100 suns

I wonder what proportion of the people who so busily argue that 'master', 'slave', 'blacklist' and so on could not possibly be offensive terms when used in computing are black? In May 2020, Google reported that 3.7% of their employees and contractors were black. That number covers more than just programmers: it covers, presumably, cleaners and catering people for instance. Perhaps the proportion of black people is much higher among programmers ... don't be silly, of course it's not: it's lowe...

Very tall towers become exponentially wide in their lowest levels, and how high they can be is bounded by the strength of the rock on which they rest. This also places a bound on the height of mountains: tall enough mountains sink into the crust of the planet. ...

Uber are a deeply, deeply shitty company. There's Facebook shitty, and then there's shitty: I think that government said that they made a mistake. It's a serious mistake. We've made mistakes too, right, with self-driving... So I think that people make mistakes. It doesn't mean that they can never be forgiven. – Dara Khosrowshah, CEO of Uber The 'mistake' he's talking about is killing a journalist by cutting him up with a bone saw. And apparently that is forgivable. Here's a clue: no, it's...

The maintainers of Linux are making changes to discourage words with unfortunate connotations following some recommendations. Words like 'blacklist', 'whitelist', 'master' & 'slave'. And of course a lot of people are up in arms about this: Would these SJWs please take Etymology 101 before banning every other word in English. Blacklist has nothing to do with ethnicity or BLM or IOU or WTF, etc. Stop the nonsense. Well. Perhaps people should also study some linguistics, where they will ...

The mass of the Sun is about 5μs or about 1.5km. ...

There's a fairly mad theory that planet 9 (which probably does not exist) is a primordial black hole, in this case meaning an object far too light to have formed from a collapsed star. I suspect primordial black holes may not exist, and we've already done measurements which show they are at least scarce if they do. Well, here's an experiment which will tell us if any exist in the outer Solar system. In the likely case that it finds none we have another data point which puts an upper bound on ...

if they can write: if they can't, then it is written by the losers. ...

reStructuredText manages: to be very painful to write compared to, for instance, Markdown (why double backquotes around code? I mean, seriously, what purpose does that serve?); to be complicated enough that you often need to look things up, and end up using it in inconsistent ways ('what's the right syntax for a reference to a method in another class again?, oh, I'll just use ``...``: it's wrong but it will do'); to not be expressive enough that it becomes second nature in the way (La)TeX doe...

I feel sorry for all the people whose sense of well-being is so dependent on them having a car, people whose thinking is driven by the mindless fear of change and the complete inability to reason about, well, anything. I feel sorry for the people whose tiny sense of self-worth is so threatened by cyclists1: I always suspect because people who cycle a lot get to look kind of fit and attractive, instead of like blobs of dirty grease2. It must be horrible being them. Well, ten years ago I used t...

People argue, endlessly, repetitively and in enormous detail, that changing terminology doesn't matter, and indeed is just a waste of time1. Changing language does matter: language is an enormously important part of what it means to be human – our use of natural language is arguably our single defining characteristic as a species. The choice of language is really important to humans at an extremely basic level2. If you haven't read a book which makes you cry or makes you really angry I feel ve...

BERT is a natural language model built by Google. It was trained using a corpus of more than three billion words of English text1. If a human could read at 200 words a minute, 12 hours a day, every day, it would take a little less than 60 years for them to read this much text, once. BERT has more than a third of a billion parameters. This is nothing like how humans learn a language, which they do in a few years with a relatively minute amount of data. The current AI hype cycle is built on t...

Sometimes, even very rich people have to obey the law. 'We were treated as if we were criminals, it's not fair' they say. Yes, you were treated like a criminal because you are a criminal, fucker and, just sometimes, even loathsome parasites like you get to obey the law, however much you whine and bribe. I know, this almost never happens. ...

The underlying argument of many climate-change skeptics1 is anthropogenic climate change is frightening, therefore it must not be true and the evidence for it must be faked. It is entertaining to apply this argument in some other places to see how well it works: bankruptcy is frightening, therefore I cannot be bankrupt and the nasty demands for payment people keep sending me can be ignored. Or: cancer is frightening, therefore I do not have cancer and the red stuff I am coughing up is ...

So Dominic Cummingsthe very wonderful UK government is in the process of buying a stake in OneWeb1 with the money of his slavesits taxpayers because, among other things, it [...] hopes the network could also work as a replacement for the loss of access to the EU's Galileo sat-nav system. Because, of course, it is trivial to repurpose satellites, some of which are already in orbit, to do what GPS does. Because, of course, they have sufficiently accurate clocks, and their radios work on the s...

A little while ago I pointed to an amazing paper which argued that there's a black hole in a naked-eye-visible star system, about 1000ly from us. There may not be: Is HR 6819 a triple system containing a black hole? – An alternative explanation A stripped-companion origin for Be stars: clues from the putative black holes HR 6819 and LB-1 The nearest discovered black hole is likely not in a triple configuration So, that's sad, but it's also a good example of science doing its job: someone cl...

So, Germany has offered to help the UK with their contact-tracing app An app which is deployed, whose source code is publicly available, with all the commit messages being in English and with at least some English internationalization already complete (and, I think, all of it). The British, of course, spent £11 million on an app that they basically knew could never work. And of course they will now refuse Germany's help because it's not British, and only British is good. Better Dead than NOT...

If you think we are doing something about climate change, you're wrong: almost without exception we are doing nothing. One group of people sign agreements which makes everyone feel good and pretend that this is doing something, which it's not. Another group of people pretends that it isn't happening or that, if it is happening it is someone else's fault, and this is not doing anything either, but is worse in other ways (see below). There are a minute number of people who might actually make a...

In case you had any doubt about whether Trump was a racist, he's just made it very clear: of course he is. I've said this before: Trump is a racist, and supporting racists is racism. That means that the people who support Trump are racists. The whole claim that somehow they are good people who don't understand who they're voting for is insulting their intelligence: no, they're not too stupid to understand that Trump is a racist, rather they voted for him because they understand and support wh...

So, Donald Trump is doing so well at dealing with CV19: so far more than 125,000 people have died, and the true number will be significantly above that both because they won't be counting properly and also because they'll be busy suppressing the information. But, but: the mortality rate is about 2.3 times higher for Black Americans than for other groups1. If you're a racist who does not care about taking a few casualties along the way that's very convenient, isn't it? One comforting thing ab...

Because of course Boris Johnson was stealing a phrase from Churchill, because of course brexit is like the battle of Britain. Or, at least, pretending it is lets us all wallow in nostalgia for a time only a tiny minority of us can remember. Except this time, the nazis are on the other side. Perhaps that should be a clue: if you find yourself on the side of the nazis you are on the wrong side. ...

Famously, history has not ended. Except it is ending: you don't get to have exponential processes with a physical component which run for ever without hitting various walls. Humans have run several such processes for hundreds of years and we're now hitting the walls. If we don't do anything about it then the walls will kill most of us: there's going to be an awful lot of history for a century or so and then none at all for a very long time. And, of course, rather than solving the fucking pro...

If you assume that sending a person to live on Mars requires about as much fuel as sending three people to stay the Moon for a day or so did, then each person we send to live on Mars requires about 770 cubic metres of RP-11. Burning this fuel produces about 1.9 million kg of CO2. If we assume that the production and other costs associated with a launch double this2 then each person we send to live on Mars results in about 3.8 million kg of CO2 being emitted. This is entirely negligible if we ...

I've always been confused about why the units of torque, which are force × distance (in SI base units N×m) are the same as those for work: why, in SI units, is torque measured in joules? But it's obvious, because torque really is work: if you turn something through 1 radian exerting a torque of 1Nm, then you do 1J of work on whatever it is you are turning. The units of torque are really joules per radian, but radians, of course, are dimensionless. I don't know why it took me so long to unders...

If you are a narcissist and someone offers you help, you assume it's because you are so wonderful, not because they have something to gain by it. This makes narcissists very vulnerable to political influence operations: they genuinely do not realise what is going on because their understanding of what motivates people is so badly damaged. ...

CERN wants to build a new collider, and inevitably people will say that we should use the money for something more useful. There is nothing more useful than what CERN does. If we're going to have a long-term future as a civilisation ('long-term' being more than a human lifetime ahead), we need two critical bits of technology (we need others, but we need these two). The first is really good batteries. Well, you carry around with you a machine which pretends to be a communication device but is ...

So, for a long time, the UK has at least tried to give aid to people who need it: people who were starving, for instance. Now we're going to be giving it to people who will help our foreign policy objectives. People in eastern Europe who are not starving, but who might help us fight the pesky Russians. So the people who we could have saved will now die. So Dominic Cummings has killed some more people: how many thousands of deaths is he responsible for now? ...

One of my grandparents was born in 1887. He died just before I was born. If he had been American and black (he was not either) there's a good chance his parents would have been born as slaves. If he'd lived a little longer as well I would have known someone whose parents were born as slaves. Certainly people alive today knew people whose parents were born as slaves. This is not ancient history. ...

So the UK is finally going to switch to the Apple-Google model for its contact-tracing app. Although they didn't tell Apple this: even though Downing Street1 said the government had worked closely with Apple and Google Apple commented it is difficult to understand what these claims are as they haven't spoken to us. Matt Hancock2 also said we've agreed to join forces with Google and Apple, to bring the best bits of both systems together to which Apple commented we don't know what ...

I've just been looking at my copy of Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. There is a spooky footnote in the introduction which must have been added late in the publication process, saying As of April 1973, there are significant indications that Cygnus X-1 and other compact x-ray sources may be black holes. When they wrote the book there were no known black holes, and I don't think everyone even thought they were physically plausible. I bought it in 1985, Hawking conceded his bet that Cygnus X-1 was...

This now seems alarmingly prescient. I think this is more evidence for what is probably the NSA's biggest problem: competence. We already know that they were not competent to prevent a fairly junior person having access to an enormous amount of sensitive data, and walking off with it, which does not say anything good about their internal security practices. Now we know that this person successfully used a really obvious social-engineering attack on other people in the organisation: you don't ...