Month: July 2011

Every data project goes through an embryonic Wordle stage. There’s a point where you’ve spent a few hours futzing with code, are many more hours away from whatever you were trying to build, and feel

aw, screw it, let’s make some pictures

.

In that spirit: headlines from the Guardian and the Mail, these past couple of days:

Guardian

Mail

The somewhat less pointless use of the data will come When I Get Round To It™ — which, given current circumstances, might not be for quite some time.

Multinational oil companies really have been eclipsed by their state-owned counterparts:

That’s ExxonMobil coming in at number 17, as the first private company. It’s 30 times smaller than Saudi Aramco by reserves, 20 times by production.

The Metropolitan Police are armed with bullets that the army wouldn’t be allowed to use.

Hollow-tipped bullets are designed to expand inside the body on impact, making them much more likely to kill whoever they hit. The generals of the 19th century decided that they were too lethal for war, despite British arguments that they were needed to stop ‘fanatical barbarian[s]’.

So they were banned under the 1899 Hague Convention**, along with chemical weapons and bombs thrown from airships. NATO still keeps to that, though perhaps few other armies do.

The police, through, are unaffected. So the Met used these these bullets to kill Jean Charles de Menezes, and this year they started using them more generally.

Now, there’s a decent argument that this isn’t as bad as it sounds. If a bullet is busy mashing your victim’s organs, it’s less likely to pass through and hit whoever is behind them. I thoroughly approve of not killing bystanders, but a little confused how that works alongside the policy of giving machine guns to the transport police

Or, more fundamentally: the UK police already kill about 90 people per year — let’s not make it any easier?

[disclaimer: I know nothing about guns, would be happy to never see one again in my life, and wish the police agreed]

The London Beer Flood occurred on 17 October 1814 in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. At the Meux and Company Brewery[1] on Tottenham Court Road,[1][2] a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets.

The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. Eight people drowned in the flood.

The brewery was eventually taken to court over the accident, but the disaster was

ruled to be an Act of God

by the judge and jury, leaving no one responsible

What kind of bonkers legalistic theology is that? God as lord of the storms I can see, stirring up hurricanes against the unholy and smiting his enemies with lightning. But

breaking beer vats

?!