The Wiki Man

Two books to recommend to my fellow transportation nerds: Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy by David Metz, formerly chief boffin at the Department for Transport; and Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar. The first is excellent throughout, the second is excellent right up

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the

Back in the 1980s a colleague of mine was paranoid about being burgled. Before he went away on a two-week holiday, he bought the most expensive telephone answering-machine he could find and installed it in plain view on his hall table. Each morning he phoned it from Spain and hung up once he heard the

In a one-day international against Australia last year, Ben Stokes was dismissed for ‘obstructing the field’, a rule rarely invoked in-cricket. The bowler had thrown the ball towards the wicket (and hence near Stokes’s head) in an attempt to run him out. Stokes raised his hand and deflected the ball. After some discussion between the

Last year, those rationalist killjoys at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission prosecuted Reckitt Benckiser over four products: Nurofen Migraine Pain, Nurofen Tension Headache, Nurofen Period Pain and Nurofen Back Pain. Their gripe was that ‘each product claimed to target a specific pain, when in fact it was found that they all contained the same

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but middle-class rules now require that every dinner party cheeseboard must contain at least two cheeses which aren’t very nice. Typically one will be a veiny French cheese which is not as good as Stilton; another may be that foreign thing with rind on it which isn’t nearly as good

I have worked in advertising for 28 years. In that time I have seen many briefs for communication campaigns, but none contained the line ‘It is important to insult the target audience, or at least treat them with barely disguised disdain.’ So I wonder whether the referendum result might have gone the other way had

If Geert Hofstede’s name is familiar to you, it might be from pop-science articles explaining a spate of Korean airliner crashes in the 1990s. A widely held theory placed some of the blame on the hierarchical nature of Korean culture; this made the junior pilot reluctant to mention any mistakes made by his superior. If

A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference in New York. ‘Where would be the best place to stay?’ I asked my assistant. ‘Well, you’re booked into The Trump SoHo’, she said, careful to pronounce the capital H. ‘Are you completely deranged? Do I look like a man with a craving

Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly designed to do pretty well. Secondly, it has some quality that you might call ‘limbic appeal’. It delights or soothes our unconscious mind in ways which defy objective measurement. Much as it delusionally believes that

We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place, you notice the surprising ways in which your behaviour is subliminally affected by your surroundings. On my second day in the new office, someone came from Victoria to meet me. After about 25 minutes of

I have always been intrigued by the scoring systems for different sports, and the degree to which they contribute to the enjoyment of any game. As a friend of mine remarked, had tennis been given the same scoring system as basketball it would be tedious to play, and even worse to watch. Once you glanced

When I was at school in the 1970s, some of the richer kids would come back from their summer holidays with jaw-dropping tales about the wondrous places they had visited. Chief among them, as I remember, was Schiphol airport. ‘It was amazing,’ they would say. ‘There were shops and restaurants and stuff,’ and you could

In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, each broadcasting a signal with little more power than a 100-watt light bulb, allows a device in your satnav or mobile phone to triangulate your location on the ground to

A first last week: a Google driverless car in autonomous mode was partly at fault in a collision, interestingly one involving a bus. The car was merging into a lane of faster-moving traffic to dodge a pile of sandbags in a collapsed drain and nudged in ahead of the bus on the assumption that its

What happens when 95 per cent of people like something, but 5 per cent of people prefer something else? You might think natural democracy would prevail: that the 5 per cent would acquiesce and go along with the taste of the majority. Not necessarily. In many cultural settings, it is common for a small, intransigent minority to beat

There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about wealth inequality. He suggested capitalism, aside from an anomalous period between 1930 and 1979, inexorably concentrated wealth at the top. One interesting defence of inequality is that the rich, by adopting technologies early, redistribute far

I am one of those annoying, mildly claustrophobic people who sit at the end of a row in cinemas. There are plenty of things in life — films, plays, social events — which I can only fully enjoy knowing I can make a sharp exit at any time. It’s not that I leave: I just

A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed their school was objectively better than a larger, more famous establishment nearby, but had more difficulty attracting pupils. What should they do? This is not easy. You see, however skilled your teachers are, what really