November 2024
Nov 19: I now believe the Bluesky mass migration is for real, having learned that even dril made the leap.
Nov 19: No religious liberty on offer from the Office of Religious Liberty
Nov 17: One more failure in care: locking up children in dangerous places
Nov 17: 📺 Watched Rivals.
Nov 16: 🎮 Played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
Nov 16: 🎥 Watched A Haunting in Venice.
Nov 16: 🎥 Watched Dune: Part 2.
Nov 15: Trump's victory added $27 billion dollars to the wealth of the 10 richest people in the world
Nov 15: The Onion buys Infowars
Nov 13: I’m reluctant to volunteer my own evidence-free theory into the morass of folk providing …
Nov 12: Google receives its biggest fine yet. $20 decillion. A decillion is a one with 33 zeroes after it. …
Nov 11: Trump’s election promises weren’t only meaningless because they were almost certainly …
Nov 11: Changing the E of an OBE
Nov 11: Who knew that Michael Gove got one particularly foolish part of his political philosophy from a 1967 …
Nov 10: OpenAI released their web search engine - at least to paid subscribers. Looks to be integrated into …
Nov 10: RSS as a method of subscribing to your favourite online content is not dead, and thanks to its open …
Nov 9: 📚 Finished reading Rough Justice by Wendy Joseph.
Nov 7: Daring Fireball collects the sycophantic well-done-Trump tweets sent by all those big tech CEOs …
Nov 7: Various breakdowns of voter support for Harris vs Trump from the BBC, in an effort to understand …
Nov 7: Trump won. By more than expected. How did it happen? Sometimes fear triumphs over hope. … …
Nov 5: Handy guide as to whether it’s safe to go to bed from The Guardian.
Nov 5: Some publications aren't afraid to endorse Harris, and do better for it
Nov 3: Cowardly tech billionaires further ruin their newspapers by letting Trump intimidate them into censoring the Opinions out of their Opinions section
Nov 3: Admittedly this isn’t the most pressing issue of the forthcoming US presidential election, but …
Nov 2: Tampering with the polls for the US election
October 2024
Oct 29: The events leading up to the US election seem even more horrifying than usual
Oct 28: Vox's take on "Is AI the new nuclear weapons?"
Oct 27: 🎥 Watched Oppenheimer.
Oct 27: Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical …
Oct 26: The New York Times advises us to believe Trump when he tells us what he's going to do
Oct 26: The Pudding visualises the process of getting an abortion as a maze
Oct 23: Two types of information overload: the situational vs the ambient
Oct 22: Currently trying out a combo of FreshRSS and NetNewsWire to experience the joy (?) of aggregating, …
Oct 22: Found a new creepy critter in the garden, just in time for the Halloween season. My phone believes …
Oct 21: The wrongness of 'If you've got nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear'
Oct 19: New Scientist Live show 2024 books list
Oct 18: TIL: Thanks to the innate lack of privacy that the technology has, whilst we might not know who …
Oct 17: Added a few more books to my absolutely unrealistic “Books about AI I want to read” …
Oct 17: It is a battle evident in the psyche of many partnered people, and especially so in midlife. It …
Oct 15: 📚 Finished listening to Fall of Giants by Ken Follett.
Oct 14: Ryan Broderick succinctly sums up why the contemporary mega-hype around AI doesn’t depend on …
Oct 13: New Scientist Live talks 2024
Oct 12: I’m curious about precisely what level of surveillance technology is powering this (admittedly …
Oct 12: Busting ghosts for breakfast.
Oct 11: Well this is one of the more aggravating CAPTCHAs I’ve had to solve. Especially as 2/3 of the …
Oct 10: A disappointing selection for the next Conservative leader
Oct 7: Google's creators envisaged that advertising-funded search engines are a bad idea (but made one anyway)
Oct 5: TIL: Until the 1948 Representation of the People Act, graduates of certain universities in the UK …
Oct 4: 📚 Finished reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
Oct 4: From Ars Technica: Streaming services say they make more revenue per user on average if the …
Oct 2: When it comes to listening to podcasts I’m a big Pocket Casts user. Whilst it has a …
September 2024
Sep 30: Absolutely love this recent post from the fantastic SMBC Comics.
Sep 29: How unique is Covid-19?
Sep 29: Elon Musk's free speech 'principles' lose to his economic interests once again as he capitulates to Brazil's Twitter demands
Sep 28: Honestly it’s probably a losing battle, but if you want to try then organisations like CNN and …
Sep 28: 📽️ Watched Hidden Figures.
Sep 26: Just re-encountered Good Clean Fun’s classic “The MySpace Song”. Emotional …
Sep 24: Somewhat bewildered at what’s going on between the ultra famous web content management system …
Sep 23: A new study finds 3,601 of the more-than-14,000 chemicals known to be used to store, process, …
Sep 21: Why limit the political gifts ban to buying clothes for the PM?
Sep 21: 'Outrage' erupts as Keir Starmer moves a painting to another room
Sep 21: The era of Britishcore is upon us
Sep 19: Now Hezbollah's walkie-talkies are exploding
Sep 19: New phones aren't all that more exciting despite what Google claims
Sep 18: 10015 is a useful website containing a ton of quick little web tools that handle a set of fairly …
Sep 18: Remote cyber-attack on Hezbollah's pagers causes thousands of injuries and deaths
Sep 14: 🎶 Listening to HIT ME HARD AND SOFT by Billie Eilish.
Sep 14: 🎶 Listening to Radical Optimism by Dua Lipa.
Sep 13: 🎶 Listening to ~mAntras~ by Alien Ant Farm.
Sep 11: Save videos, photos and audio from your favourite sites with Cobalt
Sep 10: Recent research provides some (weak) evidence that labelling menu items with calories might cause harm to some
Sep 8: UniGetUI is a handy GUI for Winget and other Windows package managers
Sep 8: Where is the boundary between blue and green?
Sep 7: Fake streamers listening to fake music by fake artists on Spotify allegedly made a single fraudster at least $10 million
Sep 6: A friend gets in touch to let me know that it’s not necessarily scary AI cyber-brains that are …
Sep 5: 📄 Reading the Pivot to AI blog.
Sep 3: More events in what is starting to feel something like a global backlash against some of the big …
Sep 3: Research suggests that GLP-1 pharmaceuticals can prevent Covid-19 deaths
Sep 1: Another great free e-books offer from Verso, a publisher that continues to release at least one book …
Sep 1: Telegram is only end-to-end encrypted if you solely use 'secret chats'
August 2024
Aug 31: 🎥Watched Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.
Aug 30: 🎥 Watched Legally Blonde.
Aug 27: Windows has a keyboard shortcut for opening LinkedIn for some reason
Aug 26: The US Food and Drug Administration approved new vaccines for Covid-19 last week. The recommendation …
Aug 26: Ibrahim Al-Nasser has officially set a new world record for how many video games consoles anyone has …
Aug 25: 📚 Finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.
Aug 24: It’s quite something to have gotten to the point in Britain that a UN committee feels …
Aug 23: US Democrats borrow a dril tweet - a good excuse to list some faves
Aug 22: The IFS's interactive 'impact of tax and benefit changes' tool shows the cruel impact of the post-2010 tax and benefit changes
Aug 16: Gotta say, currently being in the midst of the outstanding book ‘The Age of Surveillance …
Aug 15: Disabling my webcam from being a 'sound, video and game controller' fixed my Windows 11 laptop having no sound
Aug 14: Is there anything more ‘US politics in 2024’ than this? While the real Trump-Musk Space …
Aug 14: So far in 2024, one woman in the UK has allegedly been killed by a man every three days on average. …
Aug 14: 📚 Finished reading Starting & Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies by Colin Barrow.
Aug 13: The UK far right riots show the days of overt and violent racist behaviour in the UK are far from over
Aug 11: 📺 Watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
Aug 10: The tech billionaires who at least used to be ashamed about their support for Trump
Aug 9: 📚 Finished reading Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway.
Aug 9: Robert Jenrick, a Conservative MP who has aspirations to lead the party despite apparently being a …
Aug 6: In news that chills me to the core, Hazel, a software engineer, has been keeping around 7,500 tabs …
Aug 6: One of my favourite publishers in terms of their typical subject matter, Verso Books, is temporarily …
Aug 4: TIL: Boris Johnson once disfigured a Long Covid report he was supposed to read by scrawling the word …
Aug 4: I wasn’t wrong about the torment nexus AI plastic necklace company called ‘Friend’ …
Aug 3: TIL: The US' current cybersecurity legislation, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is an evolution of …
Aug 1: 📚 Finished reading The Future by Naomi Alderman.
Aug 1: Once again, managing a government budget is not like managing a household budget
July 2024
Jul 31: An AI company reinvents the concept of a 'friend'
Jul 26: A spate of double-yolked eggs
Jul 25: Rainbow CSV is an extension for VSCode that makes working with CSV fields in that editor a lot more …
Jul 24: We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and …
Jul 23: JAM Software’s TreeSize app is a handy Windows utility to quickly visualise which of your …
Jul 23: Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It Paul Ford writes entertainingly about generative …
Jul 23: Think about your actual rather than idealised office when deciding whether to go into work
Jul 21: 🎮 Played Disco Elysium - The Final Cut.
Jul 20: A Microsoft Powershell command for the brave / foolish-of-heart! This - I hope: looks through all …
Jul 19: A bug in Crowdstrike's software breaks large swathes of the world
Jul 19: If you ever have a desire to edit MP3 tags without putting your phone down, then Evertag seems worth …
Jul 19: The compareDF R package seems to be a super convenient way to quickly compare two dataframes to see …
Jul 19: No-one seems to sell cheap Linux laptops
Jul 16: 404 Media reveals the “Face Fraud” marketplace, wherein for a few dollars you can buy a …
Jul 14: Contra the New Yorker, Christopher Snowdon gives us some reasons to believe that the case …
Jul 11: Britain now has MPs aged from 22 to 80
Jul 7: The UK has a new Labour government
Jul 4: The day has come - it's time to go vote in the UK general election
Jul 3: A new Channel 4 documentary asks us 'Can AI steal your vote?'
Jul 2: Last month Ticketmaster got hacked by a group known as ShinyHunters, the same group that previously …
Jul 1: From The BBC: France’s far right is in pole position after the first round of parliamentary …
June 2024
Jun 30: Led by Donkeys doing some of their usual amazing work via slowly dropping a banner featuring an …
Jun 30: Microsoft accidentally leaks some of the source code behind their PlayReady DRM software. The …
Jun 29: New scandal dropped: The Conservative officials who bet on the election date based on inside knowledge
Jun 28: 📚 Finished reading Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart.
Jun 27: 404 reports that: Users of massively popular AI chatbot platform Character.AI are reporting that …
Jun 26: free-for.dev is a great list of free-tier cloud service tools for developers
Jun 26: ✉️ Reading the Political Calculus newsletter.
Jun 24: Another huge NHS data leak following a ransomware attack
Jun 22: Louisiana schools are now legally required to display the biblical Ten Commandments
Jun 21: What a surprise that Nigel Farage - current face of the booming Reform party - isn’t opposed …
Jun 21: 📺 Watched Clarkson’s Farm.
Jun 20: Shoutout to Patsy Gallagher, who spent the first few months of her life officially known as …
Jun 20: This month’s The American Prospect magazine has an absolutely - possibly surprisingly - …
Jun 19: Maybe I’m just vegetable-sheltered, but I don’t think I encountered something that …
Jun 19: (At least) one of the UK's general election candidates is an AI chatbot
Jun 18: Apparently I was not the only person to rather take advantage of all-you-can-eat deals, at least in …
Jun 17: Being thin is (in part) a genetic trait
Jun 14: The day has come: Reform is polling slightly higher than the Conservatives in the “Who do you …
Jun 13: The general election manifestos are out
Jun 12: The cutting edge AI-bots couldn't say who won the 2020 US Presidential election
Jun 11: The pro-Putin anti-women Reform candidate who prefers Hitler to Churchill
Jun 9: The Gunning fog index formula, amongst others, calculates how readable your writing is
Jun 8: Conservatives halt digital ad campaigns after daily spend plunged The party has halted all its …
Jun 8: A calculator to quickly compare the energy costs of using different types of appliances
Jun 5: Nigel Farage is, unfortunately, (dis)gracing us with his presence once again
Jun 4: Free music streaming and more from your local library
Jun 3: A third Conservative MP defects to Labour
Jun 2: 📚 Finished reading Lost in a Good Game by Pete Etchells.
Jun 1: 📺 Watched Beyond Paradise season 1 and 2.
May 2024
May 31: Trump can't pardon himself for yesterday's crimes even if he becomes president again
May 31: I just learned that Microsoft released some older versions of MS-DOS as open source. Whilst it shows …
May 30: Donald Trump has been convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his historic …
May 29: The study behind the trial that Novo Nordisk stopped early last year for efficacy reasons has been …
May 28: Seems it is impossible to delete your old Google Gemini chatbot chats if you have a Google business …
May 28: 📽 Watched Civil War.
May 27: The Labour party’s chief of staff Sue Gray has created a risk register - less formally known …
May 27: 🎭 Excitedly awaiting ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’, which claims to be ‘the best British musical in decades’.
May 26: Apple Music attempts to adjudicate the top 100 'greatest albums ever made'
May 25: So far 80 Conservative MPs quit rather than face a general election
May 23: Sunak announces that the UK will have a General Election on July 4th
May 22: The New Yorker suggests there was little evidence behind the conviction of Lucy Letby
May 21: The randomizr package for R (and apparently Stata) provides some nice simple functions to help …
May 21: OpenAI's latest model - why are we trying so hard to make these products sound so human?
May 19: In reassuring news, it turns out that the security code needed to get into the UK’s National …
May 18: Britain has the highest rate of homelessness in the developed world
May 18: 🎶 Listening to The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift.
May 17: The excellent ConscienHealth blog, writing about a fierce debate in the world of nutrition science, …
May 16: 📺 Watched Pompeii: The New Dig.
May 15: 📚 Finished reading Between Death and Life by Dolores Cannon.
May 14: The Rwanda bill went through, but that doesn't make it OK
May 13: Publishers are receiving a deluge of AI-generated dross
May 12: Some services that help transfer your music library and playlists between different music streaming services
May 11: 📚 Finished reading Ghost Hunter by Hans Holzer.
May 10: Happy to see that even the Norton anti-virus homepage totally acknowledges that their prices get …
May 10: Hundreds of IPCC scientists think we'll being living in an environmental semi-dystopia by the end of the century
May 9: 📺 (Re)watching Westworld.
May 8: Watched Barbie (the movie).
May 6: Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs now has a AI-generated 'digital person' as a spokesperson
May 6: A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban …
May 3: Tom Hunt's predicament is a perfect example of why voter ID laws are usually bad laws
May 3: For future reference, there is a website where you can find out what your local candidates for the …
May 2: Happy 50th birthday to SQL! Structured Query Language is an incredibly popular computer language …
May 1: The British people's opinion on immigration is becoming less hostile whilst the number of immigrants goes up
April 2024
Apr 28: Top Tory MP defects to Labour in fury at NHS crisis Dan Poulter crosses the aisle. He doesn’t …
Apr 28: What if, for example, you only want your content to be seen by humans in their thirties with …
Apr 27: Remove DRM from Amazon Kindle books with Calibre
Apr 26: 🎶 Listening to Kaiser Chief’s Easy Eighth Album by The Kaiser Chiefs.
Apr 25: 📚 Finished reading The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov.
Apr 23: 📺 Watched season 13 of Death In Paradise.
Apr 22: The results aren’t published yet, but it looks like we’re going to see that the …
Apr 21: 📚 Finished reading Becoming a Data Head by Alex J Gutman and Jordan Goldmeier.
Apr 20: Emulators hit the iOS app store
Apr 20: The source of the 'AI experts think there's a 10% chance that AI will destroy humanity' statistic
Apr 20: 📧 Reading the Data Is Plural newsletter - “a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets”.
Apr 19: Let's not make the update to the 1824 Vagrancy Act worse than the original
Apr 18: Trump forced to see mean memes about him shared by prospective jurors (from Rolling Stone) Donald …
Apr 18: Taking GLP-1 drugs may increase your chance of getting pregnant
Apr 17: Spotify's new minimum stream threshold means most tracks no longer pay the artist
Apr 15: US regulators introduce a law to limit the levels of PFAS present in drinking water
Apr 14: The 'mother of all breaches' saw billions of confidential data records leaked earlier this year
Apr 11: Started learning how to be a ‘Full-Stack Developer’ with Mimo.
Apr 7: Is the UK housing crisis more about who owns the houses rather than how many houses there are?
Apr 6: The definition of Botshit
Apr 5: 📧 Reading the Garbage Day newsletter.
Apr 5: 📺 Watched season 21 of of Dragon’s Den.
Apr 1: Today’s DuoLingo seems to be 100% sponsored by our dog.
March 2024
Mar 31: 📺 Watched The Power.
Mar 30: R. A. Fisher’s quote from his address to the 1938 First Indian Statistical Congress remains …
Mar 30: Immediate low-key stress response whenever I see a message like this from a product owned by Meta. …
Mar 28: ‘Refugee Astronaut III’, from a recent visit to the Wellcome Collection’s …
Mar 27: 🎶 Listening to Saviors by Green Day.
Mar 27: The benefits of eating snakes
Mar 24: 📚 Finished reading The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow.
Mar 24: A trip to the 'The Cult of Beauty' exhibition
Mar 24: 🎶 Listening to GUTS (spilled) by Olivia Rodrigo.
Mar 22: ChatGPT remembers
Mar 20: 📺 Watched Black Mirror season 6.
Mar 20: GB News breaks TV broadcast regulations once again
Mar 18: From The Guardian: Five people have been killed and 10 injured in Gaza when they were hit by a …
Mar 17: 📚 Finished reading The Abuse of Power by Theresa May.
Mar 14: Bash script to delete local git branches that haven't been updated for a long time
Mar 14: Perelandra Bookshop, in Fort Collins, Colorado, has a “reader-in-residence” program. A …
Mar 14: I hadn’t realised that the directors had confirmed that the fan theory that The Matrix movie …
Mar 13: Figure is putting ChatGPT brains into humanoid bodies
Mar 13: The Conservative leadership leans into conspiracy thinking
Mar 11: After a trial involving nearly 18000 participants, the US FDA approves Wegovy, one of the famed …
Mar 10: The Torment Nexus meme
Mar 8: Big Duolingo milestone this week for my mission to learn Spanish: It’s honestly amazing how …
Mar 7: The day Replika lobotomised everyone's AI girlfriend
Mar 7: From The Guardian: Britain will go into the next general election with taxes at their highest level …
Mar 3: Glasgow’s ‘Willy’s Chocolate Experience’ (as in Willy Wonka of course) seems …
Mar 2: 📚 Finished reading The PK Cookbook by Sarah Myhill.
February 2024
Feb 29: 📚 Finished listening to Out of the Blue by Harry Cole.
Feb 26: 🎙 Listening to Cyber: The End of Vice podcast.
Feb 25: The layers of the Internet
Feb 24: In data breach news, Wyze, a maker of internet-enabled smart security cameras to put in your home, …
Feb 22: 📚 Finished reading In Ascension by Martin MacInnes.
Feb 19: Apparently even more British children have smartphones than I’d have guessed. Ofcom data says …
Feb 18: Air Canada instructed to honour a refund that their chatbot inadvertently promised
Feb 15: Another 'abuse of power': thousands of students wrongly deported from the UK for supposedly cheating on a test
Feb 15: Learned a new phase last week: stinge-watching. It’s the opposite of binge-watching. …
Feb 14: 📺 Watching The Apprentice - season 18.
Feb 13: For anyone that finishes Wordle too quickly, Puzzmo - “the (new) place for thoughtful …
Feb 8: TIL: Elon Musk wasn’t the founder of Tesla. Tesla’s real founders were Martin Eberhard …
Feb 7: Interesting that “social media” is such a toxic brand these days that Snapchat’s …
Feb 6: NearbyWiki.org is a fun site that plots Wikipedia encyclopedia entries over an interactive map. You …
Feb 5: 📧 Reading the Bits About Money newsletter.
Feb 4: TIL: Buckingham Palace pays a council tax bill of £1,828 per year. That’s lower than 46% of …
Feb 4: Neuralink implants a chip in someone's brain
Feb 3: The asylum seekers fleeing from Rwanda make the UK's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda seem even more unhinged
Feb 3: 📺 Watched season 6 of The Crown.
Feb 3: 📺 Watched season 2 of The Traitors (UK version).
January 2024
Jan 30: Cory Doctorow reminds us that AI doesn’t actually have to be better than us at our jobs in …
Jan 29: 143 companies want to know that I visited the Teen Vogue website
Jan 27: A friend shares the UK National Careers Service’s job description of an astronaut with me. …
Jan 26: 🎶 Listening to Sweet Justice by Tkay Maidza.
Jan 25: This (taken from some random Discord if I remember correctly) might be a little simplistic in some …
Jan 25: 1 mobile phone gets stolen every 6 minutes in London, back in 2022 at least. That year 90,864 got …
Jan 23: The shocking role of modern-day slavery in the UK care sector
Jan 21: TIL: Ireland’s Dublin Airport holds an annual “Blessing of the Planes” ceremony. …
Jan 21: 📚 Finished reading: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov.
Jan 20: Computerphile takes us through some of the technical issues found with the Post Office Horizon …
Jan 18: NewsGuard identifies 634 entire websites full of generative-AI-created content farm nonsense
Jan 15: Amazon appears to be selling OpenAI apologies disguised as chairs
Jan 15: Mis- and dis-information are the biggest immediate threats to the world according to the WEF
Jan 14: A huge number of important elections are due to be held in 2024
Jan 13: 📺 Started the mammoth mission of watching all available ‘classic’ Doctor Who episodes, 1963-1996.
Jan 13: 📺 Watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Jan 10: Trump team argues assassination of rivals is covered by presidential immunity Not the most …
Jan 9: Compassion beats empathy in a helpless situation
Jan 9: Elsewhere, I wrote about the ongoing battle between between human creators and AI trainers.
Jan 8: On the verge of entering ‘Unbelievable’ - a magic show in the West End. It was written …
Jan 7: The 'Power Up' exhibition - a festival of mostly-retro videogaming
Jan 7: The last vestiges of Christmas lights, outside Kings Cross station, London.
Jan 6: Visiting Sigmund Freud's last home
Jan 5: What it takes to be in the top 1% of UK income tax payers
Jan 3: From CNBC: Google is considering a substantial workforce reduction, potentially affecting up to …
Jan 2: More than 1 in 50 Londoners are homeless
Jan 2: My year in music, 2023
December 2023
Dec 31: My year in books, 2023
Dec 31: 📚 Finished reading The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow.
Dec 29: Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT and its ilk are finding their way into providing direct customer service for …
Dec 29: Some books about Artificial Intelligence I'd like to read - updated
Dec 27: At last the most important top X things of 2023 post is out. Here’s Rolling Stone’s take …
Dec 24: (Nearly) new year, new URL. I’ve kept this blog up long enough it’s time to give it its …
Dec 24: Busy wasting time on The Great Scrollback of Alexandria. This is a preservation effort, attempting …
Dec 22: Over 10,000 research papers were retracted this year
Dec 22: 📚 Finished reading Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth.
Dec 21: The Word of the Year 2023 winners are in
Dec 19: Good news, it looks like federating is still in fashion. Flipboard has starting federating a few of …
Dec 14: 🎶 Listening to Stumpwork by Dry Cleaning.
Dec 13: 📚 Finished reading Zero Days by Ruth Ware.
Dec 12: Elon Musk tried to create a ‘politically neutral’ - also known as ‘politically …
Dec 11: Maryam Moshiri falls victim to the same self-inflicted disaster that I’m sure all of us remote …
Dec 9: Currently on consecutive day 9 of wearing my Christmas jumper.
Dec 8: Quiver Quantitative tracks and shares a lot of stock trading information to enable reporting on and …
Dec 8: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator I don’t …
Dec 7: TIL: When playing fruit machines, legally it’s the person who presses the button that gets the …
Dec 5: The last of the big tech giants recently released its version of a large language model generative …
Dec 5: Being an data analyst type of person I am a fervent believer in the below concept, but until now I …
Dec 4: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies Rolling Stone …
Dec 4: The world is on track for a “hellish” 3C of global heating, the UN has warned. Apparently our …
November 2023
Nov 28: 📚 Finished reading Upgrade by Blake Crouch.
Nov 28: 📚 Finished reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.
Nov 27: 🎶 Listening to GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo.
Nov 27: 📚 Finished reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
Nov 26: In 2019 OpenAI was too scared to open GPT-2 to the world
Nov 25: 📚 Finished reading The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross.
Nov 23: The Conservative party appears to hate law and order
Nov 21: Humans will go to considerable effort to get obviously useless information
Nov 20: Facebook permanently disabled my account, no right of appeal
Nov 17: Sam Altman, the famed head of OpenAI seems to have been fired. Mr. Altman’s departure follows …
Nov 17: 🎙️ Listening to Sherlock & Co.
Nov 17: There's now a dangerous black market in anti-obesity drugs
Nov 15: 📚 Finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Nov 15: 📚 Finished reading We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins.
Nov 14: Is Britain on the verge of introducing an age limit on baking?
Nov 13: Meta-owned WhatsApp confirms (once again) that adverts are coming to its app. Code to enable this …
Nov 13: Arcade claw machines are even more scammy than I thought
Nov 12: The deleterious effects of bad business models, incentives and AI on music streaming services
Nov 10: This interactive visualisation is a great way of explaining or visualising what a given …
Nov 10: Expect lots of fun new pun-ridden URLs to show up soon. Starting December 5th everyone can purchase …
Nov 8: Braverman thinks homelessness is a "lifestyle choice"
Nov 8: Ooh, after the success of the Super Mario Bros Movie they’re making a live-action Legend of …
Nov 7: TIL: The collective noun for a group of ferrets is a “business” of ferrets. So now you …
Nov 7: Jennifer Daniel shares what we can expect for official new emojis in 2025. Just seven this time, …
Nov 5: The UK does not need to widen the definition of extremism even further
Nov 2: I often wondered what happened if you accidentally tick the “Yes I have committed …
Nov 2: Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, …
October 2023
Oct 29: 🎙️ Listening to ‘Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Israel/Gaza Edition’ from the On The Media podcast.
Oct 28: The impact of the Hamas Israel war on hate-crime in Britain
Oct 28: 🎶 Listening to The More Red Chapter by Taylor Swift.
Oct 26: 🎶 Listening to The Jaws of Life by Pierce The Veil.
Oct 24: 🎶 Listening to Just a Christmas Dirtbag by Wheatus.
Oct 23: I’m sure no-one needs reminding, but today is National Mole Day. . Nothing to do with small …
Oct 23: Unsurprisingly, the 'eat 2000 calories a day' recommendation isn't very scientific
Oct 22: In a recent paper, researchers compared the trends in Google searches that suggest people are …
Oct 21: Can’t believe its taken me 7 years to learn of the outrageous decline of everyone’s favourite …
Oct 21: 🎙️ Listening to The Ezra Klein Show podcast episode “Why A.I.
Oct 18: IPleak.net looks to be a pretty comprehensive website that allows you to check what IP address …
Oct 12: Newspaper in trouble for publishing Braverman's lie about child grooming gangs
Oct 12: 📚 Finished reading Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Oct 11: Walmart finds that people who start taking the GLP-1 anti-obesity medications go on to buy …
Oct 8: 📺 Watched Jury Duty.
Oct 8: 🎶 Listening to Re: This Is Why.
Oct 4: A wet fish, outside Sheffield station.
September 2023
Sep 30: I was curious to know what age the oldest person to have ever lived got to. According to the …
Sep 27: Amazon now charges third-party sellers almost half of their revenue
Sep 22: The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give …
Sep 21: What causes the Overton Paradox?
Sep 19: 🎮 Currently playing The Battle of Polytopia.
Sep 19: My Microsoft Surface laptop decided not to recognise that anything was plugged into its USB ports …
Sep 17: 🎙️ Listening to The Studies Show podcast.
Sep 16: Last week, while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil …
Sep 15: Liz Truss is writing a new book 😟
Sep 15: Over here I wrote about some research from Pew comparing what Twitter users say they do vs what they …
Sep 10: 🎶 Listening to Hell Is A Teenage Girl by Nessa Barrett.
Sep 10: This looks like a handy comparison guide to free and open source photo libraries for anyone …
Sep 8: The corporate jargon being most forcibly injected into my ears in recent days: HMW: how might we …
Sep 6: MusicBrainz Picard fixes your musical MP3 tagging woes
Sep 5: More data leaks
Sep 4: 📚 Finished reading Q by Christina Dalcher.
August 2023
Aug 28: TIL: There’s a version of chess you play on a hexagon shaped board made up of hexagons. It …
Aug 28: Experiencing the Dream Machine
Aug 27: The trials and tribulations of installing Linux Mint alongside Windows 10
Aug 26: Treating obesity can save lives
Aug 23: When some of your personalities go blind
Aug 22: Russia's moon-landing attempt fails, but there's plenty more coming up soon
Aug 21: Twitter's habit of deleting or undeleting your posts at will
Aug 18: Getting real SimCity vibes from the view today.
Aug 17: We’re up to 91 felonies now in terms of how many criminal charges have been brought against …
Aug 17: 📧 Reading John Medina’s Substack newsletter.
Aug 14: 📚 Finished reading: The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman.
Aug 13: 📽 Watched Interstate 60.
Aug 12: Please let's not fight the next election on who can damage the environment the most
Aug 9: From PC Magazine: For 16 years, Jeremy Vaught had control of the @music account on Twitter. But no …
Aug 8: Turns out the UK’s Electoral Commission has been hacked for the past couple of years. At the …
Aug 8: 🎙️ Listening to Brad & Will Made A Tech Pod.
Aug 7: The call of Linux
Aug 1: TIL: There’s an estimated 3 million shipwrecks dotted across the ocean floors of our planet. …
July 2023
Jul 31: A new paper re-affirms that plant-based diets are far less damaging to the environment
Jul 31: Many of us have seen those adverts for smartphone games, often embedded inside other annoying phone …
Jul 30: Paper notes: How much food tracking during a digital weight management program is enough...?
Jul 30: Should one have the need to mass-download their Kindle books from Amazon without a ton of clicking …
Jul 26: 🎶 Listening to Endless Summer Vacation by Miley Cyrus.
Jul 25: Somehow only today did I realise that you can use if statements directly within R’s dplyr …
Jul 24: WormGPT is an AI chatbot designed to help commit crime
Jul 24: Very unexpectedly, something about the apparent inanity / insanity of its plot makes me actually …
Jul 24: 📚 Finished listening to The Monopolists by Mary Pilon.
Jul 20: Is it worth trying to increase your physical activity if you only have time to even think about it …
Jul 20: Terrible AI-written books hit the Kindle Unlimited best-seller lists
Jul 19: The new New Conservatives faction has no new ideas
Jul 18: Following some big companies such as Samsung banning or putting limits on their employees' use of …
Jul 15: From the i: Nigel Farage has criticised the Home Office’s decision to paint over murals of cartoon …
Jul 14: The latest deranged volley in the Conservative Government’s extremely inhumane and extremely …
Jul 14: I’ve been looking at options for Network Attached Storage recently, to help me be more …
Jul 14: Conservatives only like law and order when it suits their interests
Jul 14: The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT et al, in order to …
Jul 12: Learned that you can work in two branches of the same local git repo at once without problems via …
Jul 12: PC Part Picker seems to be a good site for seeing a summary of what, surprise surprise, parts of PCs …
Jul 11: It’s increasingly apparent that relying on the ability to reliably access or even link to …
Jul 11: The 'Redact' app lets you delete all those social media posts that you regret writing
Jul 8: In “I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop” Adam Mastroianni makes the case …
Jul 8: Twitter’s whims can break other sites too
Jul 6: Australia becomes the first country to legalise the use of certain psychedelics in controlled …
Jul 6: TIL: The US isn’t the only country to officially celebrate American independence on July 4th. …
Jul 5: 📚 Finished reading 11.22.63 by Stephen King.
Jul 4: 📚 Finished reading Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow.
Jul 3: This week is London Data Week - ‘Data in the public, for the public’. Join us at London …
June 2023
Jun 30: Providing the greatest educational resources to people who do well on tests isn't the only option
Jun 30: Absolutely obsessed with The Password Game. All the fun of trying to pick a computer password …
Jun 29: A trip to the Van Gogh Immersive Experience
Jun 27: Mya Gosling provides what turns out to be a handy guide to the 7 Shakespeare plays that might …
Jun 26: Huge shock to the system today when I saw what appeared from a distance to be a dead human body on …
Jun 25: Living in the dumbest timeline as we do, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship has …
Jun 25: A day of musical fun in the sun, perhaps to be banned in the US
Jun 20: Intrigued to learn that the RStudio folks are actively working on an integration with the GitHub …
Jun 19: US residents can join class actions against Google and Facebook's abuse of their data
Jun 18: 📚 Finished reading: Divergent Mind by Jenara Nerenberg.
Jun 16: The Partygate report is here
Jun 15: The UK is once again experiencing a heatwave, a situation likely to become ever more common whilst …
Jun 14: Boris Johnson has stepped down as a Tory MP after claiming he was “forced out of …
Jun 13: The bronze elephants of Spitalfields
Jun 12: TIL: Last year scientists discovered a bacteria of such relatively huge size that it’s easily …
Jun 9: A further 7 federal charges have been laid against Trump, some related to his having illegally …
Jun 8: Learned that the built-in fc command is a quick way to check if 2 files have the same contents using …
Jun 8: Leutner et al. provide evidence of a link between having obesity and later developing a diagnosed …
Jun 7: On another AI note, Google is going to introduce adverts to its generative AI search/chat feature. …
Jun 7: Noticed a couple of newish ChatGPT features. Firstly there’s an official iOS app, available …
Jun 7: 🎙 Listened to Tech Won’t Save Us podcast.
Jun 7: 📺 Watched season 8 of Brooklyn 99.
Jun 5: Cannabis is now legal for recreational use in 22 US states
Jun 4: Chanced upon a panel from another infinitely evergreen marvel published by The Nib, RIP once again. …
Jun 4: Rclone looks to be a super useful utility for anyone who works a lot with cloud storage providers. …
May 2023
May 31: Over here, I wrote about whether Artificial Intelligences really are developing scary new emergent …
May 31: 📺 Watched Star Trek: Picard season 2 and 3.
May 29: ChatGPT enters the courtroom
May 29: 🎶 Listening to This Is Why by Paramore.
May 26: From Ars Technica: 96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find When …
May 26: Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a tumultuous $44 billion deal completed last October, the social …
May 25: I was sad to hear that The Nib, the “publisher of political cartoons and nonfiction comics …
May 25: Naomi Kritzer, author of Cat Pictures Please et al, produces an annual list of recommended gifts to …
May 25: Meta has received the largest fine for a GDPR breach ever seen - £1 billion - for the way it’s …
May 24: 📺 Watched Chernobyl.
May 23: 📚 Finished reading Cat Pictures Please and Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer.
May 23: 📺 Watched Shadow and Bone season 2.
May 22: The rise of private GP practices in the UK
May 19: A few sites that offer blog hosting
May 18: Somewhat astonishing that what Popular Mechanics is talking about in its article headlined …
May 17: Did GPT-4 develop artificial general intelligence?
May 16: ChatGPT gets access to the Internet
May 14: The forthcoming changes to England's student loan repayments are highly regressive
May 13: Anyone who’s ever wanted to experience the often under-paid and over-stressful job of …
May 12: Golems as Artificial Intelligences
May 10: Ofsted school inspections appear to be dangerous and ineffective
May 9: Updating Visual Studio Code with winget
May 6: The crowning of King Charles III
May 5: Yesterday much of the UK saw local elections taking place. Counting is still in progress but so far …
May 4: They’ve made King Charles' coronation interactive. Presumably in an effort to promote …
May 4: Will generative AI in forthcoming office software be a world-changing development or the next Clippy?
May 3: A fiery tulip 🌱.
May 1: 🎶 Listening to Trustfall, by P!nk.
April 2023
Apr 30: 📚 Finished reading The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.
Apr 29: Knitted crowns aplenty outside the shops today, no doubt in anticipation of the forthcoming …
Apr 28: 🎙 Listened to “The Most Amazing - and Dangerous - Technology in the World” from The Ezra Klein Show.
Apr 26: A day with a huge personal revelation: adding some ground black pepper to a cup of standard black …
Apr 25: Less than 30 years ago most Americans disapproved of interracial marriages
Apr 24: 📺 Watched The Last Of Us.
Apr 23: An AI sings a song
Apr 22: The makers of Stable Diffusion release an open-source AI chatbot, StableLM
Apr 21: 📚 Finished reading Unlawful Killings by Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC.
Apr 20: Last year an AI-generated picture won an art competition. The technology has of course only got …
Apr 18: 📺 Watched season 12 of Death in Paradise.
Apr 17: Rome et al analyse the costs of newly-launched pharmaceuticals in the US. They discover that the …
Apr 16: 📚 Finished reading We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.
Apr 14: Viewers Can Watch Prince Harry Talk to a Trauma Expert for $33.09 The ‘Give me privacy’ …
Apr 13: Might AI chatbots exacerbate suicidal tendencies?
Apr 13: 📺 Watched Wednesday.
Apr 13: With their new advert, the Labour Party have managed to do the unthinkable and almost make me feel …
Apr 13: 🎥 Watched The Batman.
Apr 11: Britons rejoice: The official King Charles coronation emoji is here
Apr 9: Cobb et al. find that almost 10% of citations found within papers published in top psychology …
Apr 9: Donald Trump as Easter Jesus: the latest unhinged metaphor
Apr 8: Tomorrow’s celebrations may be expensive (along with everything else). From The Guardian: The …
Apr 7: Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of MPFC enhances humor processing. Or in simpler …
Apr 6: Google contractors say they don’t have enough time to verify correct answers from the …
Apr 6: A few years ago, a group of researchers spent their time looking for the world’s oldest …
Apr 4: Sitting through 3 hours and 12 minutes of impeccably rendered splashy-splashy water scenes is …
Apr 3: From ConscienHealth: Using Mendelian randomization they found evidence for a causal relationship …
Apr 2: Meat cultivation food company Vow has created a meatball out of wooly mammoth meat. Sure, wooly …
March 2023
Mar 31: With the recent release of iOS 16.4, both Android and iOS users have access to the latest greatest …
Mar 31: Donald Trump becomes the first ever US president to be charged with a crime. We don’t know the …
Mar 30: Public support for strikes remains high, despite what it looks like on social media
Mar 29: 📚 Finished reading Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath.
Mar 28: From a recent visit to Doddington Hall - which had surprisingly few flowers given the event was …
Mar 28: I recently got access to Bard, Google’s chatGPT-esque language language model chatbot. Curious …
Mar 27: Fans of the TV comedy show “Ghosts” might know that there’s considerable overlap …
Mar 27: This life expectancy chart from from Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker is quite shocking …
Mar 26: 📺 Finished watching seasons 1-4 of Ghosts.
Mar 25: OpenChatKit is an open-source LLM chatbot (whilst chatGPT is ever more closed-source)
Mar 25: There was a moment where chatGPT was accidentally leaking the title of people’s chats to other …
Mar 24: Started taking a course provided by the Analytics Engineers Club. Looking forward to developing some …
Mar 23: The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
Mar 21: AI image generator Midjourney recently released its version 5 and apparently not-too-disturbing …
Mar 21: The release of GPT-4 has led to a flurry of mind-bendingly impressive tricks that I mean to create a …
Mar 20: 📚 Finished reading All About Love by bell hooks.
Mar 19: A couple of years ago, Dow Chemicals, who make some of the materials that go into sports shoes, …
Mar 16: Duolingo looks to be the latest app to jump on the “find some way to integrate generative …
Mar 16: (Chat) GPT-4 is here
Mar 11: Last month, Facebook announced its competitor to chatGPT, a large language model AI called LLaMA. At …
Mar 6: Women tend to suffer from motion sickness more than men when using virtual reality headsets. This …
Mar 6: This one might be legal, but it’s disgusting. Children who have been sexually exploited and …
Mar 6: It’s not been a great couple of days for our Government in terms of managing to respect the …
Mar 5: King Charles' vegan chrism oil
Mar 3: Despite the wild hype, I can’t pretend that chatGPT isn’t already useful. My favourite …
Mar 3: It should be noted that whilst Snapchat might be the first major social network to let you directly …
Mar 3: So that didn’t take long. Snapchat is (I think?) the first of the major social networks to add …
Mar 1: Prove that you exist
Mar 1: Troubles in paradise for the real life Squid Game
February 2023
Feb 26: Decided to move the more lengthy and rambling notes I’ve made on a few books I’ve read …
Feb 24: 📚 Finished listening to Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.
Feb 20: 📚 Finished reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A Van der Kolk.
Feb 17: 🎙 Listened to Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV podcast.
Feb 10: The inherent unpredictability of earthquakes
Feb 10: 🎙 This week’s Hard Fork podcast had an interesting section on the origin story of OpenAI, creators of the incredible chatGPT bot amongst other things.
Feb 4: 📺 Watched The Traitors (US version).
Feb 3: Living the provisional life
Feb 2: 📚 Finished reading: Recursion by Blake Crouch.
Feb 2: 📺 Watched season 3 of Emily in Paris.
January 2023
Jan 31: 📚 Finished reading Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall.
Jan 30: Welcome to Super Nintendo World, the closest thing you can get to diving head-first inside a video …
Jan 27: Cory Doctorow's theory of "platform enshittification"
Jan 26: Cognitive biases as visual illusions
Jan 23: Over here I wrote about 3 papers that investigate the effectiveness of rainforest carbon credit …
Jan 20: Slightly astonished to learn that there’s a 2022 series of UK Beauty and the Geek. It’s …
Jan 18: The FT has a fascinating look into life as a high-ranking female spy now that for the first time …
Jan 17: Human Rights Watch is concerned that the UK is increasingly turning into an abuser, rather than …
Jan 16: In “products I’m really not sure need to exist” news, a company called Reviver …
Jan 15: Played Into the Breach 🎮.
Jan 14: Happy 10th anniversary to what unfortunately turned out to be the most evergreen meme of all time, …
Jan 13: Microsoft has created a language model called “Vall-E” that can simulate a …
Jan 12: A few of us just started the Statistical Rethinking online course in order to learn more about using …
Jan 12: I’m unduly nerd-excited to have received a tote bag from the Office of National Statistics.
Jan 11: Last year Europe had its hottest ever summer. Almost half of its countries broke their previous …
Jan 11: Just realised that the Obsidian text editor supports MathJax. So for the mathematically inclined, …
Jan 10: Coming soon: the first mainstream UK TV show based on deepfakes
Jan 9: 📺 Watched season 1 of The Traitors.
Jan 8: It’s getting on for four months since Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested in Iran for not …
Jan 8: Today’s Observer reports that: NHS trusts with record waiting lists are promoting “quick and …
Jan 7: 15th time lucky - the US elects a speaker of the House
Jan 6: Finished reading The It Girl by Ruth Ware 📚.
Jan 5: Watched season 5 of The Crown 📺.
Jan 5: From the NYT: Without a speaker, the United States House of Representatives essentially becomes a …
Jan 4: The Financial Times looks into why the UK’s NHS is in such a disastrous condition at present. …
Jan 2: Unlike previous generations, UK and US millennials are not becoming more conservative over time
December 2022
Dec 31: Played The Pharaoh’s Tomb from Exit: The Game 🎲.
Dec 30: Played the The Mysterious Ice Cave advent calendar from Exit: The Game 🎲.
Dec 29: Just remembered the time when The Beano comic issued a cease-and-desist letter to MP Jacob Rees-Mogg …
Dec 29: Disappointing TIL: Drag queen superstar Ru Paul and his partner George LeBar own a ranch upon which …
Dec 28: Covid-19 mRNA vaccines are weakly associated with Myopericarditis - but not nearly as much as having Covid-19 is
Dec 28: Incoming disillusionment for anyone who somehow managed to convince themselves that when the US, UK …
Dec 27: 📽 Watched The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
Dec 27: Behold the Lego piano! An incredibly clever piece, taking me the best part of a year to build. I …
Dec 27: An aspect of the eternal insufficient UK housing supply crisis that I hadn’t been aware of …
Dec 23: The independent Pay Review Boards are not very independent
Dec 22: 📽 Watched The Santa Clause 2.
Dec 22: Listening to Love Sux by Avril Lavigne 🎶.
Dec 21: The moral disaster of the Qatar 2022 World Cup
Dec 21: Health chiefs made the remarkable intervention of asking people to avoid getting drunk during the …
Dec 20: Enjoyed seeing the pretty Christmas lights on a recent visit to Lincoln. Probably could have …
Dec 20: Mental illness as a 'sane response to an insane world'
Dec 16: Finished playing Danganronpa : Trigger Happy Havoc 🎮.
Dec 13: Frosty webs 🕸️. Hadn’t realised quite how many spiders resided on the fence before now.
Dec 12: The UK Statistics Authority has once again been forced to reprimand the Conservative party for …
Dec 12: Cookie paywalls: would you pay money to not be tracked on the web?
Dec 10: The iOS Kindle app has finally made it easy to send an article from your iDevice to your hardware …
Dec 9: Remember the good old days when you could waste office time playing the secret flight simulator game …
Dec 9: Listening to Fear Of The Dawn by Jack White 🎶.
Dec 8: Listening to Wet Leg by Wet Leg 🎶.
Dec 7: StackOverflow bans "fluent bullshit" chatGPT answers
Dec 7: Listening to Dawn FM by The Weeknd 🎶.
Dec 6: Listening to Mainstream Sellout by Machine Gun Kelly 🎶.
Dec 5: An understandable epidemic of strikes in the UK
Dec 4: Finished reading The Prestige by Christopher Priest 📚.
Dec 4: Finished reading Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling by Rex Kline 📚.
Dec 3: Over here I wrote about a Microsoft Excel / Google Sheets function I only just discovered - …
Dec 3: The Economist’s model of the recent US midterms, where the Republicans did a lot worse than …
Dec 2: Paper notes: Self-Monitoring via Digital Health in Weight Loss Interventions - A Systematic Review
Dec 2: Watched My Cousin Rachel📽.
Dec 1: Exciting news about the next version of R’s dplyr library! v1.1 will introduce non-equi joins, …
November 2022
Nov 30: This is a great reference, giving guidance and citations around common statistical myths. For …
Nov 30: The 2021 census reveals a sizeable shift from people identifying as Christian to instead having no religion
Nov 29: Some Elon Musk Twitter takeover miscellany
Nov 28: Nerd accomplishment: made my first R package today. Super rough around the edges but it works. So …
Nov 27: Finished playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 🎮.
Nov 25: Listening to Hold The Girl by Rina Sawayama 🎶.
Nov 25: What happens on your iPhone no longer stays on your iPhone
Nov 24: Anyone who occasionally has to reference journal papers etc. may find the DOI Citation Formatter a …
Nov 23: I learned a lot about eating poo this week. Apparently it’s well-known that rabbits eat their …
Nov 21: The relationship between dog years and human years isn't linear
Nov 20: Finished reading All Our Relations by Tanya Talaga 📚.
Nov 19: Unflatpacked some garden furniture today, just in time for it to be far too cold outside to actually …
Nov 18: The Conservative Autumn Statement seems short term...progressive?
Nov 18: Watched season 12 - the final season - of The Big Bang Theory 📺.
Nov 17: Listening to the If Books Could Kill podcast 🎙️.
Nov 13: The British Museum, London, inside and out.
Nov 13: The wellbeing agenda, with its focus on milder problems, can lead to great statistics in a way that …
Nov 13: Some context as Hunt prepares to unleash horrendous spending cuts and tax increases on us: Liz …
Nov 11: The regressive nature of rewards credit cards
Nov 10: Listening to Midnights, by Taylor Swift 🎶.
Nov 7: For anyone thinking to join the relative masses in signing up to Mastodon in protest to Elon …
Nov 6: Immigration to meet unfilled medical staff needs is a popular policy
Nov 5: Witnessing the Lincoln Chorale, accompanied by the Lindum Baroque Orchestra, honouring the king with …
Nov 5: Recently learned that I’m just one degree of separation from one of those accidental Bitcoin …
Nov 4: Finished reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 📚.
Nov 3: Watched The Power of the Doctor Doctor Who special 📺.
Nov 1: Matt Hancock, the former Conservative Health Secretary who previously had to resign that position …
October 2022
Oct 31: The Exorcist is a true story (maybe)
Oct 29: The most overdue library book ever
Oct 29: Elsewhere I’ve recently written about Dries Depoorter’s creepy art project “The …
Oct 28: Llandudno's lockdown goats are back
Oct 26: Another probable first: our new Prime Minister is substantially richer than the King. The Sunak …
Oct 26: The Information Commissioner has warned companies to avoid using AI-based emotion detection …
Oct 26: Derek Thompson writes about Britain’s economic decline over the past few years. In the midst …
Oct 26: New Prime Minister, new lectern
Oct 25: What does the Labour party stand for these days?
Oct 24: Another day, another British Prime Minister. Now the UK is to be led by Rishi Sunak who was selected …
Oct 22: Watched season 2 of The Capture 📺.
Oct 22: Listening to The Unraveling of PUPTheBand by PUP 🎶.
Oct 22: Watched No Time To Die 📽.
Oct 21: Incredible to imagine that if the Lib Dem motion to disallow anyone from becoming Prime Minister if …
Oct 21: So the lettuce won.
Oct 20: Liz Truss finally decided to quit as Prime Minister, after 45 days in office, acknowledging she …
Oct 17: I was curious what % of the UK electorate is a member of a political party. Turns out just 1.5% of …
Oct 17: Austerity policies kill people
Oct 16: Yet more ramblings about AI generated art
Oct 15: A friend informs me that the Daily Star is running a livestream of a lettuce to see whether it can …
Oct 14: Channel 4 created a show where they purchase artwork from “controversial” artists such …
Oct 13: In an event that definitely isn’t straight out of a Stephen King horror novel, a huge flock of …
Oct 13: Another study associates increased step count with several positive health outcomes
Oct 12: Watched season 1 of The Capture 📺.
Oct 12: Finished listening to: A Special Place for Women by Laura Hankin 📚.
Oct 12: Otavio Cordeiro just released an Obsidian plugin called Micro.publish that lets you post directly to …
Oct 9: In a piece arguing that the start of the ‘current era’ began with the dual inventions of …
Oct 9: On my way back from a very enjoyable New Scientist Live show, the first IRL one I’ve attended since the scourge of Covid started.
Oct 9: Sir John Betjeman, poet, as immortalised in St Pancras railway station, London, having campaigned …
Oct 7: How Truss' rampant "tax cutting" policies actually increase your tax burden
Oct 7: Just to add further confusion to my plastic recycling dilemma, the Chartered Institution of Wastes …
Oct 5: Should I use my plastic recycling bin?
Oct 5: Finished reading: A Book Of Secrets by Derren Brown 📚.
Oct 4: Finished reading: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen 📚.
Oct 3: Watched The Last Witch Hunter 📽️ Val Kilmer is an 800 year old witch hunter, cursed to eternally …
Oct 2: Hugo Gye tweets results of a poll by BMG Research showing that the public supports most of the …
Oct 1: Watched season 1 of Shadow and Bone 📺, a fantasy type show based on an amalgamation of books by Leigh Bardugo.
Oct 1: For what I think is the first time, a judge has ruled that the content social media companies …
September 2022
Sep 30: The wordcloud of answers that occurred when PeoplePolling asked respondents “What word or …
Sep 30: New coins for King Charles III
Sep 30: Seem I missed that 2 years ago McVities officially confirmed that the side of a chocolate digestive …
Sep 30: A study from a few years ago looked at some results from Alaska’s “Permanent Fund …
Sep 29: Behold a new entry into the cesspit that is much online marketing: ads that load podcast episodes in …
Sep 29: This post by Emily Riederer is a great summary of four potential approaches to trying to infer …
Sep 28: In amongst the economic chaos, voters appear to think that the Labour Party is more trustworthy than …
Sep 28: The next UK crisis: mortgage payments?
Sep 27: Am excited that the Labour party finally have a plan that I both know what is, and at least on the …
Sep 26: Watched Everything Everywhere All At Once 📽.
Sep 25: Haven’t thoroughly dug into the Conservative’s latest mini-budget yet but I think a …
Sep 25: Finished reading: Turning the Tide on Plastic by Lucy Siegle 📚.
Sep 25: 🌱 For the first year ever, our apple tree has produced fruit that’s both plentiful and palatable.
Sep 23: TIL: Bubblewrap was originally designed to be used as a textured wallpaper. Alfred Fielding and Marc …
Sep 22: I’m one of the literally 99% of subscribers who never used Netflix’s mobile games …
Sep 21: A new study estimates that there are 20 quadrillion ants on our planet. That’s …
Sep 20: Accepting fewer refugees and asylum seekers in recent years has cost the US economy >$9 billion
Sep 20: Finished reading: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 📚.
Sep 18: If Disney did ruin The Little Mermaid then it was 33 years ago
Sep 17: Per YouGov, the public’s perception of whether King Charles III will be a good king or not has …
Sep 17: Don’t want to accuse the NYT of spreading fake news, but this definitely didn’t happen! No, …
Sep 17: Maybe the irrationality of monarchies is why they sometimes work
Sep 16: The Queue
Sep 16: In a particularly dour sounding move, AirBnB has introduced “anti-party tools”. This …
Sep 15: Finished reading: How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France 📚.
Sep 14: The polio virus re-emerges in the US
Sep 13: A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that between 19-29% of the decline in …
Sep 12: Survey shows that young British people increasingly support authoritarian rule
Sep 12: I'm struggling to believe the intro I have just written to a story but it's true.. …
Sep 11: Saving money on your electricity bill - which devices consume the most?
Sep 10: Started watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power 📺, the LOTR prequel Amazon created.
Sep 10: In one of the stranger rituals following the Queen’s death, the Royal Beekeeper has been sent …
Sep 10: A random downside of connecting too many things to the internet: A server error meant that some …
Sep 10: How your expectations affect the way your body processes food - summary of a chapter from The Expectation Effect
Sep 10: Finished reading: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World by David Robson 📚.
Sep 9: No paper published yet so tbd, but researchers claim to have developed a smartphone app that can …
Sep 8: Queen Elizabeth II died today.
Sep 8: Not long after the UK temperature hit a horrible new high, a new study reports that the prevalence …
Sep 8: A colleague introduced me to Super Auto Pets 🎮, so now I’m addicted.
Sep 5: It happened…we’ve got a new Prime Minister, Liz Truss 😩. Her victory speech felt …
Sep 5: It’s known that performing acts of kindness makes both the receiver and the giver happier. But …
Sep 5: From today’s Guardian: Shown calculations that her planned reversal of a recent rise in …
Sep 4: Jason Allen won an art competition with this picture, which was generated via the Midjourney AI. I …
Sep 4: One of my favourite charts found in the wild, both in terms of subject matter and presentation.
Sep 4: Watched EastEnders 📺 for the first time in maybe a decade.
Sep 3: Learning how to drink scotch in Edinburgh
Sep 1: Contrary to the stereotype, new research involving frequent cannabis users finds no evidence of …
Sep 1: The R library installr provides a super simple way to update your version of R to the latest if …
Sep 1: I’m sure I’m late to the party on this one, but if you’re a Substack newsletter …
August 2022
Aug 31: For the past 3 months, Germany has been trialling a scheme where for €9 a month people can travel on …
Aug 31: Started watching season 3 of Locke and Key 📺.
Aug 29: Forbes reports that more than half of all Bitcoin trades are likely fake - wash trading, and that …
Aug 24: Seeking the world's best ice-cream - a trip to Pizzo
Aug 24: A trip to Tropea
Aug 24: A brief trip to Capo Vaticano
Aug 24: Finished reading: Sherlock Holmes and the Mayfair Murders by David Britland 📚.
Aug 18: Finished reading: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow 📚.
Aug 15: Celebrating Ferragosto in Italy
Aug 13: A delightful holiday in Calabria, southern Italy
Aug 12: Well, this photo from an article in the Guardian today about a drought officially being declared in …
Aug 11: If ever you felt the desire to have a 3D representation of your Github commits in the form of a city …
Aug 10: I’m enjoying the “Standard eBooks” site as a source for out-of-copyright books for …
Aug 9: The deconstructed murder mystery novel
Aug 9: Don't over-interpret Pearson's correlation coefficient 'r'
Aug 9: Watched Primal Fear 📽 over the weekend.
Aug 9: Less than 6% of offences reported to the police lead to a charge
Aug 7: Finished reading: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy 📚.
Aug 7: Over here, I wrote about why the majority of England’s Covid-19 deaths are now from vaccinated …
Aug 2: Liz Truss, the odds-on favourite to be the British Prime Minister in a few weeks time, appears to be …
July 2022
Jul 29: My current stats nerd learning focus is structual equation modeling.
Jul 27: Finished reading: Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace 📚.
Jul 22: The internal climate migrants of the US
Jul 20: I’m enjoying the “Moriarty - the Devil’s Game” podcast.
Jul 19: This outrageous weather led me to discover that frozen grapes are an amazing ‘I’m far too hot to …
Jul 19: So as today is the hottest UK day ever, I’m grateful for the Jay et al. study “Reducing …
Jul 18: As highlighted by Tom Hamilton’s juxtaposition of a couple of recent newspaper front pages, …
Jul 18: The UK is still on course for a record-breakingly high temperature this week. Already the air feels …
Jul 17: The weather enters the culture war
Jul 17: Temporarily paused watching the incredible Mr Robot show after season 2 to let it all sink into my brain.
Jul 16: Finished listening to The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis 📚.
Jul 16: The next version of iOS gives Apple devices a lockdown mode designed to repel even the kind of …
Jul 16: A report from BCG suggests that plant-based meat alternatives are the most effective things to …
Jul 15: The UK is too hot and only getting hotter
Jul 14: Most of us might not recognise our next Prime Minister
Jul 13: The R package "todor" lets you efficiently find all your remaining #TODOs
Jul 11: I had fun over here, exploring a great dataset that Tim Durrant of the Institute for Government …
Jul 11: A leak of Uber’s internal files reveals that they knowingly broke the law, put their drivers in …
Jul 8: The Lancashire Telegraph reports that, following his resignation yesterday, Boris Johnson - wax …
Jul 8: In another awful twist to 2022 reality, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been shot to …
Jul 8: Bigquery Data View is a nice Visual Studio Code extension that lets you view BigQuery table schemas, …
Jul 7: I’ve discovered one can kind of directly write SQL within Google Sheets to produce tables, …
Jul 7: 60ish resignations later, the main deed is done. Boris Johnson has announced that he’s …
Jul 6: Quite a day in UK politics, with more and more Conservative resignations since it was all kicked off …
Jul 4: Barcoding the Queen's head - the new(ish) British stamp
Jul 4: Imagine being so unimaginative that after hacking the British Army’s Twitter and YouTube …
Jul 4: It didn’t take long for the harrowing post-Roe vs Wade stories to come in. Just 3 days after …
Jul 3: The UK's carbon emissions trading scheme actually paid polluters last year
Jul 3: Continuing my mostly subconscious attraction to media that has a “is anything real?” vibe - maybe because the common definition of reality often feels like an ARG at present - I watched 1997’s The Game 📽.
Jul 3: Finally got around to trying out Fall Guys 🎮.
Jul 2: Just learned that the “Do Not Track” setting many web browsers have does …
Jul 2: 100 books you'll never read
June 2022
Jun 30: Vancouver’s Kiss Radio has apparently been playing Rage Against the Machine’s classic …
Jun 29: Amazon is finally going to let you “Send to Kindle” digital books in epub format, the …
Jun 29: A new study estimates that Covid-19 vaccines saved 14.4 million lives (95% CrI = 13.7 - 15.9 …
Jun 28: I enjoyed The Haunting of Bly Manor 📺 more than I’d expected, so now moving on to watch it’s prequel-of-a-sort, the well-reviewed The Haunting of Hill House.
Jun 28: The Conservatives lose Tiverton and Wakefield big-time
Jun 27: Absolutely incredible Bad Chart doing the rounds on dataisugly et al today, from the app version of …
Jun 27: Pleased to see some very legitimate anti-SCOTUS sentiment making its way into Glastonbury this year. …
Jun 26: Stuart Ritchie discovers that there’s not much scientific evidence either way for the commonly-held …
Jun 26: Recommendation for the 5-4 podcast 🎙 - which should presumably now be renamed 6-3 - as a place to …
Jun 26: Saudi Arabia bans rainbow coloured objects
Jun 26: The US Supreme Court undoes decades of progress in a single week
Jun 23: The UK Department of Transport comes up with a new definition of "median"
Jun 23: Amazon aims to replicate your dead relatives
Jun 23: A .gitignore file tells the Git version control software to stop tracking files you never want to …
Jun 22: Check how a website is tracking you with the Blacklight service
Jun 22: Our government didn’t really like the decision the European Court of Human Rights made with …
Jun 20: Weekends are more fun, even if you're unemployed
Jun 19: Started watching The Haunting of Bly Manor 📺.
Jun 19: See how trackable your web browsing is with the Cover Your Tracks service
Jun 18: Convicted fraudster Anna Sorokin (of Inventing Anna fame) has made the…curious decision to …
Jun 18: Finished reading: The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means by John Scalzi 📚.
Jun 17: Here’s a great copy-and-pastable summary of why if your study ends up with a p value of > …
Jun 17: TIL: the first ever dotcom domain to be registered was symbolics.com, purchased by a computer …
Jun 16: Boris Johnson’s ethics advisor has decided to resign. That’s the second one in two …
Jun 15: I’m still struggling to get my mind wrapped around the incredible case of Blake Lemoine, a …
Jun 15: Matter, one of my favourite apps for storing things I intend to read later - articles, PDFs, tweets …
Jun 13: Currently reading: Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace 📚.
Jun 13: Finished reading: The Rise Of Communism by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius 📚.
Jun 13: Elsewhere I wrote about using a multi-armed bandit approach to experimentation.
Jun 12: Maybe we’re a little further on with the dream of driverless cars than I’d thought. San Francisco …
Jun 12: Not a sentiment I necessarily often feel, but our royalty apparently have at least one very good …
Jun 11: Whilst Queen Elizabeth celebrated being on the throne for 70 years last week, she’s still …
Jun 10: Like apparently the rest of my country, I’ve recently been enjoying the Sex Pistols' …
Jun 10: A new study was recently published which adds to the previous evidence I read that coffee may be …
Jun 9: Some data analyst truths in musical form. Am considering sending relevant snippets in place of …
Jun 8: juicr looks like an awesome easy-to-use R package for automated and manual extraction of datapoints …
Jun 7: In other software updates, Storygraph, which I find to be a nice non-Amazon competitor to Goodreads …
Jun 7: Apple revealed its plans for the next version of iOS at WWDC yesterday - the most exciting of which …
Jun 6: Somehow Boris Johnson survives to squander another day with a mere 40% of his beloved colleagues …
Jun 6: In “unexpected things I learned recently”, the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004, …
Jun 1: It’s amazing how unproficient I can still be after studying something for a solid year. To be …
Jun 1: Finished reading: The Trial by Franz Kafka 📚.
May 2022
May 30: The Gun Violence Archive reports that the US has had 227 mass shootings so far this year, where a …
May 29: From yesterday’s paper: Boris Johnson is heralding a “new era of generosity and …
May 29: Everyone has their own special goals and dreams in life, and it’s good to know that sometimes …
May 28: Perhaps this is less surprising than it should be, but it turns out Twitter illicitly misused the …
May 28: In what I’m sure must just be a tremendous coincidence, our prime minister, who is currently …
May 28: This slide from Dr. D’Agostino McGowan is one of the best summaries I’ve seen of what exactly …
May 28: An insight into how business is conducted in the modern era. Meanwhile, Musk’s relationship with …
May 27: I enjoyed the most recent Normcore Tech newsletter, with its discussion around the unreasonable …
May 27: Just came across the R package conflr which lets you post R Markdown output (including images) …
May 25: In a continuation of the odd tendency some companies seem to have to see activities described in …
May 23: 7 years behind the rest of the world, I’m just starting to watch Mr.
May 23: Coffee, Caffeine and Health - a summary of the paper by van Dam et al.
May 21: Some days the world surprises you. Other days the Bored Apes dating club shuts down because only …
May 21: Florida bans math textbooks to save students from ‘indoctrination’
May 21: DuoLingo, an app I use to learn Spanish, informs us that a single sentence can potentially have over …
May 18: Currently reading: The Trial by Franz Kafka 📚.
May 18: Has Texas just outlawed content moderation?
May 16: Am loving building the Lego piano set. The attention to detail is awesome. Gotta build the Lego …
May 16: Some longer-form thoughts on the Roe v Wade leak with relevance to data privacy. Honestly, however …
May 16: A friend reminded me that Boris Johnson’s critique of working from home as being a series of …
May 15: Our Prime Minister is against working from home on the basis that: …you spend an awful lot …
May 15: Incredible visualisation from Our World In Data showing the flow of human existence, from birth to …
May 15: Currently reading: Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones 📚.
May 15: 🎥 Watched Dune.