Author Archives: Tom Bell

Population peaks, random walks and Catalan numbers

Posted on by
Reply

Is humanity at peak population? In other words, is the total number of humans in the world currently the highest it’s ever been?

It seems like a simple question. And the answer seems obvious too: yes.

The last significant reduction in the human population occurred during the Black Death in the 1350s. Since then, it has been rising without interruption. It’s risen especially quickly in the last century, from about 2.5 billion in 1950, to 8 billion by 2022. And although the growth rate is now slowing, the population is still rising: it’s estimated at about 8.1-8.2 billion as of February 2025. The UN projects that it will continue to rise until it reaches over 10 billion in the late 21st century, at which point it will start to decline. But clearly, given that we’re still on the upward slope, the population right now is bigger than it’s ever been.

That’s certainly true on a large scale. If we were to take a look at the current population estimate every day this year, the number would always be higher than the previous day. But it’s not so simple on the small scale.

Imagine that we could know, precisely, every time a person was born or died anywhere in the world. In other words, imagine that the Worldometer tally wasn’t an estimate, but a realtime monitor with perfect accuracy. At any given moment, would that tally be at its all-time peak? Well, every time someone dies and the tally decreases by one, the population is not at its peak: it’s one below the previous value. During the brief interval before another birth occurs, the human population is not at its all-time peak. If the next event is another death, it’ll be at least two more events before the population is at peak again. So, considering the population at unit precision, even though births happen more frequently than deaths and the population is rising overall, for a significant proportion of the time it’s not true to say that the population is currently the highest it’s ever been.

Continue reading →

New Year’s resolutions 2025

Posted on by
Reply

Following the success of 2024’s resolutions, I’m going to set a similarly ambitious list for 2025:

1. Read 30 books, including the complete works of John Wyndham

With only four left to go, finishing the complete works of John Wyndham will be easy. However, hitting my target of 30 again this year may be more challenging, particularly with the 883-page The Mirror & The Light being on the tentative “to read” list.

2. Get into Talking Heads

Continue my adventures with Talking Heads‘ back catalogue and other media, specifically:

Three albums: Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, Little Creatures

Two films: Stop Making Sense and David Byrne’s American Utopia

Relevant episodes of the the This Must Be Talking Heads podcast

3. Watch 12 specific films

Setting myself a target list of films to watch has worked well in the past and again in 2024. So this time, as well as watching the two Talking Heads related films as part of the previous resolution, I’m aiming to watch nine more music documentaries, plus three others:

Vivian Stanshall: The Canyons of His Mind (2004)
Beware of Mr. Baker (2012)
The Stone Roses: Made of Stone (2013)
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019)
Zappa (2020)
The Sparks Brothers (2021)
The Velvet Underground (2021)
Moonage Daydream (2022)
In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 (2022)

Son of Frankenstein (1939)
Apocalypto (2006)
Lancaster (2022)

4. Complete Pokémon Blue

This year’s video game resolution is to complete the game I’ve already started, so hopefully should be more successful than previous ones (Lords of Midnight, Braid, Escape from Monkey Island).

5. Run a 10+ km distance once a month, get a parkrun PB, and volunteer at parkruns

I ran two 10k races in 2024 and found them a lot easier than my first in 2023. I’m already signed up for another in February, and may do the Altrincham 10k again in September. But now I know I can do the distance, I don’t need to do organised (and expensive) races to motivate me. This year, I aim to do at least one 10 km distance every month, whether it’s an organised race or a casual run. And since my nearest parkrun is 2.5 km away from my house, running there and back would do it.

I’m way ahead of my parkrun target. Originally, I’d aimed to get to 100 by the end of 2026, by getting to 50 in 2023 (failed) and 60 in 2024 (over-achieved by reaching 75). So this year, I’ll continue doing parkruns as often as possible, but volunteer instead of run at every fourth event I attend. I’m also aiming to get a parkrun PB this year.

Other fitness goals, such as continuing to swim and go to the gym regularly, are upgraded from resolutions to habits.

6. Give blood 4 times

Self-explanatory.

7. Publish 3 blog posts

I have a couple of ideas I’m working on already. New Year’s resolutions posts and The Ambivalence List Volume 2 don’t count.

8. Learn how to pronounce Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

Self-explanatory.

New Year’s resolutions 2024: end of year review

Posted on by
Reply

Time for my annual round-up of New Year’s resolution achievements. This year, I chose to be ambitious – possibly unrealistic – with my resolutions, as a spur to action.

1. Read 30 books, including the complete works of John Wyndham

Status: almost complete

I read 31 books, returning to my long-term average. However, I only read 13/17 of Wyndham’s books. I’ll complete that challenge early in 2025.

2. Get into Talking Heads

Status: unclear

I definitely listened to a lot of Talking Heads, and appreciate them a lot more now. So, in that sense, I achieved the resolution.

On the other hand, I defined this resolution more specifically as becoming familiar with their back catalogue up to Little Creatures and watching Stop Making Sense.

I’ve certainly listened to the first three albums to the point of familiarity, but I’ve spent less time listening to Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues and Little Creatures, and I haven’t watched Stop Making Sense yet. I’ve also subsequently added watching American Utopia to the Talking Heads to-do list.

So, I’ll continue with this one in 2025.

3. Do two 10k races and reach 60 parkruns

Status: achieved

I absolutely smashed the fitness resolution.

I’ve run two 10k races (Altrincham and Tatton Park). I’ve also got my parkrun total up to 75, which was way beyond my expectation. In the last quarter of the year, I also started going to the gym and swimming regularly.

4. Complete and submit 10 Private Eye crosswords

Status: achieved

Another roaring success: 18 crosswords completed and submitted, including the Christmas one.

5. Watch 10 specific films

Status: achieved

Easily completed within the year, turning around a miserable past performance where a previous year’s list had taken five years to get through.

6. Publish a Hate List and a Love List

Status: achieved

Hate List Volume 21 and Love List Volume 3 were both published on Boxing Day.

7. Complete Braid

Status: failed

I even extended the video games resolution after setting it, to include both Braid and Escape from Monkey Island, but apart from a brief test play of Escape, I didn’t touch either.

Instead, I started playing Pokémon Blue on an old Gameboy Color, and have made a reasonable amount of progress. So that’s what I’ll continue into 2025.

8. Learn how to pronounce Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

Status: failed

I just didn’t tackle this one at all.

Overall, I think it was a fairly successful year, and the ambitious targets did induce me to achieve more than I’ve managed in the last few years. I read more, listened to more new (to me) music, got fitter physically and mentally, checked more films off my ‘to watch’ list, wrote more, and found time for some enjoyable retro gaming.

The Love List – Volume 3

Posted on by
Reply
  1. Shredding documents, because not only is the act physically satisfying, it also has that feeling of saying “Fuck you!” to identity thieves and the surveillance state.
  2. Obscure fruits. I’m a total pushover for anything new and unusual in the fruit & veg aisles: goji berries, ugli fruit, açaí, etc. Unfortunately, I was played like a sucker by Tesco once, who were selling dragon fruit, knowing that people like me wouldn’t be able to resist buying something which looks so amazing: neon pink skin, with little green sprouts all over. It turned out to have almost no taste whatsoever.
  3. The Great Vowel Shift. The way that the English, over a period of about 300 years, decided to pronounce all our words completely differently. And not just that, but to do it over the same period that the printing press was invented and spelling was standardised, resulting in such an absolute mess of spelling and pronunciation that no-one can make any sense of.
  4. The strong positive correlation between: the amount of fuss a culture makes about machismo and warrior codes of honour; and the endemic propensity towards man-on-man botty sex within that culture. See: Ancient Greeks, modern Afghans, the Parachute Regiment.
  5. The insanely complicated ecosystem contained within a single fig.
  6. Girls with geordie accents. Maybe it’s a combination of watching Byker Grove at an impressionable age, or living near Newcastle for three and half years, but I love hearing the likes of Cheryl Cole or Jayne Middlemiss speaking.
  7. The seasons. It is an absolute blessing to happen to have evolved on a planet with a tilted axis, and to get to enjoy the changing of the seasons and the cyclical growth and contraction of the ecosystems we are part of.
  8. Trees that grow over a main road and appear to have a silhouette of a bus cut out of them.
  9. Obsolete constellations.
  10. Pears. Pears are fucking delicious. And I don’t mean just a normal kind of delicious. I mean a crack cocaine kind of delicious. Every time I eat a pear, I find myself wondering in complete bafflement why I’m not just constantly eating pears.
  11. When you eat a delicious sandwich you bought from a shop, and feel a bit sad that it’s finished, then look inside the sandwich packaging and there’s a big blob of fallen-out filling inside, waiting for you to scoop it out and eat it.
  12. Each time October comes around, treating yourself to a new jumper, and it becoming your bestest, most favouritest new jumper ever.
  13. Crisp jenga: when you grab an overly ambitious fistful of crisps, and then to eat them you have to carefully extract one at a time with your other hand, trying not to destabilise the clump so that they all fall to the floor.
  14. A good shortcut. The more obscure or minor the road, the more satisfying.
  15. The feeling of pushing your fingers into a bowl of dried lentils.
  16. Cheese, as an art form, as a concentrated expression of the land, environment and culture which creates it.
  17. The introduction to Roxy Music’s Out Of The Blue, especially the way the synth slides in at 00:37 like a spaceship streaking overhead.
  18. That type of conversation you sometimes have with someone, usually someone you know very well and share a sense of humour with, which is more like a little double act improv comedy performance, just for your own shared amusement.
  19. Reusable gift bags. Thank fucking god someone invented these. No more time wasted neatly covering something in wrapping paper that’s only going to be torn off. No more needless generation of paper and plastic waste. Now we are all joint custodians of a shared resource, the great gift bag pool, which we will constantly shuffle between us forever.
  20. Cold roast potatoes. The roast potato is the most delicious food item in the known universe. There’s only one thing better than a hot roast potato with a Sunday lunch: a cold roast potato taken out of the fridge as a Sunday evening snack.
  21. Computer games which require you to take notes (e.g. to sketch out a map, solve a puzzle, etc).
  22. The phrase “it’s so crazy it might just work” and variants thereof.
  23. Wasps, or rather the order Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants and sawflies). They’re all wasps really. Bees are just vegetarian wasps. Ants are flightless wasps. Wasps are amazingly diverse and specialised, mostly in parasitism. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species that specifically parasitised another wasp species.
  24. When you can feel a storm a-comin’ in.
  25. Rick Astley, who seems like such a genuinely nice, humble bloke, that it’s just impossible to see any article or interview he’s in without loving him a bit more. Also I’d rather listen to Astley playing covers of The Smiths songs than to that reactionary cunt Morrissey.

The Hate List – Volume 21

Posted on by
1
  1. Books with a “sneak preview” excerpt of another book by the same author at the end. Surely enjoying the book you’ve just read is advertisment enough for its author? Don’t waste my bookshelf space with paper trailers.
  2. The studio or technology ident films which precede some films on DVD, and go on for way too long. The Pixar one is bad enough, but the THX one (which is often consecutive with Pixar) feels like it lasts for about 15 fucking minutes.
  3. The “Fast Play” feature on Disney DVDs, the sole purpose of which is to delay the start of your film by showing you ads for other things instead.
  4. Smug-as-fuck animated children’s film characters.
  5. Trying to watch a film trailer on Youtube and having to watch adverts first. Essentially, watching adverts in order to earn the right to watch another advert.
  6. The way that more and more services and organisations require hardcopy proof of address, at the same time as fewer and fewer provide it.
  7. Packaging which is designed in such a way that you can’t use the last bit of the product.
  8. The tendency among contemporary educational establishments to refer to “learners” instead of “students”. It has an insulting suggestion of passivity: these people aren’t doing anything active and difficult like studying, they are simply learning, floating around and absorbing information from the educational environment.
  9. When something is described as being available “24/7/365”. Surely it should be either “24/7/52” or just “24/365”. Or, you know, “24/7” which already means exactly what you’re trying to say.
  10. The word “staycation”, in the UK sense. Its original US meaning was a holiday which consists of a series of day trips from your own home. This is a particular phenomenon which warrants its own name, so regardless of the aesthetics of “staycation”, it was at least doing a useful job. But when imported to the UK by lazy, ill-informed journalists, it became simply “a holiday in the UK”. Not only does this not need its own word, it’s class snobbery to suggest that it does.
  11. The term “boutique” as a synonym for small.
  12. Cash machines which tell you to say how much money you want, “in multiples of £10”. I’d like 10 multiples of 10, please. Oh no, you’ve given me £10.
  13. Gift shops. I’m outraged by the very concept of a gift shop. A shop that defines itself as containing nothing that anyone would ever buy for themselves. Because everything in it is shit.
  14. Vapes. I find it un-fucking-believable that as a society – after having made significant progress in reducing smoking, and also while professing concern about plastic and electronic waste – we seem to have sleepwalked into allowing mass consumption of what are essentially plastic, electronic cigarettes targeted at children.
  15. Ice cream with bits in it. Stuff that has no business being in ice cream, like raw dough and marshmallows and shit.
  16. Bottle conditioned beers. Breweries, it’s your job to give me a finished product that I can enjoy at leisure. Not a dexterity challenge where if I fail, I make the beer undrinkable.
  17. Millicano coffee. Mixing some ground coffee in with your instant coffee granules does NOT make a premium product. It makes instant coffee that still tastes shit, and now has a gritty sludge at the bottom.
  18. Oxo cubes. Why are they the most popular brand? They’re shit. They’re mostly salt. The foil wrapping is impossible to get off. They get all over your fingers when you try to crumble them. They’re just bad. Stock pots are better. Making your own stock is easy too, and uses up food waste. Why are we still in thrall to Oxo’s foul droppings?
  19. Pom Bears. Even people who are otherwise very concerned about ensuring their children eat healthily and avoid junk food seem to believe, for some unfathomable reason, that Pom Bears are a wholesome, nutritious snack. It’s weird, because what they obviously are is a hideous mixture of powdered starch, fat, salt and sugar. They’re no different to any other ultra-processed pseudo-crisps like Pringles, except they’re pressed into a cynical child-friendly shape.
  20. Book jigsaws. If you don’t have children, you’ve probably been lucky enough not to come across this exemplar of an “innovative product” that is objectively worse than its predecessors in every way. It’s a book in which every page has a jigsaw puzzle embedded in it. Sounds cute, right? Wrong. The pieces are all thin cardboard, much thinner than normal jigsaws, and bend and break much more easily. The book’s story is invariably dogshit, a talentless hack job as flimsy as the jigsaw pieces. And the very worst thing about it is that because there’s no box for holding the pieces, you have to complete every jigsaw back into its page before you can put it away: an infuriating burden on your time which is the very last thing a parent needs.
  21. Vauxhall indicator sticks. Despite the standard mechanism of indicator sticks which has been established for decades and allows a driver to intuitively use them on any car, some years ago Vauxhall decided that it would “innovate” a slightly different mechanism. With Vauxhall’s completely unnecessary redesign, the stick always returns to the middle, whether you’ve applied a partial or full indicate, meaning that there’s no visual or tactile feedback to tell you which you’ve done. Also, to manually cancel a full indicate, you have to apply a partial indicate in the opposite direction. But if you accidentally push too far, you’ll end up indicating that way instead. If you ever see a Vauxhall driver indicating erratically, now you know why.
  22. The pointless “innovation” of concertina-joined Post-It notes. Just stop it, 3M Company. Post-Its work; don’t try to fix them. The traditional Post-It pad, all joined on one side, is perfect. Joined on alternating sides like concertina folds, they provide the exact same functionality, with one difference: if you try to pick up the pad, but fail to grasp the whole thing from both sides, it stretches out from the table like some kind of lame stationery prank. It’s a fallacy that customers always want more choice: in this case, we definitely don’t want the choice of a product which is nearly identical, but shitter in one specific way.
  23. Graphene. If you live in Manchester, it seems to be a heresy to say anything against this wonder material. Everyone has to pretend that it’s going to be the foundation of a second industrial revolution, and that all of our futuristic sci-fi gadgets are going to be made out of flakes of graphite. In 2004, two researchers in Manchester touted a smudgy bit of sticky tape as the future of manufacturing. Since then, hundreds of millions of pounds have been poured into graphene research, including at a National Graphene Institute. 20 years later, there’s an 8,000+ word Wikipedia article on “Potential applications of graphene”, and yet still no actual applications. Excuse me if I don’t share the enthusiasm for what seems like the most over-hyped thing to come out of Manchester since Be Here Now.
  24. Toilets lights which switch on with a motion sensor and off with a timer, but there’s no motion sensor in the cubicles, so you end up wiping your arse in the dark.
  25. Air-dried towels. The ones you get given when you visit the house of someone who doesn’t tumble dry their towels, because they prefer you to experience what it would be like to zest your skin with a box grater.
  26. The Dyson Airblade V, designed to blow water from your hands straight onto your crotch.
  27. Dyson vacuum cleaners. Fragile, over-engineered gimmicky pieces of crap. Give me a trusty Henry any day.
  28. The Dyson company in general, which represents the triumph of marketing over real engineering. They apply the same formula to everything they make: pretend it’s an amazing, innovative product by loading it with complicated, useless plastic crap that’ll break the first time it’s used.
  29. James Dyson, the tax-dodging arch-cunt who inexplicably made billions of pounds from selling flimsy, disappointing vacuum cleaners. And then sold us all the ultimate broken product – Brexit – before off-shoring his company to Singapore. And then, because these gilded pricks can never imagine that they could just shut the fuck up and we’d all get along fine without their great wisdom and influence, he had to pop up again to support Truss and Kwarteng’s economy-trashing mini-budget.
  30. Alan Sugar, and his self-aggrandisement as a business guru, even though he’s basically a mediocre businessman who got lucky in the property boom. I don’t mind either that he’s a property magnate or that his other businesses failed. What I do mind is that presents himself as a paragon of business success, to the extent of being ennobled and appointed as a business advisor by the Brown government.

Tongue-twister

Posted on by
Reply

Following a conversation at work about a tantalum-tungsten alloy, and how it’s difficult to say it, I’ve invented a new tongue-twister. Here it is:

Tanned Alan tongues ten tungsten-tantalum tonnes to learn stung Stan’s turnstone’s tin-taloned.

The structure is four blocks, which are meant to be roughly homophonic with:

tantalum-tungsten tungsten-tantalum tantalum-tungsten tungsten-tantalum

That, in itself, would be a simple but effective tongue-twister (like red lorry yellow lorry). But I’ve elaborated on it by replacing three of the four blocks with similar sounding elements:

tantalum-tungstenTanned Alan tongues ten
tungsten-tantalumtungsten-tantalum
tantalum-tungstentonnes to learn stung Stan’s
tungsten-tantalumturnstone’s tin-taloned

Other suggestions for tantalum-tungsten tongue twisters are welcome in the comments.

New Year’s resolutions 2024

Posted on by
Reply

I haven’t posted any New Year’s resolutions on here for a while, mainly because I’ve been very bad at keeping them – or not set myself any at all – for the last few years. (No prizes for guessing why!)

However, the point of resolutions is to set yourself some ambitious goals which spur you on to achieve improvements to your life which you wouldn’t otherwise have made – even if you don’t manage to complete or stick to them all.

So, in that spirit, I’m going to make an absurdly over-ambitious list for 2024:

1. Read 30 books, including the complete works of John Wyndham

I used to typically read 30+ books a year; there have been a few years when I’ve read 50+. Since 2018, I’ve struggled to read 20 a year – in 2023 I only managed 18. Combining this with an author reading challenge should help, since Wyndham’s books are generally quite short.

2. Get into Talking Heads

Talking Heads is the band that it’s most anomalous that I’m not already into. They’re exactly the sort of band that I would love. I like the few songs I’ve heard – the big hit singles – but I’m not familiar with their work beyond those. I get why their fans are typically intensely zealous about them. I’ve just never put enough time into listening to them myself. So this year, I’m going to make a concerted effort to really listen to their back catalogue – at least up to Little Creatures – and also watch Stop Making Sense.

3. Do two 10k races and reach 60 parkruns

I did one 10k in 2023 (and it nearly killed me); I want to build on that and do two more this year.

I wanted to reach 50 parkruns in 2023 (from a start of 33). Unfortunately I only reached 42. So I’m setting myself the even more ambitious (by 1) target of reaching 60 by the end of 2024.

4. Complete and submit 10 Private Eye crosswords

I’ve been a Private Eye subscriber since the early 2000s, and I occasionally complete the crossword – on average, it seems, about twice a year. If I start it, I usually finish it – it’s just a matter of making the effort to start it. So this year, I’ll make the effort more often.

5. Watch 10 specific films

Setting myself a specific list of films to watch in the year (typically, classics or cult hits that I hadn’t seen, or DVDs that had been sitting unwatched on my shelf for some time) worked quite well in 2017 and 2018. My 2019 list is still unfinished (by one film). But I’m going to set myself another list to work through:

Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Mummy (1932)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
National Velvet (1944)
Godzilla (1954)
Stand By Me (1986)
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Children of Men (2006)

I also need to watch Paths of Glory (1957) to finish the 2019 list.

6. Publish a Hate List and a Love List

The last Hate List (Vol 20) was published in 2016. I have the material for another one; I just need to get my act together, edit it and get it out there. Similarly for the Love List, the last one of which (Vol 2) was published in 2007.

7. Complete Braid

I’d been meaning to play this for some time. I bought it in a Steam sale in January 2021, played for a couple of hours, got stuck, and haven’t been back since. Another one where I just need to set aside some time for myself to have a crack at it.

8. Learn how to pronounce Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

Self-explanatory.

The Barsoom series, reviewed

Posted on by
Reply

Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s Barsoom series, beginning with A Princess of Mars, is a seminal work of early 20th century pulp science fiction. Like many works which spawned their own genres, it has been eclipsed by the works which followed it and were influenced by it, in particular those of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

It isn’t widely read these days, and for good reason: it isn’t very good. Even its fans tend to admit that the first three books are the best, and the rest rapidly drop off in quality. But I decided to read them all anyway, in succession, to get a feel for the series as a whole.

Continue reading →