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100 suns

A machine made of wood, metal, paint, bone and magic

Ten thousand

I think that there is a lot to be said for the idea made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, that it takes about 10,000 hours. As with the equally famous idea about walking 10,000 steps a day, this seems to be something pulled out of a hat as well as being a conveniently round number. But in both cases the numbers are actually very reasonable. For 10,000 steps: well, I walk at about 100 steps/minute and I suspect this is fairly average. So 10,000 steps is about 100 minutes of walking per day. This ...
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Nature

Our knowledge of our immediate surroundings – of 'nature' – is declining. The reason for this decline in knowledge of the environment (and not just some idealised 'nature': cities are full of fascination as well, if you only take the time to walk through them) is simple: time. A human childhood, to age 15 and allowing 12 hours a day, is about 65,700 hours: the amount of time a child has to spend on anything is limited by the amount of time they have to spend on everything else. In 1913, when ...
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Clown

28th August 2020: People will again be encouraged to go back to the workplace in a government ad campaign starting next week. 19th September 2020: PM considering new restrictions amid second coronavirus wave Because it obviously wasn't possible to foresee that happening, less than three weeks ago, was it? Well, obviously it wasn't possible if you're an entitled clown with a degree in showing off, guided by a crank. ...
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Bad wolf

The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know he showed you too. That you don't just give up. You don't just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what's right when everyone else just runs away, and I just can't ...
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Conspiracy

The scale of the climate change conspiracy really is breathtaking. The hidden superiors who benefit from the obvious hoax of global warming being real must be an enormously powerful elite. Consider that they must convince people who work on climate but who aren't in on the hoax and who don't stand to benefit from it -- drones like me and the thousands like me -- to keep earning our meagre wages working 'for the good of humanity' rather than making the financially and socially preferable choice...
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Cold war

The vast naïvity of the people who declared that the cold war was over, and the west won never ceases to amaze me. Did they learn nothing from history? Did they pay any attention to what happened to Napoleon in 1812 and what happened to the Germans between 1941 and 1945? The Russians are really, really good at retreating further than their attacker thinks possible, taking losses greater than their attacker thinks possible, and then winning. The cold war is not yet over, and the west is not winni...
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Silicon valley ethos

People talk about the 'silicon valley ethos' as if it'a a good thing. So, let's remember what the silicon valley ethos actually is. It's the ethos that gave us techbros, gamergate and female participation in open source projects sitting at 1 or 2% (who knows what black participation is, but I expect it is very, very tiny). It's the ethos that drove down female CS & IT graduation rates in the US from 38% in 1984 to 18% in 2011. It's the ethos that gave us (male, white) people explaining that...
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A theory

I'm still very puzzled by what the UK junta government is trying to achieve. Here's a theory. While I think it's safe to say they have no long-term plans because they're not smart enough to do long-term planning, they do have the standard fascist authoritarian populist short-term plan, which is simple: blame other people. Blame foreigners, blame the gypsies, blame the Jews or the Muslims, blame remainers, blame experts, blame intellectuals, but blame someone else. So they need someone to ...
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The rule of law

If I see the rule of law being broken in a way that I find unacceptable then, of course, I will go. – Robert Buckland, UK Justice Secretary So if the law is broken in a way you find acceptable, why then, that's OK is it? I'll bear that in mind, then: in future I'll only break the law if I think that I'm doing it in a way that I find acceptable. ...
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Theory of mind

As recorded, [Trump's statement that he wanted to 'play down' CV19 early in 2020] reads like a cold-blooded confession that Trump intentionally concealed deadly knowledge at a time—February and March—when that knowledge could have saved lives. But you can reach that conclusion only if you believe that Trump knows things the way fully rational people know them: as statements about reality that exist independently from the speaker. Trump’s mind does not work that way. He does not observe the worl...
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Their law

The English UK government is intentionally breaking the law. But of course it will expect the people it governs – especially those who are not English – to obey the rules it sets for them: not because they are laws, which count for nothing, but simply because it has power over the people it governs. There is a name for this form of government: tyranny. ...
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Rule by idiot

In 2016, Donald Trump's Twitter password was yourefired: two English words with no substitutions and in a single case. Two English words which would be rather easy to guess for anyone who knew anything about him. This is known because of the 2012 Linkedin leak: Donald Trump has (or had, in 2012) a Linkedin account, and the unsalted SHA-1 hash (07b8938319c267dcdb501665220204bbde87bf1d) of his LinkedIn password was included in the leak. It is easy to verify that the password above hashes to thi...
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Rule by toddler

The UK government admits that it is planning to intentionally break international law. It is staggering to see a British minister brazenly admit to Parliament that the government intends to breach international law. Yet that is what Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, did this week – even if he sought to qualify the move as "very specific and limited". [...] As EU leaders are already asking, how can they do a trade deal with a country that is talking of ripping up a treaty it agree...
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A bit of smoke in the air

The skies are orange in California, but it's 'just a bit of smoke in the air', right? CV19 is a much worse problem. It's not. CV19 might kill 1 person in 100 as a plausible worst case, so 70 million people. And it will go away: there will be a vaccine almost certainly (and there will be other pandemics of course, and they will kill people too). Climate change as a plausible worst case might kill 9 people in 10 – more than 6 billion people – and that 'bit of smoke in the air' is an early s...
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Tantrum diplomacy

So the UK has apparently not just torn up the legal agreement it made with the EU. For which read: the UK has, in fact, just torn up the legal agreement it made with the EU and shown the world exactly what its word is worth: nothing. Populist governments: the spoiled three-year-old children of international diplomacy. ...
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What do they want?

The UK's government is driving the UK off a cliff. What do they think they are doing? In the case of Trump this is easy to answer: he wants to be dictator, for his family to rule after him, and given his vast corruption he is completely terrified about what will happen to him if he loses power and the protections that come with it. For the UK the conspiracy theorists' answer is that Cummings, Johnson and the tories wish to simply extract all of the money from the UK as the tories ever have ...
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The myth of the lone genius

One of the reasons why Stephen Wolfram's crankery is taken seriously by reviewers is the myth of the lone genius: the idea of some brilliant man – and it is always a man, of course – who spends years toiling in seclusion to come up with a theory which changes the world. The exemplar of this is Einstein: didn't he work, alone, on relativity while doing a day job as a patent clerk, only to publish the theory out of the blue in 1905? Well, he did work as a patent clerk, but that's the sort of thi...
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Stephen Wolfram is a crank

There is no doubt that Stephen Wolfram is extremely clever1. Sadly there is also no doubt that he is a crank. He may, in fact be the best example I know of why cranks are not just stupid people who think they are clever: cranks can be – and very often are – clever people. As I wrote yesterday cranks don't realise when they don't understand something: for cranks, there are no known unknowns, all unknowns are unknown. [...] One group of people who very often become cranks are narcissists. I...
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What it means to be a crank

Cranks are not just stupid people who think they are clever: cranks can be – and very often are – clever people. The important thing about cranks is that cranks don't realise when they don't understand something: for cranks, there are no known unknowns, all unknowns are unknown. The reason why this definition works is that when a crank approaches some field which they don't understand in some critical way then they fail to recognise that they don't understand what they are doing, and blunde...
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Godwin

I remember when Godwin's law was a new thing1, and how clearly right it was: how obviously stupid and offensive it was to compare people and injustices to the monstrous horror that was fascism and the Nazis. We should all, instead, be thankful that the horror was in the past, and use language more carefully for the relatively tiny horrors of the late 20th century. And suddenly not. Suddenly calling people fascists is not stupid hyperbole, because there are real fascists – there are possibly f...
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Analytic

Analytic functions are both infinitely differentiable and have a Taylor series which converges in some neighbourhood of every point. I think it's possible to argue that the functions of physics should not only be sufficiently differentiable, but analytic. The reason for thinking this – well, the reason I think it – is that I think these approximation techniques correspond to the measurements we can make: you can measure the position of something, say, and then by measuring the change in positi...
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What are the chances

that the US election on November 3 happens without serious violence or worse – perhaps much worse? I guess not zero, but not much more than zero. ...
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Run from the future

One of the great dreams of the internet is that people who do office jobs will be able to, by and large, work from anywhere. I don't think it was clear in March that the infrastructure or the people were ready for this dream. But, wonderfully, it turns out they were: the great dream came true and now many millions of people in the UK will be able to work from anywhere once CV19 is over, and won't need to spend hours a day commuting. Enlightened companies will soon realise that they can provid...
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Chaos and hardship

Holidaymakers will face 'chaos and hardship' if coronavirus quarantine measures are reintroduced for those arriving in the UK from Portugal, a travel industry leader has warned. – BBC news Forgive me for being heartless but you chose to go on holiday during a pandemic and not only that but you chose to go on holiday abroad. Obviously, when you chose to do that, you decided that the risk of getting quarantined on your return, or even stuck in Portugal, was something you were happy with. Cer...
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The biggest lie

While claiming to be the 'law & order' president, Trump is, of course, intentionally trying to cause a breakdown in law & order so that people will vote for him to restore it. On whose watch did that breakdown occur? ...
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Only following orders

Yes, quitting from Facebook, or Twitter, or Google will mean you have to find another job or be poorer than you are now, or both. But not quitting means people will die: this should not be a hard decision to make, should it? And you have all these really desirable skills, after all: you know how to build hugely scalable computing systems, how to do all this fancy AI-big-data cleverness: you're not going to be out of a job for long, are you? Of course, you won't quit. You might tell your frie...
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Just quit

At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? Anti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services. – Facebook employee Here's the thing: if you, a Facebook employee, want to stop this evil then fucking quit already. How hard can it be? If you don't quit, you are supporting what Facebook stands for, which is white supremacism and worse. And if you support racism, you are a racist. Stop whining, just fucking quit. ...
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The least bad

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms. – The Register Does this make Apple the good people now? No, it doesn't. But it might make them the least bad people. Apple have what I call a first-order business model: you pay them for their expensive hardware and expensive services, and in return they wor...
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Plain text again

I realised that there is an easier way of describing the difference between the several versions of 'plain text' email. Three definitions of 'plain text' What people want to transmit by email is generally some sequence of graphemes, possibly together with ancillary data, such as how they are to be laid out, related images, sounds, and so on. Graphemes are mostly the same as characters, but not completely so: to understand this requires understanding Unicode, which I suspect almost no-one does...
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Plain text

Sarah Novotny is worried about the reliance of the Linux kernel development process on plain text email. Inevitably a lot of people are sniping at her1, because 'it's easy to configure email clients to use plain text'. She is, however, right. The reason that she is right is that 'plain text' now has two different meanings. The first, newer, meaning is now the most common one, which is that 'plain text' means that the you can only type text – there is no support for tables, boldface or anyth...
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