The Braindump Blog

Contrary to the stereotype, new research involving frequent cannabis users finds no evidence of lower motivation than their age / sex matched non-cannabis using counterparts.

To quote the lead author:

Our work implies that … people who use cannabis are no more likely to lack motivation or be lazier than people who don’t.

The R library installr provides a super simple way to update your version of R to the latest if you’re using Windows.

Simply run:

install.packages('installr')
library("installr")
updateR()

I hear that the updateR package does something similar on Mac, but I’ve not tried it.

I’m sure I’m late to the party on this one, but if you’re a Substack newsletter reader then you can clear up your email inbox by subscribing to newsletters via RSS instead of email. Just add /feed to your publication’s home page, e.g. whatever.substack.com/feed.

There’s then a “Disable all emails” option in the Substack settings - tho beware that this seems to unsubscribe you from everything. The feeds still work fine though.

It only works for the free newsletters you subscribe to. If you pay for access to posts then they don’t appear on the feed, so you’ll still have to receive those by email or by visiting their website.

For the past 3 months, Germany has been trialling a scheme where for €9 a month people can travel on any regional trains, subways, trams and buses nationwide. Compared to the UK cost of public transport that’s basically free!

It sounds like it wasn’t the best planned scheme, so there’s a lot any future such schemes should consider to improve implementation.

But nonetheless in addition to the obvious benefits to travellers, it’s claimed to have saved 1.8 million tons of CO2 emissions by reducing car use.

Everyone’s a winner. More of this please!

For what it’s worth, the last train ticket I bought here in the UK, which was booked weeks in advance and required me to take specific trains, cost around £100 for a single return trip.

Started watching season 3 of Locke and Key 📺.

Forbes reports that more than half of all Bitcoin trades are likely fake - wash trading, and that kind of thing. Perhaps not a huge surprise in a sector riddled with fraud.

But given the amount of energy expended carrying out each Bitcoin transaction - each equivalent to 1.8 million more conventional VISA transactions according to Digiconomist - it feels especially galling in a world currently facing both climate and energy crises.

Whilst on vacation in Calabria, we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take a trip to the town of Pizzo. It’s a lovely seaside town, with a 15th century castle overlooking the ocean.

A ghostly looking wire sculpture also sits there, permanently enjoying the view.

Slightly away from the rolling waves, the old town seems to be almost the stereotype of European cafe culture, replete with narrow streets and a town square.

But what most sets Pizzo apart from other delightful towns, and probably the reason it particularly attracts us tourists, is its famous Tartufo de Pizzo. Described in various places, including by our tour guide, as “the greatest ice cream in the world” it is pretty special, and the town has upwards of 20 gelaterias serving it.

It’s essentially a ball of icecream, traditionally chocolate and hazelnut, although there were plenty of other variations on hand, dusted in chocolate powder. This surrounds a delicious melted chocolate centre. Each creator apparently has their own special and top secret recipe for how to make that delectable middle, and they’re made in a way that’s quite impossible to reproduce the splendour of in for instance a mass supermarket bought product.

The origin story is that a famous ice-cream seller - I’ve seen different names given to him in different places so will treat him as anonymous here - needed to make a bunch of desserts for an important event full of VIPs. But, oh no, he ran out of moulds to shape them. Desperate not to let them down he just used his hands to create a rough sphere of ice-cream around some melted chocolate, and dusted them in sugar and chocolate. And thus the phenomena was born.

Another place we visited whilst in Calabria was Tropea. Legendarily founded by Hercules, it’s a seaside location which has previously won a “most beautiful village in Italy” award.

It’s full of quaint narrow streets, with many shops selling either fashion items or the famed local red Tropea onion.

We picked up a jar of “onion marmalade” which was far nicer than it sounds. The area is also famed for ‘nduja spicy salami.

There’s a cathedral that’s been there since the 12th century.

It’s dedicated to the Madonna of Romania, who supposedly protects the town. Presumably as evidence for that claim, there are a couple of World War II bombs that hit the town but for some reason never exploded displayed right inside the cathedral.

Another point of interest is the 4th century Sanctuary of Santa Maria dell’Isola Benedictine monastery. It’s been hit by earthquakes a couple of times since then so has had some rather more modern rebuilds, but nonetheless remains extremely picturesque.

The town is right on the seaside as the above picture suggests. Once again, the sea in this region had some truly incredible colours.

We made a quick visit to Capo Vaticano. It’s a beautiful spot on the Italian coast.

The colour of the sea in this region was pretty magical.

The tour guide made it clear that despite its name it was nothing to do with the Vatican. Rather, the area around it seems to be most famous for growing “Rosse di Tropea” - the red onions of Tropea.

To quote Italy Magazine:

The onion’s extraordinary sweetness, its delicate scent, its lightness and enjoyable taste, which derive from the morphological peculiarities of the soil and microclimate where it is grown, make it a much sought after ingredient by gourmets and chefs.

And they’re not wrong! They are surprisingly delicious, just eaten raw. Not something I’d usually expect of an onion. Recommended.

In Britain we’d need to import the finished onion though. Apparently just growing some locally from seed won’t do the job at all; it’s all about the conditions of the local land.

But, whilst there were many nearby stalls selling the onion, the most obvious plant life at the place we stopped was what looked to be prickly pear cactuses.

I didn’t think to sample the fruit, although it sounds like they’re perfectly palatable if you’re careful about removing all the spines.

Finished reading: Sherlock Holmes and the Mayfair Murders by David Britland 📚.

As a big fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, I enjoy trying out the modern takes out now and then.

This one was pretty good, with a style and some tropes that reminded me of the originals in a good way. I didn’t love the ending, but thoroughly enjoyed most of the experience.

Finished reading: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow 📚.

In which the author argues that the multitude of problems and dangers associated with the ‘big tech’ surveillance companies are not so much to do with their ability to weaponise all our personal data they suck up against us. Mainly because they’re actually a lot worse at leveraging it to manipulate us than they think they are.

Rather, their detrimental impact relates more to abusive behaviours they are free to perpetuate by virtue of effectively being rich and powerful monopolies.

By happy coincidence, our holiday to Calabria encompassed the Italian national Ferragosto holiday.

Celebrated on August 15th, it originates from a Roman festival, later co-opted by both the Catholic Church to commemorate the Assumption of Mary, and Mussolini for a scheme allowing poorer people to travel to cities or other holiday destinations cheaply.

In practice, for me it meant going for a special meal followed by a fun beach rave party.

All capped off with a classic seaside fireworks show.

For our first travels abroad since the start of the Covid pandemic, we recently decided to go holiday in Calabria, a southern region of Italy.

We stayed at the “TUI Magic Life Calabria” hotel, which did indeed seem fairly magical!

Here’s the scene as one walks towards the lodges we stayed in:

Although rather more of our time was spent by the pool.

…at least in between the severe storms, which had quite incredible amounts of thunder and lightning. But fortunately they mostly tended to happen at night so didn’t impact the fun and games too much (with the possible exception of a mudslide in Stromboli meaning a trip we’d planned to the volcano got cancelled).

It was just a 15 minute walk to the beach, which with a mountainous backdrop was a real delight.

One could even rent a bed down there, if a standard sunlounger seemed too much like hard work.

Wandering to the beach takes one through a nice shady forest area.

With no shortage of places to comfortably lie down and take in the woody vibes.

There was no shortage of entertainment on offer, more than a lazy vacationer like me could ever get to.

The forest concealed an archery range I took a couple of sessions on.

As well as managing to get thoroughly beaten at giant chess.

I never made it to the tennis lessons, and of course deliberately avoided any activity labelled “expert” or “high intensity”. I did just about manage the gym there a couple of times, which is a world record.

On the more spectatory front, there was frequent live music offerings in the little town square type setup they had.

One night a week was “Italian night” where some supposedly more traditional entertainment was at hand.

Alongside some larger scale antics in a stadium setup. This included a re-enactment of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video:

Some death-defying acrobatics:

And many more varieties of singing and dancing, top of the costuming list perhaps being these folk:

Once a week there was a beach party.

Even the food was usually pretty great (and unlimited enough to register a decent increase on the scales the week I got back 😂).

Truly a wonderful experience, recommended to all. I’d kind of forgotten how good vacations actually were, what with the pandemic and all.

Well, this photo from an article in the Guardian today about a drought officially being declared in the UK definitely makes it look like most of the country is turning into a desert.

The last 9 months has been the driest since 1976.

If ever you felt the desire to have a 3D representation of your Github commits in the form of a city skyline, the good news is that now, thanks to “You did it!”, apparently you can.

I’m enjoying the “Standard eBooks” site as a source for out-of-copyright books for eReaders et al.

It’s a similar concept to the fabulous Project Gutenberg et al.

The main difference is that Standard eBooks ensure the texts are first cleaned up in terms of typos, punctuation, design, typography and metadata. They also add eReader-supported features like tables of contents and footnotes that you don’t always see in free downloads.

All books are available in epub, azw3 (for Kindle), kepub and advanced epub formats. As a Kindle user, I found it easiest to email the epub version to my Kindle, now Amazon started supporting that file format.

You can volunteer to help or donate if you feel so inclined.

I recently learned of the existence of the Cain’s Jawbone book 📚. It’s a murder mystery novel written in 1934.

However, the 100 pages of the book come to you arranged in the wrong order. To solve it you have to figure out the order they should be in. The number of possible combinations is a number with 158 digits.

Originally one could win a prize for doing so - £15 in 1934, and £1000 more recently after it was re-released.

Apparently it’s only known to have been solved 4 times ever so far, the solution being almost the only thing not yet available for download on the internet.

Needed to remind myself today that there is no neat practical interpretation of the Pearson’s coefficient of correlation “r” after seeing a report that suggested otherwise. It’s true - it is useful for comparing how strong and in which direction correlations are between two variables. But that’s about it.

Or

The correlation coefficient is sometimes criticized as having no obvious intrinsic interpretation

as Schober et al put it a little more formally.

You can square it to produce an R² if you like to produce a “coefficient of determination”, which does have an IRL meaning. R² expresses the percent of variation in one variable that’s explained by the variation in the other one.

Just the same as R² in a linear regression model. In fact a simple linear regression like “y given x” will have an R² that is the square of the correlation coefficient between x and y.

Watched Primal Fear 📽 over the weekend.

Recorded crime in the UK has reached a 20 year high in the first quarter of 2022, with 6.3 million crimes recorded.

Now this may well relate to changes in policy or willingness to report rather than a general increase in crime. Especially as the ONS crime survey, which doesn’t require the crime to have been reported to the police, doesn’t appear to show an increase in overall crime, at least at first glance.

But something that definitely appears to be the case is that only a tiny proportion of recorded crime results in someone being charged.

Now I usually find myself on the side of wanting to reduce the number of situations police get involved in. Criminalising someone should be a last resort. Police officers seem to be regularly sent in to handle situations that other people would likely be better trained for, including being asked to deal with an increasing number of situations where someone is suffering from a mental health crisis. This is not a good situation for either party concerned.

But where a crime has been committed then that is the domain of the police. Despite not having a particularly optimistic view of the situation, even I was a little shocked to read that only 5.6% of offences reported in 2021-2022 led to a suspect being charged or summonsed.

Unsurprisingly, rape remains one of the rarest crimes to end up with a suspect being charged, with only 1.3% of reported crimes resulting in one.

A Telegraph investigation showed that in 84% of nearly 21,000 neighbourhoods that had reported at least one theft in the last three years, no suspects were ever identified fpr any of them. In 20 neighbourhoods over 100 thefts had been reported, with zero being solved.

No doubt part of this is explainable by the decline of the capabilities of many public services, at least partly thanks to Conservative’s lack of investment or care.

The number of police officers in England and Wales fell by over 20,000 between 2010 and 2019, although this looks as though they increased to narrow the gap a little in 2020. I don’t know the research on to what extent raw police numbers relate to the rate of solving crime, but intuitively presumably there’s a floor at which there’s simply no resources left to carry out thorough investigations. Even holding the numbers steady wouldn’t make sense if there’s an increase in the number of crimes being reported.

There’s probably also indirect effects based on cuts to other services.

Earlier this week the Independent reported that due to a lack of NHS resources the police have now become a surrogate ambulance service in some places. Police personnel and vehicles are being sent to assist, transport and wait with patients who are suffering emergency medical conditions such as heart attacks. More sitting in hospitals waiting for a spare NHS bed for the unlucky patient they’re with presumably entails less time to solve crimes.

Finished reading: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy 📚.

A fairly short, often harrowing, story about a man forced to confront his own death, and the actions of those around him. Lots to think about here about the nightmarish oft-unspoken issues we have dealing with death, whether our own or others. Very recommended, if you’re ready to stare into the uncomfortable void.

A Guardian review sums it up nicely as:

a hard, pitiless stare into the abyss, not just of death, but of human nature.

There’s also a Very Bad Wizards podcast episode about it I found useful.

Over here, I wrote about why the majority of England’s Covid-19 deaths are now from vaccinated people despite the fact that the vaccines continue work well, particularly in terms of protection from death.

There’s a ton of nuances one could (and I did 🙂 ) wade through, but TLDR is basically:

1. There are just way more people that are vaccinated than unvaccinated in the UK. Over 93% of the English eligible population have had at least 1 dose.
2. Those who are vaccinated tend to be older (and possibly have other high-risk conditions), making them much more vulnerable to dying from Covid if there is a brekathrough infection, which inevitably at times there is.

As soon as you control for just the difference in number of and age of people it becomes apparent that the vaccines still seem very effective at saving lives.

Liz Truss, the odds-on favourite to be the British Prime Minister in a few weeks time, appears to be proposing to solve the cost of living crisis - i.e. people not having enough money to live a decent life - by reducing the amount of money a bunch of people have.

Apparently “tailoring” pay for civil servants is going to save up to £8.8 billion. Given the total civil service pay bill is apparently around £9 billion per year, that seems - even in its own terms - ambitious.

My current stats nerd learning focus is structual equation modeling. It’s something I’ve seen used, but never tried.

For anyone else in the same boat, I’ve had the Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling 📚 recommended, alongside a 6-video playlist for an intro.

Finished reading: Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace 📚.

Rolling Stone quotes him as wanting to write:

…stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.

and I think he certainly achieved that goal in this book. I found this an incredible collection of short stories that range from the absurd through to those that have an upsettingly familiar verbalisation of the unspoken pain of everyday existence.

Pretty much every story felt enriching and deep, with a weirdly enticing property of “are there more layers I’m not even beginning to understand?” upon completion.

“Incarnations of Burned Children” is both one of the shortest and one of the most intense and horrific stories I’ve ever read.