Responding to my posting below about poor website writing, a reader makes the following argument: My feeling is that poor use of language isn’t actually the problem: it’s a symptom of sloppy thinking. Interesting chicken and egg issue here. Does poor command of language reflect sloppy thinking, or create it? No doubt […]
The victory of England over Germany in the friendly football international this week brought back memories of this odious memory: the England team giving Nazi salutes when England played Germany in Berlin in May 1938. According to some versions it was Sir Nevile Henderson, HM Ambassador in Germany, who applied […]
My latest plan is to rewrite underperforming and sloppy English on websites. And get paid lavishly for it. Many websites are nice in technical design, but clumsy in expression. No surprise there. The capacity of people in the UK to write sharp, accurate English is plummeting. Good grammar and good writing […]
Back in 1993 or thereabouts, soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was the first wave of excitement about Newly Rich Russians steaming in to the London property market, driving house prices up. This caused interest among the UK security services who ran some discreet enquiries among estate agents to […]
Alert readers of this Blog will have spotted that there is a new link along the top, namely to an essay I have written about Amazon Space. This piece is an attempt to pull together various themes of international politics and the impact thereon of surging IT-driven integration: The world has […]
Polly Toynbee makes the quixotic points one would expect her to make about Baby P: Surprisingly few children are murdered, given how many parents are drug addicted, psychotic, violent or profoundly inadequate; 29,000 are on the child protection register and another 300,000 are reckoned to be "in need", with concerns […]
As someone said: The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 […]
I dimly remember getting a fountain pen or something cool like that for my sixteenth birthday. But things are different these days in the USA.
The Pedant General makes an observation on my posting about the Four Attributes of Economic Success: I think you have still missed one thing. Whilst the rule of law is the essential underpinning without which none of the four political aspirations can take root, the rule of law will not […]
This reminds us all about the famous Drake equation: N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets […]
