Month: September 2007

  • Local TV

    Ten Alps has just launched a broadband TV channel for my county coucil, Kent. Sir Bob Geldof reckons every local authority will have one in five years. I wish I had the sheer brass to sell shite like this. What was the deal clincher? “A platform for your back catalogue of cheesy old VNRs.” Now,…

  • Play our new game: BBC moral equivalence

    Mark Thompson writes about trust in the BBC. After condemning the children’s programme editor who apparently believed a poll had been rigged and changed the name of a cat (yes, really), Thompson lets off senior BBC manager Alan Yentob for filming reaction shots to interviews he didn’t actually show up for. Yes, according to the…

  • "One of the most important developments in the history of science"

    The New Scientist has a paywall up on its story about the mathematical work that says there are multiverses/multiple worlds/parallel universes. Somewhere, then, the story is not behind a paywall. So how can you find out more about “one of the most important developments in the history of science”? Luckily, there is an online FAQ…

  • Asymptoting towards zero…

    Nearly ten years ago Hal Varian wrote a paper called Markets for Information Goods. It’s none too elegantly expressed, but it has what you might call “profound” implications: I would like to coin a “Malthus’s law” of information. Recall that Malthus noted that number of stomaches grew geometrically but the amount of food grew linearly.…