Dr Doug - A Wide Halo Of Ease And Leisure

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

2017-02-05T16:26:06Z

For my reference, keep meaning to gather each year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch observations in one place but that's a job for later.

Weather: 100% overcast, recent rain, occasional drizzle through the hour

Spots, in no particular order:
1 Robin
2 Blue tit
3 Woodpigeon
1 Great spotted woodpecker (woo!)
7 Jackdaw (more than two dozen flying overhead)
1 Chaffinch
1 Collared dove
1 Blackbird (male)
2 Carrion crow
2 White doves (call 'em feral pigeons, which will probably annoy their owners at the end of the road)

About what we usually see, although perhaps a bit down - I recall more blue tits and chaffinches in previous years. The woodpecker was new and exciting, although I've seen and heard it around the place.

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Recipe: Every-flavour stew

2016-12-09T07:52:57Z

After making this recipe a few times, it's developed in to what I now call every-flavour stew (after Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, but not disgusting). The idea is that butternut squash can be a bit bland, so let's try to set off all the taste receptors we know about. So there's tomatoes and onion to give you plenty of umami, lime juice for sourness and bitterness, salt and sugar, and chili/harissa to set off the capsaicin/heat receptors. I don't normally put salt and sugar in things, but used judiciously they can make a big difference. It's quite tasty.

Ingredients:
1 large butternut squash
1 tin chick peas
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
large chunk ginger (optional)
olive oil
ground coriander (1-4 tsp) (optional)
ground cumin (1-4 tsp) (optional)
harissa paste (a couple of tsp, depending on taste/ferocity of harissa) OR chili powder
sundried tomato paste (about a tbsp or two) OR tin of chopped tomatoes
lime juice (heavy-handed splosh, lemon will do)
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp or generous pinch of salt

Method:
Pre-cook the butternut squash in the oven, cut in to smallish lumps. Fry the onion & garlic in the olive oil very gently, then add the spices to warm them, then the ginger. If you're using chopped tomatoes, add them and cook down for a bit. Add the squash and the chick peas, and tomato paste if you're using it, then heat through. Then add the lime juice, sugar and salt, adjusting till it tastes good. If it tastes too much of one of those three, you can add a bit more of the other two to balance. Don't overdo it though. Serve with bland carbs (rice, couscous, pasta). A bit of fresh herbs on top would finish it off nicely but I keep forgetting.

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Her Majesty's High Inquisitor of Schools

2016-12-07T07:40:03Z

**TODO has been reading Harry Potter recently, and finished book 5 (Order of the Phoenix) last week, so we watched the film at the weekend.

On Monday afternoon, we heard that Ofsted would be paying a short-notice visit to **FIXME's school on Tuesday and Wednesday. After I'd tried to explain what Ofsted do, the kids asked, "So is Ofsted like Professor Umbridge?", and after a moment's thought, I said yes, yes they are.

(For those who don't remember, Umbridge is appointed Hogwarts High Inquisitor and makes a show of inspecting the teaching, which is a thinly-veiled cover for being horrible and abusive.)

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Death rates

2016-11-28T13:42:04Z

Relevant to my last post: latest death rates from the ONS, graphed for our viewing pleasure.

It's important to emphasise that these are crude death rates and very much not the same as life expectancy. In particular, you would expect an older population to have a higher death rate. This is why China's death rate is so much lower than the UK's, and perhaps part of why it's rising: their population is much younger on average than ours, but (I think) ageing more rapidly.

But either the UK population is getting older or our mortality got worse last year. Or both.

For balance, the UK infant mortality rate did not rise but stayed level in 2015 at the all-time record low set in 2014.

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Gloomy post of gloom

2016-11-27T22:27:37Z

"The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity."

So starts The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the C2nd to C3rd CE in China and traditionally said to have been written in the C14th. You could say this is the epitome of a sort of cyclical, ebb-and-flow view of history.

Another way of seeing history is as a decline. Hesiod, writing in about 700 BCE, posited Five Ages of Man, a sequence from the Golden Age, when humans lived among the gods, downwards through the Silver and Bronze Ages, with a brief respite in the Heroic Age, and then to his own time, the Iron Age, where humans scratch out a poor life of misery and toil. Ovid, writing around the C1st, thought similarly but dropped the Heroic Age to give an account where everything just gets crappier over time.

But of course, many people at present see things as generally getting better over time. From the Enlightenment in the C18th onwards, people - well, specifically a few well-off European privileged intellectual men - started to see history as an improvement over time. And more and more people began to have a way of life where their everyday existence wasn't a sharp contradiction of that view, and by the C19th in America, almost anyone (well, specifically white and European and privileged anyones) could aspire to the dream 'this year better than last year, and next year better still'. Of course, any of them would argue, things don't get linearly better, and they don't get better for everyone all the time.

This Whiggish view of history has been looked down on in intellectual circles since at least the 1930s, and since postmodernism it's precisely the sort of ridiculous grand narrative respectable intellectuals can't take seriously any more. Wilson might have been keen on harnessing Science for Progress but he was out of touch with the latest thinking.

Despite the appearances, I like to think that at bottom I'm quite a simple, naive sort of person. The stone you kick thusly does exist. What exists is more fundamental than what you think about it. It's a very good idea to check what you think against what exists, as best you can. On this basis, things have been looking up. Mortality and morbidity are in sharp retreat: life expectancy in the UK soared in the C20th. Median incomes are a very rough and ready measure, and money does not make you happy, but overall having more money tends to at least make your misery a bit more comfortable. Hans Rosling can show you some statistics on this that will make your heart soar.

But this is not inevitable. There's nothing that means that this has to continue.

Living standards for most people in the US have stagnated. It's not been quite so bad here in the UK, but the IFS have just looked at the Autumn Statement and have calculated that on the OBR estimates, average incomes (by which I think they must mean medians) will be lower in 2021 than they were in 2008. I've not read anyone saying 'stagflation' again recently but I don't really understand why not.

And, of course, there have been Certain Major Political Events which look like they point in the same direction for what's happening in the social level of reality: Brexit, Trump, and just this evening, France facing a choice for its President of a social conservative promising to slash the state (François Fillon) or the National Front in the shape of Marine le Pen. (And for the avoidance of doubt, this is not the way I would regard as upwards.)

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain probably didn't say.

So some people have been worrying that the current times rhyme with the 1930s, and thus that we could be facing 10 or 15 years of things becoming really very awful before they slowly start to get better. On this account, we could be facing many decades before things are better again. My big worry is that they're wrong.

Rome was the first city in human history to reach one million inhabitants, around the C1st/C2nd CE. It famously declined and fell, and it didn't reach one million inhabitants again until 1,800 years later. There were no cities so large and complex in Europe between the decline of ancient Rome and the rise of London (by about 1810, from memory), and there were only two anywhere in the world: Xi'an/Chang'an, where my father was born, in around 850, and arguably Angkor a few centuries later.

The astonishingly complex machinery that is the world economy stuttered and nearly stopped in 2008; we hauled it back from the brink but we still don't really understand it even at the basic level that might tell us whether raising interest rates will increase or decrease inflation, or whether cheaper oil is a good or bad thing for the UK economy. If we don't understand it, it's hard to be confident we'll be able to fix it if it breaks again.

The really scary prospect is that it's not decades before things get better than this, it's that it could be centuries, or millennia. Or never.

I do think that's a long shot. There's nothing that says that improvement is inevitable, but there's plenty that says that decline is unlikely. We are vastly more capable and smart than we have ever been as a species. Life expectancy is still on average going up; mortality is going down. And just the other day I saw yet more evidence that things are getting better even in old age: yes, there's a lot more dementia, but only because there's a lot more older people (which is good news!). Dementia is actually becoming less prevalent on a per-capita basis, and the average age of onset of is going up, despite greater awareness and earlier diagnosis that would tend to push it downwards.

All this is from working together, understanding the world as it actually is, and using that to make things better, for everyone. It's not inevitable that we'll continue to succeed, but the results so far are encouraging, and it's sure as hell worth trying.

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More tea

2016-11-24T10:46:30Z

I'm fascinated by the way that when you start noticing something particularly, you spot loads of examples. It seems like that thing is really prevalent, when in fact it isn't really any more prevalent than it used to be, it's just that you're noticing and remembering every occurrence. (Although sometimes it can be an age/cohort effect as well - there really was a surge of people I knew having babies about 5-15 years ago, and there really is a surge of people I know starting to need reading glasses now.)

So over the last week or so I've been staggered by how many people are talking about tea and the correct brewing thereof. Opinions clearly differ. One person I had tea with was genuinely but politely aghast when I neglected to properly squeeze the teabag before removing it. Another grew impatient when I was waiting for a cup to brew properly before removing the bag, and thought I was being wilfully tardy and/or spiting myself by making a stewed cup of tea.

For the avoidance of doubt, I want to stress that the full performance in that previous post is a more optimised and complicated way of making tea than is normally reasonable, and tea made short of those exacting standards is still bloody good and very welcome. Seriously - if you offer me a cup made just by slinging a bag in a mug with some hot water, I'll be delighted. The difference all that malarkey makes is minor. They're the difference between a really wonderful cup of tea and a maybe slightly-more wonderful cup of tea.

That said, if you don't already, I do recommend trying pouring the water on while it's boiling rather than waiting, and then leaving it to brew for a good 3-4 clock minutes.

The only thing that I genuinely care about is if the milk goes in while the tea leaves are in, or if the water is so cool when meets the teabag that it won't brew properly at all. (This is a matter of several minutes after boiling, not seconds.) And even then it's still usually drinkable. If you make me tea, please do not worry that I am judging the quality negatively. If you've steered clear of those two solecisms, I will be very happy indeed, and even if you haven't, I'll still be very happy you made me tea.

As I said, opinions differ, and that's totally legit. Not everyone's cup of tea is everyone's cup of tea. I believe this to be generally true in the broad, metaphorical sense, so it definitely applies in the literal one. I like mine pretty strong, but there's nothing wrong with preferring the sort of brew where the tea bag has merely been somewhere in the vicinity of the water for a moment or two. À chacun son brew, one might say.

As it happens, I've just brewed up in a mug, and decided to do a quick bit of measurement while I was at it by slinging in a culinary thermometer. I realise I haven't calibrated the thermometer at all and it would've been really easy (just poke it in the kettle while it was boiling). And I didn't note the times or temperatures down properly either. But never mind. Less-than-perfect data is still good. Much like tea.

85 C - temperature in mug after I filled it half-full with just-starting-to-boil water from the kettle to warm it
95 C - temperature after I threw out the warming water and poured in merrily-boiling water on the tea bag
90 C - temperature about 15 seconds after that
85 C - temperature about 30 seconds after the brew started
76 C - temperature about 4 minutes after the brew started, when I took the bag out
70 C - temperature after adding a splosh of cold-from-the-fridge milk (about 3 C)
68 C - temperature when I started drinking it. This was towards the top end but well within the ideal temperature range for drinking.
47 C - temperature by the time I had drunk to the bottom of the mug. This was cooler than ideal temperature for drinking, but still good. Usually I'd drink faster than this, so the tea never gets this cool, but I got distracted while writing this post.

Edit I've just realised that I should stop worrying about trying to remember to leave the tea to cool in the mug before I put the milk in. If I've left it to brew for 4 minutes (as above), it's pretty much at ideal drinking temperature as soon as I've put the milk in.

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A nice cup of tea

2016-11-17T20:57:10Z

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea." - Sydney Smith

George Orwell, scourge of the right and of the wrong-headed left alike, fought the forces of repression with well-written essays, polemics and books. And even with actual guns bullets in Catalonia. Like most humans, he was brilliant but also terrible and occasionally shockingly bad. He had firm opinions about tea: the title of this post is a nod to an essay of his setting these out. I lack his eloquence, and his political heft, but I also like tea a lot.

I'm still working out what to do in the light of recent events. What's the British thing to do when in turmoil? Make a nice cup of tea. So, in lieu of offering anything more constructive by way of dealing with the current political situation, here are my ideas about what makes for good tea.

The aim here is to get the most satisfying and consoling cuppa. Fundamentally, what that means is down to individual taste and tradition. But if we leave it there we miss out on a fun conversation, so here's my view.

The Turks and Irish may drink more tea than we British per head (the Turks substantially so), and the Indian subcontinent might go to greater lengths proportionately to get a brew, but we are still in the top league of tea-drinking nations, and it is a fundamental part of British culture. It is evidently a tradition in decline, but to be honest that's very much in line with Britain generally, which given what most British traditions were like is broadly a good thing. As well as being the result of a deeply problematic imperialist history, the whole business of British tea-drinking is run through with class considerations, often unexamined, which is awful, but at least tea is drunk still drunk by people from all classes, and good thing too.

There are many, many lovely teas and infusions, and I enjoy many of them myself. But proper tea, ur-tea, the most tea-like and satisfying tea, is black tea. And an English breakfast blend at that. I like it full-bodied and rich, so heavy on the Assam, but with some lighter fragrant notes to balance. You can go for a pure single-estate Assam, or fine delicate Darjeeling (which I do from time to time), but the danger there is you can end up having a gustatory experience rather than a good honest cuppa.

As a materialist atheist, I'm a great believer in the power of ritual and ceremony. So while brewing up with a teabag in a mug is the overwhelming majority of the tea I drink, proper, serious tea requires the whole ritual and ceremony of a pot, loose tea, and china cups. I'm convinced this makes for better tea in the sense of being nicer-tasting, but even if a blind tasting convinced me otherwise, it still makes for better tea in the sense of being more like tea ought to be.

The mechanics matter. I don't have golden rules like Orwell, but I do have a number of key principles to keep in mind.

Principle 1: Oxygen in the water.

The water needs to be freshly drawn. That means reboiling the kettle is wrong. Those boilers that sit on office kitchen walls, boiling away merrily for hours, are a disaster in this respect. And I've scalded myself on those far more often than I have on ordinary kettles, so I'm unconvinced they're a health and safety improvement. Although I suppose there is the fail-safe that if you start to scald yourself and jerk away, the flow stops, whereas it's possible to spill the contents of a boiling kettle all over your most delicate bits, so maybe in the tails it's safer.

Anyway. Most of the time you are using a kettle, not one of those horrors.

Pour out anything that's left in the kettle, run the cold tap for a bit till it runs cold, then fill the kettle with as much water as you'll need and very little more. This is partly ceremonial and ritualistic, and historical about contamination, but is also about the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Not overfilling the kettle is polite and correct on multiple grounds. Chiefly, it uses less electricity, and boiling water in kettles is one of the most electrically-intensive things people do in their houses these days. Some have argued that boiling a whole kettle means anyone coming after you to use the kettle won't have to wait so long. But only if they reboil it, which means they'll have a less-good cuppa. It's not right to inflict that on anyone.

Principle 2: Boiling water on the tea.

The water needs to be really, really hot - like 95 C or so - when it hits the tea. If you're using green tea or Oolong or something you want it cooler, but black tea needs to be brewed pretty much at boiling point. I believe this to be backed up by all sorts of studies about extracting different flavour compounds from black tea. It's certainly backed up by tradition and word-of-mouth expertise as it has come to me, and my own non-systematic experience. It really doesn't take much to cool boiling water substantially below 100 C, so you need to take care.

This is why you want to warm the pot, or warm the mug. You can get away with not doing this, but it makes an inferior brew - a cold vessel will cool the water down from near-boiling surprisingly fast and surprisingly far. And it's only a matter of a few extra seconds to warm it first. My favourite strategy is to divert some of the water from the kettle when it's hot but not yet boiling. I do sometimes end up reboiling the kettle a bit this way, which is not ideal. If I'm doing it properly, I boil a little bit of heating water first (which can legitimately be reboiled from warm water left in the kettle), then boil the brewing water with fresh cold water.

You also, obviously, want the kettle right next to the mug or pot, so you can pour it in while it is still at a good rolling boil.

If it's come off the boil before you pour it on, it's better to bring it back to the boil than to pour it in when it's cool. This is in tension with the 'no reboiling' rule, of course, which is why you need to get everything ready and pay full attention to the job so you're not left in the awful situation of choosing between options (use not-boiling water, reboil, start from scratch) which are all less than optimal.

A fast-boiling kettle is well worth it. The difference between a 1.7 kW kettle and a 1.4 kW kettle is noticeable, and if you drink tea more than occasionally you really want a full-on 3 kW job. Once you have one you won't look back. It is not coincidental that these can be had for about a pony in just about any shop in Britain that sells anything with a plug on it, but are like hen's teeth just about anywhere else in the world. In North America, they're more-or-less impossible to make, too - at UK/European 230 V, 3 kW draws 13 A, which is up the top end of what you'd want to draw from a ring main but on the right side of the line (and in the UK the supply is generally 240 V, which drops the current well below the danger zone); but on American 110 V systems, 3 kW needs 27 A, which is more than you can draw from most outlets safely.

Principle 3: Brew for long enough, and no longer.

A quick brew can be great when you need it, but some things are better not hurried. I always remember steer observing, in response to the Windows 95 slogan 'everything you do will now be faster and better', that some things do not get better if you do them faster. Brewing tea is one of them, and sex is another.

You can get a strong-enough brew by using more tea for a shorter time, but there are particularly nice flavours that only come out after steeping for a good few minutes. This is something lots of people get wrong a lot of the time - including me. I've recently taken to setting a timer, which has dramatically improved my results. It also prevents the even worse disaster of brewing up, popping off to do something while it steeps, and then forgetting about the tea until too late. This is very bad because you don't want to leave the tea in for too long, or it gets stewed and bitter. Or even forget it entirely! 'Too long' here is something like over 10 or 15 minutes. I reckon 4 minutes is where you're aiming.

Ideally, you want to insulate the brewing vessel (mug or pot) while it's infusing, to keep it as close to proper brewing temperature as possible. With a pot, a tea cosy is just the job, but a mug cosy is probably too fiddly for everyday use.

Once it's brewed, you really need to take the tea leaves out of the water. This is easy with a teabag in a mug, but harder with a traditional setup of loose leaves in a pot. The second cup out of a pot with loose tea in is often way too stewed, and watering it down mitigates the problem slightly but doesn't fix it.

Principle 4: Don't scald the milk.

Some people put milk in their mug before the hot water goes on. This is hopelessly wrong. For one thing, it cools the water so it can't possibly be hot enough to infuse correctly. For another, the fat in the milk extracts flavours from the tea leaves that are not nice. And for yet another, adding boiling water to milk makes it really horrible - more on this in a moment. The people who brew tea like this, of course, disagree and actually like those flavours. Well, people who brew tea like this deserve what they get is all I can say.

To be clear, this is not the milk-or-tea-first dilemma as I understand it. Brewing with the milk in is just wrong.

The milk-or-tea-first dilemma occurs if you're correctly brewing in a pot and deciding whether to pour milk or tea in to the cups first. I am not a hardliner either way on this one, so long as the milk isn't heated too much (scalding it). People of good tea faith can come to different views on this one, I say. I do lean milk-first, though.

There's one idea that says that milk-first should be avoided out of fear that you might be perceived as being concerned that your inferior china won't stand up to the heat of the tea on its own. I strongly suspect this of being silly middle-class prissiness. The sort of person who would care whether I was trying to conceal the low quality of my teacups is not the sort of person I want to care about giving a good impression to. And this is a completely bogus concern now - tea cups these days can totally stand boiling water.

Very hot water on milk denatures the proteins in it, making it taste like UHT milk, which is horrible. Generally this steers you towards milk-first: the milk is slowly brought up to the final temperature of the final brew. If you do it tea-first, the first part of the milk will get substantially hotter than the final temperature of milk-and-tea, risking scalding it. But other solutions are possible. If you can get the leaves out of the tea once it's brewed, you can let the tea cool down to near drinking temperature without it stewing, and then add milk second fairly safely.

If you want to do tea-first from a pot of loose tea (and can't get the leaves out easily), you can pour the tea out and then wait a little until it's cooled enough not to scald the milk before you add it.

As a final practical point in favour of milk-first, you get a better mix more quickly that way than with
do tea-first. Tea-first almost always requires stirring with a teaspoon, but with milk-first you can often get away without.

If you're brewing in a mug, you're pretty much stuck with pouring the milk in to the tea rather than the other way round. I like to swirl the tea as the milk goes in and to do it quickly, to try to minimise the overheating effect. I keep forgetting that it would be a better plan to let the tea cool to near drinking temperature first, and then add the milk.

Once the milk is in, the tea will cool less quickly. Partly this is straight-up physics: the rate of heat loss is directly proportional to the temperature differential, so a hot cup will lose heat faster than one that's merely warm, so leaving it to cool for 5 minutes then adding the milk will cool it more than adding the milk then leaving it to cool for 5 minutes. But apparently there's also a substantial surface effect from the milk fat, which reduces evaporative cooling. So it's smart in multiple ways to do most of the cooling before you put the milk in.

Principle 5: Break any of these rules sooner than doing anything outright barbarous.

This is George Orwell's final rule of good writing, repurposed for tea making. He declined to be so open-minded about his tea. I have read and admired his writing; I have never had the chance to drink his tea, and I doubt it'd be as much to my taste. Also, I think the word 'barbarous' runs the risk of doing some questionable neo-colonial work here that I'm not entirely happy with. But the broad principle applies.

I'm a tea pragmatist. Fundamentally, tea is for consolation, reassurance, and fortification, and whatever works, works. If you can't do the full tea ceremony at some particular point, or can't be bothered with it, you can make better tea by picking off as many elements of the full monty as are compatible with the exigencies of your current situation. So, for instance, tea leaves in an infuser in your mug is a bit better than a teabag, and a thin porcelain mug is better than a chunky stoneware one.

There's a balance to be struck. In times of serious emotional crisis, in a situation where there will be sobbing, I would almost always go for a mug and the swiftest possible brew. And even, in extremis, a spoon or two of sugar. (Sugar can go in whenever you like, but it dissolves more easily if you put it in when the water is hotter.) But if maintaining composure is important, stiff upper lip style, the full performance might be a better plan.

One final whine: the way certain Continentals and North Americans serve tea is the antithesis of good tea and breaks pretty much all my principles: overboiled water is brought to you at drinking temperature, with a teabag on the side, and a tiny packet of UHT ready-scalded milk. There is no route to a decent cuppa from there, and frankly you're better off drinking something they do know how to make.

One of the things I love about Britain is that this almost never happens anywhere you get tea. You can get a decent cuppa just about anywhere in Blighty, and jolly good show.

Edit: I have been alerted to the existence of the two-pots method. You brew in a pot as normal until the tea is at the correct strength. Then you pour it in to a second warmed pot, straining as you go. With a cosy on the pot, you can linger over a huge pot of tea for ages without it getting stewed (which happens if you leave the leaves in) or undrinkably cold (which happens if you pour it out in to cups). This seems like a great solution for a situation where you have two ordinary pots rather than one of those fancy ones with a strainer insert for removing the leaves when it's brewed. It also reminds me of the two-hats cure for colds.*

* Take a hat and a bottle of whisky to bed. Put the hat at the bottom of the bed and drink the whisky until there are two hats. IME this provides good short-term relief, and once your hangover is gone, so is the cold.

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Force Major spotting

2016-10-23T10:16:10Z

I'd missed that the PM, Theresa May, had recently expressed full confidence in the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond. That's just three months since he was appointed.

This is putting his position under what I like to call force Major, as a riff on force majeure, after the luckless previous Tory incumbent who almost certainly tops the all-time table for expressions of full confidence in ministers who subsequently resign or are sacked.

At least, for now.

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Silly US Presidential rhyming slang

2016-10-16T08:21:17Z

I have no idea why these pop in to my head, but they do. Many of them have bounced round my brain for decades. I had ones for most of the Notable presidents (ie, the ones I can remember, which is basically WW2 on plus Lincoln and Washington), and I thought it might be diverting to produce a complete set, to date.

I'm not proposing ones for the next president, partly because it's a bit previous, partly because it's too hard not to do rude ones for Trump, and mainly because Bill Clinton is the probably the one I'm least proud of out of the lot, and I doubt I can do better for Hillary.

An urban hipster and a rural farmer: Barack Obama
The Himalayas and Hindu Kush: George W Bush
Spend a stint in the home of Bill Clinton
An incidence of apophenia: George Bush Senior
Iron Maiden: Ronald Reagan
I'm the firestarter, twisted Jimmy Carter
Plywood, MDF, particle board: Gerald Ford
Get your kicks in: Richard Nixon
Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais: LBJ
Penderecki's Threnody: John F Kennedy
Weak resolving power: Dwight D Eisenhower
Being Human: Harry Truman
Nubile and svelte: Franklin Roosevelt
Heimlich manoevre: Herbert Clark Hoover
Untreated sewage: Calvin Coolidge
Much disregarding: Warren G Harding
Temptation to sin: Woodrow Wilson
With eels in his hovercraft, it's William Howard Taft
Wheat, rye and spelt: Teddy Roosevelt
Meat sliced quite thinly: William McKinley
Demand a refund: Grover Cleveland (again)
Without comparison: Benjamin Harrison
Never outgunned: Grover Cleveland
Point of departure: Chester A Arthur
Gravy, congealed: James A Garfield
Hellman's mayonnaise: Rutherford B Hayes
Leaking breast implant: Ulysses S Grant
What the hell is a sponson, Andrew Johnson?*
Juvenile delinquent: Abraham Lincoln
Fresh colcannon: James Buchanan
Planking fierce: Franklin Pierce
Likely to bill more, meet Millard Fillmore [best name award]
Asthma inhaler: Zachary Taylor
A choleric bloke, was James K Polk
Lexical analyser, parser, compiler: John Tyler
Summon the garrison: William Harrison
Extracting the urine: Martin van Buren
A very loud klaxon: Andrew Jackson
Brothels and madams: John Quincy Adams
Status quo: James Monroe
The talisman: James Madison
Get your ciphers on, Thomas Jefferson
Unbridgeable chasms: John Adams
Oxygen, phlogiston, then there's George Washington

I've also come across this:

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon.
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen,
Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.

* It's a sticky-out bit on the side of a boat or ship, often used to provide extra buoyancy or stability, or for sticking things on, or to protect something. You get them on helicopters and tanks too but they didn't have those in Andrew Johnson's time.

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Saying the opposite of what you say

2016-10-10T06:52:38Z

I've mentioned before that I have a fascination for performative utterances:

They're that particular sort of thing you say that do what they say they do because you said them. They're not just descriptions of how things are, they change how things are because they are said. So, for instance, saying "You are under arrest" makes you under arrest.

Except, of course, to actually change how things are, the person talking has to be the right person saying the right words in the right context. (Where 'right' is socially determined.) So my young son **TODO telling his teddy bear "You are under arrest" is not the same as a police officer saying it to a bloke wearing a stripy jumper with a bag marked 'SWAG'. I could say 'I divorce you! I divorce you! I divorce you!' to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (senior Iranian cleric) but that will not make us divorced, and not just because it doesn't work that way in Shia Islam. A nervous vicar who practices in the vicarage ahead of her first big wedding does not actually marry her cats to each other when she says 'I now declare you husband and wife'. And if the Archbishop of Canterbury puts the crown on Charles' head in Westminster Abbey, amidst cheering crowds, and says 'I name this ship the Lusitania' it won't actually have that effect, not even if he then smashes a bottle of fine champagne against him.

My current fascination is statements that look like they're trying to be performative utterances, but do the opposite. Perhaps the top classic is "nothing to see here", which is guaranteed to arouse curiosity, particularly if none existed before. And a Minister who says they won't resign is actually saying that they might - as in J. K. Galbraith's observation that "anyone who says four times that he won't resign, will". Other recent classics include "this institution is fundamentally sound financially".

There's also the related genre of inadvertent disclosures: "the problems are now mostly resolved", when the fact that there were problems might not have been widely known, for instance.

I had a great example of this sort of stuff when I went for an UCCA (now UCAS) interview to Hull University. I applied there chiefly because I'd read that they had the lowest cost of student living in the country, and they had a not-bad Chemistry Department. First on the itinerary was a talk from the Head of Department, who was at some pains to tell the wide-eyed teenage audience that, despite what we may have heard, there was no danger that the department we were applying to would be shut down. None of us had heard anything of the sort, but this instantly raised the possibility. In the "any questions for us?" bit at the end of my interview I asked them what I should make of the talk that the department might be shut down. "Oh, my," they replied, "That rumour really is getting around ..." Yes it is, and it's your Head of Dept spreading it. More than 25 years later, after a huge wave of closures of chemistry departments across the country, Hull's department is still thriving.

At the weekend I had a great succession of examples from the Head of a school I was considering for **FIXME. Most of these are in the inadvertent-disclosure area but some are at least close to the anti-performative utterance category.

She spent most of the time talking about the wonderful new second campus they're building that is nearly open but our kids wouldn't be attending ... and in the process told us all the things that were badly wrong with the campus that our kids would be attending. The new building has much wider corridors so the children aren't crowded in so desperately when they're walking between lessons. The food tech labs have a proper professional kitchen rather than a few sad cookers. The science labs (when finished) will be much better and will avoid several serious problems. And they are responding to vehement student feedback about the horrible shower facilities by having private showers with solid doors that close. There'd been talk amongst parents that the school might have been good in the past but the senior team's attention was diverted quite substantially by the new campus project ... which was inadvertently confirmed.

She also talked about how she thought it wasn't a good idea to compel students to study languages to GCSE, because there are simply not enough language teachers in the country ... thus indirectly confirming the rumours that they have staff recruitment and retention problems.

She presented their most recent exam results under the new DfE measures (Progress 8 and Attainment 8), and was at pains to explain to us that most parents don't understand them ... but didn't really attempt to explain them to us, or give the old measures as well, or give other local schools' results for comparison. Which suggests pretty clearly that the school doesn't look good on that sort of accounting or she'd have said so.

(There were more inadvertent disclosures on the tour afterwards. The maths teachers were at pains to stress that they had recently invested in some lovely new textbooks, thus confirming reports from a teacher friend who had left that school in part because of lack of resources. The ICT department were keen to show off their special custom quiz that included questions on Jaz drives and Encarta, and their stern warnings about never accessing the Internet except in ICT lessons under close supervision.)

The whole talk from the Head was, I think, aimed at convincing prospective parents that their child would be well taught and looked after at this school. The kids in the audience were all under close parental supervision but they were visibly lolling around in boredom by the end. So the talk demonstrated an ability to bore the pants off school-age children. In fairness, head teachers generally do very little direct teaching so maybe this matters less than it looks like. Although they generally do a lot of talks to audiences of children.

Happily, there are better options and **FIXME and **TODO aren't going to that school.

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SF book recommendations

2016-09-29T20:12:57Z

What are good recent-ish scifi books to read?

I've realised I've almost entirely stopped reading purely for fun, rather than for curiosity or Improvement, and so don't read much fiction at all. I'd like to try changing that, so I'm looking for good reads. I re-read Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and enjoyed it, but it is really showing its age now, and I know it backwards.

I'm thinking of something not too heavyweight and self-consciously Literary in terms of its prose. Somewhere easier to read than Finnegan's Wake, then, and more up the Dan Brown end of the scale. Though perhaps not quite that far from what a competent editor would suggest.

I like scifi more than fantasy; a good straight-up novel would be fine as well but I often find those slow to grip me. I do find the harder sf more satisfying than the fluffier stuff (e.g. I very much like Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson in that regard) but that can be slower going. Here I'm thinking that a good fun read is more important so as long as it's not jarringly implausible it'll be fine. More of a rip-snorter page-turny plot is better. Iain M Banks was about the right balance, or maybe more up the Connie Willis end.

My world is filled with the worldview of (other) older/middle-aged upper/middle-class Western white men, so I don't think I particularly need to have additional exposure to that sort of perspective in my leisure time.

I'm almost entirely out of touch with the actually-reading-books part of the fandom world from the last 10 years or so. I am aware of all the fuss about the Hugos, but recognise almost none of the names involved apart from Farah Mendlesohn, Charlie Stross and John Scalzi, and those more as friends-of-friends than anything else. Although I have read (some of) Charlie and John's novels and quite enjoyed them.

So - what are your recommendation for sf novels?

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Stormcrow

2016-09-13T20:27:44Z

I'm starting to worry that I've turned in to some terrible harbinger of doom.

First example: paragliding accident. I was on holiday in the Alps last month (mountains! I do like mountains) and there was a paragliding landing spot about 200 m from my apartment. It was amazing to watch the paragliders - they just run down the mountain until the ground falls away faster than the parachute lets them fall and then they're off. The quick route down took about 20 minutes, spiralling down and round, but some of them glided across the valley to the other peaks and picked up thermals and updrafts and stayed up for hours and hours. I considered doing it myself at some length. Long-time readers know I'm a huge fan of powered flight. And I did very nearly go skydiving when a student. (I had a crush on a skydiver, and so turned up at the crack of dawn at the bus stop on several wet Saturday mornings only to find that it was cancelled, but before we had a clear day they got involved with someone else and it would've been awkward.) But this seemed just a little bit too risky, especially these days when even a sprained ankle takes a long time to heal up. I looked up the stats and didn't like what I saw. So I decided that no, I wouldn't do it. Next day, I'd been watching them drift down and then saw a medical helicopter come up the valley, land in the paraglider landing area, then take off again shortly afterwards and head back down the valley. Someone had had an accident sufficiently serious to warrant helicopter evacuation, not just an ambulance. I took this as evidence that I'd underestimated the riskiness of the activity, but others I've talked to have said "That would've been you!", which isn't how I see it but is arguably another way of articulating the same thought.

Second example: cable car nightmare. I was staying near Mont Blanc, in the next valley along from Chamonix. On my walks, I kept spotting Mont Blanc's white peak as I climbed, seeing it from different angles, different times of day, and in different weather - so much so I started to think of my experience as Thirty-Six Views of Mont Blanc. Anyway. I rode a lot of cable cars (and chairlifts, and a cogwheel railway, and a couple of funiculars!) and loved it. There is an amazing cable car that goes up from Chamonix to the Aiguille du Midi, a peak next to Mont Blanc, which is as high as you can easily go in the Alps without being a serious mountaineer. There's another cable car that goes up from Courmayeur on the Italian side to another neighbouring peak called Pointe Helbronner. And then there's a third cable car, the Vallée Blanche Cable Car, that links the two peaks, with a spectacular route across a glacier with an extraordinary view of Mont Blanc. I was pretty keen on going - it looked awesome - but the price was truly awesome, and I regretfully decided not to. Last week there was a terrible incident with 110 people trapped on it, many of them overnight. Helicopters came to help, and dropped rescuers and supplies down. Some people were able to escape by rappelling down ropes and climbing up the glacier to the cable car station, some were winched off by helicopter, and about half of them had to spend the night suspended above the void after the weather closed in and the helicopters couldn't fly, until the system was fixed in the morning.

Third example: Man assaulted and then hit by bus outside Camden Town Tube station. I went in to Camden Town Tube station last Thursday on my way home from a night out with friends and missed this incident by minutes, arriving just as multiple police vans and an ambulance closed in and incident tape went up. Pretty minor as disasters in London go (the chap is apparently going to be Ok) but closer than one might like.

Fourth example: TV show catastrophe. At the weekend I watched an entire episode of the Great British Bake Off for the first time. It's very nice - wonderful baking, a sprinkling of stupid-joke innuendo, the least competitive competition you could actually have, and everyone is lovely about it all. I quite liked it but decided I wouldn't make a habit of watching it. It is as BBC a production as one could imagine. So today's shocking news is that the show is leaving the BBC for Channel 4, Mel and Sue (the presenters) are going, and the fate of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood (the judges) is unclear.

I'm not sure I should offer to meet up with any of my good friends in the near future until this trend has stopped. Except ... what if I decide not to meet up with someone and that's what causes a disaster to happen to them? Argh!

Edit: Just realised. It's Open House London this weekend, and I considered visiting 10 Downing Street, but it was only by lottery and that's closed already. So I'm not going. Let's see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

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Found poetry on the autoroute

2016-09-04T20:37:21Z

I've just come back from France.

Long-time readers will know I have a tendency to misread signs in ways that make them more surreal and whimsical than they in fact are. This is even worse in French, almost certainly because my grasp of French is even more shaky than my grasp of English. It doesn't help that crucial accents are often left off in signs when written in all caps. There's classics of confusion/puns that cause trouble for lots of people: peche vs pêche (peach vs fishing), cheveux vs chevaux (hair vs horses), and ferme vs fermé (farm vs closed).

But I seem to come up with some of my own too, from that special place in my head. So, for instance, I always think that the sign "CHAUSEE DEFORMEE" means something about bent shoes (that would be "chaussures déformée") rather than a broken-up road surface. And was genuinely boggled and delighted at the idea that there existed a church called "Notre Dame des Epinards", or Our Lady of the Spinach. In real life, when I looked more closely, it was Notre Dame des Épines, or Our Lady of the Thorns, which I think is a more traditionally Catholic sort of sentiment, but I like to imagine a minor cult of adoration of the leafier aspects of the Mother of Our Saviour: Our Lady of the Cabbages, or the Blessed Virgin Mary Who Once Ate Spring Greens.

A new discovery this trip was found poetry on the Autoroute. This was displayed in large official signs by the side of the road in low-res dot matrix format. Most of the time it was quotidian stuff like telling you it was 5 minutes to the next exit, or that there was congestion near Lyons. (Another completely stupid misreading: I often imagine that when it is warning of delays because of a bouchon (=traffic jam) it means a cochon (=a pig).) But when there was nothing like that to say, the powers-that-be put other messages on it. In Britain these tend to be things like "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" and "TIREDNESS CAN KILL TAKE A BREAK", which seem rather hectoring and are not remotely poetic.

I'm not sure whether it's because they were in French, or whether they really are more poetic, but I was really struck by seeing this:

VOYAGER
C EST AUSSI
S ARRETER

Which in my terrible French means something like "to travel is also to stop [oneself]", which sounds like one of those deep philosophical statements that sounds self-contradictory but isn't, except - so far as I can make out - that it doesn't actually make much sense. Maybe to a better Francophone than me it is simply a perfectly functional reminder to make regular stops when driving.

There was also

UNE PAUSE
CA REPOSE

Which I think means something between "a pause; it rests" and "a break is what it is all about", which I think is quite clever, or it means that I'm not as clever at French as I'd like to be.

The trouble is, once I'd seen a few like that, I started to read all of the others in a whimsical, poetical/philosophical sort of way. Once you're in that mood, even a blank screen apart for a single

*

seems like it's trying to make a statement of some sort well beyond simply informing you that the sign is working but there's nothing special to tell you right now. (As a less-whimsical aside, I much prefer the current time to serve that function.) You can spend ages trying to read multiple layers in to:

LA CEINTURE
DEVANT DERRIERE
J'ADHERE

which is probably nothing more than a reminder to leave a safe gap between you and the vehicle in front, but does seem very poetic to my mind. There was also stuff about their agents (presumably employees) where I struggled to even understand the surface message. For example,

NOS AGENTS
NOUS PROTEGENT
ET VOUS?

I think that's saying that their agents look after them, and maybe they would you as well if you had a mind to it. Or maybe it's asking you to look after their agents? Really that's a matter for their employer, to be honest. Unless the 'nous' is supposed to mean 'us' including the reader, and they protect all of us, and maybe the reader ought to step up to that task too? Oh, it's turtles all the way down. They also had

VEILLEZ
SUR NOS
AGENTS

I initially misread this as "veuillez sûr nos agents", meaning something like "please be sure of our agents", which seemed a nice thought ("you can rely on our staff"). But actually I think it's asking you to watch over their agents, which certainly the other way round to how I always imagined it worked for Highways Agency staff. Maybe they're asking you not to run them over? I think veiller can also mean to wake up - perhaps they're enlisting public help to stop their people snoozing on the job?

However, even I struggled to make anything poetic and deep out of

FAITES UNE PAUSE
POUR LIRE
VOS TEXTOS

Which is simply telling you to take a break to read your text messages, rather than reading them while you're driving, you bozo. But wait ... it's saying we should pause ... to read ... our texts. Are we really *reading* them? Perhaps we just casually glance at them. We should take an actual break, a pause, a rest, to truly read them, to experience them deeply, to apprehend them in their entirety. And we should do so safely, by pulling over at the next service station, in 11 km.

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The Ruritanian Space Agency

2016-08-05T18:27:00Z

I'm off to Bicon! [Edit: I am at Bicon! And have finally sorted out internet access in my bedroom. All is right with the world.] The ball theme is Bisexuals in Space, and as my costume is more conceptual than retinal, I thought it wouldn't spoil the effect to write up the background in advance.

I'm going as Professor Commissar Colonel Teichsgraf Doug Lightyear, Flight Director, Chief Scientific Officer, and Chief Political Officer of the Ruritanian Space Agency. I have a name badge and headset but that's it for the props. Oh - and I also have a whole load of little Ruritanian Space Agency badges to give out. If you want one, let me know. Lightyear is recruiting!

Ruritania is an entirely fictional country, first invented in The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894. Since then it's taken root as a great choice for a fictional tin-pot location in central Europe, in the late C19th/early C20th or fixated on that period, and often characterised by a penchant for pageantry and pomp well out of scale compared to its size and actual influence. And ridiculous political intrigue.

In my version, it's a Germanic country somewhere east-ish and south-ish of Germany, which somehow never quite joined up under Bismarck and carried on with a fierce, idiosyncratic independence. It made it through the turmoil of two world wars and the rise and fall of the Warsaw Pact through a combination of luck, guile and, frankly, irrelevance.

It's politically unusual, partly as a result and partly as a cause. In the C19th it was an absolute monarchy under the king, Rudolf, and has remained such in practice if not entirely in name since. For some years Rudolf III styled himself General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ruritania, but dropped that in 1989 and turned out to be a tremendously pro-American. When he died in the mid-90s, there was some turmoil and uncertainty around the succession, with wild rumours that his grandson was responsible for the death and had previously arranged the poisoning of his own father and uncles. There was a minor scandal in Germany when it transpired that the CIA had used its bases Germany to get involved in political events behind the former Iron Curtain, and rumours of dodgy dealings with a bunch of disaffected Ruritanian emigres in London, but the euphoria and discussion around reunification soon swept that away. Having come to some arrangement with the Americans, Rudolf V is now undisputed monarch and falling back on old autocratic - and erratic - habits. He behaves in a somewhat paranoid fashion, regularly purging parts of the state apparatus for suspected disloyalty or insufficient patriotism, which he is quick to see in any report from a functionary that he finds disappointing.

The Ruritanian Space Agency is, like the country itself, tiny, tin-pot, and puffed up. It exists entirely for prestige and boasting rather than any military or scientific purposes. There is no danger that its stock of rickety ex-Soviet rocket parts will get anywhere near space, but there is a real danger from the rockets and fuel stores themselves. The Agency's proudest boast is that it is among the small, select group of space-faring countries that can get to space using purely their own national resources. Germany, the UK, and France, it points out, have to work together to get to space, and until SpaceX even the Americans had had to resort to partnering up with the Russians. There is an actual basis of this claim, although it is perhaps somewhat debatable. It rests on a programme set up by a Canadian intern on a working round-the-world gap year. As an engineering student, she'd enjoyed launching GoPro cameras to the edge of space using high-altitude helium balloons, and was delighted to discover a stash of Soviet-era weather balloons in the back of a store cupboard.

What of our hero, Doug Lightyear? If you're going to be an important member of a tin-pot silly space agency, you need a tin-pot silly space name. I tried a few more esoteric, subtle possibilities (like Goddard, Oberth, or von Braun - the history of rocketry is pretty Germanic/Mitteleuropean), but those are only comprehensible if you know more than most about the history of rocketry, so I dropped them.

Perhaps surprisingly, Lightyear is an actual scientist, is a full member in good standing of the Ruritanian Academy of Sciences, and holds a genuine professorship at the State University of Ruritania. He does know about Goddard, Oberth, and von Braun, the rocket equation, and delta-v and all that sort of thing. However, his expertise is a little less than you'd need to get a job at competitor agencies like NASA or ESA, and substantially less than you'd need to be scientific lead of an organisation that could actually go to space in a proper rocket. His real strengths are political, having taken good advantage of his connections to the royal family. He was appointed Commissar of Space on the personal order of Rudolf V, which makes him effectively unremovable other than by Royal Decree. To thrive in such a political climate, he is, like his patron, somewhat paranoid and prone to micro-management, as evident in him appointing himself rather than an underling as Chief Political Officer. Early in his tenure, he purged the Chief Scientific Officer for want of patriotism, after he pointed out - entirely reasonably - that the Ruritanian Space Agency lacked any meaningful access to space and that there was no realistic prospect of getting it. Lightyear, in characteristic form, appointed himself as successor. He is, again like his patron, somewhat self-important and self-aggrandising, and so appointed himself Flight Director for all missions, because the Flight Director is the one who looks most important on TV and gets to tell everyone what to do.

He's a Colonel, because in a tin-pot dictatorship, anyone with any power is a senior part of the armed forces, and the golden space-age heroes all held military rank.

His connections to the royal family come about through his hereditary title, Teichsgraf. Graf (or Grave) is an ancient German noble title, usually translated as Count. Some Grafs were appointed to border regions of the Holy Roman Empire - marches - and so were called Markgraf, or Margrave, with extra status, authority and independence to defend the borders. Some Graf titles were associated with their lands, such as Rheingraf for the Rhineland. Perhaps most prestigious were those serving directly under the Holy Roman Emperor, holding Imperial authority over their region as a Reichsgraf. Lightyear's title of Teichsgraf is somewhat less impressive. Teich is German for pond.

How did I come by the symbols for the Ruritanian Space Agency? I wanted a combination of a comedy rocket and an over-the-top Ruritanian coat of arms. I occasionally get interested in heraldry, and designing one seemed like a fun task. Off the top of my head, I thought of something like "gyronny argent and gules, an eagle displayed double headed or" - gyronny is the silliest, most over-the-top parting of the shield, and silver and red seem like good space colours. A double-headed eagle spread out seemed a good choice for a Germanic country with strong nostalgic tendencies, and gold is obviously the best. I thought it needed more elaboration - that's a moderately silly coat of arms to start with, but there are far more complex ones, so I went hunting to see what other Ruritanian coats of arms I could find. After a little searching I stumbled on the arms of Austria-Hungary up to 1914, and I knew at once that I could not possibly top that, so I stole it. It even has the double-headed eagle displayed. The rocket is Tintin's. It's forty years later than The Prisoner of Zenda but the ludicrous space ambition is too good not to use.

For the badges, I wanted a blackletter/Germanic font for 'Ruritanian Space Agency', and spent a while poking about until I found one that looked suitably Gothic but was still legible. For the Doug Lightyear-specific stuff, I used Impact, the online meme font. I'm particularly proud of the motto - inspiration struck out of the blue and I substituted 'mistakes' for the 'hard work' in the Royal Air Force's "per ardua ad astra" - by hard work to the stars - to give "per errata ad astra". Comic Sans is the natural choice for that.

Per errata ad astra! We've gone to space by mistake.

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All-seeing eyes

2016-08-01T15:02:07Z

What happens when you see something? What goes in to and/or comes out of your eyes?

Genuine question: I'm interested in what people think. It's not supposed to be difficult or a trick.

View Poll: Vision mechanics

Feel free to expand or qualify your answer in the comments.

Edit: Clarification: the kitten is sleeping, so it cannot see you.

You can't entirely trust the media, no really

2016-07-21T06:39:14Z

The respectable, reputable media present a version of what has happened in the world that can be as misleading as possible without being actionably wrong about what actually happened. (The disreputable media just make it up, but you know that.)

Have a look at these lovely photographs of the day, from teh Graun. In particular, look at the one before last, captioned "Farmers making hay while the sun shines. The race is on to bale the cut grass before the predicted thunderstorms arrive."

The specific facts are indeed true: this was near Bury, hay making was being done, the sun was shining, and they wanted to get the hay in before any rain.

You might reasonably infer that the person in the shot is a farmer by occupation, working in the deep rural countryside, making hay in a very traditional, non-mechanical way. All pretty rustic. That's the story the photo is telling. It's a good story, and makes a great picture.

But that story - that you naturally assume from what is presented - is materially misleading. If the photographer had been pointing the other way, you'd have seen the back gardens of a housing estate in a suburb of Greater Manchester. In fact, if you look closely, you can see some of it peeping through the trees in the right-hand side of the photo. And you'd also have seen the tractors, rower upper (the machine that gathers cut grass in to rows), and baler. Being driven by the actual farmers.

The man in the photograph is in fact my brother Andrew, who is not a farmer but a full-time FE maths teacher. He's the sort of person who thinks answering difficult Haskell questions on Stack Overflow is a fun way to spend his free time. I love him like a brother, but even I would have to say that the sun does not shine out of his arse. Even the actual farmers are only part time: the older one is semi-retired, and the younger has downshifted from an intense City sort of job and helps his Dad out between running a small business doing decorating and building work. To be fair to the Guardian, my brother is part of the extended family of the actual farmers (they're his in-laws) and he chips in now and then when he's free and they have a big urgent job on, like getting in the hay.

No actual farmers in Britain rake up grass by hand. We do it a bit on my Marie Antoinette Farm, but that's because we are terrible, useless dilettantes who aren't safe with large machinery. We are volunteering our labour so we treat it as free and squander it. But even so, we only ever do the orchard where it's hard to get a tractor in, and it takes forever.

I see this over and over with news stories where I know the background. Almost never is the story written how I would present what has gone on, except where they've simply republished a press release I helped put out. Which seems even worse.

I need to bear this in mind when I'm making my mind up about the world from stories where I don't know any more than what the media is presenting. The compelling picture they are painting may well be not entirely accurate, while still being not too far from the empirical facts. Media don't report facts, they tell stories.

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Kwik Fit Insurance sucks

2016-07-19T19:59:43Z

I take it back. They were nice initially on the phone on the day my car was pranged, but they have messed up big time, and I can't get hold of them.

It was crystal clear in that phone call that (a) I was not remotely at fault - the car was parked legally and unoccupied at the time, and (b) I was not going to make a claim, because - as they advised me - I wouldn't get any money.

So they've only gone and reported this as an at-fault claim in the central motor insurer's database. Which is now causing me big problems because the insurer of my new car (which is shiny and red and goes ... actually slightly slower than the older, smaller black car) is very unhappy that I did not declare this previous claim. They say the only thing they can do is for me to contact my previous insurer and get written confirmation from them with the correct details and confirmation that they've updated the central claims database. Within 7 days, or they're charging me extra.

Gah! Nuts to Kwik Fit Insurance. This will get sorted out, eventually, but it'll cost extra money in between. At least, I hope that's the worst that'll happen.

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You can get less-greasy sun cream

2016-07-19T07:40:53Z

I have very easily burned skin, so I'm a big user of factor 50. Also on the kids. My discovery this season is that you can get less-greasy sun cream! It's sold as 'non-greasy' or something like that. It's based on alcohol (look for 'alcohol denat.' as the top ingredient), so it smells of rough booze when you put it on. But it's way less bother than rubbing all the white bits of factor 50 in, and leaves your face a lot less pasty and like a badly turned-out goth. The stuff I've got isn't cheap (it was an emergency purchase) but worth it, and I suspect cheaper versions are available if I shop around.

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Kids don't hear fire alarms

2016-07-18T07:01:41Z

I think I've posted before (but can't instantly put my finger on it), but maybe I meant to but didn't.

Children sleep through fire alarms!

There was some research about this a few years ago that I read and was pretty convinced by - enough that I changed my fire escape plans from "wake the children up if necessary and take them out" to "carry the children out, since they'll probably be asleep".

And I now have independent empirical verification from last night. Our smoke alarm went off at about 1.30am, full tilt, not help-me-my-battery-is-dying chirping. It was going for quite some time - it took me a while to work out which one was going off and then to establish there probably wasn't a fire and then to find something to stand on to disable it. The kids (nearly-10 and 7) slept right through the whole performance, including the follow-up of me banging around the entire house for about quarter of an hour looking and sniffing everywhere for anything that could conceivably be a smoke source.

It's a 5-year-old ionisation smoke detector, bought in a hurry from a local hardware shop where it may have been on the shelf for some time. My guesses for why it went off: (a) dust or insect got in, (b) high humidity set it off (it was pretty hot last night - about 24 C - and maybe moist?), (c) it was getting old and faulty. I'll give it a blow and put it up again. (I have two independent ones.) If I get another false alarm I'll replace both.

So, the kids definitely don't wake up at all with the smoke alarm going off. Also, I was surprisingly (to me) dopey and slow. I'm normally pretty alert during a crisis, but here I was more annoyed that I had been woken up unnecessarily and trying not to wake up completely, long before I'd established for sure that it was in fact a false alarm. This is a habit, I suspect, born of the many years of sleep deprivation when they were tiny. But not a good plan now. I mean, a false alarm was the overwhelming likelihood, but if I don't wake up fully alert for false alarms I won't wake up fully alert for real ones. *yawn*

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Nightmare job

2016-07-14T06:50:11Z

Last evening the phone rang while I was busy reading to the kids. It was a really exciting bit in Harry Potter, and I could tell from the ring tone that it wasn't a number I knew. So I left it. When I looked later, it was an unavailable number.

Almost certainly a phone spammer then, and a bullet dodged.

Except ... with newly-minted PM Theresa May still assembling her Government, it suddenly occurred to me that someone might have been trying to get in touch to offer me a post. The old Westminster joke goes that the only way to be sure to have an MP pick up your call in person is to ring from a withheld number while the PM is appointing a Government. Calling me is massively unlikely and well beyond the bounds of what one might expect to happen. (For one thing, I'd need a seat in the Lords, and the really-junior posts are things like PPS that you kind of have to be in the Commons to do.) But that describes so many political events in the last month, I feel unable to write it off entirely.

She's not rung back. A different bullet dodged, perhaps.

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Dream job

2016-07-13T07:34:11Z

I had this great dream the other night.

I found a time machine. At least, it said it was, on a note attached in my own handwriting. The note was dated precisely 25 years in the future. It was brief, but said enough to convince me it really was from me. It also included lottery numbers for next weekend, and a few pieces of advice for how to learn how time travel works.

The lottery numbers checked out, which was enough to make me take it seriously. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was a big jackpot, so I had more than enough to jack in my job and turn to studying time travel full time.

It was really difficult. The advice was terse but helpful, and pointed me to the key ideas to draw on, and the new areas I’d need to develop. But it turned out time travel is fiendishly complicated, and takes some serious maths and some serious computation. After a year or so of struggling with it, I had a bit of theoretical framing laid out and some promising-if-you-squinted empirical results: slightly better than chance predictions of things that didn’t matter, that sort of thing. But it was increasingly clear that the maths and computation to do it properly was way beyond what I could do on my own with only occasional helpful tutorials and chats from bemused but delighted pure mathematicians.

So I decided to set about creating an Institute of Chronological Studies. I had enough of my own cash to get a small research group off the ground, but how to do it? Where? Who should I hire? When should I go public? How to get funding to grow it? I wrote down all the hard questions on a piece of paper. Staring at them, I realised that what I really wanted was the ability to see how things would work out if I made those decisions in different ways … and as I imagined those possible futures stretching out ahead of me, I suddenly made the obvious connection to my work on time travel.

Turning that epiphany in to actual results was not so easy, of course. But another year or so of theoretical and practical work got me enough to have an indication for what might be the most promising routes. So off I went.

It was a roaring success. The Institute took off, and soon Chronological Studies was the hottest field in research history. Research funders were keen, but there was also a lucrative line of consultancy. Predicting the future was still too hard to be of much practical benefit, but there was still plenty of appetite for advice on hardening processes against time travel scrutiny, and - of course - from finance. It became apparent that I’d been extraordinarily lucky, and my meagre initial practical results took a long time to match, let alone beat. But over time our understanding and capabilities grew. After a decade, we could send small amounts of trivial information, and even smaller amounts of matter, back or forward in time, under very tightly constrained circumstances. We’d developed new formalisms for what information and entropy are, for probability, and, of course, the nature of time itself is. There were promising spin-off results in physics and computation more broadly.

But I had a goal in mind, and a clear timetable. Helpfully, work towards that goal always proceeded more rapidly and successfully than other, tangential time-travel projects. It was tough, but with a massive international effort, we got there, and 25 years to the day later, I wrote a note and successfully sent it back in time attached to a time machine.

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Less appealing fairies

2016-07-12T19:49:34Z

**TODO has a couple of verrucas he's not happy about, so as well as gaffer tape (aka duct tape occlusional therapy which is legit with clinical trial evidence and everything), I've employed a wheeze of my uncle-the-pediatrician's: buying them. This was apparently one of his front-line therapies in his clinics and highly successful. It certainly worked well on me at this sort of age. It works for warts and verrucas, since they're more or less the same but in different place. I buy them from the child - we settled on £1.50 for the crop of three. (He later wanted to spring an extra charge for delivery on me, but that just got him a Look.) Then, over the course of a few weeks, the warts/verrucas make their way over to me.

I think the actual way this works is that the majority of warts or verrucas heal up anyway over that sort of timescale. The child is usually keen on the transaction - it looks, correctly, like free money at worst. And a child might well be happier waiting a few weeks for 'sold' warts or verrucas to transfer to their new owner than to wait for them to heal up over that time. Every time they're reminded of it, they should also remember that it's due to go to someone else.

Discussion with **FIXME and **TODO focused on what happened after I got them. I said - following my uncle's lead - that they tend to just drop off me.

But what happens then? Maybe the Verruca Fairy comes to collect them. The Verruca Fairy is perhaps one of the Tooth Fairy's less attractive relations.

Our Tooth Fairy letters have a photo of "my friend the [flower] fairy" at the bottom - one of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies picked to be seasonal. So the conversation turned to what sort of friends the Verruca Fairy might have. We had the Nettle Sting Fairy, the Bump Fairy, the Bruise Fairy, the Graze Fairy, the Prickly Heat Fairy, the Mosquito Bite Fairy, and many more.

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Car demise

2016-07-10T21:00:59Z

My faithful old car was smashed beyond economic repair on Friday morning. It was parked perfectly reasonably on the main road, facing against the traffic, while we were dropping the kids at school. In the 15-20 minutes before we got back, someone drove past, clipped the wing mirror, then hit the back door and rear panel, and then bashed in to the rear bumper, tearing it off and dragging it down the road, scattering broken bits up to 6m away. And then they drove off, leaving only a large amount of blue paint from their car scraped down the side of ours.

So dealing with that turned in to what I did with most of my Friday and weekend. Pretty much all taken care of now. It wasn't that far from home, so after I'd phoned the police and my insurers, I cleared the bits of the road in to the car and drove home slowly and carefully.

The police were reasonably efficient - I got through on the non-emergency 101 almost immediately, to a very helpful chap who established that there were no injuries, no damage to anything else, no obstruction of the highway, and no witnesses or CCTV, and then advised me to take lots of photos then tell my insurer and sort out clearing it away with them. If you haven't exchanged details with the other driver (which I obviously couldn't) you have to report collisions to the police in person "as soon as practicable" and anyway within 24 hours. So I called round the nearest main police station, where a duty officer laboriously filled out a paper form by hand. It's almost vanishingly unlikely that the other driver will dob themselves in to the fuzz: there's no way they didn't notice it was a serious accident at the time, and there are almost no good reasons not to stop and leave at least a very brief note. But if they do, apparently there's a good chance (!) the rozzers will match up the two reports after a week or two, and if I then phone up again and give my reference number, they will give me those details, and I can pursue their insurer to recover my loss.

As an aside, I gained a new respect for how patient the police are in dealing with people, through seeing them deal with a range of troubled and troubling people (me included) in the station. From my activist/anarchist days I'm still pretty suspicious of them. But I am genuinely impressed with how they manage not to be way more hostile to people than they are. A very large proportion of the people they have to deal with are either pretty upset because something bad has happened to them, or appear likely to have done something bad. Or both. The late-teen/early 20s lads looking unhappily at their feet while they waited for their probation meetings were probably the most mellow and easy-to-deal-with punters in the place.

My insurers were surprisingly efficient and helpful, so I'll mention them by name: Kwik Fit. The car is so old and venerable that it's not worth very much, so they very quickly established that it would be way beyond economic repair, and if I made a claim, they'd treat it as a total loss and just send me a cheque for the pre-crash value. But I'd taken out a large voluntary excess (as is my wont - and I note that I am still up on the deal over the life of this car), and the value of the car would be less than the excess, so I'd get no payout. They helpfully pointed out that not only would I get no money, I'd lose my (considerable) no-claims discount. They didn't want to tell me what to do, but hinted strongly that I should just walk away and deal with scrapping it myself, which was a hint I was happy to seize. The really good bit about that is that I don't have to have any arguments with insurers, or wait for them to decide on things, or use their stupid inconvenient car hire or garage. I could just sort things out the way I wanted.

Bit of a sad end to a long-serving vehicle. 150,000 miles on the clock, over 100,000 of which are ours. Poor old **FIXME was in floods of tears when I told him - it's the only car he's known. With its age and increasing number of mechanical issues, I'd been thinking I might have to buy a new one in a hurry some time soon, so happily I'd already researched what we'd want as a replacement, and a ballpark budget.

I got myself a hire car - it's possible we could manage with taxis for a short while, but buying cars is waaaay easier if you have a car already. (For the geek audience, this reminds me of needing a compiler to compile your compiler.)

I then spent an inordinate amount of time on car websites, and on the phone, and doing a few test drives. The first was the least auspicious. They did have some paperwork, but a glance at the MOT suggested that the exhaust and its hanger was badly corroded. I'm not a car mechanic genius, but it certainly looked just about to drop off. I had a good poke around, tested all the electrical equipment, and then went to start the engine. It wouldn't. They finally managed to get it to cough in to life, with the aid of a massive external jump starter, spitting out a cloud of foul black smoke. I'd been wondering whether my moderate car knowledge would be enough to give me confidence to make decisions about second-hand car purchases. That fear was entirely unfounded on this one: it was an easy no. Then a couple of others were sold in between me shortlisting them and phoning up to arrange a viewing, which spooked me about the market: I'd assumed that with Brexit the market would be firmly a buyer's one, but apparently not. Maybe people who'd otherwise buy a new car are buying older ones? I've certainly seen signs of the last credit crunch in the used car market: there are plenty of 2007 cars for sale, and plenty of 2010 cars, but very few 2008 and 2009 ones.

Finally I got to try two more reasonable options, and the last one turned out great. As I typed that, I thought, what are the chances that the last one I saw turned out great? Then I realised: because I stopped the process of looking when I found a good option. It's from a dealer, so not a bargain, but not a rip-off either SFAICT. It's also a really cool orangey-red colour. It's got boring but makes-me-happier things like ABS and stability control, and, joy of joys, has an actual aux-in socket so I can plug my phone straight in to the stereo, only about 14 years after iPods became a Thing.

Red cars go fast! I've never had a red car before; I've heard they go faster. Zoooooom!

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Nominative determinism

2016-07-05T11:20:37Z

I reckon that Andrea Leadsom's chances in the Conservative Party leadership race would get a significant nominative-deterministic boost if she were to change the pronunciation of her surname from "led some" to "leads 'em".

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Development

2016-07-02T08:03:42Z

People who code! What tools do you use? What do you think of them?

I'm asking because I want to up my coding capabilities, and getting to grips with better tools looks like it might be a quick(ish) win. Here's what I'm using.

TextMate (Mac) / SciTE (Windows)
My current-favourite text editors. They don't do much more than syntax highlighting but (as a result) they are very lightweight and easy to use. I havered between TextMate and TextWrangler on the Mac for a long time, confusing myself, but eventually settled on TextMate at least partly because the icon is a large pink flower. I'm not a vi fan but have used it in contexts where it was the only option - which simply don't occur these days. Emacs seems a bit heavyweight to get my head round properly, although I've used it in the past, without any understanding of Lisp. I drifted away from those two in favour of things with good native application integration as part of a general move from doing my development on a remote server to using my own local machine. I When I settled on TextMate/SciTE *mumble* years ago, they had the great benefit of acting like native apps in their respective environments, but that's not so unusual these days.

make
My first tool beyond text editing and still a key one. Writing this, I realise I've got out of my previous good habit of writing (or adding to) a makefile for any command-line process where I have to look the syntax up.

If I'm honest, these two the combo I use most of the time, for most languages, and it works for most of what I do, which tends to be small and simple.

Visual Studio
In the past I was a big Visual Studio user. It was the only sensible option for making Windows applications, and I think it still is. I no longer need to make those so I've not touched it for ages. It was pretty reasonable as an environment, although it was the first IDE I used and I was so blown away by the improvement from text editors and command-line make that I am probably biased. Come to think of it, there's no reasonable way you could do Windows application development without an IDE: it's just too complex.

RStudio
This is my workhorse IDE for R stuff, and probably most-frequently-used environment after text editor/make. I can't quite understand how anyone managed to do anything more than three-liners in base R, even though I used to. I'm so much faster and more accurate in R with the aid of code completion and syntax tooltips, which is what's pushing me to think more seriously about IDEs for everything else. RStudio has fairly-recently acquired some basic code refactoring tools (rename, at least) which I like so much I want more, although I think anything more than rename is going to get language-specific pretty fast.

Cut-and-paste from StackExchange
Indispensable for modern coding.

WordPress
This makes me sad. For WordPress-hosted blogs, it's fine enough, but only because I never do anything complicated and it's so locked down it's hard to mess it up. For self-hosted, it gives me the willies: you can version-control content (with a little effort), but on the systems I use regularly, all the configuration settings are just live tweaks to the live site, which for anything serious seems unwise. I can rollback to the last server snapshot backup, usually no more than 24h old, but that still risks losing most of a day's work for a single mistaken menu choice. Even when you do it properly with dev, staging and live sites, that only manages the (custom) code, not the configuration settings, and I have had several unhappy experiences with baffling bugs because of those being different across the sites. Surely there's a better toolchain here? Although I suspect it probably involves more sysadmin than I normally do: I try not to be the one who needs to know anything about hypervisors and containers.

I'm trying to up my game on Python at the moment and am playing around with Jupyter and Spyder (via Anaconda). I find Jupyter (nee IPython notebooks) a bit clunky; I think there's something in my brain that doesn't like having two entirely separate coding environments (Markdown and Python) in the same document. I've had the same problem with other literate programming environments in the past. I love them as artefacts to read and tweak slightly, but really don't like trying to get serious work done that way.

Do you have a favourite IDE? I've had "finally get to grips with Eclipse properly" on my long-term tech self-improvement list for ages, on the grounds that once I have got my head around it, there's a plugin for just about any language you care to mention, and most of those you don't. But it's languished on my list for so long because it seems dauntingly heavyweight. Is it worth it even if you're not doing a lot of Java?

Is it worth messing around with Docker for small projects?

What do you do for version control for your solo projects? Do you have a better way of using git than cut-and-paste from a cheat sheet?

What new hotness am I completely missing because my dev mindset is firmly stuck in 80x25 world?

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