history

Sean McFate has an interesting piece about organising the army of post-Charles Taylor Liberia in Foreign Policy. Here’s a quote: We formed investigative teams composed of one international and one Liberian investigator. Together they handled individual cases, traveling to a recruit’s home village to verify data and garner character references. We compiled and assessed existing…

Read More you may turn your papers over now!

The annual document dump under the 30 year rule is usually good for a story or two, but this year’s threw up something genuinely strange. Here’s Thatcher’s response to the Vietnamese boat people refugee crisis; some obvious Thatcher features are there – notably sanctimoniousness, vindictiveness, and the abiding right-wing tendency to mistake sarcasm for content:…

Read More thatchergrad – on sea!

From the 14th to the 15th century, women became much taller. Around the same time, says Chris Dillow: In the 13th and 14th centuries, the richest people were overwhelming those whose names derived from places, whilst the poor tended to have names derived from crafts: Smith, Wright and suchlike. However, by the 16th century, this…

Read More mobility

Other things I disagree quite strongly with Charlie Stross about. James Nicoll asks what happens if/when Moore’s Law is exhausted. Charlie has a well-known theory about this, based on the aerospace industry’s recession in the early 70s. The CE industry is inherently deflationary — Moore’s law conceals this because we double the number of transistors…

Read More no progress since 1970, except in minor fields such as cost, safety, reliability, capacity, efficiency…

After the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny’s, my own thoughts on Joe Moran’s On Roads are inevitably coming. I didn’t know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for…

Read More slip inside this (giant distribution ware)house

Laura Rozen reports that the US government is talking about Pakistan’s “existential crisis”. (They do not mean, apparently, brooding about lobsters and smoking too much.) It’s currently being manifested by the Pakistani army fighting its way back into the Malakand Division; basic details here. Fans of Winston Churchill’s My Early Life will of course remember…

Read More support your local marplot

This really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…

Read More the latent content of this airport, however…