Many links this month - it's been an informative time for me!

Is 85% of US Critical Infrastructure In Private Hands?; society, security, politics; The comments here are fairly good, but it's the basic question that's interesting. Should critical infrastructure be in private hands? If so, how do we ensure that it's secure without constraining business? THis one question raises many more, and I don't really have any easy answers.

How to stop procrastinating by making any kind of work interesting; productivity, lifehacks; This works better than many other solutions I've tried. Just do it, and don't care about the quality. Quality can come later...

FLOSS and linguistic diversity; language, open source; I've been doing quite a bit of documentation and training at work, so this resonates. Fortunately I don't have to get my work translated, but this reminds me that decent documentation solves more problems than you'd think...

How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative; exhibitions, culture, architecture; An interesting small exhibition at The Barbican Arts Centre. It reminded me that I need to check my assumptions when designing my solutions.

New tunnel starts digging under south London; infrastructure, engineering; There's a huge tunnel being dug to carry power cables. Because these need to be inspected and maintained, it'll be big enough to walk through. Another reminder that a city is more than what you can see on the surface...

1990: LambdaMOO; gaming, history, culture; An interesting tale of a very old internet text-based game, its technological development, and is highs and lows. This reminds me of Monochrome (which I really should log in to!), but is different enough to be interesting.

Thomas Becket and Magna Carta; history, law, religion; A devotee of Thomas Becket was instrumental in the recognition of the Magna Carta - a curious connection that I had no idea about.

The Way Forward (Network Rail Wayfinding Signage And Rail Alphabet 2, Part 1); typography, design, infrastructure; An interesting review of signage on the UK train networks, and how it's selected. Part 2 is here.

You’re Not Rational; pyschology, transport; An interesting read on the psychology of public transport, and how we're not necessarily understanding people's relationship with it.

Writing from the Age of the Gods; Japan, history, nationalism, culture, writing; An urge to define national history pushed people towards fake ancient scripts. I don't think I'll ever understand nationalism...

Could the pantograph make a return to London’s buses?; public transport, infrastructure; I've been converted to trolleybusses in recent years, but it seems that they really don't need a pantograph for much of their route - which could be very useful. Also the 358 route runs near me, so I might get to ride one of these if they do get put into the fleet!

Full Employment, Capitalism - And Beyond; economics, politics; Is full employment desireable? What issues might it create? Are they really that bad, or do they just threaten traditional power structures?

Laguna del Maule (volcano); geology; Did you know that there's a volcano in South America which is currently undergoing swelling and might erupt? Also, the planet is trying to kill us, and just works on a very slow timescale...

Manchester Victoria’s Telpher; transport, history; I didn't even know what a telpher was. But this is a very interesting solution to the problem of moving large goods and luggage around a train station.

See you in July!

Things are getting busier for me due to work, and lockdown is ending. Only one thing about whisky in this month's links - it's all gone a bit quiet, and with the various festivals cancelled I suspect it will remain so for a while. It's mostly transport, politics and computing. Which is fine for some, and terrible for most...

Scotland’s railways to be nationalised next year; transport, politics; I still struggle to understand privatised railways. The best service improvement I ever had was after Connex Southeastern died - the not-for-profit temporary company did a much better job. The same thign happened on the East Coast Mainline. It's long past time to admit that the privatised railway experiment has failed, and move ownership into public trusts. Scotland is choosing nationalisation by the same means - moving services into a not-for-profit "operator of last resort". It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

COVID-19 killed the last man of an indigenous Brazilian tribe; news, history; I suspect that when histories of our period are written, this will surface as a more important item. It's more an indicator of the state of the world and COVID-19's impact than anything else - it could be argued that globalisation and international trade killed his tribe. COVID-19, spreading like wildfire because of the cheap transport that enabled globalisation and international trade, was merely the final blow.

Paddick on Clapham Common vigil report whitewash; politics, policing; Brian Paddick was Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Met Police, and paints a pretty poor picture of how the vigil for Sarah Everard was handled. A failure to plan, and when they saw known agitators travelling to the vigil they just noted it in their log - no actions taken. Wow. This seems to have been one oversight after another - almost as if the leadership just didn't want to do their job.

How the Supreme Court saved the software industry from API copyrights; technology, law; This is a huge win for the whole technology industry. Oracle was trying to claim a level of ownership that would make it VERY hard for companies to make software that's compatible and interoperable with other software. Here's Ars' excellent write up of that.

Font size is useless; let’s fix it; typography, technology; Some typefaces are just ludicrously large or small compared to others. I applaud the idea of fixing it, but suspect that this is doomed.

Writing tools I learned from The Economist; writing; This website would be better if I remembered any of this...

France bans air travel that could be done by train in under 2.5 hours; travel, environment; A great move. I've never understood flying for short hops, but then I also hate airports. I can fly from London to Manchester in 45 minutes, but it takes me an hour and a quarter to get to the airport, then I have to check in and wait, then at Manchester I'm actually half an hour's travel from Manchester. It's not much slower than train - if at all - and the train is a lot less hassle. We should consider something similar in the UK.

Clerkenwell toilets hoardings turned into “art”; fun, environment; Somebody hung art cards on hoarding and turned them into "art" to protest how long the hoardings have been up. Granted, there have been delays due to COVID-19, but I still find this funny.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99; politics, law; Trust El Reg to find a computing angle - but it turns out that he had his BT Prestel account hacked in the 1980's and pushed for laws covering the misuse of computers. Vengeance or prescience? Who can tell...

The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike; computing, history; Pretty much what it says on the tin. UTF-8 is one of those things that we use every day and take for granted, so it's interesting to see how it came about.

Present tense; whisky; In which my friend Matt muses on what the whisky market has become, then reviews some new releases.

Prehistoric notation systems in Peru, with Chinese parallels; history; culture; In which a linguist muses on whether there is a link between the notation systems of Peru and ancient China. Personally I tend to think our ancestors were at least as smart as us, just lacking in some of the opportunities and technoligies - so I'm not surprised if things are invented many times independently in many different places. But it's fun to watch academics speculate wildly...

That's it for April. See you in May!

This is the first link dump. It's currently an experiment - the format may change.

Basically when I find something I like reading, I'll bookmark it. Then I'll dump that link here with a little bit of commentary about why I dumped it here. Each link dump should be on the third Sunday of the month...

I started collecting the links at the start of February, and am still forgetting to bookmark all of them, so this one's a bit small. Let's see if there's a second one!

From Dayton, Ohio to Donald Trump - Poetic Fitness; Politics, Economics, Society; This is an interesting long read that posits that both capitalism and communism suffered from the same evil - efficiency. It's an interesting point of view, and I have to admit that it resonates strongly with me. In my professional life I'm often arguing for more resources so that we can mitigate hardware failure or demand spikes - it's baffling to me that we don't take a similar view at a broader societal level. This is nothing new either - the Beeching Cuts and Thatcher's aggressive running down of coal mining are other examples of efficiency being sought with no thought to the wider impact it will have. Sadly, I have no solutions. But I do think it's interesting that it's not a problem specific to a particular political camp...

Stumbling and Mumbling: Labour's patriotism problem; Politics, Identity; I hate nationalism. I don't care which country it's from, it's just not my thing. I just can't believe the immense coincidence that all nationalists just happen to have been born in the best nation in the world, despite all being from different nations. But increasingly our politics is turning nationalist - and this reminds us that nationalism shouldn't be about flags or trophies, but about what our nation does for its people. (It also reminds us that you shouldn't read the comments. You have been warned!)

Glenfarclas 105 Review - The Dramble; Whisky; Zander writes an interesting set of thoughts about water & whisky bottling. And a decent review of Glanfarclass 105, which provoked the whole thing. Worth a read. My tuppence? I like to be able to explore some whiskies. I also like to be able to just drink some others. There's room for both unwatered and watered whisky in my selection...

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET; Computing, History; A reminder that computers used to be even more isolated than they sometimes seem today. The real value in the early internet was less that computers were connected, and more that they were learning to speak a common language for that connection. Cooperation is always a better strategy long term than exclusion.

Brexit & Beyond: The Brexit we've got; Politics; A reminder of how we got to this variant of Brexit, and that those pro-Brexit folks who complain about it have to realise - this is the only Brexit we have. Until they accept that, they will never be happy with it.

We now have new evidence that Richard III murdered the princes in the tower; History; It's not a smoking gun - or should that be blood-stained dagger? - but it's interesting to see that there's still new circumstantial evidence turning up. We'll never be able to prove something like this absolutely, but we can get a fuller picture.

Post Office Railway – Subterranea Britannica; History, Infrastructure, Railways, Logistics; A decent history of "mail rail", the underground railway in London that delivered mail without clogging up the streets. This wasn't new to me, but I found myself doing some research on it after finding an artefact of the railway on an old map, and thought it worth sharing.

King’s Cross: Clearing the Throat and removing the hump! | Rail Engineer; Railways, Infrastructure, Engineering; When engineering projects hit the public consciousness it's usually due to delays, overspends and failures. Here's a complex, difficult project that's succeeding - they not only redid a track layout, but removed a sewer and did it all despite COVID-19 and a storm. A little ray of brightness to end on!

That's it for now, see you in March.