March 2011

by 2 comments on "You are experiencing the flexibility in the rule in that they haven’t already deleted you"

Here’s Yahoo!, heroically defending the image rights of individual Egyptian torturers. It looks like it’s getting time to slurp all my stuff out of Y!, but beyond that, what a thread. The number of people queuing up to explain how compassionate and reasonable the boss is being. Ugh. Frankly, I think you might as well…

Read More You are experiencing the flexibility in the rule in that they haven’t already deleted you
by 0 comments on "787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expect"

This LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…

Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expect
by 0 comments on "787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expect"

This LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…

Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expect
by 0 comments on "If these are the compromises, the power better be good"

If you need anything to read this week, don’t stick around here. Nick Davies for, as they say, the win. Follow the links – it gets better. There’s much more detail here. This is a truly amazing story of crypto-politics, journalism, police corruption, and general depravity. Do you prefer the police/Murdoch spy who went to…

Read More If these are the compromises, the power better be good
by 0 comments on "non-Thursday music link, on Thursday due to exceptional circumstances"

John Band links to very likely the worst recording in the history of music, ever. Imagine that George Michael, many years after anyone cared, decided to do an impossibly portentous version of New Order True Faith ’94, through a vocoder (many years after everyone got sick of those), and worst of all, to not play…

Read More non-Thursday music link, on Thursday due to exceptional circumstances
by 1 comment on "get the look"

Do I notice a common style between Nasr City Security Crisis Management Centre and Erich Mielke’s office? Lots of blonde panelling, display walls of spook stars. Of course, Egypt’s secret police had both Soviet and East German advisors in the Nasser years, but you wouldn’t have expected that to include an interior designer.

Read More get the look
by 0 comments on "Inverse BOGOF"

Supermarkets are getting smaller. I wonder if the productivity numbers that famously put the 90s down to big box retail will ever be revised? Of course, they didn’t really – the UK imposed planning restrictions on big out-of-town developments and didn’t notice any trouble, and the real point was the logistics rather than the shops…

Read More Inverse BOGOF
by 0 comments on "Self-binding note: lobby metrics"

Things to get out of the data in this scraper of mine: for each lobby, the monthly meeting counts, degrees in the weighted multigraph, impact factor (i.e. graph degree/meetings to give an idea of productivity), most met ministers, most met departments, topics. For each ministry, meeting counts, most met lobbies, most discussed topics. For each…

Read More Self-binding note: lobby metrics