Lord Krebs from Jesus College Oxford lays it on the line about scientists’ human frailties: First, scientists, just like every other trade — bus drivers, lawyers and bricklayers — are a mix. Most are pretty average, a few are geniuses, some are a bit thick, and some dishonest. Glad that’s […]
I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan after he started gushing against the Iraq war after gushing so strongly in favour of it. The vile images of the Abu Ghraib abuse of Iraqi prisoners seemed to sway him against the whole enterprise, as if he only then realised that war is a […]
Perusing the website of the British High Commission in Malta (as of course one does) I found this link to a letter written by PM Gordon Brown to Dr Alan Williams MP of the Liaison Committee on the way forward after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit. It also is on the […]
Via the excellent Browser, here is a significant and subtle article by Lawrence Lessig about how changing technology creates unfathomable complications and difficulties for sorting out legal rights to books and films made decades ago under very different circumstances. The key point is that for films especially, the array of […]
Here via a reader is a neat glimpse at how every ten years for a hundred years the world has changed in quite unexpected new directions. Have a look. It brings out just how difficult it is to be ‘strategic’. The more so when there is a whirring positive feedback […]
Some of you may have read my paper on the idea of Amazon Space. If not, please do so. The simple idea is that in a world divided between large areas of lawfulness and diminishing but significant spaces defined by their unlawfulness, new doctrines are needed for protecting the networks […]
This week’s Britblog Roundup is hosted by Matt Wardman. Will we accept household electricity bills of £5000 per year? No. And a link to a gushy piece about a new economic model, which seems to mean stifling innovation to get the wonders of a ‘steady-state economy’: For example: if you […]
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is asking people what they think about its new proposals for MPs allowances and expenses. It’s a well turned set of questions. Join in the fun online. I have bunged in my thoughts, which boil down to "Don’t be Too Bossy" – weed out the […]
Is hosted again by a Very British dude with his beautiful eyes. He looks at the genre. Thus: Blogging is not new – it is pamphleteering and essaying with modern technology. Early Modern Whale, for example examines a 16th Century pamphlet about a landslip in Kent, and talks about the writer using this phenomenon to […]
With the diplomacy of Climate Change in some disarray after Copenhagen, back to all those emails. Here is a powerful piece from Dale Amon at Samizdata which looks at the technical methodology. Namely, if (big assumption) one pulls together a great mass of reliable data, how to present the data […]
