100 suns

And of course, the eugenicists also like to make claims that various groups have more or less innate intelligence. And of course it is always the groups that they don't like which turn out to have lower innate intelligence: how convenient for them. And, of course, when you actually look, you find that measured intelligence in given groups has changed enormously over periods of less than a century. Which is far, far too short a time for any genetically-driven change to happen. Because, of cou...

Sometimes people will say that the reason we're all doomed is that stupid people outbreed smart people. For this to be true you need three things: intelligence can be defined in a useful way; intelligence is largely genetic; more intelligent people have fewer children than less intelligent people. Let's just assume all those things are true, and see where it leads us. A little bit of maths will show you that, if there are two groups, where couples from one group have on average cs children...

I am the one, Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand / My image is of agony, my servants rape the land / Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain / Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name / Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law / My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore I twist the truth, I rule the world, my crown is called deceit / I am the emperor of lies, you grovel at my feet / I rob you and I slaughter you, your downfall is my gain / And still you pla...

What Cummings did will kill people: probably hundreds or thousands of people as people think that if he can ignore the rules, so can they. Johnson did not sack Cummings. Dominic Cummings is more important to Boris Johnson than the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. ...

So Dominic Cummings has said that he drove to Bernard Castle (having previously lied and said he didn't I think) to test his eyesight. Because that's what you do if you're worried about your eyesight: you get in a car, with your wife and young child, and you drive 30 miles. Risking your life, your wife and young child's lives, and the lives of anyone you hit along the way if it turns out that your eyesight isn't so good after all. Something seems to be terribly wrong with his mind: if he th...

Collateral [mass noun] something pledged as security for repayment of a loan, to be forfeited in the event of a default: she put her house up as collateral for the bank loan. What does Cummings have over Johnson? It could be just that Cummings is Johnson's brain: Johnson is not very smart, may have been brain-damaged by CV19 and without Cummings he's in quite deep trouble. But it could be more. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament delivered its report into allegations o...

Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Tell me: would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays. [...] You're just mixed up about things in general. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments ...

So Cummings, his wife and young child, drove from London to Durham while both he and his wife were infectious. If his child didn't have CV19 at the start of the journey they did at the end, after 5 hours in a car with two people who definitely had it. And, again, it's a 5 hour journey, with a small child in the car: they definitely stopped on the way at service stations, and definitely took the child to the loo, probably infecting lots of other people. And they made this trip so his parents c...

So, I've just discovered that some of the more silly1 Hi-Fi people use valve2 amplifiers with valve rectifiers, because they are, apparently higher fidelity. I have no problem with valve stereo amplifiers – I own two, one of which I made – although I would hesitate to call them 'high fidelity': they sound wonderful, but so do records (records played through valve amplifiers sound even better), but they both sound wonderful because they have significant distortion. 'That warm sound' ... is dist...

is paved with good experiments. ...

I’ve spent my life trying to build elegant tools to solve hard problems. Now I am old and tired and somehow I find myself in a world of mud where the only tool is a club with nails hammered into it, used by swinging it wildly about, spattering the ground with fragments of skull and brain of friend and enemy alike. The nails, formerly rusted iron, are now stainless steel scavenged from a vast, broken needle made of strange metals: no-one now remembers it was once a spacecraft. This is the sum of...

It may not work well, but I wonder. But when other worlds exist and even when they are almost forgotten, there are still debris in this world. At least I think it's important to recognize that the other world already exists. ...

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...