply matches willing buyers and willing sellers –…
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Am I intruding?
My extensive research (I scrolled all the way down) reveals that Carl Steadman’s proto-blog Tilde Carl was five years old last week. Five years. No archive. One very long page of such delicate self-illumination that it feels rude to link to it at all…
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A new library of Alexandria
In the future, there will be statues of Brewster Kahle. I never cease to be humbled by his ambition. Technologists have promised the digital library for decades. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who was technology adviser to several US presidents, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine outlining how computers might one day augment libraries. Then…
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I’m just going to say it…
It’s fashionable – compulsory in some circles – to knock Big Brother. In fact, the show is one of the small handful of genuinely indigenous forms thrown up by television. It’s important for all sorts of reasons: it wouldn’t be possible in any other medium, it adds much to existing formats, it changes the terms…