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"Sleator and Temperley" is a paper.

"Sleator of Temperley", on the other hand, has to be a village in Scotland somewhere, but we can't generalize this to all published papers. I wonder if there's still a sign on the A1 in Northumberland for Duddo Etal?

posted at: 12:46 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

I've got it. I understand what links ASBOs, 90 day detention, making everything into an arrestable offence, denial of judicial review to refugees and rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the prosection.

Somebody somewhere has got a crude stemming algorithm that maps word-final y to e, so "policy" must be, according to the government, the adjective derived from "police". It probably rhymes with "fleecy". That's why all the law and order legislation has been written to keep PC Numpte happe.

posted at: 12:25 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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We don't generally appreciate in the UK that the senior management of Die Bahn are looking to replicate the unalloyed success of the Major government's rail privatization in Germany. I expect it's one of these necessary reforms that the very necessary Angela Merkel will have to implement.

One thing they're still getting right, though, is their branding. The brand identity follows from the trains, rather than the other way about. German rolling stock appeals to everyone's inner toddler. The local and regional trains are bright red, like fire engines. The ICE high-speed intercity trains look like spaceships. The driver's cabin has a see-through door and an enormous front window. The DB website and leaflets take their cues from the colour schemes of the train.

In the UK the franchise holders, which are nearly all bus companies, invent or buy in a brand design which has nothing at all to do with trains and everything to do with what's fashionable in branding. 'one', which is National Express really, and the trains are owned by Abbey National, has gone for blocks of their five brand colours, and not a lot else.

It grabs neither my inner toddler nor my outer commuter. It doesn't say "train" to me, at least. My impression is of a firm which is only hanging on for as long as the taxpayer's willing to pay it.

The only thing to be said for the full rebranding is that at least they clean the trains when they do it. When's the franchise due to expire next time?

posted at: 14:15 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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The Lord Falconer first appeared in the reign of William Rufus, when he was in charge of hooding and transporting the birds of prey belonging to the King.

Nowadays the same official is in charge of hooding and transporting enemies of the state. I say enemies of the state. They have no access to the case against them, assuming there even is such a case.

Perhaps in future the Lord Falconer will follow his mediaeval predecessors and start breeding his "birds" in captivity, rather than having to capture them in the wild.

See also the Gazetteer of Invisible Cities. Any resemblance to a real political office, past or present, is obviously coincidental.

posted at: 17:55 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Is it the silly season? Yesterday the Guardian led with a peculiar non-story about wargaming an invasion of Iran. Of course the UK military will have exercises planning the invasion of noisy regional powers like Iran. It might be a better story if

• UK politicians had suggested rather strongly to the military that Iran would be a better subject for the exercise than, say, Pakistan, or
• UK politicians had been trying to make an invasion of Iran seem plausible among the general public, rather than people who are preparing to invade arbitrary countries all the time. We can't really imagine invading Egypt or Pakistan, but the mental groundwork for an invasion of Iraq was done fifteen years ago in Operation Desert Storm. NATO couldn't have bombed Belgrade if we hadn't been prepared by years of war in the Balkans.

I wonder whether this story actually prepares the public to acquiesce in the sort of action we've seen in Iraq.

A more interesting point follows from a quote further down:

According to an MoD source, war games covering a variety of scenarios are conducted regularly by senior British officers in the UK, the US or at Nato headquarters. He cited senior military staff carrying out a mock invasion of [...] Scotland in January.

What would you invade Scotland for?

• The small amount of oil left in the North Sea?
• The tourism sector (better)?
• The financial services sector (best)?

The trouble is that an invasion would destroy both the tourism and financial services sectors. I suppose the lesson is that natural resources are a poor way of avoiding invasion, unless you can use them to build social industries. This is perhaps why we can imagine invading Iraq or Saudi Arabia but not somewhere like Dubai.

posted at: 20:57 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Cattily, I observed that for someone who made such a loud noise about science, Richard Dawkins didn't seem to do very much of it any more, so I went to his web site to look for his list of publications, expecting a torrent of interesting and worthwhile stuff in the late sixties and early seventies and the occasional invited review ever since.

I found something rather more disturbing. The 1970s papers, called things like "Some descriptive and explanatory stochastic models of decision-making", are lumped together with recent opinion pieces like "Lions 10, Christians Nil", "Putting away childish things", "Religion's Real Child Abuse" and "Atheists for Jesus".

It's as if whoever put together the CV can't tell the difference.

The last entry looks promisingly scientific. "An Ecology of Replicators", appears in Ludus Vitalis. "ludus vitalis" "impact factor" is a Googlewhack.

posted at: 13:36 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry