I mentioned an impending report by the Greater London Assembly’s environment committee on London’s trees a while back but forgot to say that it had now been published, with the catchy title ‘Chainsaw Massacre’.
Two stories in the past week remind us that health is one of the things that consistently shows the limits of affluent societies. The first is data which show that the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions have doubled in ten years. The second is a report from several charities which says that obesity [...]
The Wall Street Journal interviewed Rupert Murdoch earlier this month (in the middle of News International’s takeover campaign for the WSJ parent Dow Jones). It’s long, and more interesting for his views on newspapers than online, but he’’s clearly convinced that Google is going to destroy the newspaper advertising base, and doesn’t seem so sure [...]
There are interesting articles in the Welsh political and cultural magazine Planet on the recent Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament elections. In Wales, John Osmond writes that Labour’s position as the largest party is now on a knife edge - the long-term trend in their vote appears to be downwards and they hold nine of [...]
There’s a short article in the current print edition of Resurgence magazine on how the Scottish ‘ecovillage’ of Findhorn comes to have the lowest ecological footprint ever recorded a community in the affluent ‘North’. Three factors explain this: the way the community shares goods and services; the way its food is managed; [...]
Weak signals are trends which are tiny, hiding in small subcultures or social groups, at which on the face of it seem downright odd when first explained. (But then again, there’s a famous futures quote from James Dator which says that “”Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.” 
Is there a [...]
Some interesting observations on the ocean liner and its changing shape and purpose embedded in a fine article by Ian Jack in the Guardian on Saturday. The article was prompted by the news that the QE2 is to be retired next year to become a shopping centre in Dubai. The liners built since it was [...]
The co-founder of Intel, Andy Grove, has a saying that when you think about a technology, you shouldn’t think about what it can do today. You should think about what it would be like if it was ten times cheaper or ten times faster. I couldn’t help but think of this when reading about predictions [...]
I’d better start by declaring a prejudice: I have been a natural born sceptic about the $100 lap top project, now known as ‘One Laptop Per Child [OLPC]‘, ever since I first heard Nicholas Negroponte proselytise about it. There are lots of good reasons, which I’ll own up to later in this post. So: [...]
The current issue of New Left Review has an intriguing introduction from its guest editor Malcolm Bull:
A selection of the most pressing political questions of the moment might include the following: should women wear headscarves? May we buy and sell our bodily organs? How can we control the weather? [My emphasis]
