Most debate about modern architecture revolves around aesthetics. This misses the point. I quite like the way many modern buildings look — what I hate is the way they work. Say what you like about traditional architecture, no one has ever approached the portico of the British Museum and asked, ‘Any idea where the entrance
I recently read of a music writer who believes the perfect pop song lasts precisely two minutes and 42 seconds. Crazy though it sounds, he may be on to something. Try ordering your iTunes collection by duration and you may find as I did that songs of that length seem slightly better on average than
Judging by my fellow passengers on trains or planes, I am in a minority in being more addicted to words than music. While perfectly fond of music, on long journeys I am slightly unnerved by the many people in headphones who can sit for three hours at a stretch staring vacantly into space. I could
Every time I am forced to listen to whingefests such as You and Yours, I wonder if it’s time to invent the mirror image of a consumer affairs programme — where Britain’s largest businesses get to expose the behaviour of their worst customers. Every time I am forced to listen to whingefests such as You
If the definition of a true communist is someone who would willingly live for a month in 1970s Poland, the definition of a true capitalist should be anyone who could spend a month in Las Vegas while reading nothing but Hammacher Schlemmer mail order catalogues. Even hardened materialists can find American consumerism a little much.
Imagine for a moment that every policeman in Britain were issued with two or three tracking devices, each the size of a small packet of chewing gum. Magnetically attached to a car, it would record the target’s every movement for 48 hours using its inbuilt GPS. When retrieved and plugged into a computer, it would
There is an experiment in behavioural economics which involves showing people some item — a mug or suchlike — and asking them what they might be prepared to pay for it. Some time later, you contrive to give them an identical mug for free. You then ask how much they want to hand their mug
It isn’t every day you hear the suggestion that British imperialism has ‘done more to alleviate poverty than all the world’s aid programmes in the last century’, and to hear such praise from the lips of an American is rarer still. All the more so when the American in question is an eminent economist called
Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry. Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry. Exhibit B was a quotation from a sceptical ‘youth’ report written by a
Henry Ford supposedly said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ This quotation is often used as an argument against relying on market research in the pursuit of innovation. Bill Gates voiced a similar thought to Ford’s when he suggested that ‘people don’t know how to want
I was all set to write a scathing piece about Lord Carter’s newly published Digital Britain report (http://tinyurl.com/ksp9t7) when, in a break with journalistic practice, I decided to read it first. In fact many of its proposals make sense. For instance I now accept the case for the controversial 50p-a-month tax on phone lines in
Whenever you make an optimistic prediction, you risk being wrong twice. First there is the risk that the prediction itself is wrong: 1,000 Concordes by 1973; flying cars; food in pill form. More often, though, it isn’t the prediction that’s wrong but the optimism that accompanies it. The commonest failing of techno- optimists is to
It’s called Spotify. I don’t know why. And I have no idea how it can make money for the people who have invested in it. But this is the internet we are talking about, where all of us can enjoy good things for years while it falls to other people to work out how to
When I was a child, almost everyone I knew had a single telephone kept in a draughty hallway. Why the hallway I don’t know. Perhaps the bell was better heard from there or else they were copying the location from posher homes where once a butler would have answered it. Until recently, there was also
I have just passed a pub in Gosport. ‘Beer garden with free gas barbecue’, reads a notice outside. ‘Bring your own food.’ Perhaps the landlord has just been reading an advance copy of Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free, subtitled Why $0.00 is the future of business. This book (an expanded version of a Wired article
Nobody fully realised the achievement of Sir Joseph Bazalgette until 70 years after his death. The size of the pipes he specified for London’s sewers was determined by calculating what diameter would handle the average daily flow and then doubling it to allow for natural fluctuation. Having arrived at the optimum diameter this way, Bazalgette
I had been expecting it for weeks: the announcement of the first Google Street View divorce. A lawyer speaking anonymously to the Sun now claims to have been briefed to start proceedings after his client was browsing the Google site and spotted her husband’s car parked outside another woman’s house. Although the Street View software
The strangest thing happened to me the other day. I went into a branch of PC World and found nothing to buy. I have left PC World empty-handed before, but only through an act of will. Occasionally I would steel myself not to buy anything before I went in, treating the trip as a test
When Professor Susan Greenfield warned last month of the damaging effects of new technologies on childhood, my first instinct was to dismiss it as another hand-wringing exercise. On one point, though, where she complains of the dangers of instant gratification, she might be right. I’m not even sure the problem is confined to children. One
David Young’s Spectator article ‘Health’n’safety everywhere, except in banking’ (14 February) was inspired. He might have added that bankers are occasionally made to pay for their excesses. Unlike regulators. For years the Food Standards Agency warned we should eat no more than three eggs a week. It now emerges that this figure had no evidential