"Far too nice to be a journalist": Terry Pratchett. Lead writer, Flagship. Semafor. chiversthomas(a)gmail. Third book, Everything is Predictable, out now!
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A small announcement: my next book, Everything is Predictable, about how Bayes' theorem is the most important little equation in the world, is out in April and will look like this! If you'd like to pre-order, you can do so here geni.us/EIPBook and I will be very grateful
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ooh, first of March! I can open the first window on my Brexit advent calendar!
*opens*
aww, it's a little picture of insulin shortages
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Genuinely lovely to see. This tournament has made me such a wet blanket
ITV Football
England 🤝 Denmark
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Live MRI of a person talking. Incredible. Via teddit.net/r/ThingsCutInHalf…
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For a minute there I was worried some of this was men’s fault, but I’m relieved the blame is now back on women where it belongs
The @maitlis interview of Emma Thompson was PR for latter. ET not pressed on what she’d done to tackle the abuse she claimed was everywhere
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absolutely amazing. I'm writing about The Dress (it's Bayesian, you see) and this demonstration is almost uncanny.
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Mate I’ve got enough going on without worrying about butterflies’ mental health
Sir David Attenborough has urged members of the public to spend 15 minutes counting butterflies because it is good for their mental health spr.ly/6016DqtDQ
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this is incredible to watch. Blair actually listens to the questions and provides considered answers to them. I didn't realise you were still allowed to do that.
"You don't want an election because you fear the outcome, you want a second referendum because you didn't like the result of the first. What kind of a democrat are you?"
@AfNeil challenges Tony Blair on backing referendum before election
bbc.in/2MkNcCo #andrewneilshow
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"the planes will fly, there will be clean drinking water, and there will be adequate supplies of glucose, milk solids and whey" is, fundamentally, a very weird thing for a politician to say and for a crowd to cheer
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Years ago, Slate Star Codex suggested including an obviously silly dummy question - he suggested "Do you believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?" - on surveys, to get a sense of how many people are trolling or randomly ticking boxes. I love that Pew has done basically that
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I don't know the first thing about Qassem Soleimani, I hadn't heard of him five hours ago, and my opinion on the subject is precisely without value. I can get you 800 words by the close of play
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it's not "fine", it's quite rude. But that doesn't justify you asking around to find the employer of the person who said it, saying you'll call the CEO in the morning, saying "you're finished", or threatening to sue. Those actions are not compatible with free speech advocacy.
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Subtweet, but I see 18 months into the pandemic we’re still taking disapproving photos of people on crowded beaches. They’re outdoors! It’s good! The virus is not spread by fun!
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School attendance drops on 14 December, which is "Christmas jumper day", apparently because underprivileged children's families can't afford to buy a single-use jumper tes.com/news/exclusive-data-… this seems a good reason not to do Christmas jumper day, IMO. Via @Ed_Dorrell @stephenkb
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Writing the word “sceptical” on your movement doesn’t make you sceptics, any more than writing the word “cold” on a box makes it a fridge. Scepticism involves work, real work, assessing and revising your own beliefs, not just reflexively rejecting what you see as orthodoxy
"When they start calling you names, that's when you know you're winning the argument."
Julia responds to the abuse she has received online throughout the coronavirus pandemic: "Since when was being sceptical a bad thing?"
📺 Watch the show ► piped.video/sNBu_c6amlM
@JuliaHB1
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I find this so very odd. None of it is real! None of it happened! Nothing even particularly *like* it has happened! It's a good programme but you can't learn anything real from it. It is literally made up.
Now streaming: @NetflixUK's Adolescence for free in secondary schools across the UK.
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what the hell are you doing Allison? Outing people's employers, suing randos on Twitter? What happened to the whole cancel culture/freedom of speech thing?
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musings on Dominic Cummings, who reads all the same blog posts I do, and who (I speculate) thinks he is playing some John von Neumannesque game theory strategy but may in fact be playing chicken with an oncoming train unherd.com/2019/08/dominic-c…
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A brilliant profile of Donald Trump, featuring this splendid titbit, via @mehdirhasan lrb.co.uk/v37/n20/deborah-fr…
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it is important that you unmute this vine, via @aljwhite vine.co/v/iXWz6516Ipz
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worth noting that he will be allowed to drive again in 14 years. A woman dead and two children with devastating brain injuries after he drove, using his phone, at 123mph. Previously convicted of uninsured driving. SURELY that's a "never allowed behind the wheel again" scenario
A motorist who filmed himself speeding at 123mph as he weaved through traffic on a motorway has been jailed for 12 years for killing a pregnant actress and her unborn child
thetimes.co.uk/article/123mp…
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I don't have strong opinions on whether we ought to open up on 19 July. Since people with no strong opinions don't usually say anything, Twitter is disproportionately full of strong opinions. So I thought I'd say it. I don't really know. It seems complicated.
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I find people who are actually in favour of a particular political party in this election, as opposed to merely trying to find the least terrible option, deeply unrelatable
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got unblinded from the Oxford-AZ trial yesterday! Turns out that I had the real thing, back in June last year or thereabouts (I am a bit surprised, because I had absolutely no side-effects). Am vaccinated!
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BREAKING: God-Emperor Hunt declares that he shall control the flow of spice from Arrakis
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I think I've seen the tweet. If I'm right (I'll DM) it doesn't use the phrase "hate campaign", so you shouldn't put it in quotes. Also, it's a nothing tweet which you should have ignored. You don't get to complain about cancel culture & try to get people fired in the same breath
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my only tweet about the submersible is that these "you only care because they're rich white men" pieces are dumb aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/… we cared re Thai cave boys and Chilean miners, who weren't white or rich. It's "people stuck with time running out" that's compelling
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in year 7 creative writing, I described an inappropriately bubbly character as "effervescing" instead of speaking. The teacher told me not to use words I didn't understand BUT I DID BLOODY UNDERSTAND ACTUALLY MR SUPPLY TEACHER I WAS WRITING CREATIVELY nitter.app/PuccaNoodles/status/96…
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my god, let the man look in the landfill. I find this story so weird. Why is the council so virulently against it? theguardian.com/technology/2…
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This is *wonderful*. Tony Abbott posts an "off on hols" Insta pic of his boarding pass; an enterprising nerd uses it to hack into the Qantas website, get Abbott's phone and passport numbers, and GO ON AN AMAZING JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY (while doing NO CRIMES) mango.pdf.zone/finding-forme…
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This image of Dr Katie Bouman at the moment the black hole photo was processed is just lovely, and rightly top of /r/mademesmile teddit.net/r/MadeMeSmile/com…
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"the guardian could have become hugely profitable simply by running only articles that agree with me" – everyone
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Big political news as Britain appoints its first ever Warhammer-playing Home Secretary
I liked a @YouTube video piped.video/IFtGITz_zjU?a How to paint Astorath The Grim? Warhammer 40000 | Blood Angels
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what, and I cannot stress this highly enough, the fuck
🚨 BREAKING: Germany suspends AstraZeneca vaccine over blood clot fears telegraph.co.uk/global-healt…
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Just noting for the record that @thetimes will let you subscribe online but only lets you cancel by phoning them up, so I am cancelling my subscription on principle. Utterly dreadful, predatory behaviour and I thought better of them
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*on a corpse*, which seems a sufficiently important detail to merit a mention in the headline
World's first human head transplant is successfully carried out
telegraph.co.uk/science/2017…
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On immunity passports, Bayesian statistics, and why a "95% accurate" test saying you've had Covid-19 does not mean that there's a 95% chance you've had Covid-19
(I think this is quite an important point that doesn't seem to have been addressed much?)
unherd.com/2020/04/how-far-a…
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why do orang utans all look like they've just released the hottest literary non-fiction book of the year
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A friend describes Vance as "Vice President Motte"
This is moralistic garbage, which is unfortunately the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say.
For three years, President Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn't have started if President Trump was in office; second, that neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory. This was true three years ago, it was true two years ago, it was true last year, and it is true today.
And for three years, the concerns of people who were obviously right were ignored. What is Niall's actual plan for Ukraine? Another aid package? Is he aware of the reality on the ground, of the numerical advantage of the Russians, of the depleted stock of the Europeans or their even more depleted industrial base?
Instead, he quotes from a book about George HW Bush from a different historical period and a different conflict. That's another currency of these people: reliance on irrelevant history.
President Trump is dealing with reality, which means dealing with facts. And here are some facts:
Number one, while our Western European allies' security has benefitted greatly from the generosity of the United States, they pursue domestic policies (on migration and censorship) that offend the sensibilities of most Americans and defense policies that assume continued over-reliance.
Number two, Russians have a massive numerical advantage in manpower and weapons in Ukraine, and that advantage will persist regardless of further Western aid packages. Again, the aid is *currently* flowing.
Number three, the United States retains substantial leverage over both parties to the conflict.
Number four, ending the conflict requires talking to the people involved in starting it and maintaining it.
Number five, the conflict has placed--and continues to place--stress on tools of American statecraft, from military stockpiles to sanctions (and so much else). We believe the continued conflict is bad for Russia, bad for Ukraine, and bad for Europe. But most importantly, it is bad for the United States.
Given the above facts, we must pursue peace, and we must pursue it now. President Trump ran on this, he won on this, and he is right about this. It is lazy, ahistorical nonsense to attack as "appeasement" every acknowledgment that America's interest must account for the realities of the conflict.
That interest--not moralisms or historical illiteracy--will guide President Trump's policy in the weeks to come.
And thank God for that.
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This gets my back up. Not because Labour antisemitism isn't a real problem but because it seems wildly implausible that Gove is using it for anything other than political gain. It feels so cheapening. If he truly wanted to fight racism he has plenty to look at in his own ranks
History teaches us where a failure to stand up to anti-semitism leads - which is why it is all the sadder to see this historian of the twentieth century fail to heed its lessons
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Aspartame does not cause cancer at normal doses in humans. Genuinely ridiculous headlines off a stupid, badly designed concept from an organisation that's been screwing up health-science communications for years now
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THIS ISN'T TRUE AND I WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP SAYING IT
Some days it gets a little worse. Some days it gets a little better. On average, the "a little better" days are slightly more common, and over decades that makes a difference, which is why things are better now than in 1980
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The issue for me with this is that it seems that the Conservative party thinks that KFC is itself a large chicken, rather than a place that sells the dismembered and fried parts of normal-sized chickens
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Guys just to say, I'm 5yrs late to it but I have finally seen Detectorists and: it is just the loveliest thing. I adore how fond it is of nerdy men and their ridiculous hobbies, and how it is so obviously in love with the quiet, unglamorously beautiful East Anglian countryside
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it's very simple. If the archimandrite hits the woolsack with the mace, there will be a hustings, and all the periodontists will race to the end the chamber to see who is the Lord Spiritual. If there are more than 158, the chaplain dons the black robe and eats the Prime Minister.
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a bit tired of finger-wagging "weight-loss drugs are bad mmmkay" articles. If you don't want to take them, don't! But they're helping loads of people get healthier. It's not "society" that says being slim is usually healthy, it's your cardiovascular system inews.co.uk/opinion/life-mis…
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it's so IRRITATING when clever people deliberately misunderstand an argument. Chlorine isn't the issue, it's the lower food-safety & animal welfare standards that mean the meat needs washing
(plus UK tapwater chlorine content is usually <1mg/L, well below the WHO limit of 5mg/L)
If you are worried about chlorine washed chicken you better stop drinking tap water, which in the UK is set at 5mg/litre.
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the point of a public information campaign on energy-saving isn't (or shouldn't be) "You should save energy," but *telling people what saves energy effectively.* People might not know that, eg, running your boiler for three seconds is equivalent to leaving a light on for an hour.
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Apparently there was a series of Bayesian statistics conferences in Spain starting in the late 1970s, and they had a tradition of cabaret songs about how great Bayes' theorem is
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I just wanted to say: I've been running regularly, and almost everyone I see – runners, dog-walkers, families – is really considerate and trying to give people as much room as possible. I felt it worth highlighting that because we tend only to share the bad stories
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I discover that there is a subreddit, with 120,000 subscribers, dedicated entirely to pictures of chairs which are underwater teddit.net/r/chairsunderwate… if a chair is only partially underwater, the picture must be obscured & marked "NSFW", standing for "Not Submerged Fully in Water"
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I find American politics so fascinating. I love the idea of Bridget Phillipson or someone doing this at the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election
Fox News is big mad that we’re for the many, not the money.
We rallied 1200 people in the Bronx to take on dark money, get fired up, and send busloads of volunteers to canvass and phone bank.
It’s called organizing. And it’s fun as hell.
Get into it: mobilize.us/jamaalbowman/
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Thinking about this. It is WEIRD that we seem to be relying on the population *watching no10 press briefings and the news*. Where’s the wall-to-wall bright orange adverts? Banner ads on every website? Promoted bloody tweets even? Am I just not seeing them?
Just because the PM says something a press conference doesn’t mean 100% of people will notice. But what if every digital advertising screen and Facebook advert warned against moving for 24 hours? Before going the authoritarian route.
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this is absolutely nuts. The AI GPT-2 has learned to play chess moderately well (able to give bad human amateurs a game) – despite only being a text AI, learning from a corpus of chess notation text, and not having any concept of what a chessboard is slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/0…
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Really useful NHS England breakdown of death stats, arranged by day of death rather than date of report: seems to suggest we're comfortably past the peak england.nhs.uk/statistics/st…
(you need to download the XLS file if you want to see it; it's in the first tab of the spreadsheet)
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on the continued obsession - including in official government advice! - with cleaning surfaces and washing hands to combat Covid, despite a near-total absence of evidence that it spreads that way unherd.com/thepost/repeat-af…
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absolutely thrilled to say I've won a Royal Statistical Society "statistical excellence in journalism" award.
And a massive well done goes to our winner in the explaining the facts category who is @TomChivers for ‘Do we really have a ‘suicidal generation’?’ @unherd
unherd.com/2019/02/do-we-rea…
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small self-indulgent freelancer grumble, please look away now:
media outlets, you don't need your own invoice templates. "You owe me £70, here are my bank details" scrawled in lipstick on a napkin should get the point across. It is a needless hoop for freelancers to jump through
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last night I forgot to lock my phone before putting it in my pocket and accidentally sent the Labour press team a tiger emoji
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I don’t understand how anyone can think it’s okay to offer their support for a major national decision, not on whether it’s right for the country or not, but on whether a political rival promises to quit afterward
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Bought new iPhone. Had braced myself for the rage of it not having headphone socket. But was not ready to learn that the new charging cable is no longer USB. Why not? Why make everything slightly harder? Dickheads
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Extraordinary story. The Sri Lankan government tried to end the use of fertiliser on its farms and go organic, and - inevitably - crop yields collapsed and millions are hungry. Pure Lysenkoism foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05… via @CathyYoung63
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"In short, if you are currently being offered a dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, your chances of remaining alive and well will go up if you take the vaccine and will go down if you don’t." sciencemediacentre.org/exper…
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no they didn't, all the local megafauna immediately went extinct every time humans reached a new landmass
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Bloody hell! An old chess piece sitting in someone's draw turns out to be one of the missing Lewis Chessmen (12th-century Norse chess pieces made from walrus tusk) bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-e…
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A thought that just occurred to me: everyone should be required to play D&D or Warhammer or some other dice-rolling game at school, to get a visceral sense for how often "low probability" events come up. Rolling double ones is a <3% chance, but it happens ALL THE BLOODY TIME
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I went to Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross for dinner the other day, and I thought it was the best example of modern architecture being integrated with old that I've ever seen.
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me realising I don't need to have an opinion on every blasted thing that trundles down my timeline
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you 100% do not get to go on about freedom of speech and the dangers of cancel culture one day, and the next day threaten to sue (and name the employers of) a rando on Twitter who was rude to you.
(FWIW I am worried about freedom of speech and cancel culture!)
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you are KIDDING me that the NYT is leading its entire site with the Fukushima plant releasing wastewater this week! "6,500 miles from New York, a reactor that broke down 11 years ago is releasing some barely radioactive water well within safety limits a mile offshore"
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Utterly thrilled to win the Association of British Science Writers’ (@absw) science journalist of the year award. A huge honour. Congrats to fellow shortlistees Clive Cookson and Nicola Davies! And sorry for accepting the award with a child on my lap: bedtime has been complicated
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When the frame rate matches the rotor speed teddit.net/r/aviation/commen…
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You’re the OPPOSITION. This isn’t occupied France. Stop fantasising about the Second World War, it’s bad enough when the other lot do it
Labour's @EmilyThornberry speaks powerfully here. We are the resistance now.
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On the new covid strain, what we know and how worried we should be unherd.com/2020/12/how-dange…
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This is fascinating. Apparently a nonzero number of psychological therapists end up convinced that they are literal exorcists of literal demons? astralcodexten.com/p/book-re…
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I’ve just been made aware of this picture of Gillian Anderson dressed as Morticia Addams and I thought it was important. Via teddit.net/r/OldSchoolCool/c…
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Bloody hell, this newly declassified Foreign Office report on Tiananmen Square is horrifying en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/UK_…
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I’m immensely wary of direct between-country comparisons for a load of reasons. Are deaths recorded the same way? Have demographics affected outcomes? Are different triage systems in place? A lot of this will become clear over the next few years, not in these first weeks
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yes but what do Lord Flour and Lord Eggs have to say
Bake Off will be a 'total disaster' on Channel 4, says Lord Sugar trib.al/j898qoH
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I *knew* it! And no I will not be looking into the details because PAPER STRAWS ARE AN ABOMINATION phys.org/news/2023-08-paper-…
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I wrote about Gap's "sexist" advert, and I got this email. So I would like to share this URL girlsunitedforchange.com/
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I agree with this. It's easy to say "Why does this bother you?" but anachronistic details in historical fiction can be jarring, and Jane Seymour's mother being black is unambiguously anachronistic. You could argue the message is worth the cost, but at least admit it's a tradeoff.
Racially diverse casting can work well in period TV – eg, "The Great". But Wolf Hall S01 was notable for its authenticity: candles for lighting, costumes made using 16th Century cloth designs. And yet the new series has a black guy *on Henry VIII's privy council*. Come on!
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On the New York Times’ decision to name a pseudonymous blogger, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, and why I think that’s disastrous unherd.com/2020/06/slate-sta…
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