The usual dilemma has surfaced in the Grenfell Tower inquiry. I must say I was expecting it to do so at some point. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/30/people-who-worked-on-grenfell-tower-could-face-life-sentences The dilemma in its current form amounts to this. 1. Civil engineers, regulators and others involved with buildings want to find out causally what went on during building and refurbishment of…

Some computer security experts put the majority of extant vulnerabilities down to poor code quality; for example, Martyn Thomas in his keynote at the 2016 IET System Safety and Computer Security conference in London. This was evidently the case in the late 1990’s, when some 80% of the newly-formed US CERT’s publicly-announced Internet-transmitted vulnerabilities were…

So, our European colleagues have been giving their opinions on how Brexit should proceed http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/25/eu-emergency-talks-brexit-berlin . To French colleagues Ayrault and Macron, Luxembourg colleague Asselborn, EC President Juncker and local boy Steinmeier, I say: how about you back off a little? You’re not helping. The UK is obviously in the middle of a political crisis. It happens.…

Pete Seeger died early today. It popped up on my iPad as I was reading the morning news. There is lots to say about Pete, most of it not by me. The New York Times’s obituary by Jon Pareles does justice to the man. His music speaks for itself. Because, as he would probably say,…

Can things that look like hard facts and indeed are hard facts be socially constructed? Sure. But many people, indeed quite a few scientists, think not. I remember being quite surprised a decade and a half ago when I realized how many facts were indeed socially constructed. It is more obvious that social facts such…

The British Royal Academy of Engineering, an institution whose membership is nominated and elected only, is conducting a study on the engineering and societal impacts of space weather and has issued a call for evidence. I sent the following note on Sunday 25th March to policyAT[theRoyalAcademyOfEngineering] with a copy to the Office of Nuclear Regulation.…

I don’t have time to write any blog posts or anything else for that matter at the moment. But it seemed to me that an e-mail I wrote today might be converted to a post. Herewith. Steven Tockey pointed to an article in the Huffington Post about delivering tacos by robotic helicopter. Apparently there is…

Not mine this time (the one I wrote in 1997 is still being referenced, but is out of date because the German degree system has changed) but the OECD’s from October 2011, based on 2009 data, which I have just discovered. The Washington Post published in September 2011 a startling graphic, accompanying an article on…