The last person I knew of in the UK government, including senior civil servants, with any scientific background was Maggy Thatcher. She did maths for a first degree then law. Eventually I gave up on them.

In 1982 or so I went to see Sir Monty Finniston talk about his report. One of the things he had found during the research was that there was a similar report 100 years earlier... so I am not holding my breath. It was sort of depressing for a second year engineering student.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Finniston


Yes, it's very bad that governments generally have minimal understanding of the huge technical systems they are buying. The final straw for me was when we made a military network system that far exceeded requirements and the government preferred a Canadian system that was hugely inferior. Their justification was that the Canadian system (MESHnet) was already in service and our system was not. One example of how poor their system was, in the case of battle damage we patched round failures in a few milliseconds, it takes MESHnet half an hour to reconfigure itself. About half the project team left the country after that.

Edited at 2010-05-06 02:41 pm (UTC)

It's nice not to have to switch off the tv in embarrassment when the president speaks.