The Braindump Blog

Temporarily paused watching the incredible Mr Robot show after season 2 to let it all sink into my brain. It’s delightfully complicated in places.

Switched to catching up on The Handmaid’s Tale 📺- somehow I’d missed that there’s season 3 and 4 I haven’t seen, with 5 coming soon.

Finished listening to The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis 📚.

I enjoyed it a lot, but I also like chess. Whilst there are interesting non-chess themes throughout, there’s also a lot of pretty detailed recountings of chess games! It’d be cool if the paper version drew the games out.

The next version of iOS gives Apple devices a lockdown mode designed to repel even the kind of attacks that state-sponsored hackers employ. It’s at the cost of several features so is billed as “only turn it on if you feel you have reason to”. But I like the idea.

A report from BCG suggests that plant-based meat alternatives are the most effective things to invest in from a climate point of view by a long shot, mainly because of the huge amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted under conventional meat and dairy production.

Yesterday a friend sent me this absolute horror show of a temperature forecast map for the UK.

It’s already been hot a while, but seemingly next Monday and Tuesday are going to feel extra unlivable for us in the UK, where it’s not very common for people to have air con or many other anti-being-too-hot facilities.

The MET has issued an extreme heat warning. The NHS is trying to brace itself for yet more health emergencies in amongst all the ongoing Covid.

This kind of heat can in particular be dangerous to older people with certain medical conditions, so there’s lots of good advice out there about checking on your potentially vulnerable neighbours. But if it gets hot enough that a level 4 heatwave alert is issued for the first time ever, then then even the risk-factor-free population may suffer harm if precautions are not taken.

Some of the potential side-effects of this type of excessive heat can include:

• Road surfaces and pavements melting, as happened in previous heatwaves.
• Railway lines buckling. Railway lines can get to be 20 degrees hotter than the air temperature. At a certain temperature, restrictions are placed on the speed of trains.
• Electricity supply problems - both because there’s an increase in demand for energy, and the heat reduces how much power the system can carry. Plus power stations get less efficient. It’s possible that certain designs of nuclear power reactors have to shut down because the water used to cool them gets too warm, although so far that’s never happened in the UK.
• Water shortages, due to excessive demand.
• Wildfires starting.
• Smell, dust, infestations.
• Reduced crop harvests.

Basically a lot of stuff that in extremis sounds a little dystopian. But it is 2022, so I wouldn’t rule any of it out.

There’s an estimated 30% chance that next week will in fact beat the current UK highest ever temperature on record, which was 38.7 degrees Celsius in July 2019.

New temperature records - and the associated death and destruction - might not be rare in the future though if we don’t finally find a way to reduce humanity’s damage to the environment. A study from a couple of years back estimated that temperatures about 40 degrees would be seen every 3-4 years in the UK by the end of the century if we don’t do something to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

The Conservative leadership contest is progressing with all the charm and grace you would imagine. Intra-party leaks and briefings about rival candidates, lots of truly ludicrous tax cut promises and a bit of culture war here and there.

There’s just so many of them - eleven candidates at one point before Chishti, Javid and Shapps withdrew. And despite the fact that everyone has an opinion, it’s not clear that we actually know who they even are.

A poll from Savanta ComRes asked people to name the candidates based on their official photo.

Looking at the more realistic-to-have-a-chance few, about two-thirds of people could identify Rishi Sunak, a third could identify Liz Truss and just 11% managed Penny Mordaunt.

If you look only at Conservative voters, the numbers don’t exactly sky-rocket - 77%, 45% and 16% respectively. Two people thought Mordaunt was the global soul-pop sensation Adele.

In a way this doesn’t yet matter. The British public has no direct way to select the next Prime Minister. The way the system works it’s only the 358 Conservative MPs that get a say in which candidate progresses at this stage. When it’s down to the final two then a tiny subsection of the British public - the 0.35% of the electorate that are members of the Conservative party - get to cast their votes, assuming neither of the candidates stands down. So actually there’s a way in which if 99% of Britons have no knowledge whatsoever of who any of the candidates are it might not change too much in terms of the short term outcome.

Of course the 0.35% who do get a vote are not a random selection of the population - they skew:

• Older: 40% are over 66 years old according to the Party Member’s Project, quoted by Quartz
• Whiter: 97% white vs 86% of the population
• More “middle class” 86% from the top social classes “ABC1”, vs 55% of the population (at least the latter was the figure in 2016)
• Richer: 1 in 20 of them making more than £100k a year
• Male: 70% male, vs an unsurprisingly near 50:50 split in the population

Better yet, Ipsos Mori conducted a survey designed to be representative of adults aged 18-75 in Great Britain. One of the questions, appearing on slide 3 of the output, asked about “familiarity with politicians”, with most of the questions being about the Conservative leadership candidates.

Sunak outpaces the others by quite a lot in terms of recognition. The politician least familiar to the British public in that survey was Stewart Lewis. A full 65% of people said they hadn’t ever heard of him, and only 12% claimed to know at least a fair amount about him.

The inevitable twist is that there is no British politician called Stewart Lewis, despite the fact that over a third of people made out that they’d heard of him - substantially higher than the Lizardman constant of 4%.

If, like me, you often record ideas for potential improvements to your R code by leaving comments in a format something like:

#TODO: fix this!

then the todor R library provides an easy way to actually see and navigate through all such entries in RStudio, rather than having to hope you remember to search enough times to find them all in order to actually work on them.

Triggered either from the function todor() or as an RStudio addin, it’ll search your file, project or package for markers like #TODO #IDEA #FIXME and so on - you can customise the list.

It then displays the results in a new “Markers” pane near the console window.

Clicking on any entry there takes you to the relevant bit of your code, ready to work on the todo item in question.

I had fun over here, exploring a great dataset that Tim Durrant of the Institute for Government shared. He’d collated the details all UK ministerial resignations outside of reshuffles seen since 1979.

Spoiler alert: giddy new heights were reached last week.

A leak of Uber’s internal files reveals that they knowingly broke the law, put their drivers in danger, lied to and hid information from law enforcement and manipulated politicians and researchers.

Falls in the category of ‘not surprising but somehow still a little shocking’.

The Lancashire Telegraph reports that, following his resignation yesterday, Boris Johnson - wax edition - has turned up to the job centre.

Given the hoohah about eggs being thrown at Margaret Thatcher’s new statue, I assume this one must be under some serious protection.

In another awful twist to 2022 reality, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been shot to death. This in a country which famously has almost no gun homicides - fewer than 10 a year - compared to its peers.

The chart below comes from healthdata.org:

Bigquery Data View is a nice Visual Studio Code extension that lets you view BigQuery table schemas, contents and run queries directly in VScode, viewing the results in the same app. Unlike some of the alternatives you don’t need to set up a special BQ service account.

I’ve discovered one can kind of directly write SQL within Google Sheets to produce tables, summaries and pivots of your sheet’s data, using the QUERY function.

SQL like:

SELECT a, b FROM x WHERE c > 30

can be expressed in Sheets as:

=QUERY(A:C, "select A, B where C > 30")

60ish resignations later, the main deed is done. Boris Johnson has announced that he’s resigning from being party leader. Details are sparse - he may still be the PM whilst they pick a successor? And absolutely no apology from this man mired in a mess largely of his own making.

Quite a day in UK politics, with more and more Conservative resignations since it was all kicked off by Javid and Sunak quitting yesterday in protest to the PM’s abject incompetence. Every time I think to post, someone new falls on their sword. We’re up to 38 last I checked.

Earlier this year Royal Mail released a bunch of stamps, wherein the queen’s face is accompanied by a weird looking barcode. When you scan the barcode in their app you, somewhat inexplicably, get shown a video of Shaun the Sheep.

(For reference, the perforation between the Queen’s head and the barcode is fake, so you can’t easily tear them off.)

This will invalidate the majority of stamps you might already own - the standard stamps that are just the Queen’s head won’t be valid after January 2023, although you can apply to swap the current ones for new ones if you like. But the special edition stamps with nice pictures on will still be OK to use.

Whilst badgering you to download an app to repeatedly watch a short novelty video is clearly massive added value worthy of this radical change alone, apparently that’s not the entire goal behind this change. Rather Royal Mail claims that the ability to track letters with barcodes will let it monitor and respond to changes in demand. It’ll also apparently prevent people washing off the postmark ink from stamps and re-selling them for a second use on the black market. I guess that means that barcodes will be tracked and the stamps rejected if used more than once.

I had no idea that re-using stamps was an avenue of fraudulence so prevalent that it costs Royal Mail tens of millions of pounds a year, but apparently so. Re-using stamps is already a crime, for which you can be criminally prosecuted. On the receiver’s end, they don’t get the letter delivered unless they’re willing to pay £1.50 and collect it. Of course that’s only if the crime is detected, but even pre-barcode Royal Mail made efforts in that direction, including apparently checking whether the stamp has lost its phosphor.

There are seemingly some big operations out there. In 2019 Paul and Samantha Harrison were convicted of fraud for having washed the postmark ink off 700,000 used stamps and selling the resulting “usable” stamps online, meaning Royal Mail lost out on a potential £421,000 of revenue.

All that aside, stamp traditionalists are not pleased with the new design. I must admit feeling some aesthetic sympathy for their point of view. And also some solidarity with the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, which has below zero interest in digitally engaging with Shaun the Sheep when corresponding with fellow humans. Their founder, Dinah Johnson, worries that it’s the beginning of the end for stamps in general, fearing that in future we’ll just be sticking the boring barcode bit of the setup on envelopes.

Imagine being so unimaginative that after hacking the British Army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts all you could think of to do was try and sell some dodgy NFTs.

It didn’t take long for the harrowing post-Roe vs Wade stories to come in.

Just 3 days after the ruling, the resulting Ohio state ban compelled a 10 year old victim of child abuse, who was 6 weeks and 3 days pregnant, to find a way across the Indiana border to get a termination.

The UK has an carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) such that, within certain industries, companies that create environmentally damaging carbon dioxide when doing whatever it is that they do have to own a permit for per ton of carbon dioxide that they emit. It’s a cap and trade type scheme, designed to limit CO2 emissions to a known maximum, and ensure emission allowances end up in the hands of those who most value them.

There’s a certain amount of permits available, which can be traded on a free market. If you want to increase the amount of CO2 you want to emit, then you have to find someone willing to sell you their permit and pay whatever price they want for it. Thus, the polluter pays.

If, due to the laws of supply and demand, it starts to cost too much to buy such a permit on the market then you’ll just have to figure out a way to not generate so much CO2 in the course of your business. Or pay a hefty fine if you do.

I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion to be had about this type of policy from many viewpoints. But there’s an obvious way to entirely invalidate any good effect it has, which would be to ensure that all companies have more than enough permits to do exactly what they want at no cost at all. So, naturally, that’s exactly what the government seems to have done in recent times, at least for the UK aviation industry.

According to a Transport & Environment analysis, airlines were given free allowances worth £242 million last year, which corresponds to 4.4 million permits.

However only 3.4 million permits were actually used, meaning that not only did these companies not actually have to pay for their pollution, but in fact they could actually sell the excess 0.9 million permits on the market and make free money, if they could find a buyer. Had these been sold then that’s apparently a potential of up to £72 million profit they’d get for nothing.

To be fair, Easyjet say they did not sell their excess; others unknown.

As we’re talking here about the government giving out these free allowances, of course this is all forgone public money (or “taxpayer’s money”, if you believe in that concept).

One arguably “mitigating” reason this arose was because there were many fewer flights taken in 2021 than in previous years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems like airlines' free allowances are based on data from 2010. But a cap and trade scheme wherein each year the controlling body blindly adds more and more free permits to the market, even to the point that there’s too many to even use, doesn’t feel like a particularly efffective cap.

These permits are in any case only required for UK flights departing to other UK destinations, the European Economic Area or Gibraltar. So no permits are required for long haul flights, which are those that actually cause the most pollution from many airlines that operate in the UK. In 2019, only 14% of the CO2 emissions from British Airways required these permits.

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 📽.

Hard to think of much to say that isn’t a spoiler, other than that, contrary to many commenters, I didn’t mind the ending. Sure it wasn’t very plausible, but nor are a lot of things that do actually happen.

Finally got around to trying out Fall Guys 🎮. It’s a multiplayer battle royale type game where, as a contestant on a supposed TV show you’ve got to get through various mini-games - mainly winning races and not falling into slime - until there’s only 1 player left standing.

The premise, and something about the screen you get when each game concludes, gives me strong vibes of one of the TV shows that most stuck in my brain in the recent past, Squid Game.

But there’s nothing dark about Fall Guys, it’s all family-friendly fun. It’s only Squid Game if everyone involved was Mr Blobby, you lived in a cartoon world, and when you lost you got fewer “rewards” than you otherwise would have, rather than being shot.

A better comparison might be the classic Takeshi’s Castle. In fact, one of the minigames is exactly the same as the second entry in this random collection of “best bits”.

Mindless fun that I doubt isn’t going to keep my attention in solitary form, but perhaps a good party game. It does feel a little microtransactiony-tacky, but they seem pretty cosmetic, and at least it means that the game is free to play.

Just learned that the “Do Not Track” setting many web browsers have does basically…nothing. Sites never had an obligation to respect the setting or a consensus on what it even means. There’s literally a list of websites we know do take note of it, just 11 entries long.

Each year since 2014, there’s been a Future Library ceremony in a young Norwegian forest, wherein people witness an author handing over an unpublished manuscript.

That manuscript is locked away in a special “Silent Room” within Oslo library. All we know about it is its author and its title.

And that’s all most of us will probably ever know about it. Because it’s not until the year 2124 that the manuscripts will be revealed, with the forest being chopped down in order to make the paper for the resulting books to be published on.

Naturally the authors involved, and most of the rest of the world, so far will likely be dead. So you’re going to have to go through life just knowing you’ll probably never be able to read the full works of Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kan, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ocean Vuong, Tsitsi Dangarembga and whoever gets picked in the years to come. And they’ll never know if people thought their work worth the wait or not.

Vancouver’s Kiss Radio has apparently been playing Rage Against the Machine’s classic “Killing In The Name” 🎶 continuously, for at least double-digit number of hours, even when callers plead for something else.

Maybe a protest against the hosts getting laid off, maybe a stunt, who knows - but let’s all enjoy it in the mean time.

Amazon is finally going to let you “Send to Kindle” digital books in epub format, the more open standard format most other readers work with. They do have to be DRM-free and Amazon ends up converting them to its own format - but it at least avoids having to convert them yourself.