The Braindump Blog

A new paper examining the links between the average daily step count (as measured by Fitbit) and the health outcomes of ~6,000 people reinforces the idea that being more active is good for our health in many dimensions.

Steps per day negatively correlated with obesity, sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux disease, major depressive disorder, diabetes and hypertension.

One takeaway I’d have is that in general more is always better, at least up to the thresholds displayed on the chart. There’s nothing special about the (in?)famous 10k steps a day goal in many of these curves. So an increase in physical activity is likely worthwhile irrespective of whether you’re going from 2,000 to 3,000 steps, or 9.000 to 10,000.

That said, being observational, the study cannot truly prove that the increased steps is what caused the better health outcomes, although the authors do attempt to reduce the risk of reverse causation (i.e. good health leads to more steps) . Studies like these also cannot truly control for every possible confounder.

Nonetheless, whilst the conclusion isn’t exactly surprising, it’s nice to see a study that looked at a reasonably high number of people over a reasonably long time frame - the median step-monitoring period being 4 years - and made an effort to control for various external confounders.

Watched season 1 of The Capture 📺. A thriller in which a man is first freed from jail thanks to video evidence, but then re-captured on the same basis.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling it all. But whilst some of it might be a little fantastical, I think the issues it raises are something we really need to figure out how to deal with in the real world, sooner rather than later. A couple of recent product releases from Meta and Google make me concerned that the show actually dramatically underestimates the potential mess we’re heading towards.

Finished listening to: A Special Place for Women by Laura Hankin 📚.

Somehow I’d gotten the idea that this book was a detailed critique of girl-boss culture based on a true story. In reality I don’t think it’s either; perhaps a bit of the former. But it is a fun read, with enough mystery to be very compelling. I enjoyed the informal, very relatable, tone.

Otavio Cordeiro just released an Obsidian plugin called Micro.publish that lets you post directly to blogs hosted at micro.blog (like this one!) from the excellent Obsidian note taking software. It gives you full control over which blog, tags and so on. It’s great.

In a piece arguing that the start of the ‘current era’ began with the dual inventions of the iPhone and Facebook, Matt Locke succinctly summarises up how the challenges facing those of us who work with data have changed.

The problem of measuring the audience has been inverted - instead of having to use complex maths to extrapolate tiny data sets to represent huge audiences, we now use complex maths to reduce huge data sets until they represent tiny audiences.

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.

Below are the names of the talks I attended. Plenty of fascinating material in there to inspire future posts, as well as a problematically large number of related books I now want to read.

• The dark history and troubling present of eugenics, by Adam Rutherford.
• The pattern seekers, by Simon Baron-Cohen.
• Making sense of screen time, by Dr. Karl.
• Believing the unbelievable: the science of paranoia and conspiracy thinking, by Nichola Raihani.
• Black holes, by Jeff Forshaw.
• Ultra-processed food, by Chris and Xan van Tulleken.
• A new force of nature? By Harry Cliff.
• The geological record of climate change, by Christopher Jackson.
• DNA family secrets, by Turi King.

Sir John Betjeman, poet, as immortalised in St Pancras railway station, London, having campaigned against its demolition in the 1960s.

Pictured in a flustered state, anxiously checking the departures board in the hope he is in time to get a seat, like the rest of us.

The Truss administration’s obsessive and damaging focus on reducing taxes, particularly for the wealthy and corporations, at any cost has led to her policies being eviscerated by all sorts of organisations and individuals, including many people from her own party.

The irony, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is that the average household will actually end up paying more tax overall, due to the Conservative’s stated policy of freezing the thresholds at which we start to pay income tax for four years, alongside many other tax and benefit related thresholds.

Of course due to inflation - and we have a lot of that at the moment - keeping the threshold at which tax is due to the same nominal amount means that more people reach that threshold without them having achieved any additional real spending power. But “quietly freeze things as they are” is a much less attention grabbing policy than “make wild cuts to specific things” so the effects might not be as well-known as other parts of their catastrophic mini-budget.

The IFS analysis suggests that by 2025-2, 1.4 million more people will be paying income tax, costing basic-rate tax payers an extra £500 per year.

1.6 million more people will be paying higher-rate tax, which will cost them about £3,000 extra per year.

An extra 125k people will be affected by the benefit cap, and 500k more families will lose some or all of their child benefit.

…on average for every £1 households gain from high-profile cuts to rates of income tax and National Insurance, they lose £2 from the freezes and policy roll-outs.

Whilst literally every income decile will see negative effects to their income, it nets out in a regressive way with the poorest section of society seeing a 2.8% reduction of income, vs 1.1% for the richest.

Just to add further confusion to my plastic recycling dilemma, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management has responded to the claim of “a lot of your plastic recycling ends up in the Asian sea” by claiming that’s misinformation, as under 3% of UK plastic recycling is exported to that region and almost none goes to India or the Philippines.

Everyone agrees though that the most effective measure is to not create the waste in the first place.

Just after I’ve upped my plastic recycling game after reading a book about the horrors of excess plastic, I read an article suggesting that it might all be even more in vain than the book suggested.

The way “rich” countries like the UK often deal with the waste they’ve collected for recycling is not to actually recycle it themselves, but rather just palm it off to any other poorer country that can be exploited to accept it. Then the receiving country has to figure out how to actually deal with it.

But some of these countries are not all that fastidious at ensuring the waste goes where it should. Thus a lot of this plastic we think we’ve sent for recycling actually ends up littering the environment, particularly the sea, anyway.

The author cites a model that suggests that 6,000 of the 37,000 tons of plastic packaging the Netherlands exports each year, mostly to Asia, actually ends up in the marine environment.

Apparently British landfills are fairly good at keeping in what’s deposited in them, if nothing else. So perhaps the real choice we have is between putting waste plastic in the recycle bin knowing that a good amount of it will end up polluting the sea anyway, vs putting it in the general waste bin knowing that it’ll be stuck alongside vast mass of landfill forever - but that’s a relatively “safe” and contained place.

I’m not really sure which the best option is! Both the afore-mentioned book and this article reinforce it’s far more effective to reduce the amount of plastic that’s created in the first place, as opposed to keep making it with the hope that it’ll be recycled.

Finished reading: A Book Of Secrets by Derren Brown 📚.

Philosophical meanderings on how one can frame the ups and downs of life so as to best cope with the journey. It extolls the development of a universal sense of absurdity and melancholy, alongside an appreciation of the growth that coming up against friction can bring. And that there’s really no point in trying to hide the facets of ourselves we don’t like.

I’d think it may be especiallly poignant for anyone going through something like a mid-life crisis - if nothing else to understand that even extremely famous and successful people have the same feelings of doubt, frustration and maybe even horror that the rest of us do. It’s a very universal experience.

Finished reading: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen 📚.

A fascinating dive into the experiences and struggles of the people identifying as the “A” in the famous LGBTIQA+ acronym. Despite a much-needed increased focus on some identities in recent times, I haven’t seen a lot of material focusing on people who don’t experience sexual attraction who must nonetheless live in a world infused with “compulsory sexuality”.

Watched The Last Witch Hunter 📽️

Val Kilmer is an 800 year old witch hunter, cursed to eternally walk the modern day world eliminating the pesky witches that secretly live among us.

I found it rather mediocre, tho to be fair I was only half concentrating on it at times.

Hugo Gye tweets results of a poll by BMG Research showing that the public supports most of the policies within last week’s appalling mini-budget. But they hated the removal of the top rate of tax and any limits on bankers bonuses.

15% of 2019 Tory voters now support Labour.

Watched season 1 of Shadow and Bone 📺, a fantasy type show based on an amalgamation of books by Leigh Bardugo.

It’s set in a world separated by a monster-ridden Shadow Fold that only a certain type of person has a chance of eradicating.

For what I think is the first time, a judge has ruled that the content social media companies permitted and promoted to a child meaningfully contributed to their death.

Poor Molly Russell had apparently viewed 2100 Instagram posts topics around suicide, self-harm and depression, and constructed a Pinterest board featuring another 469 images along those lines. Some ‘romanticised’ self harm, others discouraged the act of seeking professional help.

She later died ‘from an act of self harm’.

The wordcloud of answers that occurred when PeoplePolling asked respondents “What word or phrase first comes to mind when you think about Liz Truss’s economic policies?” is truly incredible.

The design for new coins featuring King Charles III has been released. Within a few weeks we should see 50p coins with his head on them, although the Queen Elizabeth coins will still be perfectly usable.

In case you’re wondering why it feels like he’s facing the wrong way, then it turns out that’s actually tradition. Each time we get a new monarch, the coin design flips such that they alternate from facing left to right and so on. We just haven’t had a new monarch within almost anyone’s living memory.

This has been the case since the 1600s, only broken at the request of King Edward VIII. Although even that was mainly a theoretical breach for anyone outside of specialist coin collectors, because no coins got into general circulation before he abdicated.

This also explains why Queen Elizabeth faced left on stamps but right on coins. The convention for “normal” stamps has been for the monarch to always face left, whereas she happened to be on the looking-right phase of the coin schedule.

Likewise kings typically do not wear crowns in their coin portraits, whereas queens do.

Seem I missed that 2 years ago McVities officially confirmed that the side of a chocolate digestive that has the chocolate on is in fact the bottom of the biscuit, not the top.

(So did 84% of respondents to a recent DeltaPoll survey.)

A study from a few years ago looked at some results from Alaska’s “Permanent Fund Dividend” - a policy that’s akin to a universal basic income scheme. It concluded that one of the side-effects of providing (mostly) unconditional money to its citizenry was a reduction in childhood obesity.

…we find that an additional one thousand dollars in PFD payments decreases the probability of an Alaskan child being obese by as much as 4.5 percentage points.

Behold a new entry into the cesspit that is much online marketing: ads that load podcast episodes in the background so as to increase the download and potentially ad impression count, even whilst the user likely has no interest whatsoever. Bad for everyone except the middleman.

This post by Emily Riederer is a great summary of four potential approaches to trying to infer causality from data where a formal experiment wasn’t run.

She covers the concepts behind

• stratification
• propensity score weighting
• regression discontinuity
• difference in differences analysis

in a short and very readable article, with business-focussed examples.

In amongst the economic chaos, voters appear to think that the Labour Party is more trustworthy than the Conservative Party in terms of…well, everything they asked.

Except Brexit, where the larger mass of folk apparently don’t trust either party to handle that well.

Mortgage payments look to be one of the next crises the UK is going to have to stare into the existential void of, or do something about.

Not content with folk being unable to afford food to eat or energy to heat, it seems like housing may be the next to go. Even for those people who are rich or lucky enough to be mortgaged home owners - in many places it’s been nearly impossible for first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder in the first place.

As the British economy appears to destroy itself in reaction to the Conservative’s recent bewildering and reckless mini-budget, the Bank of England has felt compelled to raise interest rates. This has many consequences, but of note here is the fact that many mortgages are directly linked to the BoE interest rate. Those that aren’t are likely influenced by it, at least at the time of taking out the loan.

The Bank of England’s web page shows how the interest rate has changed over the past decade.

So it’s been very low, under than 1% for most of the decade, but has already shot up to more than double that figure recently. But that’s not where it’s likely to stop. The markets are apparently pricing in an expected rate of 6% for next year.

This certainly isn’t historically unprecedented - the rate was last 6% back in 1999, and it was more than double that a decade before. But people have obviously been taking out mortgages - and companies have been offering them - based on the situation in contemporary times rather than the state of the world 20 years ago. Even if a consumer did proactively try and integrate future interest rate considerations into their mortgage decision they wouldn’t have been saved; just a few months ago the projected interest rate for next year was just a quarter of what it seems like it may turn out to be.

There are about 2.2 million people on variable rate mortgages, who are likely to be affected in the short term. About 3 times as many people currently hold fixed rate mortgages so are “safe” in the short term, but as soon as they come to the end of their fixed rate - usually 2 or 5 years after they took the mortgage out - they will end up in the same disaster-laden boat.

The consequential differences in the monthly payments homeowners will be required to make are not small! Unfortunately a rise of 1 percentage point in the bank rate doesn’t mean your payments get 1% larger. For mortgages that follow the Bank of England rate, the interest rate relates to that of your debt. I’m sure many of us have been schooled about the miracle of compound interest when it comes to savings. Unfortunately the same applies to debt.

Various articles have given some example calculations. A tweet from economist Samuel Tombs calculated that the average household looking to refinance a 2 year fix next year would need to find £627 extra a month.

If mortgage rates rise to 6%—as implied by markets’ current expectations for Bank Rate—the average household refinancing a 2yr fixed rate mortgage in the first half of 2023 will see *monthly* repayments jump to £1,490, from £863. Many simply won’t be able to afford this (1/2) pic.twitter.com/hkoZCcSfjJ

— Samuel Tombs (@samueltombs) September 26, 2022

Others examples quoted by Yahoo Finance include someone with a £140k mortgage that went from 2.25% to 6% would need to pay an additional £270 a month.

You can choose your own example using one of the many mortgage calculators, such as the one from MoneySavingExpert.

With that for example you can see that you’d taken out £150k over 25 years at say 1.5%, that’s a monthly payment of £600. The same borrowing at next year’s expected interest rate of 6% would cost you £967 a month.

In the mean time, the state of affairs is in such disarray that 985 mortgage products were withdrawn from sale overnight, with some banks and building societies entirely stopping offering mortgages to new customers.

Am excited that the Labour party finally have a plan that I both know what is, and at least on the surface, thoroughly support.

….the Labour leader says he will double the amount of onshore wind, triple solar and more than quadruple offshore wind power, “re-industrialising” the country to create a zero carbon, self-sufficient electricity system, by the end of this decade.

As well as the much needed environmental impact, the hope is that it’ll also create a whole lot of jobs, and make energy bills permanently lower, as well as make the UK less dependent on Putin et al.

It’s ambitious, perhaps overly so in some people’s opinion - but if we don’t even try then we’ll definitely not get there.