The Braindump Blog

The large majority of homelessness in Britain doesn’t manifest as the stereotypical rough sleepers, but rather an increasing number of people being forced into (frequently dangerous) temporary accommodation of one sort of another - “a peripheral and fragile existence” to quote the Financial Times.

The FT goes on to reveal that Britain has an horrendously high rate of homelessness - “by far the highest rate…in the developed world”.

It was not always this way.

What happened? The FT puts it down to 3 key factors:

• Absolutely inadequate rates of housebuilding.
• An ever-diminishing social housing sector .
• An erosion of financial support for folk who can’t afford the market rate for rents.

After all, whilst much fuss about housing benefits is often made in “anti-welfare” circles, last year the IFS determined that local housing allowance has now gotten so low in comparison to rent demands that any recipient of that benefit could not possibly afford 95% of the private rental properties listed on Zoopla.

🎶 Listening to The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift.

As has everyone else, given it has broken a wide arrange of world records, including being the most streamed album in one week ever, the first album to get to 300 million Spotify streams in one day, the first to occupy the top 14 entries of the Billboard Top 100 Hot Songs chart and also sold the largest number of vinyl copies in a single week in modern times - 859,000.

The reviews seemed to me to go through phases of “this is quite good” to “actually it’s too long and repetitive” - not helped per the release of an extended 31 track “anthology” version hours after the original dropped at which point the NYT asked whether we’ve finally had too much Taylor, apparently not - to “actually there are some great moments”. That’s also roughly my trajectory so far.

It is much more in the style of her last album, Midnights, than her earlier work, so if you liked that you’ll probably like this. Very, very occasionally some of the lyrics felt just a bit like they were made by ChatGPT - but mostly I found it pretty cool and clever. And besides, any bits I didn’t understand are probably because I am no true Swiftie; I don’t know the lore.

A New Yorker article provides perhaps the best explanation of what it means to be a Swiftie that I’ve seen. Why in one of the tracks does TS appear to be trying to rhyme “wife” with “bike” when words that actually rhymed would make at least as much sense? Clearly she didn’t make a mistake that no-one noticed. Rather:

Swift obsessives know to connect “imgonnagetyouback” with “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975 that was written by Swift’s ex-boyfriend Matty Healy. In it, Healy sings, “I’m so excited for the night / All we need’s my bike and your enormous house.” Swift’s mention of a bike, in “imgonnagetyouback,” is therefore an intentional creative decision, like the lack of spaces in the song’s title.

Some fans have gone even further, claiming that the lack of spaces not only invites a comparison to “Fallingforyou” but to Swift’s own “Blank Space,” a song on her “1989” album. (1975, 1989—there are a lot of years to keep track of here.) “In Blank Space music video, Taylor Swift is smashing things and sings ‘Cause you know I love the players And you love the game,’ ” a YouTube user called Miranda-ry9tf writes in a comment. “In imgonnagetyouback she says ‘We broke all the pieces, but you still wanna play the game.’ ” Perhaps “Blank Space,” released in 2014, was about Healy, too?

And that stuff like this has led to a disconnect between your typical music reviewer and the more intense parts of her fan base.

Kotaku gives another taster of the parallel Taylorverse, linking to a 100 page presentation someone made to explain the timeline of her relationship with Matt Healy, all essential to fully interpret the album - at least for some folk. As the Washington Post wrote some time ago, there’s a whole Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe out there for those with the time and inclination to indulge.

The excellent ConscienHealth blog, writing about a fierce debate in the world of nutrition science, reminds us that big shadowy agenda-led corporations having paid scientists to conduct their research is not the only sort of conflict of interest we should care about when evaluating scientific studies.

We read a lot about perceptions of conflicted interests in nutrition and obesity research. Typically the focus is on financial interests. If a company funded the research, does that mean we cannot trust results that might favor business interests of that company? But experience tells us that intellectual investments can produce equally powerful biases.

📺 Watched Pompeii: The New Dig.

The BBC shows us some days in the lives of an Italian archeology team as they continue the 100+ year effort to uncover what’s under the horrific mess that the eruption of the Mount Vesuvius volcano caused to be rained down upon the city of Pompeii. in the the year 79 AD.

Much of the city, its contents and the physical remains of the poor people who were stuck there at the time has been astonishingly well preserved by virtue of it all being covered by huge layers of ash. There’s been various efforts to unearth it over the years - Wikipedia gives the modern archaeological effort a start date in the 1920s. But the very start of the process could be a lot earlier depending on when you start counting from.

However, over 100 years later, a surprising-to-me amount of it is still buried under the ash, despite the complex now being a popular tourist site. So this new BBC documentary follows a team of Italian archeologists as they excavate a whole new city block.

Discoveries abound; including potentially the world’s first ever known illustration of a pizza no less. Although the i newspaper is not entirely wrong to suggest that, whilst the discoveries themselves are exciting, it is hard at times to translate that thrill to a 3 hour documentary series where most of the work involved in getting to the discoveries consists of people meticulously digging into piles of dirt. Nonetheless, the end product certainly seems to make their toil worthwhile.

I wouldn’t want to include any more find-spoilers here, but for anyone who is interested enough in the topic to want to see what was unearthed, but not interested enough to spend 3 hours watching the process and commentary, the History Extra website lists some of the brightest and best finds. The accompanying BBC site also has some short highlights clips along with links to a virtual tour of Pompeii put together by the Open University, who were also involved in producing this documentary.

📚 Finished reading Between Death and Life by Dolores Cannon.

Ever wanted to learn what happens after you die? Well, this is the book for you. Possibly.

The author is a hypnotherapist, specialising in past life regression. Past life regression is a method that some claim allows you to access memories of what happened to you in past lives whilst under hypnosis. Of course this means that the idea that we are something like souls that get reincarnated into several different human bodies over time must be taken for granted by adherents.That is of course enough to deter plenty of readers, at least if you’re looking for a slightly more conventional, more scientific, exploration of what we know about what happens after you die.

But otherwise, or perhaps if you’re just in a sort of sci-fi fantasy mood, then her claim here is that whilst conducting her therapy she started to notice that all her clients were basically telling the same, fairly fantastical at a glance, story. In particular about the nature of the time they claimed to spend between lives.

This observation led her to give credence to the idea that if they’re all saying it then it must be true (of course other interpretations would be possible - just because several children reported that their parents were involved in elaborate and sickening satanic rituals whilst under hypnosis didn’t make it true).

So here Cannon presents what seem to be mainly transcripts of the interviews that she conducted with her clients whilst they were hypnotised. It particularly focuses on their descriptions of the times between lives - after we on Earth would say they had died, but before they were reincarnated into a new body. The claim is that, sure, your body dies, but your spirit lives on in another dimension until such time as its ready to reincarnate into a new, usually human, body.

Her clients report a whole world - “world” is probably the wrong word - out there in a different “higher dimension” of temples, libraries, a computer room, a tapestry room and and a kind of soul hospital for those spirits who need to rest and recover from the experiences they had in the physical realm.

Whilst in her telling most animals don’t have souls in this sense, other do entities exist; things that in the Earth-bound realm we might call elementals, aliens, demons, sprites - although plenty of times in the book the person supposedly regaling their experiences notes that they can only approximate what’s going on in answering Cannon’s questions as humans simply don’t have an adequate language for it.

Then, when the soul is ready, unless you are one of the few who have risen so far through the hierarchy that this is no longer required, it consents to return to the physical realm as a different person on our planet; a reincarnation in the traditional sense. Typically this would be to reside within a newborn baby, but it doesn’t have to be.

Why would the spirit choose to return, given that human life is laborious, difficult and unpleasant at times compared to the pretty utopian experience that’s presented as what it means to live in the higher dimensions? It’s to learn important lessons. To redeem previous “karma”, a word which here is used almost entirely in a negative sense.

Perhaps last time you were on Earth you were a rude, abusive person. Now’s your chance to adopt a different lifestyle based on what you learned from reviewing your bad behaviour in the spiritual realm. To make up for what you did, to fix the harms you caused.

A key tenet of her world view is that we all agreed to whatever happens to us in this life prior to reincarnation. With the help of advanced soul guides, a school, a library and the use of a computer we figured out what went wrong in our previous life and hence what experiences we need to have this time round in order to overcome or redeem our past ways of physical living and which other beings we’d like to meet again in this life to help us do this. Often these will be people infused with souls you met in prior lives.

With all that info the various spiritual guides and extra-dimensional computers recommended our assignment to the (mostly) Earth-bound life that would most meet our needs to lead.

This idea of prior consent has some, to me, unpleasant implications. But it does bring a kind of comfort to some as far as I can tell insomuch as if you’re having a tough time then it’s something that was planned, agreed to by you beforehand and from which you’ll gain substantial (karmic) benefit from in the long term. There’s a reason for everything and it’ll serve your soul in the long term. The worse the experience the more you’ll end up benefiting from it. This got a somewhat harder to stomach for me when topics like Hitler come up.

In a way there’s a semblance of some branches of Christianity here, with a kind of “suffering is good and necessary for redemption” and a kind of original sin type ethos. In fact figures from the major world religions - Jesus, Bhudda et al - are part of the story. These were folk that simply had very “advanced” souls embedded within.

There’s not much here to convince anyone of the reality of these ideas who isn’t already a believer or advocate of some of the underlying principles. Her claims are rather wild compared to what passes for mainstream thought - and indeed much non-mainstream thought - on the matter. Those who don’t really identify with much that falls under the modern usage of the term “spiritual” might not get much more out of this than some potentially interesting tales. If phrases like “astral plane” or “advanced souls” grate on your nerves you’ll surely not enjoy it. That said, the book does seem to have its fair share of true believers who find a great deal of solace in what it tells.

From the combined forces of Freedom from Torture, Amnesty International UK and Liberty:

This shameful Bill trashes the constitution and international law whilst putting torture survivors and other refugees at risk of an unsafe future in Rwanda.

…

It’s time for those in power to stop demonising and scapegoating some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and to restore the right to asylum in the UK and uphold vital international protections.”

Yes, we’re talking about the Rwanda immigration scheme / scam again I’m afraid.

The government may have, appallingly, finally forced the ‘Rwanda bill’ - the one that magically legislates Rwanda into being a perfect wholly and indisputably pleasant dream destination for the UK to (probably illegally) abrogate its international responsibilities and remaining semblance of human compassion to - through the system.

But they still have to find planes to actually put these poor beleaguered seekers of urgent respite on to - and the UN is warning airlines and aviation operators that, even though the less well-hinged members of our government say that This Is Fine, other organisations do actually still need to try to avoid breaching international human rights laws.

The Conservatives may not care about tiny little minor issues like becoming international pariahs - but they are of course not the only show in town.

The low-effort AI-generated botshit has presumably reached such a volume in the books world that Amazon has decided to impose a limit such that authors may only publish 3 books per day (!) onto its site. Maybe they didn’t enjoy that point in time that pure nonsense started topping their Kindle book charts.

Any humans that can in fact author four high quality books a day might suffer. Luckily they probably also don’t exist.

Smaller companies are obviously suffering more. Last year, the famous Clarkesworld sci fi magazine had to stop accepting submissions for publication because they couldn’t handle the volume of AI generated guff. Their competitors, Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictions are seeing similar behaviour.

I’m slowly weaning myself away from the use of the mainstream music streaming service - Spotify et al - both due to the problematic effects they increasingly seem to have on the industry and the now-radical idea that I might want to permanently own my music collection.

That said, I’m not there yet, and perhaps there will always be a role for them when it comes to, for instance, modern-day music discovery. Problematic or not, they do indisputably provide tremendous accessibility to a music library far beyond the ability of most individual humans to cultivate.

In the mean time, I wanted to reduce the fragility of my situation by replicating my library as far as possible between more than one service.

If, for instance, I only have my music libraries in the walled garden of Apple Music, there’s a (possibly paranoid) feeling that should they ever close my account, I feel compelled to close my account, some bug means they lose the details of my collection or I simply can’t afford the subscription any more then not only can I obviously no longer listen to my hand-picked collection, I also entirely lose access to what that collection was in the first place. Which albums I added to my libraries, which tracks I liked, the algorithm that suggests new music to me, all gone.

I don’t think there’s much I can do about the latter, algorithms are virtually never accessible or portable in their current instantiation. But in terms of one’s library and playlists, it is possible to try and recreate that in another service, say Spotify.

This will never work perfectly as another issue with the services is they don’t necessarily have the same music. If for instance you switch to Spotify from Apple or vice versa you may simply not have the option to listen to some of your preferred tracks, they’re just not on the service. Such is the penalty of not owning your collection. However, realistically, if your collection is vaguely mainstream most of it probably exists in most of the big services.

However, these wannabe-prison services do not want you to leave, so offer no universal way to export or import a useful list of what is in your collection that I can see. Data portability is probably the last thing they want - and something I’d love regulators to enforce one day. But for now by default it’d be a manual effort, laboriously going through everything you care about on one service and trying to search for it on the other service, saving to library, liking, whatever.

This is fairly untenable, or at least very tedious, if you have anything beyond a fairly small collection. But there are third party solutions that attempt to solve this problem by automating the search-and-save operation. You would have to give them access to the accounts you wish to transfer from and to, but if you’re comfortable with this then they can attempt to automate copying your libraries and playlists from one service to another.

In my case, I’m a big listen-to-albums fan so I was most concerned in copying my library of albums across to a new service. Let’s assume Apple Music to Spotify to take a common example. Importantly. I wanted my album library to appear as actual albums in Spotify, not as playlists containing the album’s songs. Some people prefer the latter of course or only use playlists in the first place. There’s no right way to do this kind of stuff.

So below is a list of services that promise to do this kind of thing that I compiled from a few searches for apps and services that can automate this transition, including what at-a-glance appeared to me as being their scope and their costs.

There’s a fairly wide range of pricing and features. Most are subscription based, although if you only want to do this kind of thing once you could just buy one month. You will generally have to pay if you have anything beyond a very small library, although many have a limited free version you could test to see how well it’s going to work for you.

A common feature some have is a continual sync of libraries across services. I was mainly interested just in testing a one-time operation at present but I can imagine use-cases for the latter.

Whilst my examples above all about Apple Music and Spotify, many of these products handle a much wider range of services so don’t let that put you off.

None of these are recommendations as such as I haven’t yet tried them. But as a starter list, here’s some options I found, their taglines, pricing and what their homepage indicated to me is their rough feature-set, in no particular order.

Playlists.cloud

Playlists.cloud - “Connect to your favorite music streaming services, transfer your music playlists between them, easily generate backups, and more.”

Features:

• Supports Apple Music and Spotify
• Works with playlists only
• Transfer your playlists between Apple Music and Spotify, either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
• Transfer your playlists from one account of a given service to another account of the same service.
• Create new playlists by uploading a CSV file
• Export playlists into a CSV file.
• Free of charge.

SongShift

SongShift - “Simple Music Transfers and Sharing”

Features:

• Supports many services: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Discogs, Hype Machine, LastFM, Napster, Pandora, Qobuz, Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube.
• Works with playlists, songs or albums.
• Transfer your music from one provider to another either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
• Share your playlists with anyone on any supported platform
• Free and paid version ($9.99 per month, $39.99 per year, $59.99 lifetime). Not immediately obvious what the limits on the free version are except for being slower and able to connect more services at once.

Soundiiz

Soundiiz - “Transfer your playlists and favorites”

Features:

• Supports 43 services, including Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Amazon Music, YouTube Music
• Works with playlists, albums, artists, and tracks - although some services may not work with some of these.
• Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
• Create smartlinks to playlists and releases you can share.
• Generate playlists using artificial intelligence.
• Import and export your playlists from / to file.
• Free and paid version (£4.5 per month, £36 per year). Free version looks to be limited to dealing with playlists, one at a time, and only up to 200 tracks per playlist and one active sync.

Free Your Music

Free Your Music - “Transfer, sync & move your music library”

• Supports many services including Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, SoundCloud, Deezer.
• Works with playlists, liked songs and albums.
• Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
• Back up playlists in cloud.
• Free and paid version. Free version lets you transfer up to 100 songs and 1 playlist, or 300 songs if you provide an email. Paid services include one-off £10.99 for “basic” or £34.99 per year / or £4.66 per month for premium. Basic version doesn’t allow automatic syncing or backup.

Tune My Music

Tune My Music - “Transfer Playlists Between Music Services”

• Supports many services including Spotify, TIDAL, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music and Deezer.
• Works with playlists, favorite songs, favourite artists, favorite albums.
• Transfer music between services either as a one-off or a continuous sync.
• Share your music with friends who use other music services.
• Upload songs to your library via a file (I think this must surely mean uploading a playlist, not a song itself!).
• Backup your music library (again I think this means your playlists etc. via exporting a CSV - not the music files themselves).
• Free and paid version ($4.50 per month or $24 per year). Free plan limits you to transferring up to 500 tracks, no syncing.

Playlisty

Playlisty - “The Playlist Tool for Apple Music / Spotify”

• Has one app that works to get music into Apple Music and a different one to get music into Spotify.
• Works with playlists, mixes, liked tracks and albums.
• Can transfer playlists from several music services into Apple Music / Spotify, or also import them from text, weblinks or various file formats. You can browse other people’s playlists from various music sites too.
• Can export playlists to a file.
• Free trial version lets you create playlists up to 20 tracks. Paid in-app purchase of a one-off $2.99 unlocks other features.

Playlistor

Playlistor - “Convert playlists between Apple Music and Spotify”

• Supports Apple Music and Spotify
• Playlists only
• Paste in the URL of a playlist and the site will convert it to the appropriate services, no signup required.
• Only one playlist at a time. It seems really designed as a useful service to share a single playlist with someone who uses another service, not designed to transfer your library from one account to another so wasn’t actually suited to this list.
• Free

📚 Finished reading Ghost Hunter by Hans Holzer.

Hans Holzer was a parapsychologist and a ghost hunter. As well as a prolific author, having written over 120 books on this kind of subject. Perhaps most famously, he was involved in investigating the “Amityville Horror”, which of course there are more than a few films about now. He also hosted the TV show “Ghost Hunter” at one point.

This book sees him chronicle a few of his adventures into ghost hunting. The typical set up is that he’ll hear of some unexplained ghostly type phenomena; a person living in a home with weird noises or other more disturbing occurrences, that type of thing. He’ll go recruit a medium, and off they set to visit the location in order to hold some kind of seance.

The medium invariably falls into a trance whilst he, via the medium, tries to communicate with whatever ghostly presence. The hope is to resolve whatever the problem is that’s causing the spirit to feel inclined to annoy or scare the living humans around them. In general he reports being successful at this.

He wants us to believe he’s doing this in a scientific way, although some of his peers were sceptical. I don’t think it’s a book that’s going to change anyone’s mind about whether ghosts or ghostly experiences are “real”. But nonetheless it’s a fun series of somewhat spooky short stories, along with some commentary on his methods and the tremendous value he puts on mediums during such activities.

Happy to see that even the Norton anti-virus homepage totally acknowledges that their prices get crazy expensive if you let the subscription renew. Next step: how about don’t do that scammy behaviour in the first place.

Most people are probably fine without specific antivirus software now Windows comes with one built in. But if you do feel you need one, then never a license renew before seeing if buying as a new customer is far better value. With Norton, it absolutely is, and it’s far fro alone.

Nearly 80% of the 380 expert scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that responded to a Guardian survey reported expecting that, as in the grand scheme of things we’ve done so little to combat global warming, temperatures are likely to rise by at least 2.5C by 2100. Which is pretty much in line with last year’s pre-Cop28 UN report that had us on track for a 3 degree increase in the same time frame.

This is….not good. The claim is that a 2.5 degree increase will cause “catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet,”

Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.

The lawmakers and regulators have not helped as one might have hoped they would.

Numerous experts said they had been left feeling hopeless, infuriated and scared by the failure of governments to act despite the clear scientific evidence provided.

But most of us, especially those in more privileged positions, likely bear at least some small responsibility for the situation. Or as on unnamed scientist said:

The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.

📺 (Re)watching Westworld.

Humans invent a theme park populated by supposedly memory-less, insensible androids; mere automatons there solely to allow the (rich) customers to live out their wild-west fantasies . Something other than hilarity ensues.

I’d watched season one several years ago and vaguely remember it being one of the finest and most fascinating pieces of TV in a long while. Season two to be honest I don’t remember very much from at all, not sure if that’s their fault or mine, we’ll see. Season 3 and 4 I haven’t yet had the pleasure of.

From the very beginning though, the show does hit a bit differently in a today’s world where artificially intelligent drink-serving robots already exist, albeit typically less clothed in artificial human skin than their Westworld equivalents are.

It doesn’t stop there. Out here in our world, real people are already falling in love with their virtual AI companions. And there’s a non-zero contingent of folk out there who suspect that even today’s chatbots are already sentient and surely many more who are working, at least tangentially, on the issue of making them so.

Their electronic brains certainly already have memories, so perhaps we best treat them more nicely than the show park’s visitors treat Delores just in case.

Kind-of spoiler ahead: The whole weird billionaire’s big business secretly surveilling everyone’s data whilst you feel like you’re being entertained is also not exclusive to the fictional world, nor are the big potentially catastrophic leaks of the resulting information.

Watched Barbie (the movie).

Unfortunately this film was a big enough sensation that I’d heard many of the best lines before watching it, and I don’t suppose it’s single-handedly going to cause the feminist revolution we all still sadly need. But it was very cool to see some of these ideas brought to the truly mass market](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/barbie-biggest-warner-bros-movie-globally-box-office-1235575786/) in such an enjoyable way, alongside some nods and winks to folk who already have already started the journey to enlightenment.

Same applies to film buffs - many shoutouts are included to iconic films of years past. The way it starts is an extremely clear parallel to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s famous intro.

The world design was also delightful, especially (I’d assume) if you have a history of playing with the classic doll. And somewhat educational too. I did for instance learn that there used to be a pregnant Barbie, aka Midge, for real. The Today website informs us that it came with:

…a detachable, magnetized pregnant belly that could fit her accompanying plastic infant

No-one wouldn’t want to see this, so here we go, from the same Today article.

Not to mention an $82 doll actually called ‘Sugar Daddy Ken’. But don’t worry, that’s definitely not wildly inappropriate, he comes with a dog-doll that happens to be called Sugar. He’s just Sugar’s Daddy. Only someone must have forgotten the apostrophe and s when designing the box. Here he is, taken from the same article.

And, at the other end of the slightly disturbing spectrum, ‘Growing Up Skipper’ which was:

…a technological marvel of a doll that grew taller — and grew breasts — when users twisted her left arm

So you’ll need to see a video of that one.

For the avoidance of doubt, despite being the film’s villains, Mattel - owners of the Barbie brand - are probably not all that upset at the film. They estimated the film will have increased their monetary takings buy at least £100 million - some directly as coming from the rights to a percentage of box office revenues, other parts more due to a surge of interest in Barbie after the film release.

But it can’t be all bad though. After all, the movie drove a certain kind of conservative activist wild when it came out - who can forget hilariously thin-skinned Ben Shapiro burning his Barbie in protest?

Here’s the trailer for the few remaining people who haven’t seen it.

Ukraine’s latest government spokesperson is an AI-generated “digital person”. A deep-fake, if you will, although it’s not a trick - the authorities are being very transparent about what we’re seeing. And what the spokesperson actually says is going to be 100% written by humans, as much as anything is these days anyway.

Known by the name “Victoria Shi”, the idea is that she (it?), rather than a traditional human being, will share any necessary official operational and consular information with us. Whilst not supposed to be reflective of a real person as a whole, her image is (consensually) based on none other than singer and former ‘The Bachelor’ contestant, Rosalie Nombre.

I am a digital person that means that the text you hear was not read by a real person it was generated by artificial intelligence I will carry out a number of tasks first and foremost I will inform the public providing timely and verified information from Ukraine’s Consular service I will provide journalists with updates about the work of consules in protecting the rights and interests of Ukrainian citizens abroad.

Supposedly this is all in the service of freeing up time and resources for real humans to do what they need to do in times of war. Something tells me people will come up with a wide range of alternative theories though.

The legitimate videos will each feature a QR code that link to a text version of the speech published on the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to let you verify their integrity. Whether the inevitable future fake versions will do something similar, or whether the majority of humankind would care enough to actually check each time that each video is legit, seems less certain to me.

Here’s an example of her in action from Business Today.

A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

(from The Guardian)

It seems not at all surprising that Britons would mount incandescent and effective campaigns against the desire of various authorities to remove apostrophes from their street names. An Englishman’s home, and hence his address, is his castle and all.

But it did surprise me that here, in techno-AI-infused 2024, the stated rationale for doing so is because computer databases don’t handle them well. Even though my professional life leads me to find this very plausible, it’s still a bit embarrassing.

I suppose grammatical error-riddled street signs would grate on me a little too, if I’m being entirely honest.

Yesterday the UK saw a swathe of local and other miscellaneous elections taking place. It’s one of the first occasions Britons have been to the polls en masse since the introduction of the law requiring you to bring certain types of photo ID with you to the polling station in order to be allowed to vote.

This policy was introduced via Boris Johnson’s Conservative government via the Elections Act 2022. So it was rather darkly hilarious to learn that day before the elections were to run, Conservative MP Tom Hunt realised that he had no suitable ID and hence wasn’t going to be able to vote.

The reason we know about this is because someone leaked a Whatsapp message (of course!) where he was asking fellow Tory party members to help him out via being his emergency proxy, a facility designed for people who lose their ID amongst other circumstances, that I’m certain the vast majority of the UK populous doesn’t know about. If they even know about the photo ID requirement in the first place; for such a big change I at least haven’t seen any publicity around it recently.

It later came to light that he suffers from a medical condition called dyspraxia , which is what he attributes his overweight to. Some of the symptoms of that condition include “difficulty with organisation and/or problems with attention, working memory and time management” so it’s perfectly plausible and may make the more vicious commentators of a certain type tone down their output, as tempting an opportunity as it is.

But, as a friend noted, another thing Tom’s situation perfectly demonstrates is why voter ID requirements tend to be bad laws that cause unjust disenfranchisement in the first place.

Back in 2022, Toby James shared six reasons why introducing the voter ID law to Britain was a bad idea.

1. There is no evidence of voter fraud.
2. Photographic voter ID could deny legitimate voters
3. Photo ID discriminates
4. Voter identification is expensive
5. The change is happening at too short notice
6. Other problems need fixing

Some of these seem more serious than others to me - but points 2 and 3 exactly describe the situation with Mr. Hunt. There’s no question he was a legitimate voter. And had he not known about the proxy workaround, or been unable for any reason to use it, he would have been denied his right to vote.

Some research for the government carried out in 2021 put the number of people who say they have no recognisable photo ID they could use was 4%. That might sound low, but as James notes it’s equivalent to 1.9 million potential voters. And that’s just any recognisable photo ID. The proportion of people reporting that they don’t have any recognisable photo ID that hasn’t expired is more than twice that, 9%.

In reality, I’d wager that the number of people who say that they have usable, in-date, photo ID is somewhat higher than the number of people that can actually locate such a thing and remember to provide it at a polling station.

Furthermore, having some kind of disability puts Hunt in one of the many groups that have a higher risk of being prevented from voting than others as a result of this law.

From the same governmental research:

12% of respondents with a severely limiting disability and eight per cent of those with a somewhat limiting difficulty said that having to present photo ID at the polling station would make voting difficult, compared with four per cent of those with no disability.

Some of that relates to their concurrent finding that people with a disability are less likely to have appropriate photo ID in the first place. Other groups that also had lesser rates of having ID include:

• Older people, especially those who were 85+ years old.
• Unemployed people.
• Those with few educational qualifications.
• Those who haven’t previously voted.
• People living in certain regions of the UK, e.g. West Midlands, South West and Yorkshire and the Humber.

As ever, it’s perhaps of note that these are different segments of the population that those who typically work in politics or the media.

Younger people aged 18-29 were actually more likely to report having a photo ID than the rest of the population. Although if they were talking about their travelcards then that would be meaningless giving a strange-on-the-surface decision by the government to allow the Oyster travel card issued to 60+ year olds as valid voter ID, but not the Oyster travel card issued to 18+ year old students or the railcards issued to 16-25 year olds. There is an actual reason for this that relates to the differing application processes for the two types of cards which can certainly be discussed - but the survey I’m took the above numbers from certainly didn’t include that nuance.

The Electoral Reform Society has similar concerns. As does the Joseph Rowntree Foundation who, focusing on the economic dimension of privilege, wrote that:

…there is a very real risk that the Government’s Elections Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, will disenfranchise around 1.7 million voters living on a low income.

And note that making available an option to get a “free” photo ID is no panacea:

It’s not easy, or necessarily going to be a priority, to apply to your local authority for a free Voter Card if you’re working in an insecure job with irregular, unpredictable and long hours, or juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet while also managing caring responsibilities and health needs. It’s also much harder to apply for a free Voter Card if you don’t have access to technology, or if previous interactions with your local council or job centre have created a feeling of fear and mistrust of the system.

The same article notes that other organisations such as Crisis, Operation Black Vote and The Runnymede Trust have similar concerns.

In any case, our voter ID law appears to be targeting a basically non-existent problem. Sure, any motivated media organisation will likely be able to find (or conjure up) a handful of individual stories of people that seemingly got away with defrauding the system. But an analysis of elections held in 2019 showed just how rare electoral fraud of the nature this law sets out to reduce seems to be.

As far as I can see from the Electoral Commission’s figures there were a whole 2 people convicted or cautioned for using someone else’s identity in order to vote in a way that this kind of voter ID law could potentially have perhaps prevented. Out of around 58 million votes. Which is not surprising when there are already mechanisms in place to ensure that votes are attributed to real individuals, that the same person can’t vote twice and, let’s face it, you’re going to have to fake-vote a whole lot more than twice to make an meaningful impact on the result of almost any election.

Toby James and Alistair Clark published an analysis of a pilot voter ID initiative that was carried out during some of the 2018-2019 local elections that found that:

Attempted impersonation was exceptionally rare, however, and measures to introduce voter identification requirements therefore had little effect on the security of the electoral process.

Rather, the ID requirements during the pilot:

…led to some voters not casting their ballot, either for reasons of convenience and availability of suitable forms of ID, or reasons of principle and protest.

These laws thus seem to be setting out to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist at meaningful scale, or less charitably, only exists in the minds of a certain type of culture-war-addled populist brain. Instead, in practice it creates a new and real problem that prevents a set of people from exercising their most fundamental fundamental democratic right. Worse yet, the disenfranchisement is likely to be biased particularly against those people who may already be struggling more than the average citizen, have a relative lack of power and privilege, and may thus be particularly affected by the constitution and nature of any elected government.

The real problem the UK has with people’s voting behaviour is not that too many imaginary people vote, but rather that too few real people do. According to research from the House of Commons Library, the turnout at England’s local elections in 2021 - even before voter ID was introduced - was a pretty appalling 35.9%. Nearly two thirds of people who could have voted didn’t vote. Perhaps we should use any available resources to focus on increasing the number of people who see fit to vote, not making it harder to do so for those who are already motivated to do so. Remove the existing barriers, don’t add new entirely unnecessary ones.

Just to finish on a moment of comedy rather than despair, another person who inadvertently (?) turned up to the polling station yesterday without any suitable ID was naturally none other than our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the very person who presided over the country and the government that put these rules into place in the first place. He is, to be fair, not known for his ability to adhere to rules, even those he himself put in place.

For future reference, there is a website where you can find out what your local candidates for the role of Police and Crime Commissioner have to say for themselves: choosemypcc.org.uk .

I’m sad that I discovered this a day too late to be useful, but also glad to know I didn’t accidently vote for the one who is going to “stop woke policing” and blah blah something about net zero I’m sure the PCC has no control over. Also:

Push to ban all Police officers from dancing while on duty/ in uniform

That’s definitely going to solve the whole “most crime is defacto legal” issue the UK has 🙄.

Happy 50th birthday to SQL!

Structured Query Language is an incredibly popular computer language used to query a huge variety of databases today. But it was described by Chamberlin and Boyce in a paper published in 1974.

They may have saved us from having to query databases using its predesccor, SQUARE, which had much trickier sounding concepts of bound variables, quantifiers and first order predicate calculus.

TIL: the reason many people pronounce SQL as “sequel” perhaps relates to the fact it was actually called SEQUEL - “Structured English QUEry Language” until they noticed another company had a trademark on SEQUEL. Wikipedia claims the modern-day correct pronunciation to be simply its letters: S-Q-L. But I doubt anyone involved would be confused either way.

Peter Kellner notes what seems to be something of a paradox in the British peoples' views around immigration to the UK.

Since Brexit, the number of migrants coming to the UK has rapidly increased - by a lot. Which I’m sure is annoying to a certain type of Brexiteer. The media is constantly in a frenzy about the issue, the government makes ever more desperate promises it won’t keep whilst simultaneously attempting probably illegal and certainly immoral strategies to make it all go away.

But yet, even with all that, the British public’s hostility to immigration has tended to decline over the last few years, albeit with a slight uptick last year.

Back in the ancient pre-Brexit-referendum era of 2015, an Ipsos poll saw 67% of British public saying that they wanted to see a reduction in immigration. Last year’s update showed that figure has dropped to 49%. And the percentage of people that want to see an actual increase in immigration has more than doubled from 10% to 22%.

Top Tory MP defects to Labour in fury at NHS crisis

Dan Poulter crosses the aisle. He doesn’t want to be part of a party that’s become a ‘nationalist party of the right’.

Good stuff, especially if he’s right about Labour’s priorities.

One of the things I really like about Labour party policy on the NHS is the focus on the social determinants of poor health and actually recognising that tackling poverty, poor housing, all those issues, particularly giving children from poorer backgrounds better chances and focusing on child health

What if, for example, you only want your content to be seen by humans in their thirties with passions for subway tile, “doggos,” and posting JLaw reaction GIFs in Slack?

Drop everything and go see if you can get through The Millennial Captcha.

(h/t Sophie)

Amazon Kindle provides a popular, easy-to-use, and (sometimes) cheap ecosystem of devices and books for anyone who enjoys reading eBooks. Of course they are also not the most ethical of companies which might make the proposition entirely unattractive to you - which is not a topic I’ll deal with here. However their monopolistic ways are such that many folk end up with a stash of Kindle ebooks they bought.

One problem though is that Kindle books are (usually) encrypted with DRM. This means that whilst they open smoothly on Kindle devices, Kindle apps and the Kindle Reader website they won’t work anywhere else. You can’t switch to a different ereader device, a different app or read them on an operating system that doesn’t have the app (except perhaps via the web).

Furthermore presumably if you lose access to your Amazon account then you’ve also lost all your books. That’s presumably unlikely to happen most of people, but there are plenty of stories on the internet of people this has apparently happened to.

And it’s not absolutely unheard of for Amazon to magically make a book you thought you purchased vanish. Famously, people woke up one day to find that the copy of George Orwell’s book ‘1984’ of all things - you know, the one about how the government retrospectively rewrites history by changing the digital records of what happened - had vanished, from the Amazon store and their own Kindles. They’re also able to change the content of the books after you purchased them - in theory for good, but each individual case might depend on your opinion. So all in all, whether you’re switching apps or devices or simply trying to make a safe backup, you’re going to end up with a bunch of unusable files if you try to open them in something not officially created by Amazon. I don’t love this, to say the least.

But it turns out that the wonderful internet people have figured out how to remove the DRM from Amazon eBooks. Once the DRM is gone you can open it on any device or app that supports the file format, or use a tool such as Calibre to convert them to other formats that your chosen reading setup can work with.

Obviously if removing DRM is illegal where you live - and to be honest it probably is, but hey, you never know - then you shouldn’t do it. But once you moved to a country where it is permitted then the below is - purely in theory of course - one of the simpler ways you might do it.

One method to do this is via the aforementioned Calibre ebook management software which is free, open source and available for Windows, MacOS and Linux operating systems and one of its plugins. Calibre is actually well worth a look if you’re into ebooks even if you aren’t stuck with a load of DRM-laden Kindle files.

Below I’m going to outline what I believe to have been the most reliable approach over time.

There are two downsides to this approach though:

Firstly you have to have a hardware Kindle eInk device currently registered to your Amazon account. It shouldn’t matter which model as long as its one of the eInk ones and not one of their Android ‘Fire’ style tablets. I have heard of people buying an old and cheap ereader from eBay just to connect it up to their Amazon account to enable the below, even if they have no intention of using the device itself.

It doesn’t actually matter if your Kindle is later broken or lost; the key is that it must currently be registered to your Amazon account.

Secondly you have to download your books from the Amazon website to your computer one at a time as far as I can tell. This will be painful if you have a lot of books.

If it’s unbearable then I know some people have had success using the Kindle apps for Windows and Macs to download books en masse. But the encryption Amazon uses in that case is different than that used when you are using a Kindle eInk eReader. It seems to change often enough that depending on exactly what and when you try it you might come up against problems with the actual DRM removal.

That said, if you want to try that way you’ll still need the plugin mentioned below - but also I’d suggest you search for another guide as there’s more to it than what I’m outlining here. The Calibre subreddit is perhaps one of the best places to find this stuff, but there are plenty of possibilities.

But if you can cope with that, then:

• First make sure you have Calibre installed.
• Then download the DeDRM_tools plugin. I think the newest version is from the noDRM repo; this one. Download the zip file at the bottom of the page ( DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip at the time of writing).
• Extract the files from the zip somewhere onto your computer.

Then load Calibre and do the following inside it:

• Preferences -> Advanced -> Plugins -> Load plugin from file.
• Choose to load the DeDRM_plugin.zip file you extracted from the zip above.
• Reboot Calibre (maybe).
• Preferences -> Advanced -> Plugins -> DeDrm -> Customize Plugin -> Kindle eInk ebooks
• Add the serial number of your Kindle, which is available either somewhere in your Kindle settings or on the Amazon website if you go to the page called “Manage your content and devices” and enter the devices section. Now you can see why you need an eInk Kindle to have been connected.

Now back the Amazon website page “Manage your content and devices”:

• Go to Content and then Books and find the book you want.
• Under “More actions” select to download and transfer via USB.
• Pick the device that you added the serial number of when it asks you which devices. This will download a file, currently ending in azw3.

Lastly, Inside Calibre, import the azw3 book as usual via Add Books menu. And there we go, the book should hopefully open just fine in Calibre and be freely available for reading, conversion and all the other good stuff Calibre does.

🎶 Listening to Kaiser Chief’s Easy Eighth Album by The Kaiser Chiefs.

Here’s another entry from the “sort of surprised they’re still going” hall of fame.

Unlike the last album I mentioned, 19(!) years after this bunch were famously Predicting A Riot, their latest album sees them taking a new and rather more calming path. Here they turn their hand to the pop-funk genre, with mere hints of their earlier style now and then.

📚 Finished reading The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov.

This is another wonderful, mind-bending, book from Georgi Gospodinov, who wrote the “Time Shelter”, a book I greatly enjoyed earlier in the year. This is somewhat peculiar story, but written in a way that feels very suited to my brain; somehow calming even in its melancholy.

Presumably it’s not only my brain that it’s suited to - it became an instant best-seller in its country of publication, Bulgaria, when it was released around 2011. So it was written much before Time Shelter, but has only been released in the UK relatively recently.

As the FT notes, The Economist once referred to Gospodinov’s homeland Bulgaria as a particularly sad place.

Although richer countries are clearly happier, the correlation is not perfect, which suggests that other, presumably cultural, factors are at work…the saddest place in the world, relative to its income per person, is Bulgaria.

It’s somewhat an autobiography - the main character has the author’s name and grows up in the country of the author. The progression through his life is clear. But it’s also fantastical, whimsically and seriously so, as we follow his life - and those of the other minds he inhabits - over time. See, as a child, the book tells us that this Georgi suffers from “obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome” which essentially allows him to get trapped in and compelled to live out other people’s memories. When in one of these episodes, “I” in this case would not refer to Georgi, but rather his host, for want of a better word.

The story is fragmented, moving from one scene to another and back again, from his point of view to someone else’s, obsessing for a while of some old list he found and then ruminating on what it feels like to be something else, or retelling a snippet of someone’s life story. Time fast-forwards, time rewinds. It’s labyrthinic, and deliberately so. Very much like the human mind, of course.

Gaustine, of Time Shelter fame, gets a shoutout. References to Borges, the author of some of my favourite short stories and similarly a fan of narrative labyrinths are made.

As time passes, story-book Georgi grows out of the afore-mentioned childhood syndrome, and no longer inadvertently leaps into other people’s minds. Instead he becomes a collector of everything; every note, ticket, picture, menus, whatever - boxes of the stuff. But primarily a collector of stories. He’ll pay for a good one.

One of the themes he constantly returns to is that of abandonment, and those oft-related emotions of isolation and loneliness.

Interwoven through the experiences of “normal” people he comes back again and again to Greek mythology, specifically the story of the Minotaur. But in this retelling the minotaur is no vicious beast. He’s just a sad, lonely child who through no fault of his own got born with an alien face.

There is sorrow in him which no animal possesses.

Poor Minotaur’s father hated him. His mother abandoned him to a dark, depressing, lonely labyrinth. At least in this novel you do get to hear the Minotaur have his day in court at one point.

This is the lens which much of the presumably more autobiographical elements and aspects of social commentary are shown through. The claim is made that the “history of the world” can be described through a series of children being abandoned.

📺 Watched season 13 of Death In Paradise.

More (mostly) light-hearted murder in the sun. I guessed wrong about who Sunset Chaser was. But still, good to know that getting that a comment on otherwise very boring blog can indeed change your life.

Last season.