Reading

Things to read. James Meek on housing in Britain as part of a wider project to declare the basic fabric of life an illegitimate subject of political debate. Inside Housing‘s review of the year, mostly of interest for the way it paints the Coalition as a culture not just uninterested in facts but actively hostile to fact as a philosophical category.

Things are very bad in Iraq, and the BBC makes the point with a simple and therefore good chart. William Langewiesche explores the underground infrastructure of New York City, and profiles the people who keep the water in some of the tubes and out of the others. Incredibly, Vanity Fair has an archive page that lists all Langewiesche’s work for them, and it’s absolutely free, so you can just shove your face into the pile, like the guy at the end of Scarface with the plateful of cocaine.

Bunnie Huang has discovered that SD cards – SD cards! – contain a programmable computer, substantially more powerful than an Arduino or similar. This is because the quality of the physical medium is subject to psuedorandom imperfections, and the only way to get around this is to learn where they are. I knew HDDs worked like that but I had no idea SD cards contained microcontrollers. We are surrounded by an ambiguous plenty of electronics in which only trust is scarce.

This is interesting about the Ed.