In a recent episode of Doctor Who, we see a lovely sequence where The Doctor has a nice chat with Paul McCartney of The Beatles. Great larks! The Doctor often meets real people - Dickens, Shakespeare, Rosa Parks. But, crucially, all those people are dead by the time the episode airs.
Macca is unusual because we could, theoretically, call him and ask what it was like meeting The Doctor1.
So, how many times has The Doctor met a historical figure who is alive in the viewers' time?
Not many, by my count. There are a few people who play themselves (like Brian Cox and the band McFly) but don't actually meet The Doctor. There are many people who are real, but dead (like Agatha Christie). If I stick to the main TV series, I think the contenders are...
Sylvester McCoy's 1988 story The Silver Nemesis sees him sort of meet both the musician Courtney Pine and almost Queen Elizabeth II (died 2022). The Queen mentions knowing The Doctor towards the end of 2007's The Voyage of The Damned
We do not talk about Colin Baker's 1985 story A Fix with Sontarans!
William Hartnell's Doctor meets Bing Crosby and Charlie Chaplain (both died 1977) in the 1965 story The Dalek's Master Plan which, sadly, is lost to the ages. While there are photos, I don't think a clip survives.
Are there any others that I missed? Stick a note in the comments!
I've tried, but his office aren't returning my calls. ↩
Le FN : Un parti littéralement fondé par un Waffen SS et un tortionnaire en Algérie.
Un parti entièrement dédié à la haine raciste et la différentiation ethnique. Mais. Pas. Raciste.
On peut fermer le ban, on n'ira jamais plus loin dans l'inversion des normes, le retournement de la réalité.
Même ma citation préférée de Debord ("Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux") ne suffit plus à décrire ce que nous vivons.
Been homeless over 6 years. My social services agency, high turnover. Being female , almost all my case managers have been female, standard practice....
I don’t think you’re imagining things at all. In my experience, women and gay men tend to be more empathetic.
That said, I just wonder how those men CMS behave towards other men, and how different you’d be treated by women CMSs if you were a man.
Also, I found this review that compares the differences in empathy between males and females[*]. I don’t have the time or energy for it, but it could be a place to start if you want to learn about the research on this.
Dans Libé:
Jordan Bardella, invité pour la première fois à HEC sans qu'aucune association identifiée ne proteste, applaudi à la fin par une salle qui a ri quand le patron du RN s'est moqué d'une question sur l'histoire de son parti.
Ny rapport til FN's Menneskerettighedsråd advarer om, at Israel overtræder den fjerde Genèvekonvention ved at fordrive palæstinensere på den besatte Vestbred.
Okay, Color Spaces: "When I was a kid, art teachers taught me about The Color Wheel with its Three Primary Colors and its Three Secondary Colors and while that did help me make greenish paint when I only had yellow and blue, it also gave me some wrong ideas about color." #CSShttps://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/#fn-2-mark
It’s Monday Morning, I’m halfway through my morning coffee and allergy season has begun. As I use caffeine to power through allergy brain fog my synapses are misfiring into oddness. These are random TTRPG thoughts.
I’m about 80% through a sabbatical grant application. The proposed project is to write a TTRPG. So hopefully that’ll happen.
The Ninth World Bestiary is about to make my Numenera table really uncomfortable. Yay.
My last BFRPG session was a bottle episode. It was intense.
I’ve got my Land of Eem review outlined. It’s going to take a bit to edit it, though, so I’ll be recording another video today that’ll go live first.
Ecclesicon badges are on sale. Are you in the Philly/South Jersey area and want to spend a couple of days gaming? Come on out!
I’m in the process of creating mini-golf rules for No Thank You, Evil! This should be interesting.
The Dragonbane Bestiary has entered my review queue. This book is stunning. When my new YouTube payout hits I’ll be picking up the hardbound edition of the core rules.
Dragonbane is going to be my next long-term campaign once my BFRPG campaign winds down.
I had a wonderful conversation with Stephen Grodzicki, the founder of Pickpocket Press. His upcoming game, Tales of Argosa, is an update to the terrific Low Fantasy Gaming. Crowdfunding should launch in March 2024 1!
There are so many games!
Stephen was the first game designer to send me a physical review copy. But I’ll be moving from reviewer to backer for Tales of Argosa because his role under system and luck mechanics are fantastic. ↩<a></a>
This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in February 2019, but published much later.
My life is weird. Again.
Looking out over London from the top floor. The Eye is glittering and the Palace of Westminster is glowing.
Someone pours me a glass of (very expensive1) champagne, as the Secretary of State laughs at my witty bon mot.
Is this my life now? People of distinction and influence listening to what I have to say? It isn't an oak-panelled room, with deep armchairs, where cigar-smoking men carve up the world. It's a modest and plain office where men (and women!) have gathered for a bit of mutual backslapping. But I am here. I'm in the room and being thanked.
And why not! We've all worked hard on launching NHSX and are rewarded with a little audience. The chit-chat is awkward - despite the geniality, we're all aware that the boss is here.
Naturally, I believe someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and ask me what the hell I think I'm doing in a room full of proper grown-ups. But, no, people keep asking me questions and telling me their well-practiced anecdotes.
It is simultaneously amazing and banal. I've been at this work-party several times in my career, with dozens of companies, with a parade of CEOs. This feels different. A tiny glimmer of "I've made it a difference!"
I eat my fill of crisps - I am driving later - and slip out. I want to savour the moment, but know too well the perils of outstaying my welcome. I float all the way home.
Proximity to power is a powerful glamour. I understand why some are drawn to it, and some are seemingly addicted.
But I'll be different, I'm sure, as I bask in the experience.
The fizz has come from someone's home. No taxpayers' cash was splashed on booze. ↩
Superbe épisode des Portraits chez @blast_info dans lequel M0diie et Ostpolitik reviennent aux racines du mal et comment le #FN/#RN a fini par imposer ses thèmes. Les mots tuent, ou à tout le moins ils produisent des effets sur le réel.
This is half-way between a biography and autobiography. Parts were clearly dictated and recorded prehumously and are interspersed with observations from others. Terry's voice shines through although, as forevermore, I was left longing for just-one-more quote.
In among all the amusing asides1, perhaps what I found funniest was just how bitchy the man could be! A world-class grumping machine with built-in catty-power fuelled by snark and rage. He took grouchiness into an elevated art-form.
Rob Wilkins has the tricky job of making Terry accessible. He weaves his own life into Terry's (although he never oversteps) and acts as the perfect avatar for the reader.
For some reason, the eBook places all the photos in a gallery at the end. Understandable in a paper volume, but it would have been nice to intersperse them with the text.
But it is marvellous to spend a little bit more time in Pratchett's brain. Wandering around that glorious cathedral and weeping as it slowly falls into ruins.
i realize some of you may have thought i was joking when i said one of the things that made me excited about leaving substack was control over how my footnotes and references look
@slepkin sort of yes to both. I write my post in their regular editor and use "[#fn-uniquename]" and "[fn-uniquename]: Footnote content" for the anchors and footnote content. Then at the end I run a script to convert the in-text references into the proper HTML and number everything.
Trying not to be daft here, but what does it mean for a Bitcoin transaction (or AI server farm, or whatever) to "consume x amount of fresh water"? What makes it unusable to downstream users?
As an analogy, power stations also use fresh water for cooling, which they return it to the waterways. It's warmer (to the detriment of local ecology) and presumably not quite as clean, but the news doesn't seem especially bothered. Is this a grudge in the reporting or is there something else I'm missing?
@skyfaller I'll have to do some math when I get home but "and large amounts of water are lost through evaporation from the reservoirs that supply hydroelectric plants" is a good example of what I meant by grudge reporting. By that logic you could credit Bitcoin for the water it saved from evaporation by sending it downstream to produce power instead.
@thenexusofprivacy it's pretty janky lol. i just write either [#fn-uniqueidimadeup] or [#ref-uniqueidimadeup] in-text depending on whether it's a footnote or a reference, and then i put an accompanying [fn/ref-uniqueidimadeup] at the bottom of the page with the footnote/reference content.
then when i'm about ready to publish, i run a little script to go through and grabs the rich-text, changes it to a HTML card, inserts the footnote, and numbers everything for me.
so we have been batting around the idea of some kinda paper bot for awhile re: the question "how do we track discussions around scholarly work" and I am starting to think this paper-feeds project is the way to do it.
So say it is an AP instance and it has one primary bot user, you follow it and it follows you back. When you make a post with something that resolves to a DOI, then that post is linked to that work. Any hashtags used in that post are added to that papers keywords (assuming some basic moderation and word ban lists). Then keyword feeds are also represented as AP actors that can be followed and make a post per paper. I wonder if we can spoof the "in reply to" field to present all those posts as being replies to that paper.
So say the bot also has some simple microsyntax for linking your account to an ORCID - either directly in a profile field, or by @'ing the bot and checking a rel=me, or hell even oauth. Then you could also relate when the authors of given works talk about other works and use that as another proximity measure. Then you could make an author RSS feed/AP actor that is just the works someone publishes and optionally that they talk mention - so eg I could make an aggregate feed for the papers my friends are reading.
Then you could have instances of this feed generator follow one another and broadcast aggregated similarity information at a paper level not linked to personal information, and also opt-in info like the fedi account <-> ORCID link. Since youre on AP already you basically get that for free.
Thinking about what would be useful for social discovery of scholarly works, and there are a lot of really interesting ideas once you start actually yno doing it starting from a place of not having a product to sell or a platform to run so you avoid some of the scale and liability probs.
@hochstenbach yes yes - i have ultimately come to the conclusion that the LDP needs to be #P2P in order for it to do the things it wants to do. Fluid ontologies indexed by DNS have basically never worked, and so most of RDF world just treats them like non-dereferencing IRIs, which is sad - it's just intrinsically fragile, and really the only #LinkedData vocabularies you can really rely on still being there are the ones that w3c hosts because they're the only ones that really care about URLs staying the same forever.
I really like the design of what you're working on here - just operating on files is great, rules syntax took a bit to read but makes sense and seems amenable to interface design, and i especially like the plugin approach to 'just pull and push from anywhere'. The problem i have with thinking about the longevity or deployability of things like this are not really intrinsic to your project at all, but about the imo naive assumptions that LD makes about DNS: it is genuinely expensive and complicated to put something on the 'net for your average bear (timbl said as much). All the (necessary) placeholder example.com's in the demos are a reflection of that - since of course the rule isn't actually at example.com, presumably it isn't actually dereferencing there, and so it becomes just an IRI slug that is simultaneously necessarily bound to a URL but can't use it.
my longest lasting question in studying LD is "where is #SOLID?" I have tried and failed dozens of times to just run something from the project and have never managed to do it and have never heard of someone actually using it day-to-day. millions of people run bittorrent clients though, so it's not just an intrinsic "people don't want to run software" problem. The barrier to 'how do i actually put my stuff online' has to be a lot lower than 'rent a domain, manage a bunch of paths, and run an always-on server forever'.
The federated approach like the fedi and eg. institutions hosting pods is promising for many things, but it is sort of a nonstarter for anything with arbitrary clearweb user-generated content for liability and security reasons, so I think that would be super dope for things like notifications for scholarly work, but I think institutions will balk at an eventing framework that requires arbitrary code to run on an institutionally managed server, and especially can result in arbitrary content being available on their domain.
I think we should take advantage of existing infrastructure though - eg. i like how you're using npm to host and version vocabularies, and that federated infrastructure could (and imo should) serve some backstop role of preserving availability and providing bootstrap entrypoints for a p2p swarm. I think that has to look like using different protocols than HTTP though, and following along that line you pretty rapidly get to needing social infrastructure at the base in order to have comprehensible namespacing (rather than a bunch of long hashes, even with some naming system patched over the top of it, as IPNS demonstrates doesn't really work that well). I think your going towards integration with email and masto and whatnot from a local client is a nice set of steps towards personal web tooling, and i'm gonna keep this bookmarked for when i get closer to working on something related :)
Nuclear power was sold to the world as a safe, clean, and economically viable source of electricity. We were told that it would be "too cheap to meter"1. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power will have to admit that hasn't come to pass. Construction costs for nuclear power stations are dwarfed only by their decommissioning costs. Yes, politics and regulation conspire to increase the price - but nuclear hasn't made electricity particularly cheap. Indeed, we mostly seem to be paying more than ever for our power.
Well, not quite.
On Christmas Eve, my electricity company emailed me to say that I would have several hours of free electricity. They would charge me £0.00 per kWh. More than that, at a few specific times they would pay me for my electricity use!
Most factories and heavy industrial plants weren't running the day before Christmas. UK power usage spikes when everyone boils a kettle at the end of a football match or other similar event - but there was nothing so momentous happening at 3AM. So supply outstripped demand.
Anyone with a smart-meter could have been paid to charge their car, run their tumble dryer, or stay up until the wee hours playing on their console.
It wasn't mined uranium which gave us power which literally had to be given away; about 62% of the electricity came from wind.
At this point, the nuclear lobby will start whinging about subsidies (both nukes and renewables are generously subsidised) and how wind can't provide a base load (which is fair). But although sticking a bunch of turbines in costal waters is an engineering marvel - it's pretty cheap compared to building and maintaining a nuclear power station.
Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.
Because home appliances are increasingly efficient, domestic energy use is falling - it's down 19% since 2010. Electricity use by domestic properties was about 96.2 TWh in 2022 and 135 TWh was generated by renewables.
Yes, electricity is fungible, but you can convincingly make the case that every home in the UK was powered by renewables.
Solar panels don't work at night, and wind-turbines don't work when there's no wind. We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. That might be nuclear, or fossil fuels, or it might be storage from the excess power from renewables.
Sadly, the world is still filled with war, famine, and disease. But, for a few moments on a winter's evening, wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.
If you want to move to a time-of-day electricity tariff, you can join Octopus Energy - if you use that link, we both get £50 bill credit.
There is a lot of contention about that phrase. It was (probably) about the future prospects of nuclear fusion - but it became attached to nuclear fission. You can read more at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission↩
I made my own tofu a few weeks ago1. I got soy milk, heated it, mixed in coagulants, drained it, pressed it, sliced it, then cooked it. And, you know what? I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
It tasted basically fine - no different to any shop bought tofu. It wasn't noticeably cheaper, it wasn't more nutritious, nor was it easier to store and prepare. I'm sure that if I spent several attempts I would gradually get closer to creating something comparable with the shop-bought product. And then what? Do I want to spend a few hours tending to my tofu whenever I feel like a stir-fry?
Cooking - and learning its chemistry - can be fun. It can also be a drudge. Sometimes I don't want to individually peel and slice a dozen ingredients. I want to push a few buttons on my microwave and then eat something.
The same extends to nearly every field. I could knit my own clothes and - no doubt - I would find the process interesting, relaxing, and entertaining. But for everyday wear, it would be a startling waste of my time to do so. Even if I avoid sweatshop labour and fast-fashion, a decent jumper is cheap and provides excellent utility.
But part of the joy of making - and mending - is that you get to learn a little slice of how the world works.
I first encountered Conway's Game of Life when I was a kid. I thought it was the hideously complicated thing which I simply was not qualified to understand. But after reading the biography of von Neumann it suddenly clicked. I understood its simplicity.
In order to test my understanding, I built my own Game of Life interpreter. It's nothing fancy. A few dozen lines of Python. It won't win any awards for efficiency nor for coding style. But it works.
In the unlikely event that I ever need to use Life in production, I'm going to use a mature and well supported library. But by building my own toy implementation, I have a superficial understanding of what it is meant to do, where the pitfalls are, and what limitations I might encounter.
And that's my approach to most things. Learn how to make, understand the obvious problems, fall back to the mainstream option if it is easier than continuing.
Yes, I am fully aware that I am a knit-your-own tofu, Guardian-reading, hipster, vegan stereotype. ↩
FN/RN, magouilles et compagnies
« escroquerie en bande organisée »,
« abus de biens sociaux »,
« recel d’abus de biens sociaux »,
« faux et usage de faux »,
« financement illégal d’un parti politique »
I did a few interviews for magazines and podcasts - but nothing like as much as previous years. I did get involved with some Doctor Who props which was pretty cool!
Here's how I did against last years hopes and dreams (not goal or OKRs)
Graduate from MSc (and regain my free time).
Done! MSc Managed. I scored a distinction and have vowed to not do anything academic ever again. Until I change my mind.
Go on a proper relaxing holiday where all I do is sip cocktails and read books (and maybe a little sightseeing).
Done! Spent a week in Cape Verde swimming up to the bar and reading books (not simultaneously). Visited Berlin (gorgeous). Kuala Lumpur was an incredible city, I think I'm still full from all the food. And a couple of weeks driving around New Zealand's South Island was just perfect.
Put more effort into things like OpenUK and BCS (I need to give back more to the community).
I've been doing more things with OpenUK - both attending board meetings and meet-ups - but the BCS work has been harder. I keep suggesting things but they never get much traction. I have to admit to myself that I'm not a very good organiser of events and lack the ability to convince people to engage with them. Consequently, I'll be resigning shortly.
Consider joining a Worshipful Company (looks like it could be a fun way to get more involved with charities).
Nope! I went to a couple of events, and they were... fine, I guess? I don't think I'm sociable enough to benefit from them. I don't have the hustle to pick up work from them. And I'm not sure how much time I want to devote to something like that.
Blog more. I'm not introspective enough to keep a diary of how I feel - but I do enjoy looking back at what I thought. Probably not daily - but we'll see.
Done! Daily, as well. I find it a tremendously cathartic outlet. I do not have a rich emotional inner life - but it is nice to get my thoughts out.
Read more. I have too short a commute to get into a good book. So I'm going to have to proactively set aside some time.
Done! 52 books this year.
See more friends. I'm conscious that I've been keeping to myself rather a lot. If you fancy a beer and a natter, please get in touch 🙂
Well, mostly. Again, I need to put more effort into arranging things and seeing people.
So, what's up for 2024? More of the same, with a twist.
I have two contradictory goals. I've moved to 4-days-a-week in order to glide down to FIRE / FILE. But I'd also like to grow my own consultancy. I've already had several clients who are happy with me doing ad-hoc work for them. So how do I reconcile working less with taking on more work? Answers in the comments box, please.
With the upcoming General Election, perhaps I will get a bit more involved in politics - both local and national. After being politically constrained by my job for so long, it'll be interesting to see how that feels.
We've hit over 30,000 submissions to OpenBenches. Have we hit the limit? Is it worth promoting it more?
I am terrible at playing with all the toys I have. I want to spend a bit more time playing the games I have on the Oculus and Switch.
After several years of intensity, I think I want to throttle back a bit.
No doubt life will throw the usual amount of twists and turns. Let's see what happens!
The year 2014 has been removed pending legal advice. Needless to say, I fully expect to be vindicated and look forward to being crowned the rightful winner of The Eurovision Song Contest. ↩
"Pour le député européen Bernard Guetta (Renew Europe), la place que les nouvelles extrêmes droites ont prise en Europe et dans le monde est déjà suffisamment inquiétante pour qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire d’aller les croire et les dire irrésistibles. Aux démocrates, centristes et écologistes de faire front pour les battre."
"Il y a, c’est vrai, toutes les raisons d’avoir peur. Il y a dans l’air comme un parfum d’avant-guerre mais en est-on vraiment revenu aux années 30 ?
Avec l’Ukraine et Gaza en toile de fond, on le serait si les électeurs américains n’avaient pas refusé un second mandat à Donald Trump il y a trois ans, si les Polonais ne venaient pas de chasser du pouvoir une droite réactionnaire, si les Espagnols n’avaient pas préféré reconduire les socialistes que passer les commandes à une droite dure, si Geert Wilders pouvait s’appuyer sur une majorité parlementaire et non pas sur à peine un quart des députés néerlandais ou si Javier Milei avait les moyens d’appliquer son programme de démantèlement de l’Etat argentin dont ni le Parlement ni les régions ne veulent.
La place que les nouvelles extrêmes droites ont prise en Europe et dans le monde est déjà suffisamment inquiétante pour qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire d’aller les croire et les dire irrésistibles alors qu’elles ne le sont pas. Elles sont, au contraire, incohérentes et contradictoires car, opposées ou non à l’évolution des mœurs et au droit à l’avortement, tantôt libertariennes, tantôt conservatrices, elles sont de surcroît divisées entre partisans d’une pleine liberté du marché et défenseurs d’un rôle économique de l’Etat."
(...)
"Peu de temps avant que Donald Trump n’impose des droits de douane à nos industries et ne menace de refermer le parapluie américain, Mme Le Pen était allée vainement chercher son onction jusqu’au pied de la Trump Tower à New York. Elle était ensuite allée à Moscou demander et obtenir celle de Vladimir Poutine et ses amis avaient voté contre l’emprunt européen destiné à relancer nos économies malmenées par la pandémie, contre l’intérêt des 450 millions de citoyens européens.
I remember seeing the original "A new decentralized microblogging platform" on HackerNews back in October 2016. A few weeks later, I joined - becoming the 7,112th user. As the years went on, my use of it waxed and waned. I started cross-posting to both Mastodon and Twitter. Gradually, I started spending more time on the Fediverse.
Once Elon shat the bed on Twitter, I moved over completely. And, you know what, I don't regret it for a second.
I've found a lovely community of people. I get my parasocial fix without being inundated by cryptogrifters shilling shitcoins, nor by thought-leaders posting inflammatory takes for clout. There are no disingenuous politicians and remarkably few celebrities trying to sell me their bathwater. There's no advertising. There's a great API for bots. And - for now - people are generous with their time and expertise.
But, just to be contrary, let's list some of the bad points about it.
That does mean there are fewer arseholes1. But it doesn't yet feel as magical as Twitter did - when you could suddenly be in a conversation with a goat farmer from the other side of the planet and a world-famous astrophysicist.
The people who are about tend to be on the techy side of things. Which does mean putting up with some annoying pedantry and plenty of "jUSt InsTaLl LinUx aNd delETE facEbOoK."
Small, insular communities are fractious. A perceived insult or slight can rapidly descend into childish taunts of "well I'll defederate you first!"
There was drama on Twitter - and even more since Elon's full on conversion to the dark side - but because the community is smaller here, the drama feels bigger.
This is a mixed bag. Frankly, Twitter should never have been a customer support channel. But businesses wanted to promote their goods and services, and customers took the opportunity to upbraid them in public. That led to all sorts of weird behaviours.
Nevertheless, I'd like to be able to see what's going on in local politics, and transport, and a dozen little services I used Twitter for.
I've posted some thoughts on Mastodon search. It's now pretty good. But the federated nature of Mastodon means it'll never be as comprehensive as Twitter.
I've seen plenty of waves of users over the years. But I think that the majority of people who wanted to leave Twitter have done so.
And... I think that's OK. I still use Facebook, I'm signed into a dozen different forums, I'm not particularly loyal to anything.
The Fediverse is about diversity. It would be nice if Twitter and Threads and BlueSky all federated with each other. But I think that Mastodon now has enough users to be self-sustaining. It doesn't need to become a giant killer. It mustn't become a de-facto monopoly.
Why are male social workers so different?
Been homeless over 6 years. My social services agency, high turnover. Being female , almost all my case managers have been female, standard practice....