Furthermore: March 2004

March 31, 2004

Links of the Day

• Markdown (via BoingBoing) - a very minimal markup system for generating XHTML. The source text is almost “just” plain text with some simple conventions to allow the Markdown scripts to parse it.



• Europe and the War on Liberty - depressing but essential Crooked Timber piece on the post-Madrid attempts to further restrict our civil rights by the back door of European legislation.


• Situated Software - a new and thought-provoking piece by Clay Shirky on software which works because it works within a particular social sphere, without attempting address the issues that large scale deployment requires.

E-voting in the US

I wrote here a while ago about the e-voting resolution and there’s now a terrific article up at Wired on the mess that non-verifiable e-voting is in in the USA.

March 30, 2004

More Guided Bus

A great post from cam.misc on why the Guided Bus is idiotic. This is probably the most unbiased and comprehensive summary of the issues that I’ve seen.

New Morrissey Album

I’m a big Morrissey fan, so it’s great to see this [PDF] (via Morrissey Solo). I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the Jonathan Ross interview and the Later… performance.

Abel Prize

I had no idea this existed until I saw this link on Slashdot yesterday. It seems the Abel is basically the Nobel Prize for mathematics. There’ve only been two so far and this year it was Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer for the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem.

Despite having a degree in maths, I still have relatively little comprehension of what the theorem actually says, other than that it links algebra and topology in a deep way and that it’s provided something of a bridge between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. I was mainly pleased to see that the omission of maths from the Nobels has been corrected.

March 27, 2004

Links

Just a few that looked interesting:

• Jon, Mark and Robbo - my wife kindly bought me a bottle of this very good whisky for my birthday. There are three types - all vatted malts I think - and although the site is pretty lame (basically marketing whisky to trendy people) it does have some useful information on what’s actually gone into the blend of each one of the whiskies.

Not really a link, but I just bought the soundtrack to Amelie, which I finally got round to watching when it was on at Christmas. It’s really good.

Guided Bus

I managed to get a response in to the TWA unit to object to the Guided Bus scheme. I hear from cam.misc that they’ve had over 500 objections so far, so that sounds promising.

March 18, 2004

The Mis-guided Bus

I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages - Cambridge County Council has decided it wants to build a guided bus system to provide transport into Cambridge from St Ives and ultimately Huntingdon. However the scheme seems to be completely farcical as the buses will have to run on the roads when they get into the city. Not only that but the scheme will destroy a viable rail trackbed to provide the guided route for the buses thus removing the possibility of building a rail system that could be far faster and cheaper.

There is a proposal to build such a scheme - it’s called cast.iron, but of course it’s very hard to judge whether it really is viable. The council are spinning their mad scheme for all it’s worth, and the only other people who’ve gone into the matter in depth are cast.iron themselves. I’ve tried to follow the discussions on cam.misc and cam.transport, but there’s really only so much time I can devote to trying to work out where the truth lies on the enormous number of areas the schemes have an impact on.

All I can say is that I can’t believe the Guided Bus scheme is sensible - it seems to be a combination of a vanity project for the council, and the fact that central Government will put money up for this, but nothing else. I’m going to write to object to the scheme - not because I’m necessarily in favour of cast.iron but simply so the matter can be debated more fully at a public enquiry.

Passel o’ Links

I’m sure to forget some things, but here’s a few:

• MySociety - a project for creating tools to enhance public participation in politics. They’ve recently been given some money and chosen a set of initial launch projects.


• DowningStreetSays - MySociety project to provide better publicity to Downing Street press releases.



• Lord of the Rings - The Musical - link to lyrics courtesy of Crooked Timber.


• BeyondTV - software PVR. I may get round to doing something about this eventually.


• Reg on Google - useful overview of the kind of things that can be searched for to look for security holes.


• Bruce Sterling at SXSW - usual amazing stream of consciousness stuff (via Cory Doctorow)

Catch Up

Well not really running - I’ve missed blogging two runs on the last two Sundays - both standard circuits of about 55 minutes each. That also means that I haven’t blogged anything for over two weeks which is a bit annoying.

In my defence I can only say that I’ve been a bit stressed and generally waiting for a particular thing to happen and that often makes me put things off - like everything is on hold until the thing I’m waiting for occurs. I still can’t say what it is but I’m pretty hopeful now and that’s sort of unblocked me, which means I now have a gazillion links and bits to post. Oh well.

March 1, 2004

Political Links

A couple I just saw:

• The New Yorker - Seymour Hersh on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the US hunt for Bin Laden



• Mike Harris’ link blog - great piece from Vanity Fair about the US Attorney General - read it before they get annoyed at him re-posting their stuff.