Miscellany ⁽⁸⁾

Hyperbole and purple prose abounded in Britain today over the unfortunate fire in the substation which provides Heathrow with the enormous amount of electricity it needs to function properly (the equivalent of a small town, apparently). A national embarrassment, a calamity, a disaster. How could…

Dr Judith Rodin, president of the Rockerfeller Foundation What does it take to make cities resilient? In a thoughtful talk to the RSA Dr Judith Rodin, current president of the philanthropic Rockerfeller Foundation, summarised some of the findings of the foundation's 100 Resilient Cities project. In…

My daughter, a second year student at Royal Holloway, University of London, has just moved into her new student house Egham. She was offered a student-only deal of a 9 month contract instead of the usual 12 months. Meanwhile, my son Alex, who spent last…

I moved to WordPress on August 29th and one of the plugins which I was recommended to install immediately was Akismet from WordPress themselves. This turns out to have been a very smart piece of advice. In under a month I have 121 comments caught…

In 2004 the US defence research organisation Darpa set cars the challenge of navigating a 150-mile desert course without drivers none of the cars finished and the two leaders only managed seven miles. Ten years on and Google's tricked out Priuses have travelled over 700,000…