Hello, welcome to Pigsaw Global Commodities plc. We’re not around at this week because we’re on holiday in Germany — just outside Stuttgart, since you ask. This is a recorded announcement. If you’d like to talk about something utterly inconsequential, please leave a message after the beep and we’ll get back to you on our [...]

Nicole says: Here’s what can happen when you publish (or broadcast) the wrong address. A former prosecutor on Fox News as a “terror expert” mistakenly identified the house of a family as that of a terrorist — only, the man in question had moved three years ago. Now there’s a family of five living there, [...]

Ooh, this is exciting… First, the Times is relaunching its second section to be aimed at women. Its name is to be Times2 — presumably to suggest to the new audience that they’re twice as good as men, and perhaps because the current name of T2 is a bit too reminiscent of heavily armed male [...]

Amid the story of the so-called Piano Man (the one which so many people were going to base a film on — like Shine, but true — only now it turns out he’s just a guy with no musical genius who lives on a farm with his family — so if anything it will be [...]

I was speaking to my friend Andrew this weekend, who is just completing an MBA. In one breath he was saying that there was no “formula for business” because each business has been created in a unqiue set of circumstances, and so evolves as such; in the next he asked why any technology project ends [...]

A cup of tea from N19, and a moth from NW5. Tags: tea, moth, tuffnelpark

Simon makes the case (well, a case) for “messy media”, saying that while the Economist, with its labelled and ring-bound view of the world, might not like it, it might just be the only way to survive in a messy online world. I stopped trying to predict the future after I suggested to a friend [...]

Mark Liberman reports on Gerald Cohen‘s test for bullshit: …how could one prove … that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a “not” to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn’t, that statement is bullshit. Mark had learnt [...]

Look, if they keep writing these things, I’ll keep photographing them. Tags: trains, thameslink, timetables, london

I’m delighted — and frankly very surprised — to discover a new sudoku rule, to complement yesterday’s Rule of N. And within 24 hours, too, at a point when I was starting to despair. This is very exciting partly because it actually helps solve the Diabolical puzzle that the Rule of N alone wouldn’t solve, [...]