Borderland Beat needs no introduction, as a great and indeed heroic blog. This week, it has excelled itself. Here is an interview with an American lawyer, a member of an elite Mexican-American family that straddled the border and the law with minimal concern, who became a defence brief to the cocaine traffickers, and eventually one…
Read More A blog you should read if you don’t alreadyI’m getting referrals from inside OKCupid to this post. I really hope this means two of my readers are falling in love. “Hey! I read Yorkshire Ranter too!”
Read More awww.I did some Ralph Miliband blogging a couple of weeks ago. Here’s some more, from my back-cover notes. The chapter on “The Politics of Survival” is quite possibly more use as a playbook for the opposition than anything else and I even suspect that US and French rightwingers might have done so. Delay everything, get…
Read More A bit more Ralph Miliband blogging(from here If I started a Hoxton Startups blog, that would certainly be the header image. Go home roundabout, you’re drunk. Christian Wolmar wants to break up the Met if elected. He should change his voicemail PIN. Here’s a blog of data visualisations that didn’t go as expected. Reminds me of some posts of mine.…
Read More More Friday linksHere’s something cool. According to the Zarya Blog, a Russian Dnepr rocket just orbited no fewer than 32 satellites, including one package that deploys no fewer than nine subsatellites. They’re a huge variety of scientific and engineering experiments. At the same time, a NASA Minotaur rocket was launched from the Wallops Island range, with some…
Read More Links in spaceSo YPlan. It’s a neat enough proposition. Basically, it’s a way of getting rid of spare tickets, or if it gets big enough, guaranteeing a minimum sale. It buys up what’s left. It asks new users some questions and runs a weighted Bayesian classifier to guess what they might accept and pushes recommendations to them.…
Read More The threat of preference modificationHere’s a map of the UK creating regions the size of London. Compare the emergent regions in the BT CDR graph.
Read More Redesigning Britain on a rational basis, againThis blog has to move, apparently. Bytemark, Beasts, Squid, Linode, or somewhere else? Jesus what an autumn. First e2fsprogs ate my HDD. I still have to go back and hack on that. Then we migrated the work e-mail, with the result thanks to Microsoft that although a load of archive e-mail has the right headers…
Read More EvictedDid you know you can still get a ticket for £20 to see England vs New Zealand and Australia vs Fiji at Wembley next week? Those are the three best and four hardest Rugby League sides in the world, probably the biggest concentration of all-round athleticism you’re ever likely to encounter. It’s a pity the…
Read More Public service announcementNow this is really interesting. The Grauniad talks to some drug dealers about how they use bookies’ video roulette machines to launder their earnings. The main reason to do this is that they issue receipts, which permit you to explain to the police (and also the Revenue) why you’re carrying so much cash. It’s also…
Read More A case study in cluster spillover from the financial services sector