The aviation industry is one plagued with red tape and strict process, and not without good reason. With more than half of all plane crashes caused by pilot error, and the flying public unwilling to fly without pilots in the pointy end, aviation authorities are doing everything they can to turn the Continue Reading
Bad Company: Plusnet
“Hello, Mr. Stokoe, I’m afraid I have an apology to make – we spoke on Tuesday night but I forgot to save the comments onto your account, can you remind me what we were discussing?” said Mike from painfully incompetent ISP, Plusnet, a subsidiary of BT. 18 Months Earlier… The Continue Reading
Where is Malaysian Airlines Flight 370? Here’s one theory…
I know as soon as I post this the wreckage will be found and I’ll look like a mug, but I had a theory bubble to the top of my brain which might explain where Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is, and why it disappeared. The Facts So we know the Continue Reading
Google’s Project Loon
Google are doing a lot of “10X innovation” right now. That is innovation that isn’t just incrementally better than the competition (like a 10% improvement) but a moon-shot, 10-times improvement. One of these initiatives is called Project Loon: You can sometimes see these balloons being tested off the coast of Continue Reading
Answering Some Common Questions About Flying
Flying is such a common occurrence these days that it’s almost a non-event. We’re pre-programmed to sit upright on take-off and landing, keep our arm-rests down, seatbelts on, but why? Time and time again, everyone asks the same questions about flying. It’s a sad fact that most of the procedures Continue Reading
Swatch Internet Time on Your Desktop
I’ve spoken before about Swatch Internet Time as an option for solving the horrible problems of cross-timezone collaboration. But nobody is adopting it. There are good reasons for this: it’s not overly difficult to work out timezone differences, there are more intuitive alternatives such as using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Continue Reading
How to Take a Good Photo
Christmas is almost upon us and pretty soon the flood of pictures of Uncle Bob in his reindeer jumper will reach its peak. Photography is a very simple thing, you just point and click, right? And with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and other devices you’d have thought that learning Continue Reading
Natural Disaster Magnet
I’m no dare devil, in fact, I’m pretty risk averse, and yet I’ve managed to be in the wrong place at the right time to experience some of nature’s most destructive forces first-hand. I’m a natural disaster magnet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not your average storm-chaser. I don’t have Continue Reading