Al-Qaeda – the new Luther Blissett?

(Cross-posted from Ubiwar)
“You are a member of ‘al-Qaeda’ if you say you are” – Jason Burke (2007), Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam
The franchise analogy has occasionally been applied to the decentralised nature of al-Qaeda-inspired activities and the above quote from Jason Burke neatly sums up the idea that al-Qaeda as an idea, nay, [...]

Launch of Ubiwar new blog

Posting has been sporadic (again) of late, due to the coupling of the setting up of my new blog Ubiwar with a holiday in Barcelona. The mission statement of the new venture is as follows:
Ubiwar posits that as technology becomes ubiquitous, the means available to people – which may eventually include all of us – [...]

Photographic history of computer memory

Royal Pingdom has a great post laying out the history of data storage in photographs. The comments are well worth reading too. Ah, the sound of a ZX Spectrum loading …

Above left: The magnetic Drum Memory of the UNIVAC computer. Above right: A 16-inch-long drum from the IBM 650 computer. It had 40 tracks, 10 [...]

Flying Cities and Mobile Micronations

A lazy post this, but also an experiment, for unspecified nefarious purposes: republishing an old post from a year ago, very lightly edited … (apologies to all those who’ve seen it before)

BLDGBLOG posted on the Helicopter Archipelago a couple of times, based on the work of Geoff Manaugh himself and Leah Beeferman at inkbox.org (who [...]

Conference: Imaging War: Intergenerational Perspectives

European Science Foundation conference, ‘Imaging War: Intergenerational Perspectives’, Vadstena, Sweden, 3-7 September 2008:
We have entered a time of highly technological warfare, where over half of the world’s research and development is now military and an ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA) is changing the rules and weapons that will be used to define our common [...]