Goodbye, Xitter! And some of my xits…

So, I finally got around to doing something I should have done a long time ago: deleting my Xitter* account.

*That’s the website formerly known as Twitter. I believe the X is pronounced as it is in Chinese or Catalan, with a “sh” sound.

To be honest, I haven’t really used it for a long time. I largely stopped tweeting after the fiasco of the 2019 UK general election. This was in frustration at the self-defeating tribalism and bickering I’d seen between opponents of Brexit – those of either Labour or Liberal Democrat leanings – which of course resulted in everything those people collectively didn’t want: a whopping Boris Johnson majority and a shambolic exit from the EU.

The idea of shouting my political wisdom into the void felt more than usually pointless after that. Aside from a handful of tweets, I pretty much gave up on Twitter at that point. But I didn’t see any particular need to delete my account entirely. However, the site’s transition to a sewer of far-right disinformation and bootlicking changed that. So now my account is gone.

The majority of my xits were political, but a few weren’t. Here’s a pick of the latter:

Defending the end of a computer game level… like a boss.
Apr 22, 2012

Holding a clamp in some laboratory apparatus… like a boss.
Apr 22, 2012

Singing along to Born To Run… like The Boss.
Apr 22, 2012

The Ramones are now more successful as a t-shirt brand than they ever were as a punk rock band.
Sep 16, 2012

I just can’t get enough of medieval Muslim north Africans. I think it’s because they’re so Moorish.
Mar 23, 2013

Not many things have more pathos than a smashed Henry Hoover staring imploringly at you from a fly tipping site.
May 1, 2013

“The English language’s noun stacking ability” – another fine example of the English language’s noun stacking ability.
May 28, 2013

Hey guys, I just discovered a new range of mountains! It’s going to be massif!
Jun 17, 2013

If I had one time machine trip, I’d be tempted to waste it, just to kidnap the Pope and show him Joseph and Mary having it off.
Sep 1, 2013

If an actor has a natural London accent, as their career length increases, the probability of them taking a role on Eastenders approaches 1.
Sep 11, 2013

I estimate the anticlockwise carriageway of the M25 is about 125m shorter than the clockwise one, making the journey 4s quicker at 70mph.
Oct 30, 2013

How often is it normal to think about the Great Vowel Shift? I average about once every three to four days.
Dec 10, 2013

Hemingway writes so beautifully about the power and allure of alcohol, it almost makes you want to become an alcoholic yourself.
Dec 24, 2013

I just can’t summon up the tribalism needed to care which group of American PhD students can move fastest up a river. #boatrace
Apr 6, 2014

“Around the survivors, a perimeter create.” – the worst line of film dialogue ever written? #StarWars #AttackoftheClones
May 10, 2014

What’s the point of mild cheddar?
Jul 19, 2014

When I’m in charge, to get a tattoo in a foreign language you’ll first have to earn a GCSE or equivalent in that language.
Nov 20, 2014

“I don’t eat wheat, it’s not been in our diet long enough for us to evolve to digest it”
*serves vegetables brought from new world in 1500s*
Jul 24, 2015

‘Missing’ by Everything But The Girl fundamentally misunderstands the nature of desert ecosystems.
Oct 28, 2015

“and I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain” – what, you’re specifically adapted to survive without me for long periods of time?
Oct 28, 2015

Somehow the Airblade doesn’t seem so hygienic when you can feel the droplets spattering on your face
Mar 12, 2016

“My wife’s acting was reviewed by one of those Chinese bear critics.”
“Panda?”
“No, it was quite complimentary, actually.”
Apr 8, 2016

“My wife went on holiday to an obscure Eastern European country.”
“Was it Moldova?”
“No, more a spur of the moment thing.”
Apr 9, 2016

“My wife and I did a tour of Dutch cities.”
“Utrecht?”
“No, we took the train.”
Apr 14, 2016

Tim Henman’s favourite recipe is a venison and rabbit terrine, flavoured with green tea. It’s called game, set and matcha.
Apr 29, 2016

Lincoln Cathedral, completed 1311, was the first building taller than the Pyramids. Humans didn’t build anything higher until 1874.
Aug 3, 2016

How do ISIS staff provide updates to their senior leaders? With a Daeshboard
Oct 6, 2016

Talking of confusing date formats: in the doc I’m reading, YYYY-MM means Mth month of financial year ending in Y: so 2017-09 is Dec 2016.
Feb 14, 2017

Client “isn’t joined up enough”. So 3 directors each hire rival consultants for separate projects promoting “joined up working”. True story.
Mar 13, 2017

Reading the list of Arthurian characters is fascinating. They all have the same linguistic background, but forgotten ones sound mythical and exotic (Galeschin, Melehan, Orgeluse), while others sound ridiculous through familiarity (Gareth, Lionel, Elaine).
Jan 19, 2018

Did You Know?
There are 9 laughing emojis – 😀😃😄😁😆😅😂🤣 – but 8 are never used, because people never laugh at anything less than crying, head-tilting intensity.
Jan 29, 2018

I don’t know whether you can cross a Wolfhound with a Chihuahua, but if you can, it should be called a Wolfhuahua.
Feb 3, 2018

Why are council staff so bad at looking after their work clothes? Because they have no overall control. #LocalGovernmentHumour
Feb 23, 2018

How do local government officers put up posters? Using council tacks. #LocalGovernmentHumour
Feb 23, 2018

“Bender”: homophobic insult
“Ben, durrhh”: homophonic insult
Jun 8, 2018

I’d like to see an analysis of Quantum Leap that looks at all the times they took a course of action after Ziggy gave a % chance of it working, and how frequently it actually worked out.
Jul 21, 2018

A man walks into a drinking venue called “The Rigid Obstruction”.

Inside are a racial, a national and a professional stereotype, discussing their spouses.

“Consider, and also remove, my wife,” one says.

“I wouldn’t want to do that,” says the man.

“Why not?”

“Meta.”
Jul 31, 2018

I’d like to propose the Barn Door Corollary: the safest place to keep your horse is the barn from which a horse has most recently bolted, because they’re now busy making damn sure the door’s closed.
Sep 24, 2018

How do you mansplain probabilities to someone who calculates them for a living?
“Well, actuarially…”
Jul 18, 2019

Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) by The Darkness deserves a much higher place in the Christmas pop canon.
Dec 4, 2019

It’s been 25 years since a new pop song entered the canon of Christmas classics (1994’s All I Want For Christmas Is You)
Dec 4, 2019

If Die Hard “isn’t a Christmas film” because while “it’s set at Christmas”, it doesn’t have the right “uplifting Christmas themes”, then in what sense is Fairytale of New York a Christmas song?
Dec 11, 2019

That bit in Bing when Flop calmly approaches the goose and scares it away by popping a paper bag is the pre-school equivalent of Atticus Finch shooting the rabid dog.
Aug 12, 2021

My earlier tweet was wrong. I now realise the most recent song to be accepted into the Christmas pop canon is Kelly Clarkson’s Underneath the Tree (2013).
Dec 12, 2021

What do you call a hackathon where everyone writes programs which output their own source code, and then rates each other’s efforts?
Come Quine With Me
Apr 24, 2022

Population peaks, random walks and Catalan numbers

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.

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Lasagne Structure: An Investigation

We all know what lasagne is. A baked pasta dish, consisting of alternating layers of pasta sheets, a ragù/bolognese sauce and a bechamel/white sauce.

Obviously, there’s room for a lot of variation in the constituent sauces, especially in the recipe for the ragù. But once the sauces are made, putting them together into the lasagne is straightforward, right?

Wrong. It turns out it’s not quite so simple.

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Eggs, Bacon, Chips or Cheese

At school we used to play a bizarre game.

St Mary’s C of E in Welton, Lincolnshire, was an ordinary, medium-sized, rural primary school. For the most part, the playground games were equally ordinary and universal: classics like tag (though we called it tiggy) and British Bulldogs, plus of course football. These could all be played on the concrete play area that we had access to for most of the year. The school had a much larger grass playing field, but this was usually out of bounds due to the soggy ground that was the inevitable result of the British weather.

However, during the few weeks of early summer, when it was sunny and dry, but we hadn’t yet broken up for the holidays, other possibilities were opened up.

First, we had to seek permission to “go on the grass”. A child would be nominated by their peers to go and ask the supervising teacher, who would then walk to the edge of the concrete play area adjacent to the grass. Meanwhile, the children would all line up along that sacred boundary and poise themselves in anticipation. The teacher would reach down and touch the ground, feeling for moisture and assessing the situation. Then they would loudly announce their decision: yes or no. If it was a no, we would all trudge dejectedly back to our humdrum, concrete-based games. But if it was a yes… the whole school would sprint out onto the grass, screaming with delight. Some would race to see who could reach the far side of the field first. Others would run immediately to secure a preferred area to play. Once the field had thus been ritually claimed, we would decide which game we were going to play. And more often than not, it was Eggs, Bacon, Chips or Cheese.

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In Praise of Noughties Music

Musically, of the four decades that I’ve lived through (80s, 90s, 00s, 10s), my favourite is the nineties. It was my teenage decade, the era of personal discovery, so the music that I grew up with – Britpop, basically – has a subjective importance to me that nothing will ever match.

However, I’m moving towards the opinion that of these four decades, the noughties was objectively the best for music. At least, for the indie/pop/rock genre.

Just think of all the great bands that came out of that decade. The list goes on and on: The Libertines, The Strokes, The Killers, The White Stripes, Razorlight, Arctic Monkeys, Elbow, Muse, Franz Ferdinand, The Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Kaiser Chiefs, Florence and the Machine, Mumford & Sons, Keane, Snow Patrol, MGMT, The Darkness, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and of course Amy Winehouse, are just a few of the incredible acts which were absolutely massive in the noughties.

Close behind them, you’ve got the likes of Kasabian, The Vaccines, Bloc Party, Vampire Weekend, Doves, Editors, British Sea Power, Fleet Foxes, Goldfrapp, Interpol, The Coral, The Decemberists, The Kooks, Athlete… I could keep going. OK, I will… Bat for Lashes, Rilo Kiley, The Go! Team, Wolfmother, The Zutons, The Thrills, The Delays, Cloud Control, Magic Numbers, Hal, The Noisettes… Even The Duckworth Lewis Method (Neil Hannon’s cricket themed band) got their fabulous debut album out just before the decade closed.

Even the massive commercial bands that critics and musos get a bit snobby about were actually pretty decent. It says something about the musical quality of a decade when the very worst thing it produced was Coldplay.

Brexit, and the Second World War in popular culture

I wrote this in late 2018 and never got around to posting it. Italics added by me now.

I think one of the big differences in ideology and worldview between Leavers and Remainers is their understanding of WW2 and the rise of fascism.

The popular view of WW2, as portrayed in countless books, films, TV series, etc, is that fascism was an external threat: foreign dictators and armies, defeated militarily by the plucky Allies.

Popular culture doesn’t often look at the rise of fascism in the ’20s and ’30s. When it does, it generally subscribes to what I call the “George Lucas Theory of Fascism” – dictators are sneaky super-geniuses who make their way to power using trickery and force.

The other view – the more historically accurate one – is that fascism was a popular movement, a wave of grassroots fear and anger, ridden by opportunistic politicians who styled themselves as the people’s champions.

People didn’t have fascism imposed on them from above. They demanded it themselves.

They wanted strong leaders to tear up state bureaucracy and get things done, reassert sovereignty and regain past national glories, protect them from dangerous foreigners and socialists, and take revenge on the liberal elites they despised.

I can think of only two works of popular culture which come close to portraying the popular rise of fascism, and then only barely: Cabaret and The Sound of Music. And those films are unlikely to have been watched by many ardent Brexiters.

When you ignore all of that, and see fascism as its end result – a political establishment, backed up by military force – it’s easy to see why Leavers regard the EU as a totalitarian threat, and themselves as the plucky Allies fighting it.

But when you know how fascism really starts, it’s obvious which side of the Brexit divide most closely resembles it.

Brexit IS a class issue, and here’s why

This John Harris article, Brexit is a class betrayal. So why is Labour colluding in it?, is a persuasive argument about Labour strategy and why it should support a #PeoplesVote. But it doesn’t do much to support its headline claim – that Brexit is a class issue. (I know, the headlines are written by the editors, not the commentators.)

I think the claim is right: Brexit is a class issue. I’ll try to explain why.

The spectacle of millionaire toffs and spivs inciting popular hatred against “elites” – which Harris mentions but doesn’t analyse – is an obvious example of misdirection from the ruling class.

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Meal deal economics

The law of demand is one of the most widely understood laws of economics: if you raise the price of something, fewer people will buy it; if conversely, if you reduce its price, more people will buy it.

The law generally holds true as long as the goods in question don’t have any special properties or constraints. However, there are a number of known exceptions, for example:

  • Veblen goods – expensive goods which are desirable for the status they confer on anyone rich enough to buy them. Contrary to the law of demand, demand for a Veblen good will rise as its price increases.
  • Giffen goods – a cheap but essential good which counter-intuitively increases in demand as its price rises. This is because, if a staple food (e.g. bread) rises in price, the poorest consumers have to stop buying more expensive foods (e.g. meat), and spend the savings on more of the cheapest good.

I hypothesise the existence of another type of good which behaves as an exception to the law of demand: a meal deal good.

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“It’s the principle”: why turkeys do often vote for Christmas

US liberals and leftists who won’t vote for Clinton, even though that decision will help Trump, who is even worse, are an interesting case study. It reveals a deep difference, not between liberals and conservatives, but between “principlists” and “consequentialists”.

Consequentialists do what they have to do to get the best available outcome, even if the means – and the end – fall short of their ideal.

Principlists feel an inherent wrongness in doing anything against principle, even if the result is an outcome even further from their ideal.

They’re two totally opposed mindsets – ways of thinking about how to choose action – with little scope for persuasion between them.

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