100 suns

The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good – because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn't it? – John Cleese, apparently, but probably just reading a script ...

There hasn't been a COBR meeting since the 10th of May. After all, it's not like we're living through an emergency or anything, is it? And those awkward people disagreeing with the plans laid down by the mighty Cummings: we can't have them, can we. Jolly good, what? ...

I don't know what to think about this. Obviously a lot of statues commemorate horrible people, and those statues should not be there1: no-one needs statues of people whose importance is that they got rich from the slave trade. The people defending such statues are either racists, stupid, or both2. But what about Churchill? Clearly he had some views which are repugnant. But so did almost everyone: I was alive in the 1970s and even then many, many people had really repugnant views (probably i...

Moral theatre doing or saying something which has no good consequence and quite possibly a harmful one but which appears to have a good consequence on casual inspection. Generally done to impress people with the virtue and purity of the person performing the act, often also because the act, although meaningless, 'feels good'. See also virtue semaphore, security cinema. – First Encyclopedia of Tlön, 23rd edition, 2049 ...

In 1990, about 1.9 billion people were living in extreme poverty. In 2015 about 730 million were1. The number of people living in absolute poverty has gone down by a factor of about 2.6 in a generation: the number of people living in extreme poverty in 2015 was less than half of that in 1990. But that's not really the right number: in 1990 the world's population was about 5.3 billion people: about one person in 2.8 was living in extreme poverty in 1990. In 2015 the world's population was abo...

has changed beyond recognition they say: once it was a party of, well, conservatives – people who would prefer that things stay the same if possible – who had no time for people who whine or people who regarded themselves as victims; today it is a party of whining self-declared victims who want to tear everything apart. Except not so much has changed, has it? The conservative party has always been known as 'the stupid party'. It still is. ...

So, Priti Patel again: I have already said repeatedly there is no place for racism in our country or in society. So why are you pushing legislation which targets Roma? Because there's a name for that, and that name is 'racism'. Just because you aren't white, and just because you were the target of racism, does not mean you aren't a racist. If you do things or say things which are racist, or support people who do or say such things, then you're a racist. And, Priti Patel, the things you d...

So Priti Patel thinks that the removal of a statue commemorating a slave trader is 'utterly disgraceful'. Of course she does. After all, it's important to commemorate slave traders, isn't it? Let's just remember that Priti Patel is also the person who wants to make being a gypsy illegal: an act which would be explicit ethnic cleansing. I'm half-surprised she'd not campaigning to bring slavery back. Perhaps she is. She's really a piece of work: a bully, a liar, a bigot and, if that wasn't e...

Protests about the brutal way the police treat black people are pretty obviously going to make CV19 worse: saying they won't is just implausible. But on the other hand, saying 'the police can kill people and you are not allowed to protest because CV19' is clearly opening the way for some very nasty behaviour indeed. 'How convenient that there is an epidemic,' the authoritarian thinks, 'now we can say that people are not allowed to protest while we round up people we don't like and ship them of...

Exhibit 1: Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square [...]. – John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association Exhibit 2: There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders [...] I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty. – Adolf Eichmann, Nazi ...

Corporate clients will get access to Zoom’s end-to-end encryption service now being developed, but Yuan said free users won’t enjoy that level of privacy, which makes it impossible for third parties to decipher communications. 'Free users for sure we don’t want to give that because we also want to work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose'. – Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, 2nd June 2020 So that's just fine, then. ...

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past g...

Don't read this, just delete your Facebook account. Violet Blue: New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose spotted that the "top 10 stories on Facebook over the past 24 hours" were all from Fox News, "Blue Lives Matter," and similar sources. Meaning: the slant of all stories in FB's "top 10" (surfaced to the masses) were pro-police and Trump's agenda. Roose documented that FB's daily specials were "about Trump declaring antifa a terrorist group," he wrote. "One is a feel-good story about a t...

I'm interested in how many people will die because of what Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson have done: Cummings by treating the lockdown rules as something that apply to other, lesser people, and Johnson by demonstrating that doing that is just fine. The result will be that people take lockdown and social distancing less seriously, and some of them die as a result. So I wrote an epidemic simulator. It's fairly simple-minded, but it does the susceptible / infected / immune-or-dead thing. An...

from the 1950s and design technology around people. We could have programming editors which treat code as a structure which can be dynamically reformatted depending on the window width the person editing or reading the code wants, and programming languages designed to accommodate that. Well, in the late 1980s I will use an editor like that and it will be fine, although somewhat curiously constructed, as things written by the fae often are. But none of that will exist until the late 1980s: thir...

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...