I'd picked up Phineas Redux at a charity shop and was about to read it when I read somewhere that it was important to read Phineas Finn first.

Reading Phineas Finn, I came across the following speech:

"...Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy …

Not sure when this was taken but it's our dog Roger, who died a long time ago.

I often boldly state, as an iron law of history, that you don't get civil war in a democracy. Putting it more cautiously, I just think that civil war is less likely in a democracy.

By Charleston Mercury - Public Domain

The counterexample that most people come up with is the …

If someone asks, Do you live in a democracy?, then you'd think about how your country is governed and give an answer. For example, say I lived in the USA (in Humboldt County, California to be precise) and someone asked me that question, I'd say that with some shortcomings, yes …

I've just finished reading Mark Edmundson's The Death Of Sigmund Freud (Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism). If ever I mention Freud, people say, "Freud? Hasn't he been shown to be wrong?". Over the years I've read this and that by Freud or about him and he was a …

Staying in a medieval town, there is plenty of inspiration for sketches:

In our village there's an automated farm shop:

You find the food you want by looking in the glass-fronted cabinets. Each cabinet has a number, and when you punch in the number and pay, the cabinet pings open …

I don't want my projects to track users, so I'm getting rid of Google Analytics. I've gone on to my Google Analytics account and found 7 tracking codes that I've set up.

• The first one is the code for OwnId, which was a website that made it easy to use …

My website and blog were hosted by Google, which tracks people on an industrial scale. So I've now moved to GitHub Pages using a site that's statically generated using Pelican. GitHub Pages have better privacy than Google, but the deeper point is that a static site stored in a git …

BANES is to be congratulated for creating a plan to tackle the air pollution that is generated by transport in Bath. Unfortunately the plan has several flaws:

• It doesn't consider pollution from brake and tyre dust.
• It considers pollution per vehicle rather than pollution per person.
• It doesn't help tackle …

For some time I've been concerned about Google, Facebook etc. I'm writing this to try and pin down what my concerns are and what (if anything) I should do about it. So here are some thoughts in no particular order (a 'brain dump' in the vernacular):

Monopoly

It seems that …