🎥 Watched The Creator.

It’s a few decades from today, where humans, of course, gave up many of their former responsibilties to AI powered robots. Unfortunately, there was a nuclear disaster, killing huge numbers of people, which was attributed to said AI. Certain parts of humanity - particularly the US - thus declared war on AI. In a literal sense here, given the prevalence of armed AI humanoid robots.

Our hero Josh, a well trained military operative who is greiving his wife to the extent he’s not all that much to lose, is recruited to go behind enemy lines to kill “the Creator”, before their creation, an AI superweapon, is deployed.

But, no spoilers, things are not necessarily found to be as assumed.

It’s visually very impressive, in the way that Blade Runner vibes films can be when done well. Very spectacular, very immersive. And sits a bit differently than it would have a few years ago given the IRL debate about and deployment of increasingly autonomous AI powered weapons, even whilst it’s a typical sci-fi action movie in many ways.

The Monevator blog summarises the darkly hilarious offer our big tech AI overlords incessantly promote to us:

Behold, our new model is so terrifying that even we can’t control it. Get your access for a special price of £9.99 per month

Rescue iTunes music from your iPhone by connecting it to Linux as thought it was a disk drive

One of the increasingly few reasons I have to boot into Microsoft Windows these days is to use iTunes.

Of course iTunes on Windows is famously a horror show. So 99% of the time this is because I want to download any music I bought in the iTunes store to my computer so I can put it into a far better music player; the bonus of iTunes music, for the last few years at least, being DRM free.

But it’s also totally inaccessible if you don’t use Apple’s propietary software as far as I can see. Ugh. Why not just have it downloadable from the web??

Recently iTunes, of course, stopped being able to log into my Apple account. So it couldn’t see, and I couldn’t download, the newer music I’d bought. It has since magically fixed itself but who knows how long it will be until it breaks again, and tbh the less I have to open the Windows the better.

So I was looking for a Linux solution. There are, naturally, no official ones. I braced myself for difficult times ahead but actually it proved surprisingly easy, although not exactly straightforward. Basically, forget iTunes, iCloud etc. Go old-school. I downloaded the music to my iPhone and then sought to connect my phone to my computer to be seen in file manager.

Note that you will not be able to extract any music you haven’t purchased as such like this, i.e. Apple Music downloads. You don’t own that anyway. This is just stuff you actually bought in the iTunes store.

You can use also the below as a method of access lots of other things on your phone too, beyond music. Photos would be a common one.

Anyway, something like this did the trick and let me access the contents of my iPhone just like it was any other folder.

1. Install relevant packages

# Install packages that help connect to iPhone
sudo apt install ifuse libimobiledevice-utils

2. Plug the iPhone in via USB. Make sure the phone is unlocked and hit “Trust this computer” and enter in the passcode as requested.

3. Then pair and mount it to a local folder

idevicepair pair

mkdir -p ~/iPhone
ifuse ~/iPhone

Now you should be able to see it in that folder or in file manager.

Once you’re there, you can then use your file manager or whatever to find and retrieve the music:

For music, go to Music then Downloads. If it’s not there. look for some other obviouslyish named folder.

Annoyingly the music files all appear with very random seeming titles so you can’t immediately tell which is which. Usually they’re the m4a files. The file’s metadata will be correct though so that’s one way to tell what’s what, or you can do what I did which, given I knew the date I downloaded the music to my phone, just retrieve the files with the appropriate Date Modified.

When you’re done, unmount the iPhone:

fusermount -u ~/iPhone

Job done.

Apparently after an iOS update you might have to unpair and pair again like this, but I haven’t experienced that yet:

idevicepair unpair && idevicepair pair  # after any iOS update

Note that if you’re on Windows there are various (pay-for) grahical software packages that let you do this kind of thing without iTunes too. iMazing and CopyTrans are some of the more famous examples.

An investigative journalist describes how one of the most consequential acts of sabotage in recent history (probably) took place, and what came next

📚 Finished listening to The Nord Stream Conspiracy by Bojan Pancevski.

This is the real life story of the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that transport a huge amount of gas between Russia and Europe.

Remember this?

The book’s most thrilling section is that surrounding the details of how the operation was carried out by a handful of people operating on a relatively shoe-string budget. But of equal interest is the subsequent investigation various state authorities did on it in order to establish who committed this potentially very criminal act. The legal waters are muddied in that one seemingly intuitive explanation is that it was effectively a Ukrainian attack against Russia as part of their defence of the horrific illegal invasion of their country that Putin continues to wage. However, other theories abound - was it the CIA, Russia themselves, someone else?

The book covers the method used both to blow up the pipeline and to bring the people it claims are the perpetrators of it to court. OSINT fans such as myself will be interested to know elements of that were involved in the latter, although far from exclusively. Very minor mistakes made by the team - slightly speeding for a short time whilst driving on a highway for example - proved fatal to their attempts to hide from scrutiny.

Well, that’s assuming that the author’s claims that it was a small team of Ukrainians are correct. Technically I believe this is still an unsolved case. Investigations by Sweden and Denmark got nowhere. Italy arrested a Ukrainian man on behalf of Germany 3 years later. Various people have been accused or taken to court over it but as far as I know no one has actually been found guilty of it as yet - possibly not least because if the story is as told here then the people involved are regarded as absolute heroes by many, and the actions as part of a war Ukraine didn’t instigate rather than, as some of the German authorities seem to see it, a sabotage of critical national infrastructure. There’s also no concrete evidence of state involvement.

The book is a very gripping example of incredibly detailed investigative journalism around an incredibly important geopolitical event - if one that is potentially a little too firm in some of its conclusions, unless, as is quite likely the case to be fair, the author knows something the rest of us do not.

🎶 Listened to The Wow! Signal by Muse.

The name of this album is a shoutout to the actual “Wow signal” which was an unexpected radio signal recorded by an American radio telescope on August 15th 1977. The signal remains, to this day, unexplained, although much has been made of it as being a broadcast from aliens, in both non-fiction and fiction literature. We can only hope. Although if it was, the extra-terrestrials clearly weren’t excited about what they found as something like that has not been detected ever since.

Anyway, this album certainly comes across as having a very sci-fi atmosphere in places.

From it’s first song Dark Forest:

Launch a pulse out into the abyss Reaching our hand to the lonely, lonely Stars extinguish themselves out of fear A beacon that can’t light the darkness

Broadcasting reckless confessions We will all beg for extinction

Dark Forest is also a real term that seeks to provide one reason that we are not constantly bombarded with off-world signals:

…the idea that extraterrestrial civilizations may exist in abundance across the universe, but remain silent and hidden out of fear that revealing themselves would lead to destruction by a more technologically advanced and hostile civilization

The album over the top, its own cinematic universe. And it’s great. It might even be up there with their early-2000s-era classic records.

Facebook is apparently experimenting with a ‘feature’ where, for some people at least, if you want to post more than 2 links to other websites a month then you have to pay them a subscription (of course).

Seems like it started being tested end of 2025 and is still happening now.

A slightly unbelievable new low from a company that has already damaged the web so much.

Make your product good and you wouldn’t have to worry about people clicking links!

Reform UK are wasting time and money launching a dumb mobile game to let you pretend you are the navy stopping small boats

So now we know what Reform UK are wasting their untold new sums of billionaire money on, besides making multi-millionaire Farage even richer.

They’re to launch ‘small boat scramble’ presumably to distract everyone from their ongoing sleaze. This will be some no doubt shitty mobile phone game where you play the navy and have to stop small boats in the English Channel.

The party said players will face “small boats, mega-dinghies and, every so often, a Boriswave”…

As Nathan notes, this is truly horrible:

Nathan Phillips, head of campaigns at Asylum Matters, said: “Human beings are dying in uncounted numbers in our Channel. The fact that any political party feels able not only to gamify people’s lives and deaths like this, but to offer up cash rewards to their followers for “playing”, is a sickening new low which demonstrates how far towards the dehumanisation of people seeking safety our political discourse has fallen.”

Nonetheless there’s a cash prize if you intercept the most boats.

Morality aside I’m going nowhere near these apps given they were launched by a duplicitous party who have a history of not handling personal data appropriately, or perhaps legally.

I see they already released ‘Small Boat Watch’ which, pointlessly, simply repackages easily available government statistics on how many small boat crossings there’s been per day, only in big red scary numbers on a black background.

Two non-resident crypto billionaires are attempting to wreck British politics even further by funnelling astonishing amounts of cash towards Nigel Farage

So, last week, between them, two billionaires that have made their fortune in the extremely crime-infused business known as ‘cryptocurrency’, and hate Britain so much that they prefer to live abroad, have donated £72 million to that supposed ‘anti-establishment’ ‘party of the common man’, Reform UK.

These are by far the biggest donations to a political party ever in the UK. Regarding the most recent couple of inflows:

The £72m from the two donations is more than the total received by all UK political parties last year, which stood at just over £69m.

In fact the total donations if you count Harborne and Delo’s previous gifts to Reform and its direct predecessors comes to over £100 million. Not to mention the £5 million Harborne secretly gave Farage personally.

In return they want…nothing.

🤔 🤔 🤔

Nothing.

🤔 🤔 🤔

Even the one who is a convicted financial criminal, Delo, is apparently doing it out of the goodness of his heart.

I wonder what it is about seeing the recent documentary showing that the corrupt oligarchs constituting Reform’s high command are very open to taking even explicitly illegal donations from the mega rich for access that made these two think, hmm, I want to shovel more cash in their direction.

Political high-ups accusing everyday people or fraud are simply telling you what they themselves would do

When I see stories like this:

Reform’s Jenrick ignores PIP fraud evidence and claims it is ‘common sense’ that claimants are ‘gaming the system

I can’t help but think the speaker is doing nothing beyond telling on himself. It makes me believe that he thinks, contrary to the best known evidence, that everyone is fraudulently claiming PIP on the basis that he himself would fraudulently claim PIP if he could.

Or course this is merely a theory. I, likewise, have no evidence of this. But in this case, it’s not like Jenrick doesn’t already have a history of cheating the system, ripping off the public purse.

See for example:

In July 2020 Jenrick admitted, yes_ _admitted, that he deliberately helped a Tory donor avoid paying a new tax on his housing development

Or

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic Jenrick faced criticism for moving his family to a £1.1 million country manor, despite government advice urging people not to escape to second homes.

The cabinet minister has charged taxpayers more than £100,000 for the home that he appears to use only rarely.

Or

Despite being a man of financial means Jenrick was forced to pay back expenses earlier this year after it was found he claimed for both petrol costs and rail tickets for a return trip to his constituency in Newark.

There are so many examples where this dynamic is apparent to me. Election fraud is another one that springs to mind.

At least some members of Patriot Platform clearly had something beyond the extremely misnamed and much abused phrase ‘valid concerns’ on their mind when building up to their recent protests.

At least one person is understood to have sought to pass on details to counter-terrorism police after people heard the far-right activists boasting in the local pub that they intended to go to Dover and “attack Muslims”.

Unfortunately it seems that neither the counter terrorism police nor standard police had much interest in this tip.

As predicted, whilst Nigel Farage can be rightfully credited with coming out against the tactics - if not the goal - of the ‘Patriot Platform’ ‘protestors’, some of his party members are in fact massive fans.

Nigel Farage said demonstrators in balaclavas were ‘horrible’, but others in the party defend them as ‘brave, passionate patriots’

This sort of thing has been an issue for a long time. Reform as a party have tried to distance themselves from the right-wing-nut criminally convicted chief grifter Tommy Robinson, but not all of their members agree with that decision.

This will always be a problem when you explicitly built your party/company to be attractive to people with the very worst of viewpoints.

Been a while since I’ve seen a decent comedy redirect. Thank you https://unsatisfying.penis.ceo/.

This week in British far-right idiocy

It has not been a good week for British fascists, proto-fascists and the fascist-adjacent. Or rather it has not been a good week for anyone who is against the evil ideology.

First up, a bunch of black-clad balaclava wearing probable morons turned up to have a march and block the port of Dover.

Inevitably they chanted such tedious slogans as “stop the boats” and “England till I die”. Whilst it was covered as some kind of impromptu protest at the time, it seems instead to have been a very pre-planned event by a new group of racists who call themselves Patriot Platform.

I am just guessing here, but they feel like the exact sort of folk who would condemn other types of protestors covering their faces and blocking the streets. If nothing else, any of the British far right who support these guys better not complain about that sort of behaviour ever again.

The police apparently knew nothing about this, and whilst they did turn up no arrests were made. Some might call this two-tier policing given their behaviour at e.g. climate protests, albeit in the opposite political direction to the folk who normally whinge about this kind of unfounded conspiracy.

In the below I am going to refer to these wannabe paramilitaries as “protestors” although several people believe that is not an accurate description for these cosplaying wannabe alphas.

A couple of days later the cowardly exercise was repeated but this time in Portsmouth. He and “his men”, again in their black masked outfits, travelled down, and blocked the roads for hours.

Their plan was intercept a bus that contained140 asylum seekers, which they did indeed swarm around. The usual tedious slogans I can only imagine how terrified the poor beleaguered passengers felt about this horrific and intimidating introduction to the UK.

This time some of the protestors reportedly violently assaulted police officers and their vehicles, for which an investigation has now been opened.

Finally, their leader, another right-wing extremist criminal known, confusingly, as Tommo (backed by the more famous Tommy), had his fake army turn up outside the offices of the Daily Mail to demand, I think, that the newspaper gives his mother a new house or something. It was extremely cringeworthy.

As many people have noted, the bunch of supplicant losers behind him must have appreciated that their faces were covered for this lame action.

I think they chose the Daily Mail because it published a not too flattering description of the guy. Turns out he’s a privately educated son of privilege who enjoys luxury holidays in between running a roofing company that provides roofs that reflect “our integrity and strong Christian values”. Inevitably, he’s been in jail for conducting a violent kidnap against a person he incorrectly thought stole £10000 of his drugs. Remarkable.

Several of Reform’s top brass, to be fair, have condemned the nature of these protests. I applaud them for actually sticking to their principles although I think it’s more on matters like they don’t agree with protestors using facecoverings more than they dislike what the protestors claim to want. I suspect a few of their members are less upset by it all but there we go.

Anyway, it was their party conference where the main news that came out of it that I saw is a violent assault of the type of protestors none of them like. A woman associated with activist group Climate Resistance stood up to make her objections during Farage’s speech. It is of course normal that protestors doing this sort of thing are made to leave by security. It is less normal to see a bunch of men surround her and assault her in various manners including pulling her hair, hitting her with a walking stick and the like. It was bad enough that the police are asking the victim to come forward so they can start an investigation.

Even after the fact, the Reform high-and-wannabe-mighty don’t think there was any wrong-doing here, well, not on the part of the women-beaters. Boo-hoo says Jenrick. “We’ve got a screamer. Oh dear…Boring boring boring” says Farage.

In other Reform conference news, Greenpeace managed to unfurl a banner reading “collect £5 million, burn the planet” during Tice’s speech.

(Photo source)

The whole event was delayed by Farage arriving late. He told the media that this was down to counter terrorism police warning him not to attend for his safety. Inevitably the counter terrorism police say that they had no involvement whatsoever. To quote Farage’s reaction to the protestor in the midst of their assault, he tells this kind of lie so often that it is boring, boring, boring.

🎶 Listened to I’m camera by Sofia Isella.

This is a dark, kind of creepy EP from singer/poet Sofia. Real ominous, occasionally whispered lyrics. It must be quite the experience to go see a live gig.

Confronting some of my favourite political concerns; surveillance, technology, the horrendous sides of the experience of being a woman and so on.

Forgive the lengthy lyrics quote, but who can’t recognise this as an especially insightful take on the world we are in, or at least heading to:

The humans are gray They all act the same They have metallic-glossed brains They respond to dings And bells and rings

They’re a dog being whipped by a screen And they thought that they had the reigns But their creation has them trained And they’re being controlled by what they made

We want the humans to grind We want the engines to sing We want machines to be human We want humans to be machines

Kind of hard to imagine her as a support act for Taylor Swift, but that did happen.

UN votes to adopt new world map that shows Africa’s true scale.

Today’s typical Mercator projection maps make Africa look similarly sized to Greenland - but in fact it’s 14x larger.

Here’s a quick before and after, comparing today’s map to one that’s based on the Equal Earth design that’s to underly the newly proposed map.

Per Wikipedia, some advantages of the Equal Earth map, creates in 2018, are that:

• The relative area of any region on the map is preserved.
• The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
• Straight parallels make it easy to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.
• Meridians are evenly spaced along any line of latitude.
• Software for implementing the projection is easy to write and executes efficiently

British people urged to make emergency preparations before next year's weather starts its deadly onslaught

A harrowing warning from our representatives in today’s paper:

British people have been urged to have enough food and water on hand to survive a few days without power or water, as the UN said the El Niño climate phenomenon was “supersizing before our eyes”, exacerbating extreme weather events worldwide.

Forecasters say they are braced for the biggest El Niño in 1,000 years, bringing wildfires and floods to parts of the world, and the threat of a wet, stormy winter for the UK.

El Niño is of course a natural phenomena in the sense of its existence, but human-created climate change is making its effects all that much worse:

El Niño climate patterns supercharged by burning of fossil fuels, study finds

And of course the heating effect we’re now expecting it to create is on top of the ever increasing, ever more dangerous, temperature our behaviour is already causing:

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

Next year is going to be even more unpleasant than the one we’re already in. People will die in the UK. Far more will die in other more affected, more vulnerable countries. Whether or not we learn anything from that that actually changes our behaviour in a substantial way remains to be seen.

I can’t say I’m hopeful in a world where one of Britain’s most popular political parties is ridden with fossil-fuel funded high-ups who continue to verge between denying climate change in contrary to all obvious evidence and claiming it’s a good thing because it might make British wine a bit better. Insane stuff. These people cannot be allowed anywhere near the reins of power. And the rest of the parties need to lead us in a far, far better than we’ve seen to date.

📚 Finished reading All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell.

In this novel we follow the life of Professor Sturrock over a few days. He’s a very well-regarded psychiatrist who treats all manner of patients who have severe mental illnesses of one kind or another. But they’re not the only ones struggling with day-to-day life, to say the least.

It always feels kind of risky to read a book written by any kind of “celebrity” who is known for something other than their writing skills. The author, Alistair Campbell, was most famously Tony Blair’s spin doctor, who turned out to be an extremely polarising figure back then. These days he co-hosts a wildly successful politics podcast, wherein he regularly expresses his love for his old party, Labour.

But, to give him credit, this book is not any kind of political rant. Sure, there’s a (fictional) MP in it, but he’s one amongst many characters, and there sure isn’t any veneration of any particular party in it.

Also kind of famously, Campbell himself went through a major mental health crisis in the past, something, again to give him credit, he is very open about and campaigns for improving the help similar sufferers get. I suppose he thus, unfortunately, writes from experience. Stephen Fry notes that he has “‘rarely read a book where the agonies and insecurities of mental trauma have been so well chronicled”.

Whilst not universally loved, I found the book to be a good, compulsive read, and the message underlying it is undoubtedly an important one.

So ‘quietly’ has pushed its way through the ranks to be the word that I now most assume indicates that the text you sent me was never written or read by an actual human, and hence likely to be worth little.

Even more so than the ‘not only X, but Y’ construct.

Although I suppose there will be a point - perhaps it happened long ago - where humans will, consciously or otherwise, start picking up the writing style of AI. Even the few remaining humans who write their own stuff without any kind of AI assistance.

Language changes over time, with technology being one of many influences. Long before generative AI was popular, a certain subset of human language was after all already being very shaped by online algorithms.

(AI of course picked up its writing style from humans. To the extent that an inanimate object can be said to ‘pick up’, ‘write’ or have ‘a style’ of course.)

Not only WEIRD, but DEAD

New psychological science acronym just dropped.

As developed the Crockett lab’s recent paper “AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science”.

You might already be aware of the WEIRD sample critique - that psych science has tended to experiment on “convience samples” of people that are unrepresentative of the world’s population. That is to say folk that are:

• Western
• Educated
• Industrialized,
• Rich
• Democratic

Doing so limits generalisability. How could you possibly say that your finding applies to humans in general if you’ve only tested it on Harvard undergrads? But yet, few papers present their findings as “we found X in Harvard undergrads”, preferring to make sweeping statements about humanity.

Crockett and Messeri have come up with another you-can’t-generalise based acronym. DEAD:

• Decontextualized: interpreted without taking into account any cultural, relational, institutional, historical or situational factors participants are affected by.
• Engineered: measured using tasks that are designed to suit the limitations of what the researchers can easily measure rather than the real experience of someone in the outside world.
• Anonymized: taking no account of who is being measured; their identities, life experience, social positions or other relationships.
• Disembodied: without reference to any effect that people’s bodies, physical surroundings and so on might play on cognitition.

This is again a generalisation based critique, but instead of WEIRD’s focus on who gets studied, it relates to exactly how things get studied.

Work in the cognitive psychology field is full of proxies designed to measure some more general - and more interesting - psychological construct. The authors' critique here is that with DEAD data you cannot be at all sure that the actual thing you measured properly reflects the in-context human experience of the construct you want to write about.

In their words:

DEAD cognition is unlikely to be representative of the diverse ways in which cognition lives out in the real world: contextualized in culture and relationships, sprawling and unconstrained, tethered to our identities, and enacted through our bodies.

An example is instructive. There are a lot of papers that claim to measure (or alter) how generous humans are. But “generous”, in the layman’s sense of the word and its complete meaning, is obviously a rather difficult thing to measure quickly and simply in a lab or online. So instead, proxies such as the Dictator Game are used.

In this:

… participants are invited to share money with a recipient (typically a stranger or charity). Giving money is taken as a measure of generosity…

But:

…this task is hardly representative of all the ways in which humans show generosity. The standard version of this task measures generosity outside of specific relationships (decontextualized); it allows only one way to express generosity (engineered); articipants are typically not identified to experimenters or recipients (anonymized); and it excludes embodied cues and expressions (disembodied).

However, the resuilting papers tend to want to claim that “our intervention makes people more generous”, not “our intervention makes people behave a bit differently in a simple game involving a low sum of money”.

This is thus a potentially huge generalisation issue:

When we write papers about abstracted processes, such as ‘generosity’ (rather than, say, ‘donating US$1 to the Red Cross over the internet’), we perpetuate another illusion of generalizability, portraying DEAD cognition as more representative of cognition than it actually is.

A useful discussion in this episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers elaborates further. To provide an exaggerated-by-me version of one of their examples: Some unknown Mechanical Turker who decides to keep the $1 rather than donate it could be reflecting real selfishness of a millionare who craves every last bit of money, but on the other hand they might be living out of their car, desperately saving money for their mother’s life saving operations. Laypeople would likely interpret those two cases as rather different representations of generoisty, but the typical psychological study does not even attempt to differentiate between the two.

This is a shame (in my view):

Iceland rejects EU accession talks after divisive referendum campaign.

Lord knows we don’t need less European solidarity at this point in time. You can see that it’s an unfortunate result simply by looking at who is celebrating it (Farage, Le Pen, and, I would assume, Putin).

It was a close result: 52.8% against, 47.2% for. Upsettingly close to the cursed Brexit ratio.

Staying in bed extra at the weekend turns out to be a healthy habit

Good news for fans of a weekend lie-in!

‘People should not feel guilty’: weekend lie-in may be good for you, experts say.

Contrary to previous advice about keeping a regular bed-and-getting-up time even thruogh the weekend - especially so for those of us who suffer in general from a lack of sleep - it seems like there’s at least a correlation between having a weekend lie-in and not having unduly high blood pressure. High blood pressure is of course associated with all sorts of serious bad health issues.

For years, experts have stressed the risks of lie-ins, warning that catching up on missed sleep at the weekend can disrupt the body’s internal clock and trigger adverse health effects.

Now analysis has produced a heartening caveat to that advice: if you do not overdo it, weekend lie-ins may be good for you, with an ideal benchmark of 1hr 27min extra in bed to protect against high blood pressure.

Perhaps the reason this finding exists is more to do with the fact that basically everyone is sleep deprived in general these days:

Not getting enough sleep puts extra stress on the body. It keeps the heart and blood vessels working harder and can increase blood pressure.

“Getting some extra sleep on the weekend may give the body a chance to recover and reduce some of that stress.

But don’t stay in bed too long! Massive lie-ins are actually associated with higher blood pressure. Apparently 1 hour and 27 minutes is the perfect time, if you’re someone with that amount of control over the fact.

Overall, weekend catch-up sleep was associated with a 6% reduction in the odds of hypertension.

A slightly greater benefit was seen in people who were considered to be physically inactive. They were 6.9% less likely to have hypertension if they had a weekend lie-in.

Analysis identified the 1hr 27min benchmark as the ideal amount of catch-up sleep, Lee said. Someone getting this amount of extra sleep would be 9% less likely to have high blood pressure.

Not getting enough sleep is known to prevent blood pressure from falling at night, which raises the risk of developing high blood pressure.

Experts have previously stressed the importance of having a regular bedtime and wake-up time and dismissed the idea that you can catch up on missed sleep at the weekend.

However, while the new research showed that getting some catch-up sleep could boost heart health, getting too much could be harmful, Lee cautioned. For instance, people sneaking in more than four hours extra sleep at the weekend were at greater risk of hypertension.

Given the sample size and language used I suspect we’re talking about associations rather than definitive causations, but hey, as the article notes, no need to feel guilty about having a lie in if this turns out to be true! And it sounds like it makes sense from what is already known about sleep and blood pressure.

Developing the UK's North Sea oil fields further would likely end up being a pointless disaster

One of the more upsetting things that Andy Burnham’s government seems oddly enthusiastic to do is to enable the expansion the North Sea oil fields. This is mostly in the name of helping with improving the UK’s economy, cutting our cost of living and improving energy security.

However, all these motivations seem set to be utterly unrealisable given that we are not talking about a situation where the UK state owns the oil. What’s being talked about is not a nationalisation. Instead, it’s simply that private companies would be granted licenses to exploit further the oil fields and sell it onto the oil markets to whoever wants to buy it.

“Drilling for Oil and Gas Will not Reduce Bills or Deliver Energy Security” says the UK Energy Research Centre.

Spiking prices appear to favour home production. But the prices UK consumers pay for oil and gas are driven by international markets, regardless of whether it is extracted from the UK Continental Shelf or somewhere else. While oil and gas markets are different in significant ways, their available supply from the UK is small relative to overall market demand. Squeezing additional oil and gas production from the UK may be technically possible, but it will have negligible impact on the UK cost of living.

Another odd argument I’ve heard is that it’s somehow better for the environment than shipping in oil extracted by foreign competitiors. I suppose people are thinking of transportation needs? Buy local, and all.

Of course, this is not what drives the damage and not going to be helped by extracting new oil out of the sea no matter who does it. Besides in this case it seems like to actually make things, if anything, even worse:

Although the carbon-intensity of UK gas is lower than imported LNG, carbon emissions from UK oil and gas production are almost three times as large (per unit extracted) as Norway, the primary source of UK gas imports.

So:

Assertions that drilling the North Sea will provide energy resilience and affordability in the face of current fuel price shocks are a delusion.

A newer article in the Guardian shows that the further exploitation of these damaging and declining oil fields also does nothing for the economy, at least in the longer term. Further fossil fuels = further environmental destruction; something we’ll need to deal with if we want to survive.

The climate damage caused by developing the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields under consideration by the UK government would destroy their economic benefits many times over, according to an analysis.

It estimates the economic damage caused by the carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields.

These incredible costs are, if anything, likely to be an undercount:

The assessment applies peer-reviewed research on how rising temperatures harm economies to the production estimates for the fields from the company. The figures are likely to be underestimates, as they do not include losses from amplified extreme weather, sea level rise or climate deaths.

Such that:

“Expanding oil and gas production in the North Sea is not just an environmental crime but also economically illiterate”

Every pro increasing North Sea oilfield extraction argument fails to stand up according to experts. The UK is certainly facing all sorts of economic crises and difficulties at present, but it would be short-sighted, immoral and seemingly largely pointless to go down this route.

The real beneficiares of this change are, as ever, going to be the shareholders of huge oil companies, who have already been accused of “cashing in on human misery”.

Between 8 of them they’ve raked in an incredible $93 billion profits in the last three months.

The companies have used the biggest disruption of fossil fuel supplies in the market’s history to almost double their combined profits from just under $50bn in the same period last year, with campaigners warning that millions of households are left paying the price in higher bills and climate chaos.

The data suggests the eight oil companies – Aramco, BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, Chevron and ExxonMobil – made more than $700,000 of profit every minute over the spring quarter.

All this whilst British citizens have been dying due to the recent heatwaves, in addition to the horrific life and health destroying climate driven disasters in other parts of the world.

Things are…not going well on the heat front:

The obvious solution to part of our economic woes? Yes, it concerns oil companies - but it’s not via letting them print further masses of money at our expense.

Patrick Galey, the lead on fossil fuels at Global Witness, said: “BP’s sky-high profits are a scandalous reminder of who’s been cashing in on human misery this year. While wildfires threaten communities across the world, drought bites and energy costs spiral, ordinary families are paying the price for big oil’s prioritisation of shareholder wealth over a livable planet.”

He added: “It’s time to make oil giants pay up to repair the climate breakdown they’re driving. Think how many fire and flood defences we could build, or how many solar panels we could install, if big oil paid their fair share in taxes.”

Albums worth listening to: 2026 releases (so far, non-exhaustive)

Here are some albums released this year that I’ve quite liked, last updated 2026-08-29. The occasional EP might also slip in.

RADICALGavin Prophet · 2026

HELP(2)Fontaines D.C. & War Child Records · 2026

Be Someone BetterRed Arrow Highway · 2026

Romanticize The DiveMetric · 2026

Nine Inch NoizeNine Inch Nails & Boys Noize · 2026

Oversharing on the InternetEarth to Eve · 2026

LAURENLauren Sanderson · 2026

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in loveOlivia Rodrigo · 2026

TRAUMACORE (RAW AND UNCUT) [DELUXE]SkyDxddy · 2026

The Wow! SignalMuse · 2026

Daughter from HellGracie Abrams · 2026

Cruel WorldHolly Humberstone · 2026

Music, Fashion, FilmCharli xcx · 2026

Miss Misfortunatelygracie · 2026

OZebrahead · 2026

GOTTA GET OUTThe Linda Lindas · 2026

Geeqie is a handy little open-source app for Linux systems that helps you view, sort and organise all your images. I’m sure it has far more capabilities than I will ever need, but as a way to flick through hundreds of photos, mark ones to keep vs delete and then do exactly that it works a treat.

I especially like the way you can split the screen into 2 or 4 so as to compare several images against each other. Here’s a screenshot from the official project page.

Beyond that it supports bookmarks, tags, collections, what have you, as well as full access to your Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata.

I believe it also has a duplicate image dector but I haven’t tried that.

Results of the 2024 UK General Election under different voting systems

Today’s Guardian has an interesting graphic simulating what the results of the 2024 UK general election might have been under various different proportional-representation influenced voting systems.

Of course if a new voting system was brought in, then people’s voting behaviour might change - but it’s an interesting look nonetheless. The results do basically seem a much better reflection of what I believe the current vibes of the country are than the result that our existing FPTP one produced.

Sure, I really might not like the parts of the potential results in some cases (and really like them in others). But voting systems must not be designed based on what outcome you want, so I’m glad to see that the majority of MPs - including the majority of Labour MPs,which is the group who most benefitted from the limitations of our system last time - apparently do support this kind of change.