The Wiki Man

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention

Hours of googling have left me unable to find the essay on domestic horticulture, written by a Victorian aristocrat, which contains the legendary sentence: ‘Any garden, of whatever size, should contain at least three acres of mature woodland.’ And though that seems a high bar to set, in times like this, millions of Brits have

The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or

For all the abuse heaped on the Behavioural Insights Team early in the crisis, let’s not forget that the only three immediate solutions proposed by the combined ranks of the scientific establishment were, um, behavioural. People were encouraged to wash their hands with soap for 20 seconds, to stay home where possible and to keep

One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash course in complexity. If nothing else, many people may have learned why it makes sense to plot infection rates on a logarithmic scale, and a few may even have learned to use the word ‘exponentially’

In Mr Alton’s absence, I thought readers might want a column about sport. The problem is that I’m largely indifferent to most sports. But I will berate the All England Club for cancelling the Wimbledon Championship. Fair enough, I can see that tennis might be a problem what with all the loud, virus-spreading grunting, but

The brother of a friend in Durban was once given a generous donation by a wealthy aunt. ‘I hate to see you just hanging around indoors all day. Buy an old Land Rover. Go and see the real Africa.’ The brother took the money but bought an enormous television instead. When my friend visited, he

The newspapers are full of stories about how small groups of engineers from Formula 1 teams have been able to design, prototype and manufacture essential health equipment incredibly quickly. So why aren’t organisations allowed to perform such super-human feats of brilliance the rest of the time? Or to put it another way, why is it

Once we’ve flattened the curve of infection with mass self-isolation, the next debate will concern how to soften the restrictions on movement and work without causing a second wave of the pandemic. Behavioural science, abused as it has been to date, may be useful in formulating the new rules for social behaviour. That’s because it

Compared with every other household chore, progress in bum-wiping has been glacially slow. It’s only in living memory that schools and institutions stopped using something called Izal, a box of medicated toilet wipes similar in texture to greaseproof paper, and thus spectacularly ill-suited to its purpose. It was characteristic of the Britain of my childhood,

Next time there is a highly deserved round of public applause for NHS workers, do add one additional clap for the tele-communications industry for — so far — keeping the show on the road. High-speed broadband, for those lucky enough to have it, has made self-isolation more tolerable, and may have significantly reduced the impact

For the past 12 years, Roger Alton and I have shared this half page like Box and Cox: he writes fortnightly about sport and I write fortnightly about technology. Normally it would be Roger’s turn this week to cover sport. Unfortunately there isn’t any. So we’ve reached an agreement. For now, while there’s no longer

It wasn’t a coincidence that the US government chose Ellis Island as an immigration station. The crucial word is ‘island’. Had the RMS Titanic missed that fateful iceberg in 1912, she would eventually have taken up station at a quarantine area at the entrance to the Lower Bay of New York Harbor, to await medical

A consensus seems to be forming that the BBC licence fee is for the chop. In a digital age, the reasoning goes, we should not be forced to subscribe to huge bundles of content, with no choice over what we pay for and what we don’t. This argument, intriguingly, is both true and false at

In the recent debate over Britain’s 5G infrastructure, one dog didn’t bark in the night. At no point did anyone dare suggest that, regardless of the supplier, upgrading our mobile networks to 5G might be premature. In saner parts of the economy, an investment requires something called a ‘use case’ or a cost-benefit analysis. In

Some years ago, two British supermarket chains needed to place a large order for replacement trollies. They had to decide what ratio of full-depth and shallow trollies to order, and how best to allocate them between stores. One of them amassed mounds of demographic data and tried to construct an elaborate optimisation model. The second

Outside mathematics, the word ‘commute’ can mean two things. Mostly it refers to the act of making a daily journey between one’s home and work; more rarely it describes replacing one penalty with another — as in ‘the Home Secretary commuted the death sentence to one of life imprisonment’. The curious may wonder why one