Links on Tales from the Bitface

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 15:48:13 +0000

Today is Irony Day: Wetherspoon’s short on some beers as Brexit affects deliveries.

They blame ‘lack of lorry drivers and strike action.’ Hadn’t heard about a strike; does it exist? And more importantly, what on Earth could have caused a lack of drivers???

Corona Vu

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 18:45:16 +0000

This article was in yesterday’s Independent. I felt like I had travelled back in time to last May:

Crucially, the report, which was written by independent experts, concludes that NHS guidelines failed to consider airborne infection, a key way the virus is transmitted.

– Sean Russel in the Independent, NHS Covid guidelines ‘fundamentally flawed’ and need replacing, says nursing union

It further says:

But research now suggests that airborne transmission – where tiny droplets of saliva from people talking, calling out or coughing can remain suspended in the air – can be a particular problem in poorly-ventilated rooms.

– As above, Independent article

‘Now’? Research now suggests that it’s airborne? We’ve known that since at least June of last year. In fact, I first posted about masks, and about going out with a rudimentary one, in early April!

How can NHS guidelines be so ludicrously far from what we understand? It would be comically far if it wasn’t so serious.

The Guardian Might Stop Being a Printed Paper

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 11:34:58 +0000

Colin Morrison, writing at ‘Flashes & Flames’:

The Guardian, which has arguably become the world’s most sophisticated digital news operation, may be contemplating an end to its printed newspapers. That may have been signalled by the recent decision to cut 180 jobs (or 12% of its UK workforce) as a result of Covid.
...
But, tellingly, newsstand print sales, at £49.3m, were 50% down compared with 2016. Last year, print accounted for 42% of revenue (£94 million) and an estimated £75 million of production, distribution and marketing costs. So, the printed newspaper may last year have delivered almost £20m of real profit. But now Covid is pushing it into losses from which it may not be able to recover – without dramatic change.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

Interesting and unsurprising to learn that Saturday is (was?) its biggest day for print sales:

Like most UK national newspapers, The Guardian has been highly profitable on Saturdays because of higher prices and sales volumes. Pre-Covid, The Guardian had been selling 100,000 copies at £2.20 on weeekdays. But, on a Saturday, it was selling 246,000 copies at £3.20 – and with more advertising revenue too.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=03c6c90989-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-03c6c90989-396542471

After our local newsagent stopped delivering the Saturday Guardian, we went out and bought it most weeks… until Covid and the lockdown. We haven’t bought it since, probably, March. But we do pay online, as supporters and subscribers.

I don’t think I’d mind that much if it went digital-only, though it would be the end of an era. You’d think they could keep just the Saturday edition, but:

The management may already have concluded that any plan to print a newspaper only on certain days (including the weekend) will not be viable. Much of the experience (especially of the Newhouse family’s Advance newspaper group in the US) seems to show that reducing the daily frequency seldom works: once the daily habit is broken, newspaper buyers quickly seem to stop buying the paper altogether. A consolation print option could be the expansion of the 101-year-old news magazine Guardian Weekly which claims readers in more than 170 countries.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

I’d guess they’ll maybe keep The Observer going for a while: Sunday papers have their own distinct identities.

The contrast with digital could not be greater. The Guardian has 160 million monthly uniques across the world, some 25% in the UK. More striking, though, are those digital editions in North America and Australia/New Zealand which, respectively, have advertising revenue of £25 million and £11 million. These are now strong operations, evidenced by Australia where The Guardian is the fourth largest online news service with an audience of 11.6 million (more than 50% of the adult population) – ahead of News Corp’s national daily, The Australian.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

Good to know it’s beating Murdoch on his home turf.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes The Guardian as “a weird newspaper” because: it has nearly two-thirds of its readers coming from outside its own country; started in one city and moved to another; and is owned by a trust that mandates it promotes liberal journalism in Britain and elsewhere.
https://flashesandflames.com/2020/07/31/the-guardian-to-end-print/

“A weird newspaper”: works for me.

The Monster (Wear a Mask!)

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:58:38 +0000

Dr Sayed Tabatabai writes beautifully about the horror of working in an ICU at the moment.

Sometimes when people sound quieter and calmer during a respiratory issue it’s a sign of impending doom.

You can’t make noise if you can’t breathe.

– Dr Sayed Tabatabai, The Monster

Go read. It’s a Twitter thread. Only 22 tweets. ThreadReaderApp doesn’t seem to be working.

And please: start wearing a face covering if you ever go out.

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 17:18:33 +0000

Good piece by Margaret Atwood about… what everything’s about, these days.

Any child growing up in Canada in the 1940s, at a time before there were vaccines for a horde of deadly diseases, was familiar with quarantine signs. They were yellow and they appeared on the front doors of houses. They said things such as DIPHTHERIA and SCARLET FEVER and WHOOPING COUGH. Milkmen – there were still milkmen in those years, sometimes with horse-drawn wagons – and bread men, ditto, and even icemen, and certainly postmen (and yes, they were all men), had to leave things on the front doorsteps. We kids would stand outside in the snow – for me, it was always winter in cities, as the rest of the time my family was up in the woods – gazing at the mysterious signs and wondering what gruesome things were going on inside the houses. Children were especially susceptible to these diseases, especially diptheria – I had four little cousins who died of it – so once in a while a classmate would disappear, sometimes to return, sometimes not.

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:49:44 +0000

In General Election 2019: the news media failed profoundly — but not in the way you think, Adam Tinworth buries the “lede.” Probably deliberately, as the whole piece is worth reading.

The key point is that the Reuters research showed that people spent only 16 minutes a week on average reading news during the election.

That’s a ludicrously low figure.

Also odd is that the Shortcut that I used to create this post pulled this text out as the title: “The Media & the 2019 General Election: trusted, but little consumed.” Which would be better in terms of not burying anything, but I can’t see where it came from. The <title> tag, I’d have to guess, but you don’t really see those on a phone. And not that much on a computer, once you’ve got more than a couple of browser tabs open.

The End of the Dream. The Start of the Resistance

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 13:19:27 +0000

Ian Dunt, writing at politics.co.uk:

What is happening is a tragedy. A betrayal of Britain’s role in the world. A betrayal of the Europeans who came and made this their home. A betrayal of the idea that this is a calm, sensible country, that thinks in practical and pragmatic terms about what it is doing, that deals in small ideas instead of grand ideologies.

– The end of the dream. The start of the resistance.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Irony Failure Among Elite Headteachers

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:23:16 +0000

“Private schools criticise plans to get more poor students into university“. Of course they do.

Sally Weale writes in The Guardian:

Leading private schools have challenged plans to widen access to the most selective universities in England, warning they could lead to discrimination against young people “on the basis of the class they were born into”.

Which doesn’t happen at the moment. Not at all.

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:18:39 +0000

Jolyon Maugham QC and the Good Law Project are petitioning Johnson to ask the EU to allow us to have associate EU citizenship, as part of the exit negotiations. I can’t imagine it’ll do much good, but there’s no harm in signing.

On one level I think they’re trolling Johnson: suggesting that he might want to — or suggesting that there’s any chance he would — appear statesmanlike.

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 15:01:16 +0000

I hope everyone’s not petitioned out, because we need this: To establish a Public Inquiry into the conduct of the 2016 EU Referendum.

There will be a public enquiry about Brexit and how it was mishandled, eventually. But it could be years from now. Sooner is better.

Marina's on Fire Again

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 11:20:55 +0000

Marina Hyde may have written her greatest line (so far):

the Commons decision to take the prime minister into special measures

The whole piece is, as ever, glorious.

The Compulsive Pursuit of a Product That Does Us Only Harm

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 16:39:32 +0000

Rafel Behr analyses our national condition:

It looks like British social awkwardness elevated to the scale of a constitutional meltdown. It is the stiff upper lip chewing itself to pieces rather than name the cause of our suffering: not the deal, not the backstop, not the timetable, not Brussels, but Brexit. The poison in our system is Brexit. We need a path to recovery, not May’s frantic hunt for a stronger, purer dose.

At The Guardian

Nick Cave on AI and Songwriting

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 15:18:39 +0000

If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend?

Mr Cave’s latest newsletter muses on the potential songwriting abilities of AIs.

“Why’s it taking so long? We should just leave!” | The Reinvigorated Programmer

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:07:13 +0000

Good analogy:

Suppose your family lives in a flat that’s rented from a housing association. And you have come to feel (rightly or wrongly) that it’s not a very nice flat, and that the association interferes too much. So you discuss it as a family, and you think about all the lovely houses out there that you could live in, and eventually you decide to leave. So far, so good.

EU Figures Rule Out Concessions as May Postpones Brexit Vote

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 21:36:49 +0000

Honestly, she has no idea what she’s doing. Plus, she seems to be acting alone. We don’t have a presidential system here. The Prime Minister is not the entire executive.

EU figures rule out concessions as May postpones Brexit vote

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 18:11:58 +0000

Some Labour MPs are thinking along similar lines to me.

Wes Streeting:

“Labour cannot sit by and allow the choice to be between the economic ruin of a hard Brexit or the loss of sovereignty under Theresa May’s deal, with Britain subjected to EU rules but with no say over them,” he said. “As with any fork in the road, there is always the option of turning back home.

“We know this is a mess made by the Tories, but the Labour party can’t just sit back and watch. It’s time for all of us in the Labour party to make the full-throated case for a people’s vote with the option of remaining in the European Union.

“That leadership must now come from the top, or our party may never be forgiven for the consequences that follow.”

Chris Leslie:

“With even Tory ministers recognising Brexit threatens the poorest in society, our public services and Britain’s place in the world, to have a Labour leader just shrug about it, then go awol, is nothing short of a dereliction of duty.”

OK, they’re maybe not planning to leave the party, but still.

They Took Something Very Weird and Made It More Usable

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 18:03:50 +0000

Good piece by Paul Ford, writing at Bloomberg on Microsoft buying GitHub:

[GitHub] has a well-designed web interface. If you don’t think that’s worth $7.5 billion, you’ve never read the git manual.

He means the man pages, I assume.

GitHub is “the central repository for decentralized (sic) code archives,” which is mildly amusing. But this:

In the pre-git era, you updated your software annually and sent customers floppy disks. But if you’re running a big software platform, you might update your servers constantly—many times a day or every 20 minutes.

is a bit over the top. There were a lot of changes between sending out floppies and continuous deployment.

I question his (lack of) capitalisation. The command is git, all lower case. But if you’re talking about the application, you should spell it “Git”, with the capital. I think so, anyway. You would write about “CVS”, even though the command was (is) cvs; and “Subversion,” with the command svn. But at least it’s not as annoying as people who write it in all-caps.

Lastly, when he says, “Computers are mercurial,” I’m assuming he’s wryly referencing what was once Git’s major rival in the distributed version-control space. Nicely deadpan, if so.

Microsoft to Buy GitHub?

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 09:30:58 +0000

I can’t help but feel concerned about the news that Microsoft may be buying GitHub. I know they’re big on open source now, and even use GitHub themselves. But I remember how antithetical to open-source they used to be, so that worries me. And it rarely works out well when a big company buys up a small, interesting one.

It's Inconvenient to Talk

Tue, 22 May 2018 12:58:32 +0000

On Trump’s phone (mis)use:

Trump’s call-capable cellphone has a camera and microphone, unlike the White House-issued cellphones used by Obama.

—Eliana Johnson, Emily Stephenson, and Daniel Lippman, reporting for Politico

I mean, it’s not going to be much use at making calls without a microphone.

A Special Way of Being Afraid

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:17:25 +0000

I only know one other of Philip Larkin’s poems; it is about parents and children. This one — ‘Aubade’ — is the best poem about death I’ve ever read.

A sample:

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Crazy Copyright Claim

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 14:34:00 +0000

Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:

Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’

I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.

If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.

I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.

Mayday for Human Rights

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 13:37:55 +0000

More evidence, as if it were needed, that this government is not just incompetent, but actively malevolent:

The EU (withdrawal) bill, published on Thursday – known as the “great repeal bill”– which will formally enact Brexit, includes a clause which says: “The charter of fundamental rights is not part of domestic law on or after exit day.”

Yes, Theresa May and her cabal of crazies do not believe that British citizens should have the same fundamental rights guaranteed to them as citizens of the rest of the EU.

A Firefighter's Words On Grenfell Tower

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 18:20:28 +0000

This can’t be spread widely enough: the words of a firefighter who attended the Grenfell Tower fire.

Right Wing Pirates to Plague the Med

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 12:45:03 +0000

This is a disgrace on humanity:

Far-right activists are planning a sea campaign this summer to disrupt vessels saving refugees in the Mediterranean, after successfully intercepting a rescue mission last month.

Members of the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant “Identitarian” movement – largely twentysomethings often described as Europe’s answer to the American alt-right – have raised £56,489 in less than three weeks to enable them to target boats run by aid charities helping to rescue refugees.

From The Guardian.

A right wing organisation that wants to stop aid agency boats that are trying to rescue refugees. I hope the coastguards of Italy and Greece shut them down hard.

Landmark European Court Case Could Curtail Freedoms of British Dual Nationals

Tue, 16 May 2017 07:55:19 +0000

The Home Office refused his application on the grounds that she could not rely on her EU freedom of movement rights, which include the right to bring in a family member, as she was a British national as well as an EU national.

Does this legal case mean that British citizens automatically have fewer rights than EU citizens in general? If that’s the case then we should be leaving the UK, not the EU.

Protect the Human Rights Act

Tue, 09 May 2017 19:02:12 +0000

There’s a petition at Change.org to get the parties to commit to protecting the Human Rights Act and Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The latter was drafted by British lawyers, remember, after the Second World War; and now some British politicians are suggesting we should abandon it, as we are seemingly committed to abandoning the EU.¹

The former enshrines the convention in UK law.²

This one is definitely worth signing.

Although I retain hope. ↩︎
Thereby protecting it from faceless Brussels Eurocrats, I dare say. ↩︎

Margaret Atwood's Uncanny Ancestor

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 21:32:09 +0000

This is a horrific quote from The New Yorker‘s interview with Margaret Atwood:

Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. ‘The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,’ Atwood said recently. ‘But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.’ Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary.

But I can’t help thinking, if there’s anything to the story, wouldn’t they have taken her survival as further evidence of her witchy nature, and made sure they killed her next time? As it is, it sounds like she lived on.

Brexit and Northern Ireland

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 23:38:43 +0000

Here’s a great tweetstorm about the effect Brexit will have on Northern Ireland. Worth reading the whole thing.

Interrupting-Kids Video and Analysis Thereof

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 17:54:53 +0000

The video of the guy being interviewed on the BBC and interrupted by his kids is great, but even better is Ben Thompson’s analysis of it.

You can see the video and read about it at that link.

The Writing Process

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 13:23:39 +0000

In What Writers Really Do When They Write George Saunders gives a great insight into some parts of his working process.

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs.

Or “Writing is rewriting,” as someone once put it.¹

It’s a good piece, and well worth reading. Oddly, in the printed edition (Saturday’s Guardian Review section) it was entitled “Master of the Universe.”

Hard to find who, but it seems to have been Hemingway. Whose writing I don’t like, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. ↩︎

Tory MP Claims Astrology Could Help the NHS

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 07:21:25 +0000

This should be enough to disbar someone from public life for good: Astrology could help take pressure off NHS doctors, claims Conservative MP — The Guardian. Though I notice the article is two years old. It just came to my attention via ~~Facebook~~ one of Twitter’s occasional emails.

David Tredinnick said astrology, along with complementary medicine, could take pressure off NHS doctors, but acknowledged that any attempt to spend taxpayers’ money on consulting the stars would cause “a huge row”.

Getting his defence in early, he goes on to say that his likely critics (he names Brian Cox specifically):

“… are also ignorant, because they never study the subject and just say that it is all to do with what appears in the newspapers, which it is not, and they are deeply prejudiced, and racially prejudiced, which is troubling.”

Nice tactic: he knows he’s talking bullshit, so accuses people of racism. Last time I checked, astrology wasn’t a race.

Nor was stupidity.

And in the unlikely event that anyone reading this thinks I’m just being reflexively mean and as bad as the critics he fears, here’s a considered scientific opinion. The only possible known way the positions of the planets and stars at our birth could affect us is by gravity. And while gravity does travel all through the universe, it is very, very weak — the weakest of the fundamental forces. Just look at how hard it was to measure gravitational waves. We were only able to do that in the last year, and it took colliding black holes to make enough of a splash for us to measure.

Is it possible that heavenly bodies affect us in some other, as yet unknown way? Yes. And here’s what science says about that: show us how, and we’ll study it. Demonstrate the mechanism by which this influence happens, and we’ll write down the equations that govern it and learn all about it. We’ll have to throw out all existing models of physics, but if you bring the evidence, that’s what we’ll do.

That’s science.

Brain Explain

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 23:54:29 +0000

Interesting article on psychology wherein Robert Epstein tells us that “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer.”

It is, as I say, interesting. But it’s also profoundly annoying in the way he asserts that the human brain is not an information processor, but then makes no attempt to explain what it is, instead.

He asserts that the brain does not hold a copy of a song it has learned, for example, but instead “is changed in a way that allows the person to sing it” (I paraphrase).

But isn’t that just another way of saying that it has stored a copy? If that change does not in some sense denote making a copy, then what exactly does it mean? What is the brain doing when the singer recalls the song? Inventing it anew, exactly (or not) as the original composer intended?

I don’t doubt that what he calls “[t]he information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence” has its limitations; but he has completely failed to explain them or provide an alternative explanation.

The truth is we don’t understand much about how the brain does what it does; and this guy knows more than most of us. But he’s a psychologist. He no doubt has a deep understanding of the workings of the human mind. But I think if you want someone to explain what we understand of the workings of he human brain, then you want that person to be a neuroscientist.

Why Liberals Are Wrong About Trump

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:45:39 +0000

This is well worth reading. We should all see an alternative view from time to time:

Why Liberals Are Wrong About Trump

Brexit Hope?

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 19:30:19 +0000

A very small hope. Brexit—take back control by the improbably-named Jolyon Maugham, suggests that a court ruling could be achieved which would ensure that we can back out of Brexit at the last moment:

The effects of an Article 50 notification are not fully understood—and not only because May is still peddling a blind bargain, a Brexit pig-in-a-poke. We do know that, should we ask and the other 27 member states agree, we could remain. But it is brave to assume that two years of exposure to the negotiating skills of Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis will not generate even one hold-out. [...] The preponderance of legal opinion is that we could, after all, decide to remain. That we could, having notified, withdraw that notification. But, given the magnitude of the issue, our parliament must know more than what the answer probably is. It must know what it actually is.
[...]
only the court to which we all subscribe can give an answer: the European Court in Luxembourg.

He/she (I’m guessing “he,” from the writing style) says:

But a case which—along with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley, Steven Agnew, a Green member of the Northern Irish Assembly and Keith Taylor, a Green MEP—I am bringing in the Dublin High Court seeks to give us the power to travel back if we need it.

And he explains that:

We access it via a national court. And it can’t be one of ours. One of the complaints in the Dublin case is that the other 27 have breached the Treaty by excluding us from Council meetings before we’ve notified under Article 50. And that complaint can only be made by a court in one of those 27. The Irish court is the natural choice

Which all seems fair. The idea seems to be that the European Court of Justice could rule definitively that we could revoke our triggering of Article 50 at the end of the two-year negotiating period. And if the deal is bad, or especially if there isn’t one, parliament is likely to call another referendum in those circumstances, wherein we’ll know exactly what we’re voting for, and get it right this time.

A small hope, like I say. And it doesn’t protect us from the damage that’s being inflicted in the meantime.

But a small hope is better than none at all.

Beginning of the End

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 23:56:58 +0000

A total of 47 Labour MPs voted against the Brexit bill, joining 50 SNP MPs and seven Liberal Democrats. Just one Conservative MP, Ken Clarke, joined them in the division lobbies, to applause from Labour rebels.

A fifth of Labour MPs defy three line whip to vote against article 50 bill | Politics | The Guardian

Well done to all the rebels. But really, Tories: only one? Only Ken Clarke? Is that really you doing your duty, acting in the best interests of the country?

We’re living through the death of representative democracy.

Thanks, Obama (for Real)

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 22:26:07 +0000

Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of dthe most prominent whistleblowers in modern times when she exposed the nature of modern warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with a 35-year military prison sentence, is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.

From The Guardian

Nice one. Next, pardon Snowden?

The Only Good Brexit is No Brexit

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 19:46:22 +0000

38 Degrees is consulting the public on a “DIY Brexit,” wherein the public can give their opinions on what Brexit should look like, and supposedly the results will be looked at by a group of think-tanks who are being consulted on the matter.

The things people have come up with so far all seem pretty good and sound, at a first glance (kind of hard to read, the way it’s presented with big fixed header and footer).

But. But what we want is not the best Brexit we can get. What we want is no Brexit at all.

And I think I can safely say I speak for the majority when I say that. But Theresa May and her crazy government don’t look like they’re willing to listen to anyone about it.

You know how all recent prime ministers get “isms” named after them? Ever since Thatcherism, at least? Well this one gets an alternative suffix: Not Mayism. Mayday!¹

And not the good one. That’s May Day. ↩︎

Probably a Good Time to Download Your Twitter Archive

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 19:55:32 +0000

This Bloomberg article may not be entirely serious, but it is, you know, Bloomberg:

There’s a strange idea circulating among Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain logic to it.

It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious reserves to defend the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter Inc. — at a cost of about $12 billion — and immediately shut it down.

The idea being that it would be the easiest way to stop the Trumpet tweeting negative things about Mexico.

I don’t know, he’d just find another forum, no doubt. Shit, in a week’s time he’ll be able to put whatever he wants on Whitehouse.gov.

[T]hat the idea was even raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a sentiment that presumably would be shared by U.S. investors in companies like, say, General Motors Co. or Lockheed Martin Corp., but in Mexico, the pain, and the accompanying despair, appear to be on a much greater scale.

A lot more than Mexico is at the mercy of those “seemingly random musings.”

Trump Not Appointing Palin as Scientific Advisor

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 08:06:08 +0000

There’s a story doing the rounds on Facebook that Trump has appointed Sarah Palin as Science and Technology Advisor. Terrifying, if true. But a rudimentary search tells us it’s false.

The clue was the site it was reported on — which I can’t find at the moment as I now can’t locate the post where I saw it (bloody Facebook). Not that I would have linked to it, but I might have given its name. People need to look at the sites they’re reading and evaluate them for credibility. But apparently that’s hard.

Can We Stick With Labour Now?

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 21:11:39 +0000

This story about Labour giving in to Brexit is the latest straw in a… problematic few months. I’m not sure I can stay a member of the Labour Party if the leadership is now as definitively opposed to sanity as this. While still failing to actually oppose this terrible government.

Trump/Schulz

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 09:23:34 +0000

If you’re a fan of the Illuminatus trilogy, or the works of Robert Anton Wilson in general, the idea that Trump’s speech is like the last words of Dutch Schulz is particularly amusing.

Jerry Doyle Dead

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:13:44 +0000

Sorry to hear about this:

Jerry Doyle — best known for his role on Babylon 5 — died Wednesday.

Brexit Latest Thoughts

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 13:33:46 +0000

In today’s "Brexit weekly briefing" from the Guardian, they say that:

May is soon going to have to choose between a soft and a hard Brexit – one that maximises single market access and minimises immigration controls (which the City wants), or the reverse (which a majority of British voters want)

Now, as we’ve discussed before, you can’t really argue that a majority of British voters wanted any kind of Brexit. But let’s assume they mean “The majority of those who voted,” which is fair. Even then, you can’t really, fairly, state what it is that those voters wanted, since they were sold a pack of lies, and many voted that way merely as a protest.

Self-Hosting

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 23:52:33 +0000

One very good reason why you should post at your own site, and not necessarily trust big companies to look after your stuff: Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper’s Beloved Literary Blog? – The New Yorker.

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 16:58:15 +0000

Good advice from The Intercept:

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Daily Mail Taking Over Yahoo?

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 07:56:08 +0000

Christ, we're gonna have to pull all our photos from Flickr if this goes through: Daily Mail publisher in talks with companies over Yahoo takeover.

Patience

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 23:43:08 +0000

"Would you go anywhere near a book described on its back cover as ‘a cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love’?", begins this Guardian review of Patience by Daniel Clowes.

What other answer could there be but, “Hell, yeah!”? My copy arrived today.

PC

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:05:28 +0000

Panel 3 just nails the whole “SJW” nonsense.

Source: Brostitutional Rights - Scenes From A Multiverse

Moffat Leaving Who

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 01:04:58 +0000

Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat is leaving, but his final series won’t run till next year. Nothing but a Christmas Special in 2016.

Woman Who Shot at Home Depot Shoplifters Vows to Never Help Anyone Again - The New York Times

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 07:04:33 +0000

Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez of Michigan, who had been a passerby when she noticed the commotion, lost her gun-carrying permit and got 18 months’ probation.

The NY Times reports this without comment. This crazy woman shot at people who were suspected of shoplifting. Not murder, not terrorism. Shoplifting. And the lesson she says she’s learned is, “I’ll never help anyone again.”

The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 14:43:44 +0000

Paterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers talks wisely about the southern USA.

If we want to truly honor our Southern forefathers, we should do it by moving on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity, the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them.

Today's xkcd is weirdly compelling

Tue, 26 May 2015 19:33:18 +0000

Just run your eyes over the names and let the imagined connections form.

And look at the hover text; do you know who the missing doctor is?

The Tories want to reintroduce the Lord Chamberlain

Sun, 24 May 2015 19:11:03 +0000

From The Guardian:

David Cameron has backed plans to give Ofcom stronger powers to prevent the broadcast of “extremist messages” despite concerns from one of his own cabinet ministers that this could amount to state censorship.
The prime minister appeared to support Theresa May, the home secretary, after the Guardian revealed a split in the cabinet over her counter-extremism measures.

Let’s return to the days when creations had to be authorised by a state censor, says Cameron.

Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 13:13:01 +0000

Why have I never seen this before? Excellent. Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings.

Do you think he might be a fan of Sublime Text?

Eclipse SVN key bindings not working

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 12:11:32 +0000

I often get problems with the key bindings when I create a new Eclipse workspace. The recent ones with Subversion seemed intractable until I found this answer on the mighty StackOverflow.

It’s a frustrating thing when your muscle-memory has an action and it doesn’t trigger the expected response.

keyboard shortcuts – SVN key bindings not working in Eclipse – Stack Overflow.

Netflix: because your DVDS are allll the way over there

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 13:14:38 +0000

So true.

“Netflix: because your DVDS are allll the way over there”.

EU 'benefit tourism' court ruling is common sense, says Cameron

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:18:24 +0000

I’m assuming the UK government won’t be bound by this European court ruling. After all, UKIP don’t like European court rulings, and government policy these days is all about keeping the Kippers sweet, isn’t it?

EU ‘benefit tourism’ court ruling is common sense, says Cameron

MPs to escape expenses investigations after paperwork destroyed by Parliament - Telegraph

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:24:31 +0000

You are fucking kidding me!

MPs accused of abusing the unreformed expenses system will escape official investigation after the House of Commons authorities destroyed all record of their claims.

BBC Music Greatest Covers

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 23:03:12 +0000

This BBC Music "Greatest Covers" poll has some quite good -- and interesting -- choices. It has the right answer, of course, but also Hüsker Dü and The Fall (and not even The Fall's best cover -- that would be "Xanadu").

Link: The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:33:30 +0000

The One Correct Way to do Dependency Injection | Schauderhaft In the end, "Dependency Injection" just means "passing parameters"; which was always the right way to do things anyway. From my Pinboard

2001: The aliens that almost were

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 12:51:33 +0000

[W]e could summarize the whole ordeal by saying that Kubrick tried to the last minute not to follow Sagan's advice!.

An interesting piece on Kubrick, Clarke and collaborators trying to design the aliens for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Via Daring Fireball.

We Are The Clash: The Last Stand of a Band That Mattered by Mark Andersen & Ralph Heibutzki — Kickstarter

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:04:55 +0000

A Kickstarter for a book on the last two years of The Clash. I should volunteer to be interviewed, as I saw them thrice on the busking tour.

Scapple: new from Literature and Latte

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:46:26 +0000

New Mac app from the makers of Scrivener. Looks good. Mind mapping, but without the requirement to have a single central node. In beta at the moment.

Google is Buying Sparrow, but not Updating the Apps

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:39:59 +0000

Google buys Sparrow, current apps will not get any new features | The Verge.

This is annoying. The only thing that was stopping me from making Sparrow my default mail client on my iPhone was the fact that it doesn’t do rotation to landscape mode yet. Now it looks like it never will.

It’s rarely good in the long run when big software companies hoover up small ones, it seems to me.

A British Court Bans a TV Broadcast

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:44:19 +0000

BBC lawyers consider formal appeal over court ban on riots drama | Media | guardian.co.uk.

The most chilling thing about this is not so much banning the broadcast; there could conceivably be a legitimate reason for that, though it’s hard to imagine a good one. Rather it is this:

For legal reasons, the Guardian cannot name the judge who made the ruling, the court in which he is sitting or the case he is presiding over.

This meta-blocking smacks of the "superinjunctions" that we heard a lot about a few years back (but which strangely seem to have dropped out of sight recently).

Bash - how to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 11:40:20 +0000

Recursively finding the latest modified file in a directory.

From the mighty Stack Overflow, some useful tips on using find with dates.

Weird Law-Enforcement Things

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:38:33 +0000

There were three slightly weird law-enforcement- or intelligence-related stories in the news today:

Two jailed in Northern Ireland over police officer's murder.
I heard the policeman’s wife on the radio. She spoke calmly about how getting the murderers off the streets was good for the community, and positively about the people who had bravely given evidence (at least one had to be given protection).

The odd, disturbing, and intelligence-community-related thing is that army intelligence had a tracker device in the car of one of the murderers, and at first they refused to reveal its details to the police undertaking the investigation. The police had to threaten to get a warrant. Then when they did provide the data, it turned out to have sections mysteriously missing. You have to sympathise with the PSNI here: they had both the Continuity IRA bampots and the army working against them.

'Dark Arts' involved in MI6 officer's death.
So what, this GCHQ codebreaker on secondment locked himself inside a bag using magic? I’m surprised that they’re even considering that it might not be murder here; or at least that someone has covered something up. More importantly, there’s the fact that the DNA evidence got messed up by a typo. Surely there’s got to be a better way?

Police officers deleted records of crime gangs
And then there’s this business about the corruption in the Met. Evidence allegedly deleted on the orders of crime gangs? That’s some scary stuff. I’m pretty sure that when the Serious Organised Crime Agency was set up, it was meant to be anti-organised crime.

No real connection between these, I just heard about them all today.

Penguin Pete's Blog - Using Bash To Solve A Brain Teaser

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:49:47 +0000

[Great use of Bash scripting to do a maths puzzle, but demonstrating lots of useful features.](http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php?title=using_bash_to_solve_a_brain_teaser&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)

Link: Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:21:41 +0000

Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band « East Kent Live Lit.

Some nice thoughts on what my friends in Edinburgh get up to with their spoken-word performances and chapbook publishing.

I really must get up for one of their performances.

Link: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:00:36 +0000

How good scripts get turned into bad movies: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo

Link: How to Write a Story, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:00:21 +0000

"The first step is waking up." Brilliant: How to Write a Story, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Link: "Long-standing party loyalties, even in a less tribal world, are not easily suspended"

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:45:40 +0000

"... But May 2010 offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape politics for the better. It must be seized."

Fascinating list of signatories to this letter in The Guardian: “Long-standing party loyalties, even in a less tribal world, are not easily suspended

Link: An Awesome Interpretation of Avatar

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:00:07 +0000

Brilliant analysis of what could have been "really" happening in Avatar. Don't read if you haven't seen the film.: An Awesome Interpretation of Avatar

Link: A Self-Referential Story

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:00:29 +0000

"Sentient sentences": an astonishing piece of work.: A Self-Referential Story

A quote from Amanda Palmer: asking for money for your art is not selling out

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:28:18 +0000

ASKING FOR MONEY FOR YOUR ART IS NOT SELLING OUT.
selling out is when you go against your own heart, ideals and authenticity to make money.

selling out is an action, a 180 from a stated position.

i don’t consider pop stars to be sell-outs. the lady gagas, britneys and madonnas of the world are UNABASHED about why they got in this game: fame, money, über-success, chart-topping hits.

but if neil young were to suddenly hire the matrix to write him a thumpin' dance album and then appear on saturday night live snogging bob dylan, i’d have reservations about his integrity.

From Virtual Crowdsurfing

Link: Do I know where hell is? Hell is in "Hello"

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:00:08 +0000

God save us from crazy religious nutters.

The title is taken from ‘Wandrin’ Star', by the way.: Do I know where hell is? Hell is in “Hello”

Link: A report on FT.com: The man who invented exercise

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:00:31 +0000

Amazing story. Hard to believe that the benefits of aerobic exercise were unknown as recently as the 1940s.: A report on FT.com: The man who invented exercise

Novelist Joanna Kavenna points out that I was wrong

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:38:56 +0000

Ok, I was wrong when I said that no other genres had disparaging abbreviations.

"I don't understand what chick-lit means, and to a degree it's just used to dismiss quite a lot of writing by women," she says. "It's a blanket term that renders a wide variety of literature frivolous. It's used either to dismiss the writing or to avoid thinking about it." Stephen Moss interviews novelist Joanna Kavenna on her seven unpublishable novels, and eventual success | Special Reports | guardian.co.uk Books

Looking forward to hearing this

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:10:24 +0000

My favourite author and a favourite TV writer: together again for the first time!

Iain Banks has now taken a look at the recording script of my BBC Radio 4 adaptation of his novella ‘The State of the Art’ and pronounces himself pleased.

From Paul Cornell’s blog.