The People Photographer
The People Photographer
Our story begins with a number being bandied around. 1,800,000 to be precise. That being the reported cost in pounds sterling, of London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks. [Update Jan 2012: this post was written after New Year’s Eve 2010; the…
(Title taken from one of my favourite Douglas Hofstadter essays. Look him up if the name is new to you. Worth it.) You might have seen a little gem of a fact circulating in the last couple of days, to…
The thing about members’ clubs–the original social networks–is that they’re really only as good as their members. You can put all the effort you like into a shiny new cocktail bar, book the best DJs, and do all the other…
Tortoise: Y’know Achilles, when we were last talking about this identity business we got into all sorts of hot water very quickly in trying to find ways to use a definitive identity to do governmenty things on the Internet. But…
Achilles: I’ll make things cheaper and simpler for you, you’ll see. Then you’ll be happy. And richer. And so will I. Tortoise: What? Achilles: I’m going to give you a new unique identifier so you can have a better relationship,…
I’m hugely sympathetic to snow and ice closures in large, complex systems. I can imagine that the cost of replacing the entire third rail system used on much of the south-eastern rail lines makes little sense in relation to the…
Ho ho ho. How many civil servants does it take to put up a tree?[précis: link is to an Independent article mocking Treasury civil servants for making a meal of implementing the Chancellor’s directive to save money on this year’s…
If you were reading my outpourings a year ago you may remember a distinct preoccupation with train operating information. In the great range of public-facing datasets out there, the ones that offer the very highest utility, in my opinion, are…
I wrote recently about service failures in extreme conditions – and that it’s generally more useful to try and understand where systems have gone wrong than to point fingers. But I concluded by saying that I’d found a public service…
Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O no! it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken; So wrote…
I had an interesting and difficult journey home last night. Three hours of train. Two hours of cycling (on ice). But I got home. The train bit was only really “train journey” in parts. Most of it was sitting in…
You know there’s gold down there. You can glimpse it. Through words and images, anyway. For many years you’ve heard the stories, seen the drawings, heard about the gold found buried deep in a far away country, under just the…