The Wiki Man

The Wiki Man: Not-so-basic instinct

As someone who has a panic attack when the Sky box fails to work, I am fascinated by people who stay calm in a major crisis. Hence I love listening to cockpit voice recordings on YouTube. Among the best are Apollo XIII and ‘US Airways Flight 1549’ — the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’. With both

The Wiki Man: Double crossed

There is no shortage of competitors for the strangest site on the internet. ‘The Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics’, for instance. Or gooseduds.com — an essential website (essential, that is, if you have ornamental garden geese and feel the urge to dress them in seasonal clothes). Or hatsofmeat.com, a website that shows exactly what

The Wiki Man: Tailor-made television

I could paint a Mona Lisa, I could be another Caesar; Compose an oratorio that is sublime. The door’s not shut on my genius – but I just don’t have the time. Like Flanders & Swann’s sloth, many people are secretly convinced that they could write a masterpiece. Almost everyone also believes that they could

The Wiki Man: Let the road-train take the strain

Only two things matter when choosing a car. What is it like to drive fast? And what is it like to drive very, very slowly? Forget about cornering and acceleration. Very little of our time in cars is spent negotiating hairpin bends or revving chavvishly at a junction. Most motoring falls into two distinct categories.

The Wiki Man: In with the old

I have noticed Britons in France or Italy cringe with embarrassment, and mutter apologies to waiters when ordering a cappuccino after dinner — or at any time after noon. ‘Look, you needn’t apologise,’ I say. ‘The reason foreigners drink their coffee black isn’t because they’re sophisticated: it’s because their milk tastes like crap.’ It has

The Wiki Man: The best thing since wheeled suitcases

I had a Land Rover Discovery once. It was expensive to run, largely on account of the rear visibility. The blind spot was so large that, when reversing, you had to worry not only about lurking cats, shrubs and bollards but also bungalows. I felt proud whenever I went for six months without needing to

The Wiki Man: Class system

1) Imagine you have the choice of living in two worlds. In World A you have a five-bedroom house and everyone you know has a six-bedroom house. In World B you have a four-bedroom house and all your friends have three-bedroom houses. Which world would you prefer? 2) You can live in World C, where

The Wiki Man: Speaking to Siri

Why am I typing this article rather than dictating it via some wonderful voice recognition software? It’s a question worth asking. Twenty years ago, all Spectator writers would have written every article by hand (only two or three still do). In my office in the 1980s, it was frowned on to type your own letters,

The Wiki Man: In times of crisis, use your head

A few years ago in Malaysia I found myself reading the national paper, the New Straits Times. There was a headline on the front page that caught my eye. It read something like ‘New road to the airport will make it easier to get to the airport’. I’m sure those weren’t the exact words, but

The Wiki Man: App happy

If you are a Spectator subscriber, the plastic wrapper in which your magazine arrived this morning is probably already in the bin in the kitchen. By now it has been joined by two sodden teabags, four strips of bacon rind and a couple of eggshells. Try to steel yourself now, pull on a pair of

The Wiki Man: The rigged roulette wheel

I came face to face with the real banking problem a month ago when speaking in Oxford to an audience of undergraduates. ‘Well, I suppose one good thing about the last three years is that you won’t now all be applying to work in banks,’ I joked. It seems I was wrong. At these words,

The Wiki Man: Next bus

True or not, there is a persistent story about a former Duke of Devonshire who, seeing some silver napkin rings in Asprey’s, asked his companion what they were for. ‘Your grace, in some households they roll napkins inside these rings so that they can be used for a subsequent meal, rather than being laundered every

The Wiki Man: Better than a ride on a banana

A friend of mine once spent a week on a vast luxury yacht cruising the Mediterranean. It was all jolly pleasant, he remembered, except for a strange thing: throughout the entire trip, the only time the shipboard party had experienced what you might call ‘fun’ was when somebody discovered in a locker some kind of

The Wiki Man: Evolution and the airline seat

How can something as complicated as a human eye possibly arise through a process of natural selection — through trial and error? Most people will have asked themselves this question at some point in their lives, but without bothering to find out the answer. A pity, since the stage-by-stage explanation of how the eye might

The Wiki Man: Bring back the madcaps

I recently watched another one of those delightfully obscure BBC4 archive documentaries. This one was called Bristol on Film. I like archival film footage for what it reveals unintentionally: the incidental details which have nothing to do with the film-maker’s original intent, but which 60 years later reveal how profoundly the world has changed. Like

The Wiki Man: The billionaires who no one seems to hate

Two interesting news items coincided the other week Two interesting news items coincided the other week. The growing debate about the relatively light tax burden shouldered by the massively rich and the partial retirement of Steve Jobs. One dog failed to bark in the night. No one, as far as I can see, dared name

The Wiki Man: Technology and the riots

It was the biggest technological story of the month and I missed it. Instead it was my much cooler friend, Jonathan Akwue, who first mentioned Blackberry Messenger and its possible connection with the riots (at urbanmashup.wordpress.com). He spent the next two weeks fielding inquiries from the media. Blackberry Messenger (or BBM, as its users call

The Wiki Man: My other car is an iPad

A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary