The Braindump Blog

It’s known that performing acts of kindness makes both the receiver and the giver happier. But new research shows that givers systematically underestimate the increase in positivity that the receivers actually feel after experiencing the kindness.

So if you’re ever in doubt about whether someone would actually appreciate you doing something nice for them, do it anyway - it’ll probably make more of a difference than you expect.

From today’s Guardian:

Shown calculations that her planned reversal of a recent rise in national insurance would benefit top earners by about £1,800 a year, and the lowest earner by about £7, and asked if this was fair, Truss said: “Yes, it is fair.”

Seems I have a very different definition of ‘fair’ than our probable next prime minister.

Here’s the data she was shown:

Jason Allen won an art competition with this picture, which was generated via the Midjourney AI. I wrote more about that, trying to figure out how I even feel about it all, over here.

One of my favourite charts found in the wild, both in terms of subject matter and presentation.

Watched EastEnders 📺 for the first time in maybe a decade. Astonished to see that I recognise almost all the characters from before. They just look surprisingly old, as I guess we all must do!

Had a great time visiting the Scotch Whisky Experience in Edinburgh. Thinking we were going for some kind of formal lesson in the art of scotch tasting, we were somewhat taken back by part one involving getting into a little cart which took us around an fairly trippy exhibition where a ghost explains all sorts of things about the production of scotch.

Later on we entered the Diageo Claive Vidiz collection, which apparently includes a total of 3,384 bottles of whiskey, for some actual tasting.

You don’t get to try a bit from all 3000+ bottles unfortunately. Some are pretty rare. The one in the middle below with the colourful artwork on the label apparently sells for around £80,000, if I remember correctly.

Although I guess that’s a bargain compared to a bottle that sold for £1.1 million in auction a few years ago I guess. I suppose billionaires needed something to do with their money before NFTs were a thing.

The oldest ones in the collection were these two, from the turn of the twentieth century.

Whilst it looks like someone’s drunk a fair bit of especially the right hand one, apparently that’s not the case - these are technically unopened bottles. What’s missing there is the ‘angel’s share’, an ongoing amount of whiskey that evaporates into the atmosphere over time if not perfectly sealed.

I decided I’m a big fan of whiskies from the Islay region.

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.