A notebook of useful things
On 7th March, US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta, testifying before a Senate committee, declared that “it is not clear what constitutes the Syrian armed opposition – there has been no single unifying military alternative that can be recognized, appointed, or contacted”. He was right. Continue reading
In 1937, the BBC were to cover the Illumination of the Fleet at the Spithead Royal Naval review with live commentary by Lt Cdr Thomas ‘Tommy’ Woodroffe. Pre-transmission naval hospitality had been lavish, and Woodroffe was already listing heavily to port, awash in pink gins.
What followed was a masterpiece. The full eloquence of his commentary is a monument to radio broadcasting, full of long gaps, repetition, vagueness, and sudden changes of tone from obsequious to aggressive, against the whistling crackle of vintage radio.
There’s nothing between us and heaven. Nothing at all.
At this point Woodroffe was faded out and replaced by music. He later denied being “lit up” himself, claiming to have been affected by the emotion of the occasion – possibly the first recorded example of broadcaster euphemism.
Nature reclaims the city. Photos of Fukushima exclusion zone, one year later.
And here’s Chernobyl after 25 years.
The time for analyses is over. You’re better off burning your money and arming yourself with a bow and arrow. There may not be many mammoth still roaming the wastelands but at least you’ll die with dignity.
Last Updated at 17:33 GMT
| Dow Jones | 12689.29 | Down | -133.28 | -1.04% |
| Nasdaq | 2881.83 | Down | -43.47 | -1.49% |
| FTSE 100 | 5533.87 | Down | -117.90 | -2.09% |
| Dax | 6419.33 | Down | -210.69 | -3.18% |
| Cac 40 | 3101.53 | Down | -92.36 | -2.89% |
| BBC Global 30 | 6165.68 | Down | -39.86 | -0.64% |
Not quite the Deutscher Bauernkrieg. This one’s coming from 172 economists, led by Hans-Werner Sinn who published an open letter demolishing Angela Merkel’s economic policies in favour of a European banking union. The letter was published two days ago in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Is this an Economists’ Revolt, after the Manifesto for Economic Sense?
. 
Richard Layard has become (once again) something of a household name after the publication of the Manifesto for Economic Sense, which he wrote with Paul Krugman.
Baron Layard (he is a Labour peer) rose to prominence after having lobbied the Blair government to include happiness economics in its policies. The results have been mixed. But that is to be expected. The real world has a nasty habit of derailing the best-laid plans.
On the substance though, Layard is right.
Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC
Thus spake the headlines. To be precise, it was a five-sigma detection. Of course cynics will say that we’d been using the Higgs boson in our calculations for half a century. Given enough energy, we were bound to observe it. And the Large Hadron Collider was built exactly for that purpose.
Expect torrents of commentary about “the god particle” over the next few weeks.
There’s a lesson for us here. If physics allows it, and if you throw enough money at the problem, it’s a piece of cake. The LHC is a very expensive bit of kit. So in the end it all boils down to money.
No technicolour here, but this is what it actually looks like.
Bo Thide of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics and a team of colleagues in Italy recently demonstrated the encoding of data using the orbital angular momentum of light, sending two beams made of different OAM states across a canal in Venice. Casanova would have been delighted.
Radio spectrum policy groups should be delighted too. The two beams were in fact incoherent radio waves, with the same frequency, but with different OAM states. With the airwaves getting crowded, this could be the next big thing.
I endorse this radio message
Or is it?
Futurology and futurism are only a couple of centuries old. Why? Because that’s when the first uncomfortable socio-economic shift occurred. Agrarian to industrial doesn’t really sit comfortably with human nature.
Attempting to predict the future is risky business. As someone pointed out:
I think the most telling technology in Blade Runner is the telephone. The flying cars landed to use payphones, no sign of a mobile anywhere from memory.
Chris Busby, Crawley, UK
© 2025 Ivan Debono
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑