Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace: They Fight Crime!

Via Making Light, which has sequential links to the major comics, Babbage and Lovelace. It’s not your usual webcomic - for one thing, the artist wrote it primarily as a way of avoiding other work, so updates will by necessity be haphazard - but the idea is fantastic, the art is great, and ( Read more... )

Taji has noticed.

Last summer, when we took the dogs to France for the first time, we put up a quick and dirty fence to keep them in. It was a temporary job only, and in any case wasn’t sturdy enough to keep Taji in; if he ran straight at it he could probably send it crashing down.

When I was down last spring I talked to our builders and ( Read more... )

One of them may be less authentic than the other.


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Diagnosing how and why The Sims 3 kept on regularly crashing.

I recently acquired The Sims 3, which all in all is fantastic fun. I should clarify that I first downloaded a pirate version of it, because I didn’t want to wait until it finally came out, then bought a legit copy as soon as it was out in this country. (I’m even more legit than ( Read more... )

Which side of it you are on matters a great deal.

It’s 9:40pm, and it’s still light. The train has just passed Carluke, and, before that, fields full of cows and horses happily eating grass. I’m now gazing out at a field full of sheep and lambs.

Just a couple of months ago, on pretty much the same train journey, I’d have had nothing to look ( Read more... )

Don’t miss the mouseover jokes.


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It’s stupendously easier than it used to be.

Vali is back. She’s sitting on my lap, and from my current angle you wouldn’t know that anything had happened. In a bit she’ll shift herself and lie on the other side, at which point I’ll see the vast expanse of shaved skin, and the ugly stitches that are an unfortunate but necessary result of ( Read more... )

“Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.”

Via Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly, The World’s New Numbers talks about current demographic trends and how they’ve suddenly changed. For instance, Britain and France are both seeing their birth rates skyrocket - in part thanks ( Read more... )

They’ve been a fixture at Merlhiot for the last 15-odd years.

People from the generation before mine have a flashbulb memory: they remember where they were when they heard JFK was shot. For (then-) Labour voters of my age, it’s John Smith. I remember walking down Kirklee Road on a bright sunny day in Glasgow and seeing a newspaper headline ( Read more... )

When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption.

I did a lot of travelling around as a teenager (I lived in France and my best friend Tom still lived in London), and I made a lot of mistakes. I missed trains, lost my wallet, ended up in the wrong station (Margaret and Bruce drove down to Toulouse station to pick me up, only to ( Read more... )