The Suburban Sublime – Southgate Tube Station

Nige admires the work of Charles Holden, the architect behind Southgate Tube Station, one of London's finest Art Deco Underground stations... That is not a newly landed art deco UFO above - it is Southgate Underground station, towards the end of the Cockfosters branch of the Piccadilly Line. I discovered this part of ... Read More...

Project Habakkuk

Perhaps Boris Johnson could press today's weird wikipedia discovery into action as the new Thames estuary airport? Project Habakkuk was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete (a mixture of wood pulp and ice), for use against German U-boats in the ... Read More...

Chess, Cricket, and Man versus the Machines

Machines are already better than humans at chess, and now computers are increasingly important in sports like cricket and baseball. Author Jon Hotten ponders the implications... Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: '[They are playing] the foremost game of ... Read More...

Compelling Machinery VI: The B-58 Hustler

Scott Locklin continues his irregular series on machinery that, in one way or another, is utterly compelling. Today a crazy machine from a crazy time. Aerospace technology became grotesque and beautiful in the 1950s. One of the most grotesque and beautiful creations of that bizarre era of technological excellence was the Convair ... Read More...

Marathon of machine versus mind

How many of your Christmas gifts were made in China? Ongoing upgrades in transport and technology will no doubt make the world an even smaller place in 2012. Translation innovation think tank, TAUS, believes that translation will become a ubiquitous service, “like the internet, electricity, and water, translation is one of ... Read More...