25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl – they set up a radiation monitor in the car…
Read More alternative YorkshireVia Airminded, find your local V2 rocket strike. London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Tehran have what in common? That’s right, it’s the list of cities that have been subjected to attack from space. Then, why not go here and look up how big a hole it made? Someone’s photographed and flickr’d a whole…
Read More there are, however, rockets in this postOK, so yer lie detector. It’s been something of a blogosphere hit. And in the comments, we have Nigel, who appears to know something about acoustic signal processing – in the sense of “makes speech recognition systems for Eurofighters”. It seems that rather than being a signal at a frequency between 8 and 12Hz, the…
Read More voice stress clarityOK. So we looked into voice stress analysis and the world telecoms infrastructure. And we concluded that proper VSA – the sort with the peer-reviewed scientific papers an stuff – was technically impossible. Recap; the original VSA research is based on a change in a signal in your voice between 8 and 12Hz, but even…
Read More Dr. Benway strikes again, with Venture CapitalI was going to fisk the Government’s depressing sudden love affair with the discredited nonsense of “lie detectors”, but I see the Ministry has already done it. Go and read; it’s an instant classic. And as a bonus, there’s a great comment from the Great Simpleton, who you occasionally find in comments here, about some…
Read More G.729 and the welfare stateNo wonder the Indy‘s moving in with the Daily Mail; it’s taken to publishing leaders like this one, a crude bit of hard right culture war stuff which blames the Sharon Matthews case on “welfare”. Yes, really. They also rehearse the old Peter Lilley thing about “single mothers who get pregnant just to jump the…
Read More The Independent: Is OverGeorge Osborne is not getting any better. His latest shaft of brilliance is to threaten everyone with a sterling crisis – Chris Dillow has details and more. The problem here is that for a start, he is deliberately beating the water to drive sharks away from his vulnerable ideological underbelly. The Conservatives’ “economic plan” currently…
Read More George Osborne: A National EmbarrassmentAh, MEND – everyone’s favourite dark-globalisation guerrilla gang, whose strategy is based on the world oil market as they career around Nigeria in RIBs with six or so huge outboards and silly numbers of heavy machine guns, while God knows where their leader/committee/nameless mobile phone number is. You can see why the defence establishment loves…
Read More kings and queens and generals learn your nameThis story; from China is predictably horrible: Chinese authorities have sentenced two women in their 70s to a year’s “re-education through labour” following their application to hold a protest demonstration during the Beijing games, a relative said yesterday. Officials said this week they had not approved a single permit for a demonstration, despite designating three…
Read More Can’t we be more helpful and appropriate?I’m about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it’s a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I’ve made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy…
Read More The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)