2007

Kiri Te Kanawa, Alan Deere, Keith Park, Gary Freeman, Kurt Sorensen, Bernard Freyberg, Vik Olliver, Kotare, Phil Blake, Graham Lowe, your boys took a hell of a beating! Since when did Leon Pryce become a world-class stand-off? What happened to Gareth Raynor? I remember when he was intensely average; suddenly he’s become a cracker. And…

Read More Blogging Rugby League; GB 44 NZ 0

It used to be reasonably commonplace that bloggers, especially American ones, would say that at least in Britain there was enough diversity in the press that no equivalent to the classic US pundit wanker existed – no-one like David Brooks or David Broder, essentially content-free and heavily invested in the self-regard of the political class.…

Read More Martin Kettle Is a Worthless Old Hack

Google is, essentially, a honking great unix system whose command line interface is addressed through URLs. This came to mind preparing the embedded map for the G3 Systems post; Google Maps autogenned a slightly different location than the view I wanted every time, although I could link directly to the right view. So, of course,…

Read More Google: the world’s favourite command line

If you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds…

Read More The Failings of Social Network Analysis

The Foreign Office has finally published some actual instructions about what to do if you are an Iraqi employee of the British Government and you wish to flee. You can read them on the FCO website here; one could have wished for a more memorable URL, perhaps, rather than whatever the JSP servlet randomly generated.…

Read More Official Instructions for Iraqi Locally-Engaged Staff

Update: Right, I am somewhat calmer. The first thing that strikes me about this is that we still don’t know quite a few interesting things about the decisions that led up to the shooting; for example, why the firearms squad took so long to rock up, who was responsible for the briefing they received, which…

Read More It Is the Deliberate Policy of the Metropolitan Police to Shoot People and Lie About It