- Blog
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Touring Machine
Via Matt, I learn that Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Dutch computer science pioneer, recently deceased, achieved in his lifetime two citations in the OED – for first use of the words ‘vector’ and ‘stack’ in a computing context. I also learn that his beloved VW Camper Van was called the ‘Touring Machine’.
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Architects and housing
The orthodoxy is that the last time professional architects were allowed to design housing on a large scale in Britain they did more damage than the blitz, snuffing out historic street patterns and fracturing communities in their fervour to ‘improve the lives’ of the poor. But experts (demographers, mostly) tell us we’re going to need…
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Azeem Azhar is out of control
Azeem is developing his BBC GPL idea slightly more quickly than I can read all the words. For the time being I’ll just link and trackback to shut him up. This is essential reading, people! Comments later.
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Break up BT?
Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos’ latest report ‘The Politics of Broadband’. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of sponsor) but we should expect that of a Think Tank whose average age seems to be about 19 (I make this observation because I am…
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Information about energy
Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for the NS archives or, if you subscribe to the magazine there’s no charge) Eric Schneider and James Kay think the biologists (and the rest of…
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Fireworks therapy
So after two or three hours running up and down the garden in the fine drizzle, lighting fireworks of every variety (including some fucking enormous roman candle bundles about the size of a fire bucket), I can confirm that my favourite is the Angry Wasps Mine from Standard Fireworks. It produces a gorgeous fountain of…
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edemocracy spiked!
Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally steam-rollered by a law suit in 2000 but these guys were always more switched on than the rest of the factional hard left so it’s…
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The downtown music scene after 9/11
I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked…
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What passes for entertainment round my way
If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn’t been washed into the river by the already torrential rainstorm here in the burbs, you might catch our garden fireworks live on the Shedcam from 1730 – 1900-ish this evening. I’ve upped the timing on the cam and pointed it out the shed window. I…
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An Open Source BBC?
Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC’s role in the post-crash Internet. I’m a busy man – I’m nearly forty and I’ve never lit a firework in my life (can that be true?) and this evening I have to light lots of them. So, here are…