The answer to the question in the title is — for quite a long time to come. But not necessarily forever.
These thoughts were triggered by a cluster of recent high profile blog posts.
First off, Steven Poole, Guardian columnist and author of ‘Trigger Happy’, a book about video games, wrote about giving away content. I […]
(I hesitate to use the word ‘dumb’ to mean ’stupid’, since I am an English speaker).
BooksThatMakeYouDumb is someone’s attempt to correlate favourite books (as claimed on Facebook) with academic success (as measured by average SAT scores at American schools). Not that I really know what a SAT is, nor exactly what is meant by […]
So why doesn’t hartnup.net have a poppy in its title? Why am I not wearing a poppy on my lapel like most people on the street?
First, I must stress that I appreciate the need for armed forces. I’m also broadly supportive of a lot of the work done by the British Legion. First […]
“Nine. Effty-nine. Eleven. Two. Ninety-dee. Seventy-four. Eety-three. Fifty-bee. Deety-eight. Forty-one. Fifty-six. Ceety-five. Sixty-three. Fifty-six. Eighty-eight. Ceety.”
Does it make sense that I could get in trouble for repeating (and arguably, obfuscating) the above Very Secret Number?
This story from the Leamington Courier, about vacant shops in Leamington got my attention. Bath Street is on our walk into the town centre, and the vacant commercial properties are conspicuous and long-standing. Regent Street ought to be a high-end commercial street, and the the vacant properties on the East end do let it […]
This CNN story and this BBC story both tell how Mikhail Gorbachev has asked Bill Gates to intervene in a software piracy prosecution in Russia.
Apparently the headmaster involved could be sent to “a Siberian Prison camp”.
There’s a phrase with connotations. We are invited to imagine ourselves as white collar criminals chained up in unheated […]
I have just learned about the Stalin-era Soviet miner Aleksei Stakhanov, or rather the political movement of the time, which bore his name.
In 1935, word reached the Politburo in Moscow that, at his mine in East Ukraine, Stakhanov had hewed 102 tonnes of coal in 6 hours — 14 times a typical yield. Stalin […]
Michael Kinsley casually writes in today’s Guardian:
“No doubt many Israelis have racist attitudes towards Arabs, but the official philosophy of the government is quite the opposite, and sincere efforts are made to, for example, instill humanitarian and egalitarian attitudes in children. That is not true, of course, in Arab countries, where hatred of Jews […]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I felt that more people should broaden their minds through travel.
This week the film Turistas opened in the USA, in which a group of young holidaymakers in Brazil find themselves victims to some kind of murderous plot because, you know, that’s what happens when you […]
Before I start, apologies for my egregious use of non-metric measures in this post. This is because all the sources I’ve used provide Imperial values. I tried starting by converting to metric, but I botched it, and started again the lazy way.
Further to my last blog entry, I’ve seen quite a few articles in […]