Social
- The company I work for got an innovation award from the queen
- I talked about my Thursday-night pringles-and-primula sandwich tradition
- I wondered about the EU wanting up scan all your uploads
- B3ta’s photoshop competition “Make TV more British” was hilarious.
- I complained about complaints about measuring standards.
- Using my new speaker, I can play piano from the couch!
- Imagine staying in Labour when they change the Leader-voting rules!
- My internet broke! It was down for more than a day!
- Turned out to be Squirrels. I’ve been tracking the squirrels.
- I was pleased with the upgrade to my E-ink tablet the Remarkable 2
- Ranting about the UK’s extreme and increasing lack of of democracy
Releases
This month’s new cartoon is “Fuel”, in which The Observers laugh at the fancy-dress moneys fighting each other. But what are they really fighting about?
https://starshipsd.com/observers/fuel/
As usual, there’s a flat-screen version and a 3d Virtual Reality version.
Reading
I read This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
Two soldiers in the time-war get caught up in a letter-writing dialogue and fall in love. Good poetry in the way the letters between Red and Blue are composed, they’re beautiful and lyrical. A strange and winding story. Not bad, it won a Hugo award which was probably well deserved.
Watching
Watched Greg Davies’ new series on the BBC The Cleaner about a crime-scene cleaner cleaning up after the murders and stuff.
He’s brilliant, and they’re all great stand-alone episodes. Cute stories about people in strange days of their lives. No gore, just jokes.
Links
- Great Veritasim video here on the public DNA databases. Because the DNA sampling now uses so many nucleotides, you can figure out who someone is even if you don’t have their DNA, so long as you have the DNA of like their fourth cousin. I wrote more on the show.
- Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. Cory Doctorow is brilliant here, talking about how debt eats up a society until it’s paying more in interest than it earns and so collapses, or alternatively how inequality in a society grows until it costs more to guard the wealth than the wealth has, so it collapses. I wrote more on that.
- Honest Government Ad on the Aus/Uk/US alliance. Juice Media always do good work, unlike the Australian government. Or indeed the UK/US ones.
- George Monbiot on the Earth’s tipping points. “Even when all the promised technofixes and offsets are counted, current policies commit us to a calamitous 2.9°C of global heating” – We are in a lot of trouble.
- V-Sauce – Do Chairs Exist? V-Sauce does 20 minutes on Ontology. What exists? What even are things anyway?
- Scott Alexander – Too Good To Check On confirmation biases and the media that reports things without checking, and we all accept things without checking. Scott is amazing as usual.
- Ed Snowdon – Covid, Climate, Denialism Ed Snowdon is blogging on Medium. Good reads so far, this one on Science Denialism.
- Piano mash-up of Blurred Lines and Rape Me By Amanda Palmer and Reb Fountain. They sing the two songs at once and play duet piano and are raw and full of pain and energy.