It is perhaps timely to remind ourselves of three questions quoted in a remarkably pertinent paper written by John Mueller in 2004: Three key issues require careful discussion but do not seem ever to get it: How much should we be willing to pay for a small reduction in probabilities that are extremely low? How [...]
A group of luminaries met to discuss transformational government, and an account of their deliberations has been published. Look at HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP): why do they have separate call and enquiry centres? Getting the two cultures to come together is hard enough, before you even start [...]
This is what happens when you bolt a jet engine on the back of a VW Beetle. On the interesting grounds that it hadn’t occured to anybody that somebody might want to do this, there is apparently nothing illegal about it in California, so the car is street legal. The owner provides helpful illustrated summary [...]
This weekend’s Guardian had an interview with the New York Times columist, Maureen Dowd. She was describing a concept called ‘truthiness’: "Truthiness is a good story, one that feels right, but doesn’t correspond to reality. Truthiness is what you want to be true. A White House press statement saying the army’s doing fine in Iraq [...]
Hillary Cottam – last year’s UK Designer of the Year is not a designer in the normal sense. She has designed process, policy and environments for schools and prisons and is now the director of the Design Council’s RED unit which is looking at other areas eg. health. In fact, she answers "How do you [...]
Finally a tube map mashup which could potentially be useful.
Waiting a very long time for a lift to return me to real life from the e-Government Unit eyrie in Stockley House left a bit of time for reflection. Stockley House lifts have no controls on the inside: you choose which floor you want to go to from the outside, then a fiendishly clever journey [...]
A small prize for identifying what this is:
Potentially more useful than tube station anagrams, this map of the underground plots the history of 20th century music by genres and influences. The full version is here, with an explanation of how it was done here: I started out with a packet of coloured crayons, four sheets of A4 taped together and a big [...]
Following Lara’s contribution to the genre, here is a tube map with all the station names as anagrams of themselves. Perfect for handing out to tourists. Update: Now removed, apparently because TfL’s lawyers don’t like it. But it’s hard to make things disappear on the internet.