Russell Davies

November 2016

November 2016 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Leak before break

'Leak before break' is an engineering principle which suggests that things (like the pipes in a nuclear power station) should be designed to leak (in a detectable, fixable way) before they explode (in a catastrophic, horrible way).

That also seems to speak to some of the virtues of openness in organisation design. An organisation's blogs, twitters etc aren't leaks in themselves, but they are vectors for fixable leaks, so potential disasters can be spotted and averted before they explode in non-fixable ways.

Or something. Anyway.

Regifting

I was struck by this phrase in this piece:

"the 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan report, the Victorian-era stab at Whitehall reform described by the celebrated historian Lord Hennessy as "the greatest single governing gift of the nineteenth to the twentieth century”

It's a shame the 20th century didn't offer a similar gift to the 21st. Or, in fact, simply re-gifted.

Generally true

Sooner

Literal: why not leave the old map up?

Metaphorical: it can't come soon enough

Silly machines

This blog post is funny, a masterful use of YouTube and a potentially valuable reframing of big data and dataviz as 'silly machines'.

"I’M SORRY, you can sit there and look and play with all your silly machines AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE…"

This wasn’t just a rallying cry for all Proper Football Men, as Sky’s stranglehold on vacuous football discourse began to take hold, but a prophetic one. For 1996’s “silly machines”, read today’s football analytics boom, Owen Coyle’s dismissal of tactics writer “Zonal Whoever” in 2011, Tim Sherwood’s belief that “players only call themselves No. 10s because they can’t score goals” and Sean Dyche’s ongoing war against the fraudulent European managers who simply make their players “run harder” and that’s it.

Back to 1996, though, and this was a football world struggling to come to terms with the prospect of a man in a TV studio rewinding all the errors and playing them back in slow motion until everyone had been taught a thorough retrospective lesson.

Old Fitzrovians

I'm going to try and get a Walking Football club going at the 5-a-side pitch near Warren Street. Here's a page where you can express your interest, if you have any.

 

Ring binder bling

I think perhaps I have to accept that I will never have files as beautiful as those of Jean Mohr

(From)

Weapons of Math Destruction

You should read Weapons of Math Destruction, you're probably planning to, I am. It might be queued up on your kindle or bedside table. You might be getting it for Christmas. But maybe you won't get round to it. That's possible. We're all busy. So, just in case, listen to this. It's fascinating stuff.

Cathy O'Neill talks about Weapons of Math Destruction.

Who Will Command The Robot Armies?

Maciej's latest talk is full of genius:

"Amazon hires such workers through a subsidiary called Integrity. If you know anything about American business culture, you’ll know that a company called “Integrity” can only be pure evil."