The Braindump Blog

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.

A new study estimates that Covid-19 vaccines saved 14.4 million lives (95% CrI = 13.7 - 15.9 million). Or millions more if you count excess deaths, as opposed to deaths recorded as being due to Covid. However, rich countires benefitted the most.

I wrote more about that here.

I enjoyed The Haunting of Bly Manor 📺 more than I’d expected, so now moving on to watch it’s prequel-of-a-sort, the well-reviewed The Haunting of Hill House.

The first great horror TV series ever, if one is to believe GQ.

Flickers of joy amongst the desolation of 2022 can be felt through a good amount of the UK as the Conservatives were thoroughly beaten in last week’s 2 by-elections.

The first was in Tiverton and Honiton, where the Tory incumbent had to quit on the basis of having been caught watching porn in the House of Commons . Word on the street was that he was innocently searching for a “Dominator”-branded farm vehicle but got led astray, twice.

The Lib Dems made out there, overturning a Conservative majority of more than 24,000 - rumoured to be the biggest majority ever to be overturned in a by-election, with an unprecedented 30 point swing.

Even their classic post victory stunt was only about 90% cringe this time.

The second was in Wakefield. The Tory incumbent there had to go, this time on the extremely upsetting basis that he had been sent to jail for sexually assaulting a 15 year old boy.

Here it was Labour who got the seat, this time with a margin of 4,921 votes, around a 13% swing.

It’s not a naturally Conservative seat, the 2019 outcome having been the first time they held it within nearly 90 years. But still, hopefully a sign that the “Red Wall” is vulnerable. At least if you’re a party who just can’t get rid of a leader that most of the population think is doing a real bad job at playing Prime Minister according to the latest YouGov polling.

When asked whether he would be resigning given this catastrophic result, Boris Johnson seemed to be continuing the trend of not letting real life get in the way of his hopes and dreams, and started talking about his third term.

That implies he’s confident he’ll still be “leading” our country in the 2030s; a thought described as “completely delusional” by one of his previous cabinet ministers.

Absolutely incredible Bad Chart doing the rounds on dataisugly et al today, from the app version of the Times (subscribers only).

Sadly (from a point of view of high drama) it seems like it was just a mistake - the right numbers but from an entirely different survey question.

Pleased to see some very legitimate anti-SCOTUS sentiment making its way into Glastonbury this year.

Perhaps the highlight was a 🎶 collab between Oliva Rodrigo and Lilly Allen. One of those songs that unfortunately seems as relevant now as it did upon its release 13 years ago.

Stuart Ritchie discovers that there’s not much scientific evidence either way for the commonly-held idea that homophobes are often in fact secretly homosexual themselves.

There are certainly several high profile cases. But there’s little evidence that it’s a systematic truth.

Recommendation for the 5-4 podcast 🎙 - which should presumably now be renamed 6-3 - as a place to get your US supreme court info.

3 lawyers, dissecting decisions past and present, to let even outsides like me understand (the true horror) of what has been and is now going on.

In one of those policies that might almost seem hilarious if it wasn’t entirely based on ignorance, prejudice and cruelty, the Saudi Arabia state has apparently sent out officials to confiscate any rainbow-coloured toys and clothing on sale, be they colourful hair clips, hats, pencil cases or anything else bright and shiny.

Presumably because Pride flags usually have a rainbow-inspired design, their rationale is that rainbow coloured products contradict “normal common sense”, send a “poisoned message” to children, and “promote homosexual colours”, whatever that could possibly even mean.

Basically, they’re concerned that if a child sees a rainbow coloured pencil case they will become gay. And that that’s somehow a bad thing even if it wasn’t pure nonsense.

I’m not sure of their state position on what should be done should an actual rainbow appear in the sky.

Just to reinforce the cold hard reality of the situation behind such breathtakingly absurd policies as this, Saudia Arabia is one of ten countries where having gay sex is potentially punishable by death.

What can one say, even as a citizen of another country, other than to share the anger and sorrow that in the past few days the Supreme Court of the United States looks to have destroyed decades of progress towards a better, more humane, society.

Last Tuesday, the 6:3 conservative, and seemingly very activist, court started off by ruling that a state cannot exclude religious schools from tuition programs. The fact that states must - not can, but must - now subsidise religious organisations is particularly controversial for a country that makes a big deal of the separation of church and state.

Or as Justice Sotomayor put it in her dissent:

I feared that the Court was leading us to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment… Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation

Then on Thursday, following 2 very high profile mass shootings in the past few weeks (and another 283 mostly less profile such events catalogued so far this year), the court ruled that New York’s 100+ year old law that you should have a license and a specific reason if you want to carry a gun in a public space is illegitimate. Thus New Yorkers, and potentially in the future residents in another seven states with similar laws, will likely have to go about their business in the knowledge that anyone in their vicinity may have a concealed and loaded gun and, well, that’s just how it is.

Finally, on Friday, the leak became policy. Roe vs Wade has been overturned, against the wishes of most Americans - even most religious Americans.

And with that so too the constitutional right for US citizens to have access to abortion. As we knew, nearly a quarter of states had “trigger laws” already in place with the purpose of banning safe and legal abortion in the case that this decision was made. And at least another quarter are thought likely to ban abortion, such that anyone who may become pregnant in around half of the US states just lost their right to self-determination, potentially their quality of their life, or, in the most awful cases, their life itself.

In the past few decades, countries have tended to move towards democracy, equal rights for women, and with that most often increasing access to abortion. The US appears to be moving in the opposite direction, a more authoritarian regime where even the elected president doesn’t seem to be able to do much to restrain the impact of the views of five people.

These five, as well as the four others that make up the entirety of the Supreme Court were appointed in a process not designed to be congruent with the will of the American people, which in recent times appears to have been enacted with no shortage of controversy, even on its own terms. As an external observer, they appear to me as a unremovable, unaccountable handful of appointees with sometimes life-or-death power over more than 300 million people’s lived experiences.

The judges didn’t temper the wording since the leaked draft one bit. Justice Thomas' concordance explicitly called out by name three cases that he thinks should be reconsidered - Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.

These cases correspond to rulings that couples have the right to access contraceptives, that gay sex cannot be outlawed by states and the right to same-sex marriage. Within the US, the very idea that these already-decided issues would be back on any respectable court’s agenda in 2022 is surely jarring, shocking, and likely deadly.

Herald the entry of a new statistical misadventure from our government, never shy of fiddling the books.

In the context of disparaging the current RMT union’s railway workers strike that’s taking place at the moment:

Mr Shapps went on to say: “The median salary for the rail sector is £44,000, which is significantly above the median salary in the country.”

We asked the Department for Transport (DfT) how it got to this figure and it initially said it had taken the median figures from the ONS for four categories of workers, added them up and divided by four

I barely know what to call that calculation. The mean average of medians? It most certainly is not the median.

Out of interest, the 4 categories, in order of actual median salary, were:

• Rail travel assistants
• Rail construction and maintenance operatives
• Rail transport operatives
• Train and tram drivers

To work out the median salary earned, you need to line up each individual’s salary in a row, low to high, and pick the middle one. Admittedly I haven’t looked it up, but I feel it’s pretty safe to say that there are more lesser-paid rail travel assistants than higher-paid train drivers out there.

To compound the crime against maths, the highest paid category of those four, train drivers, is apparently largely irrelevant to the current RMT strikes - because almost none of them are actually in the RMT union. They tend to be members of ASLEF.

Whilst the RMT union does apparently often include the lower-paid of the listed categories, it also includes staff such as 10,000 cleaners, who are routinely paid a lot less than any of the listed roles.

Amazon has apparently created the ability for its voice “assistant” Alexa to simulate any human voice after just a minute of listening to it.

In a demonstration video, a child said, “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”

Of course, the darkest scenario is the exact one they have in mind.

While it could ostensibly be used to replicate any voice, Prasad suggested it could be used to help memorialize a deceased family member.

Apparently their SVP has forgotten that this did not work out well for Black Mirror’s Ash and Martha.

Honestly, more than once I’ve felt that Big Tech somehow missed the point that that show is more deliberately horrifying and dystopian than a blueprint for things to go ahead and unthinkingly realease onto the world. Unless I’m just getting old?

A .gitignore file tells the Git version control software to stop tracking files you never want to add. But people have differing workflows and I didn’t necessarily want my personal preferences to be enforced in our team repo.

That led me to discover there’s a /info/exclude file in your repo’s .git file which you can add your desired ignore patterns to, and they only affect your local experience. More about how the system works is in the documentation.