100 suns

When you sign some agreement to get an account with a social media company, do you read the terms & conditions? I'm pretty sure almost no-one does. This is not the social media company's fault: if you sign a document you have not read you're a fool (and almost all of us, therefore, are fools). But there's a more interesting question: what proportion of people who agree to terms & conditions understand them? I think that proportion is approximately zero, for two reasons: the terms &a...

So, you disbelieve all of the good evidence – all of the scientific evidence – about audio right? You think that you need to listen to 50s & 60s jazz recorded on tapes with, on a good day, 60-odd dB of dynamic range (say 12-bits worth – 72dB of dynamic range – to be optimistic) using 24-bit files – 144dB of dynamic range – despite all the maths and experimental evidence that say this is just not true. Because magic. But that's all the science you disbelieve, so that's OK. When some anti-v...

It's tempting to think that the world is now run by a conspiracy of very rich, very selfish people: people who care only about themselves and who are happy to burn their own children. But I don't think it is: conspiracies are extremely hard to maintain and I don't think they've ever really tried to conspire. Rather they've just done their evil in full view. And this works for a simple reason: the difference between the rich people – the people who can fund the politicians who drive brexit &am...

Having grown up in a world where people were just beginning to realise that black holes were not just mathematical curiosities, it is just astonishing to be alive in one where we not only know that they're just everywhere, but we have heard them colliding, we have pictures of the immediate surroundings of one, and now we can see, without a telescope, stars which are in a system including a black hole. We live in a golden age for astronomy and astrophysics. ...

One-bit thinking is a common error made particularly by computing people. The error is to treat something which needs to be represented by a real number (a continuum of values) as if it was either true or false, and if it is not completely true, it is completely false. In other words something which needs a real number has been replaced by a single bit: a boolean value. For example, let's say you're trying to make the computing security of your organisation better. Pretty soon you discover t...

When people vote for someone with well-documented views then they are supporting those views, and supporting racist views is racism: there just is no way around that. If you vote for a racist, you are a racist. You don't get to say 'oh, I voted for Trump but I'm not a racist', because you are. And you don't get to say 'all those people who voted for Trump are not racists': yes, yes, those people are racists. There are a very large number of racists, it turns out. ...

Then you have not thought hard enough. The reaction of politicians to an epidemic which, unchecked, might kill half a million people in the UK and has probably already killed over a hundred thousand people in the US is that, if letting more people die will improve their chance of keeping power then they will do that: they do not care, at all about anyone but themselves. So what do you think their reaction is going to be to climate change: a problem which, unchecked, will kill billions of human...

Successful politicians1 do not care about you: they care about themselves. Boris Johnson cares about Boris Johnson, and that's the only person he cares about; Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump & that's the only person he cares about. Smarter politicians are better at pretending that they care about other people: Johnson might fool you that he cares about the splendid people of England2 in their fight against the fiendish foreign European foreigners with their dangerous elite liberal way...

Physicists are well-known for wading into other fields assuming that they're essentially simple, and studied only by people too stupid (in other words: not by physicists) to realise that, often completely missing all the subtleties which mean that, in fact, they are not simple at all. This is particularly true for fields where there is a lot of inherent complexity. Physicists tend to be very good at approximating complex systems by much simpler ones1: sometimes this works brilliantly, quite ...

Yesterday I wrote that the important thing when looking at COVID-19 deaths is the death or infection rate: how many people are dying or have been infected per million, or equivalently what a given person's chance of having died or having become infected is. And I said that the right way to compare various approaches to dealing with the epidemic was to look at these rates – at the numbers normalised by population rather not the raw numbers of people dying or being infected. This is, eventually,...

[This is almost entirely wrong: pay no attention to it.] It is obviously complicated to know what the important statistics are for COVID-19, not least because the situation is rapidly changing, there are exponential processes involved, different countries are not always counting things the same way and are not all as good as each other at counting things at all. But I do know what the wrong statistics are: any number which is of the form 'n per country' is almost always meaningless and often a...

I was very much hoping for splendidly gothic vampires when we moved here – the kind who are never seen except in immaculate late-19th-century evening dress complete with silk-lined cloak (the linings red for the men, very dark blue for the women). The kind who prey exclusively on impressionable young county tories. Sadly we only get the shamblers: the kind who will drain a sheep if they can't find a human. Perhaps that's because, even here in deepest ruralshire, there are insufficient young tor...

We all worship geniuses, but while we might respect people who are really good at some craft we also kind of sneer at them. What they're doing is only a craft after all: some kind of lesser skill which you learn through an apprenticeship and long practice rather than at university, the way proper geniuses learn. But genius and being really good at a craft are much more similar than people often like to admit: one of the most important characteristics of being a genius is the ability to put in ...

Or: the UK's contact-tracing app. If Google, a company whose entire business model is based on surveillance, are not supporting the model you want to use because it's too privacy-invasive, then you kind of know you're making a bad decision. If you find yourselves dealing with Palantir as part of providing the app, then you kind of know you're making a bad decision. (Dealing with Palantir is like that meeting where you realise that the chief sales person has eyes which glow a dull red and horns...

אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט / a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot – Max Weinreich A programming language is a dialect with a standards organisation – tfb ...

Arguing with a crank is like fighting an octopus: whenever you think you’re winning there’s another tentacle to deal with. But the cranks are now in power: the octopus now has an infinite number of tentacles, and a flamethrower. ...

To make a hundred dollars into a hundred and ten dollars – this is work. To make a hundred million into a hundred and ten million, this is inevitable. ...

Other scientist I had this clever idea that you could do something like [...] only of course the engineering considerations would make it completely impractical: maybe in a century. Obviously you will credit me with the idea. Astronomer Oh, yes, we used to do that, but we worked out that [...] would be better. Of course what we do now requires [obviously completely absurd engineering even in theory], but we got it all sorted out in the end. Other scientist [gives up science, becomes co...

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. [But] that’s not the way the world really works anymore’. – Ron Suskind ...