BY NICHOLAS ENGERT When I was growing up in the 1960’s there stood in the corner of our sitting room a magnificent Grundig wireless set. This was radio as furniture – a statement. A polished mahogany cabinet with a facia comprising a loudspeaker grille, below which was the backlit glass “dial” which listed the radio stations from around the world. To either side of the … Continue reading Radio Days
BY PAUL T HORGAN A person mentioning the humorous magazine Punch to most people under the age of 50 will be met with blank stares. Punch closed, barring an abortive resurrection, in 1992, when today’s 50-year-old would have been in their teens, and by that time, Punch‘s mass appeal had long gone as monolithic markets began to break into smaller segments. A decision sometime in the mid-1960s had seen the magazine redesigned … Continue reading Artificial Dishonesty
CITY GRUMP An old City colleague led me to a letter in the Financial Times last week. It is an eye-opening wake-up call to our politicians, civil servants and anyone else who professes to be interested in spurring on what the letter writer calls the “UK tech ecosystem”. It concerns the takeover bid for a £1.2bn UK listed investment company you probably have never heard … Continue reading Hark the Herald, the Goths Rush in
BY ROGER WATSON I am sure that I am not alone. My life is dominated by series of electronic devices which include a MacBook, an iPad, an iPhone (providers other than Apple are available) and a Kindle (Country Squire passim). It is not so much the fact that my whole life is on these devices, having fallen totally for the convenience of the digital age, … Continue reading Tech Grandpa
When it comes to safeguarding our history, the stakes have never been higher. The memories and achievements of our ancestors, encapsulated in various forms of heritage, give us a sense of identity and belonging. It’s crucial, then, to employ every tool at our disposal to ensure these treasures are preserved for future generations. With the advancement of technology, we’ve been handed a powerful set of … Continue reading Heritage Conservation: Tech Tools For Documenting And Preserving The Past
BY PETER HARRIS Part 1 of 2 is available here It is good to save the best till last, and in his analysis, Kissinger does just that. But if his analysis at this point is at its most original, it is also at its most terrifying as it concerns a novel threat that is existential in scope, but which can be understood analogously again through … Continue reading A Response to Henry Kissinger Part II
BY JACK WATSON Snapchat has recently introduced its own AI chatbot which, according to Snapchat, is an experimental, friendly bot which can offer advice and ask questions. It can answer a burning question about virtually anything; offer advice on a gift for someone; help plan a holiday and suggest what to make for dinner. Also, it is powered by OpenAI’s GPT. Helpful, perhaps, but there … Continue reading Spy Media
BY ADAM JAMES POLLOCK But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. … Continue reading On Simulation and the Metaverse
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” ― George Orwell, 1984 ‘Just imagine’, a particular kind of civil servant drooled in 1985, ‘if we could create a message capturing device with which we could trace miscreants and get to know what they were planning and thinking’. ‘Even better than that,’ his colleague retorted, ‘we could … Continue reading Gifts that Keep On Giving
BY ALEX STORY After a week away from home, I walk in. Not a sound. I take a few tentative steps into the flat. I open the door to the living room. There in total silence, my four children, each with their own devices, slouch on the sofa. They barely notice me. For a second, a pair of eyes zeroes in on me, only to … Continue reading Live Life to the Full
BY JIM WEBSTER I remember an old farmer commenting about lads ‘helping out.’ “One boy is one boy. Two boys is half a boy, three boys is no boy at all.” I know of a couple of farms round here that used to get a lot of lads ‘helping out.’ With village farms where the village was a community, not a dormitory suburb, it was … Continue reading Lads
Rural internet: a slower pace of life, but not in a good way Part of the joy of living in the countryside is remaining a few steps out of sync with the modern world, in splendid isolation. While they whizz busily head, we’re usually content to trot along at a slower pace, enjoying time-honoured traditions and basking in the glory of nature. But there are … Continue reading Rural Internet
BY BEN EVERITT HS2 Ltd continues to cause outrage and disbelief in my part of the countryside with ‘enabling works’ and ‘de-vegetation’. Somehow contractors are allowed to continue the project’s environmental vandalism, even though the whole caper is currently officially on hold. It’s a monumental waste of money and it’s an answer to a question that no-one’s asking. When I travel to London for work … Continue reading End HS2 – the Countryside Vandal
BY CRYPTO Humans are essentially tribal, people with similar traits and beliefs group together. You can see this played out on the Internet every day. It’s very clear. Ancient humans understood this early on and realised if you can set the base axioms for a group, the narrative, i.e. answer the mother of all questions, what’s the meaning of life. Then you can control and … Continue reading Why the Hysteria?
BY PAUL ELLIS In today’s world it seems that our lives and everything we do are captured digitally. Nothing we do can escape ‘Big Brother’. You make a quick call to a friend, your service provider knows where you are as your phone connects to three mobile phone masts. If you use Google they also know your exact location within 50 metres, something not known … Continue reading Becoming Digitally Invisible
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Today the counter-conservatism arguments of British Socialists tend to go something along these lines, put especially eloquently by Phil (a sociologist who blogs for the Far Left) … “Toryism is a dishonest project. Socialism can come out and openly declare itself to be the movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority. Conservatism has no such luxury. To … Continue reading Conservative Red Pills
BY SAM WHITE As discussed here on this magazine a few days ago, the BBC Asian Network went a little off kilter last week. In case you missed it, they sent out a cheerful message in which presenter Shazia Awan, who just arrived from the Middle Ages, vacuously requested listeners to call in with their views on the appropriate punishment for blasphemy. The corporation had to … Continue reading Stealth Blasphemy UK
BY JAMES CAMPBELL Since I was a boy I have always yearned for a Riva launch. The Italian sleekness, the polished wood, the cutting-edge design – Riva makes simply mouth-watering launches, which, in my youth, were always adorned by Sophia Lauren or Brigitte Bardot (pictured below), to make them even more jaw-dropping. The Riva boatyard was established in 1842 on Lake Iseo, in Sarnico, Italy. … Continue reading Riva Aquarama
BY PAUL ROBINSON Actually, let’s not. It’s only fair to warn you this piece is about servers, big computers, so you have the opportunity to disappear and wash your hair or something. Few companies these days run their business without the use of computers and, once larger than a relatively modest size, the organisation needs to centralise its data to allow sharing and avoid duplication. … Continue reading Let’s Get Physical
BY JAMES CAMPBELL The Jaguar XKSS was a road-going version of the Jaguar D-Type racing car. When Jaguar withdrew from competition at the end of the 1956 season, a number of completed and partly completed D-types remained unsold at Jaguar’s Browns Lane factory. 12 of 16 Jaguar XKSS sports cars ever built reunited at Pebble Beach To recoup some of the investment made in building … Continue reading The XKSS Dream Machine
