The Wiki Man
London Bridge station: Netwór Krail’s £1 billion experiential artwork
In the shadow of the Shard, not far from Borough Market, is a £1 billion public artwork, an allegorical sculpture…
Forget your data – it’s your DNA privacy you should be worried about
Nearly ten years ago, a lorry driver known only as ‘Michael Harry K’ adopted an extreme response to combating what…
Could an Owl make video conferencing take off?
When I was ten, the two things we all expected to enjoy by 2020 were flying cars and videotelephony. What…
Where’s the internet revolution they promised us?
At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet…
Had 533 people voted differently, the Tories would have a full majority
Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement…
ISA and pension limits discourage ordinary people from saving
The maximum amount you can save in an ISA for the tax year 2017-2018 is now £20,000. The maximum annual…
Why I’m not on board with quiet carriages
Every now and then I try to invent a new scientific unit. I’ll never come up with anything as good…
Reducing activities to their core misses the point
There may be a very simple evolutionary reason why water does not really taste of anything, as I learned from…
Let’s face it: the Presidents Club was on to something
There exist in the annals of salesmanship certain ideas that are both highly immoral and wickedly clever. Before P. T.…
A nice, cuddly NHS would be bad for us
Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter…
How to make economists fight like ferrets in a sack
One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of…
Design everything for the disabled and you can’t go wrong
About 30 years ago, BT introduced a telephone handset with enormous keys. It was intended for people with serious visual…
The inventions (and Welsh rarebit mix) that will change your life
At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos…
What we need is a Freedom of Uninformation Act
One dietary fad that never made sense to me was the campaign against the consumption of eggs. Now call me…
How to stop the Grenfell Tower disaster from happening again? Ask the air industry
It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight…
Perception vs objective reality
I hate to tell you this, but every time you watch television you are being duped. In fact there are…
Raising the threshold crappiness
I love anything open late at night. Never mind ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’; even mundane activities…
Make life easier and all else will follow
You can try to change people’s minds, but this is difficult. You can bribe people to change their behaviour, but…
Migration is complicated. Don’t pretend it’s not
I expect you’ve already noticed it, but in case you’ve been living in a cave or an economics faculty for…
Want greater diversity? Try being less fair
In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within…
Sutherland’s Law of Bad Maths
Imagine for a moment a parallel universe in which shops had mostly not yet been invented, and that all commerce…
The right kind of dumbing down
Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…
To buy cheap art, buy architecture
Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise…
Why driverless showers are key to the housing crisis
Although it is commonly assumed that faster-than-sound passenger travel died with Concorde, this isn’t quite true: it overlooks the Caledonian…
Universities should offer one-year courses
In every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what…
