Kevin Drum has often complained about the terrible state of data protection laws and the related burden of dealing with identity theft. Over the weekend, I was listening to That Mitchell and Webb Sound on Radio 4 and heard this sketch and thought it summed up the issues pretty well.
Last weekend I read Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McGraw’s biography of Joseph Schumpeter. Maybe more on that later: I need to write something about it before I forget the content. Somewhere in there McGraw quotes Schumpeter’s line that “the budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of all misleading ideologies.” With that in mind, […]
Steven Pinker reviewing Natalie Angier’s The Canon:
Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.
C.P. Snow, 1959:
A good many times […]
By all accounts not any sort of couch potato, Ogged is understandably distressed to look at the age-group records for his chosen event, the 50 meters freestyle, and find that he has to go all the way up to the 75-79 age group to find a time he would stand a chance of beating.
I have […]
The 17-year Cicadas are coming. The fact that subsets of them are named by Brood Year and the current batch is Brood XIII is just fantastic. Surely (where’s John Holbo when you need him?) there is a ‘50s Attack of the Giant Cicadas film called Brood Thirteen. Or an early comic book? Even better, according […]
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