Via Scott Adams, I encountered this, from someone called Peter Smith:
Been chatting to my wife while Twitter was down. She seems nice.
But what does she now think of him?
Category: Social media
I need a link dump
Twitter is causing ever more interesting things to pile up on my computer screen, and slow everything down. (I know, “bookmarks”. Hate them.) So, here is a blog posting consisting of such links. Which I can come back to and follow through on but probably never will, but possibly just might.
Eyebrows – we all have them, but what are they actually for?
The Kremlin has a Reckless Self-Image Problem.
Via 6k, how to take bizarre photos by stuffing wire wool into a egg whisk, setting the wire wool on fire, and swinging all that around on a rope. Do not try this at home, unless you want to burn down your home.
Next, a Twitter posting about cactus patterns:
So frustrating! My cactus patterns are going viral on FB, but the person who posted the photo of them a) didn’t credit me and b) deletes any comments I write responding to people asking for the patterns.
But what if she made that up? As a ruse to get the world to pay attention to her cactus patterns? Or, what if she hired, in good faith, some sleazy “internet marketer” who deliberately posted her photos on some faked-up Facebook site, minus any credit, told her about it, and then blocked her complaints? The sleazy internet marketer then advised her to complain about this to all and sundry, knowing that all and sundry would sympathise. She seems like an honest person, doing honest business, which is why I pass this on. But a decade of internetting has made me cynical.
Next, a Spectator piece about someone called Scaramucci, who is writing a book about Trump. The piece says more about Scaramucci than it does about Trump, but his book sounds like it will be quite good. Scaramucci sounds like he has his head screwed on right, unlike a lot of the people who write Trump books.
Also in the Spectator, Toby Young realises that his wife is smarter than he is. And she chose to stay at home and raise their kids because that’s what she wanted to do. You can feel the tectonic plates of Western Civilisation shifting back towards stay-at-home mumhood, even as mere policy continues to discourage it. Jordan Peterson, take a bow. That man is already raising the birth rate in rich countries, by encouraging both fatherhood and motherhood. The only question is: By how much? Trivially, or significantly? My bet, with the passing of a bit of time: significantly.
George Bernard Shaw tells it like it was and is about Islam. I lost track of how I chanced upon that, but there it is. These days, GBS would probably get a talking-to from the Thought Police, a talking-to which might well include the words: “We’re not the Thought Police”. If the Thought Police were to have a go at her, they just might get an earful themselves.
Mike Fagan liked this photo of Mont Saint Michel with sheep in the foreground. I can’t any longer find when he liked it, but he did. Reminds me of this Millau Viaduct photo, also with sheep in the foreground.
Boaty McBoatface got turned into David bloody Attenborough, but Trainy McTrainface proudly rides the railway lines of Sweden. As usual, You Had One Job supplied no link (so no link to them), but here’s the story.
Thank you Paul Marks for telling me about someone telling me about Napoleon’s greatest foe. His name? Smith.
The sun is now spotless, or it was on April 11th.
David Baddiel has doubts about the bloke who said “gas the Jews” rather a lot, to a dog. As do I. It should be legal, but don’t expect me to laugh.
All of which leads to the correct Brexit stance to be taking. No deal. We’ll go to unilateral free trade and the rest of you can go boil your heads. We’ll give it a couple of decades and we’ll see who is richer, OK?
Quillette: The China Model Is Failing.
The three temporarily separate Elizabeth lines.
Anton Howes on Sustained Economic Growth.
John Arnold made a fortune at Enron. He is now spending some of it on criticising bad science.
Human genes reveal history. This book is number (about) twenty on my to-read list.
Philip Vander Elst on How Communism Survived Thanks to Capitalist Technology.
And finally, Bryan Caplan still thinks this is pretty good.
I now feel much better. And more to the point, my computer seems a lot sprightlier than it was. This has been the computerised equivalent of cleaning my room. The job is not done, but I have taken a big bite out of it.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The Devil’s Dice is The Times crime fiction book of the month
Yes. From yesterday’s Times, in the Review section:
Here is what Roz is making of this.
Sadly, that wonderfully admiring review is behind a pay wall. But: remarkable. I don’t know how much difference a thing like this makes to sales, but it surely can’t hurt. All those favourable Amazon reviews also help a lot, as Roz, unsurprisingly, confirms.
Here is a piece I did for Samizdata, more about crime fiction generally, but provoked by – and giving a plug to – The Devils Dice.
Why all this fuss from me about The Devil’s Dice is because Roz is my niece and because The Devil’s Dice is very good. See also this earlier posting here. I have not posted an Amazon review, because If I didn’t say I’m her uncle that would be dishonest, and if I did, then it would be dismissed as hopelessly biased, as it would be.
Roz’s cat is less impressed.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A picture of a not missing cat and the link to the story
Twitter is getting seriously addictive for me these days. What will stop that is that it is getting a bit samey, as the same people keep on saying the same things.
Kristian Niemietz spends most of his Twitter time shouting at Corbynistas. So I was rather delighted to see this:
Niemietz supplies no link, which I hate. This hatred reminds me of the time when I used to rain curses down upon would be Libertarian Alliance authors who did not supply proper footnotes, in that now long gone era when there were no links. Just footnotes. I know, weird.
To quote myself (who else will?):
If you submit something to the LA for publication, your manuscript must be legible, and it must be complete. If we publish it exactly as you have submitted it, you should be content. On the other hand, if we are unable to publish it as it stands, either because we can’t read it, or because it lacks vital details, we will not be at all content.
We do not favour the “people generally, are, in a general way, inclined to think approximately such and such” style of writing. Who thinks it? Exactly what do they think? Where’s the proof that this is what they think? You should supply chapter and verse. If you are depending upon or taking issue with some written point of view or other, it is essential that you should enable your readers to acquaint themselves at first hand with what you are praising or criticising. They must be able to satisfy themselves that your criticisms are fair. They must, if encouraged by your praise of something, be able to explore further. The LA would be a waste of everyone’s time if all that happened was that a whole bunch of people read everything published by the LA, but read – or wrote – nothing else.
Accordingly, you must supply complete and accurate footnotes. …
Ah, those were the days. It’s a wondrous exercise in invective, though I say it myself.
Although, I note that I broke my own rule. Who actually said: “no one says that”?
But however much those days were the days, I still prefer these days, when you just shove in a link. Much easier.
Like this link, to the actual story about the missing cat that no longer was missing.
Later: Also this.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Show and tell
A reason I like to put my photos on a blog, rather than just shove them out to the world on Flickr or Instagram or some such thing, is that I often like to say complicated things about them. I like to say why I like about them, basically. For the photos I show here, this blog is about what’s in the photos, as well as just photoing itself.
I also like explaining the photos. Often it isn’t obvious what they are off, or where the thing they are of is.
Distressing though it is to contemplate, not everybody in the world is able to live in London, the way I do. Some of these unfortunates read this blog and view my photos. Not knowing London, such persons require explanations.
Take this photo, for instance:
Very pretty, I hope you agree. But where on earth is it, and where was it taken from? It was taken from the top of the Tate Modern extension, which is the brick building in the middle of this photo:
What we also see in that photo is the big old tower of Tate Modern, and in the foreground, one of London’s more interesting railway stations, interesting because it is on a bridge. I love that about it. Especially if it encourages other bridges to be building, say out east, which also have buildings on them, like old London Bridge once did.
But I digress. Which is another reason for sticking photos on a blog. On a blog you can digress all you want.
So anyway, back to that photo at the top, of the staircase with all its shadows. Where would that be?
Well, here’s another photo taken from the exact same spot, at the top of the Tate Modern extension, which puts the staircase in context and shows where it is. It is right in the middle of this view:
Or consider this rather banal view, also to be seen from the top of the TME, this time looking south:
On the right are those flats, whose inhabitants have been complaining about being looked at through their big windows, with its big lift shaft on its left. And further over to the left, further away, we see the three-eyed tower that is Strata, or the Razor as some call it. Why do I show you that? Because this …:
… which is what I saw by moving along a bit to the right, and looking at Strata through the lift shaft.
How would you know what that was, if I didn’t explain it?
And there’s more explaining to be done. What is that odd brick pattern, reflected in the glass of the lift shaft, through which Strata is to be seen?
Well, here is a closer-up photo of the TME, taken around the same time, but when the sky was white rather than blue:
Click on that and you get a closer look at that brickwork. Or better yet, just look at this even-closer-up photo of it, that I took, also on the white sky day:
I actually like this brickwork a lot. It makes this extension both blend in with the old power station that Tate Modern used to be, and yet makes the new building distinctive. In general, this extension has a highly individual look about it. As I think I’ve said here before, Art I can take or leave, but I do like the new buildings they build for it. Yes, see also here.
Islam can’t be made nice
Says Armin Navabi:
A short video, lasting just over two minutes. Navabi is right, provided by “reform” we mean “make nice”. That verbal quibble aside, agreed.
There are many nice people who want to remain nice but also to remain Muslim. Can’t be done. Islam demands nastiness from its followers, and there’s no way round that, only out of it.
The current Western governmental view of Islam is: resist the bad stuff, appease the good stuff. But the only good stuff in Islam is good people trying to be good but being told not to be good by Islam. Islam itself is the enemy.
The way to defeat Islam is to persuade a large number of its current adherents to stop being its adherents. That will put Islam on the defensive, both ideologically and physically. Muslims will be put in the position of trying to explain that Islam is nice. They will fail, but will then look weak, because they will have abandoned their strongest weapon, which is the fact that Islam demands nastiness. And the Muslims will thus lose. There will still be many “Muslims”, so-called, in the world, but the ones who really believe in it will become a beleaguered minority, constantly betrayed to their enemies by other “Muslims” who are trying to prove, to the world and to other Muslims who are thinking of leaving Islam, how nice they are, despite going through all the motions of saying that they still believe nasty things.
In other anti-Islamic news, Dawkins notes a stirring of atheism in the Islamic world. I hope, and more and more think, that this is right, and very good news. The more I learn about this man, more I admire him, even though I mostly don’t agree with him on domestic political issues.
If you are now, still, a Muslim, stop it.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Assorted Twitterings
I follow Tom Holland because I have liked several of his books (especially Persian Fire), and because I often agree with him, as when he says things like this:
The assumption in Europe that its brand of colonialism was uniquely awful is, in a perverse way, one of the last hold-outs of eurocentrism.
Very true.
Via Tom Holland, I came upon this, from Anthony McGowan:
I came across a place called Strood. I looked it up (having no idea where or what it was), I found this achingly poignant statement: “Strood was part of Frindsbury until 1193, but now Frindsbury is considered part of Strood.”
It’s the implication that “now”, in the Strood/Finsbury part of the world, began in 1193 that makes this so entertaining. I guess they have long memories out there in the not-London part of Britain.
Anthony McGowan is someone I don’t agree with a lot of the time (here is what I think about that). But, I also liked this:
An article about the history of the Chinese typewriter. One old machine had a strange pattern, as some characters had been polished by over-use. It belonged to a Chinese-American immigrant. “The keys that glitter with use are: emigrant, far away, urgent, longing, hardship, dream”.
McGowan doesn’t supply links to where he got these intriguing titbits, which I don’t like. But despite that and other similarly nitpicky nitpicks on my part, Twitter is working, for me. At present I have no plans to depend upon it to say things, although that may change, for I am too distrustful of its increasing political bias. But it is supplying me with much more stuff to be thinking about and writing about.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The Devil’s Dice in Piccadilly
On March 21st, Roz Watkins, author of The Devil’s Dice, will be signing copies of that book at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, an event which I will attend. This afternoon, finding myself in that part of London on account of needing a new battery for my ancient Casio watch, I dropped in on Waterstones to see what, if anything, they were doing with the book.
They had just one copy on show, in a New Crime Hardbacks display:
Can you spot it? Memo to self: If I ever design a book cover, make the title on the front either in dark lettering with a light background, or with light lettering on a dark background. The Devil’s Dice, with its light orange title on a light coloured sky, is second from the right, bottom row (on account of Watkins beginning with W). Another memo to self: When I become a published author, have a surname starting with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet, rather than almost at the end.
Anyway, here’s a close-up of it, just so you know it was really there:
I needed another copy of the book, because I gave the advance copy Roz sent me to someone else. But I was reluctant to buy the only copy of The Devil’s Dice that they had on show, thus depriving Waterstonians of any further sight of it. I asked at the desk if they had a paperback. Oh no, they said, not for at least six months. I asked if they had any more copies on order. Yes, said the lady, sounding rather impressed when her computer told her, we have eighty copies coming, ordered this morning.
I have no idea what that means. Maybe those copies are just for the book signing, and maybe many will be sent back after that. But maybe this is good, and reflects how well the original launch in Derby went, assuming that this did go well. Anyway, with eighty more copies on their way to Waterstones, I bought that one copy that they had today.
See also, The Devil’s Dice with dog, in Waterstones Brighton. Again, right down by the floor with the other Ws.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Bridge reflected
Yes. Here at BMdotcom we like bridges and we like reflections, so here is a bridge, reflected:
I encountered this photo here.
New bridges are a bit hard to come by these days, especially given the fact that so many places are called “Newbridge”, and so many bridges, are called The New Bridge no matter when built because once upon a time that was accurate. All of which complicates all searches for new bridges. And when you do find new bridges that really do claim to be new bridges, it turns out I’ve seen almost all of them, and all the interesting ones.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Wartime Encryption for Pigeons
As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:
Twitter caption:
War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.
Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.
“Liagson”:
Wayne Meyer:
They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.
Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.
And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?