Bill Higgins is boasting about buying a very cool secondhand book indeed; Manned Spaceflight Operations, stamped “Edwards Air Force Base”. I’ll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn’t track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this: Well, I watched this one: In the bad old 60’s…
Read More Blue Streak, Black ArrowDespite the title, this is not a post about Boris Johnson. Can anyone trace this story, one of my favourite tech war stories, to an original source? It’s the early days of semiconductor fabbing at Texas Instruments; the process is still a bit of an art, both in the sense of a science with more…
Read More My God, it’s full of chips!Crack BBC journo Peter Taylor’s film The Secret Peacemaker, about Brendan Duddy, the man who maintained secret communications between the IRA leadership and the British government from the early 70s to 1993, was a cracker; it provided rich detail about the practicalities of ending the war, the missed opportunities of the first ceasefire, and moreover…
Read More What if they staged a coup and nobody came?I liked this comment from Chris “Chris” Williams regarding Arthur C. Clarke: What future? A better one than we’ve got: a worse on than we’d have had without him. Several million fanboys and girls grew up exposed to clear prose, opposition to nationalism, scepticism about organised religion, faith in technology, faith in humanity, and some…
Read More Appreciating ClarkeDespite all the promises, the Government is still achieving nothing with regard to its Iraqi employees. Leave aside, for the moment, the considerable numbers who are being rejected. Even the accepted – in so far as this category means anything yet – are still in Iraq, still on the streets, and still in danger. “I…
Read More I am still in Iraq…I hear nothing from your Government!So what about those submarine cables then? There has been a mass of blogfroth about this, but I’m quite surprised by the degree of mis- or possibly dis-information that is circulating. For a start, Iran is not without Internet connectivity, whatever this webpage says. It shouldn’t be this difficult; after all, the route to anywhere…
Read More I am a lineman for the county…The consistently superb Bartholomew’s notes on religion has published extensive details about Paul De L’Aire Staines, various old friends, and South Africa. As it seems inevitable that he will fire off a nastygram at any moment, readers are asked to mirror the text in the interests of public enlightenment; I’ve dropped it in the comments.…
Read More Mirrorball: Paul Staines and those “Liberals”How did a set of medical techniques and institutional styles with absolutely no therapeutic value survive for 2,500 years from ancient Greece to the early 20th century – even though the scientific knowledge required to demolish them had been available since the 1600s? This is the question David Wootton’s “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since…
Read More Review: “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates”, David WoottonThe naval incident in the Strait of Hormuz has rapidly been blogged into next week; I think there may still be some angular momentum to be had, though. It now looks like the USN is backing off from the claim that the voice taunting them on an open radio channel was someone aboard one of…
Read More Away sea boat’s crew!Says Royal Holloway prof, and I suppose colleague, David Cesarani in a wankerish letter to the Guardian: Would Mearsheimer and Walt care to explain the power of the Armenian lobby? Apart from “why not ask them?”, I can offer a more useful answer. Aqoul: The bill, pushed by Armenian-Americans, who crucially are an important constituency…
Read More Intellectual Rigour