Very cool, if true

Gideon first started having an upset stomach in 2023, aged two and a half. It took us until late 2024 to get him to see a specialist, who wasn't able to spot anything, and we were left baffled, but with medicine (Mebeverine) which helped a lot. And so things carried on with that making his life okay for the last two years.

About 3 weeks ago his stomach started getting worse. He was completely attached to the microwaveable fuzzy giraffe that he clutched to his stomach, he was crying intermittently from pain, and it was clear that we were going to have to go back to the doctor. We'd made a half-hearted attempt at an exclusion diet when he was 3, but excluding food from the diet of a very picky 3-year-old is...not easy. But at age 6 he was capable of understanding what we were doing, and once we explained a couple of times he was entirely on-board with us trying a week without milk and then a week without wheat, to see if we could at least exclude the most common foods before we went back to a specialist.

4 days without milk did nothing to fix things. But I did notice that Gideon was regularly feeling just fine before dinner, and then rubbish afterwards (highlighted by me getting him to score his pain out of ten several times a day) And, as his evening meal is universally fish-fingers, potato waffles, and beans, and as wheat sets off my IBS, I decided one night to substitute his fish fingers for my gluten-free fish fingers. Which, again, made no difference.

Somewhat baffled, but with all of the obvious options excluded, I switched his beans out for peas the next night. And he felt fine. His stomach was rated a "9.5" at bedtime. So I did some research and discovered that baked beans are a prime source of galacto-oligosaccharides - part of the O in FODMAPs (which I am very aware of because of my own IBS), and a common source of food intolerance.

It's now been a week since then, and 4 days since he has had his stomach medicine (which was previously thrice daily) and he's been fine. I am relieved, delighted, and ashamed for not having worked it out years ago. I've let his school know that they should stop with his lunchtime dose, and we'll see how it goes.

One interesting point along the way - when trying a milk-exclusionary diet at home we tried him on almond milk in his cereal, and his lips got all puffy and he felt all weird. So we've dropped that very quickly, and at some point over the next few weeks I'll take him to the GP and ask for advice on allergic reactions to nuts.

I just noticed that there were a cheap pair of earbuds - £24 reduced from £50. And I noticed there was a new model out this year, so out of pure curiosity I checked the last time it had cost £50. And the answer, according to Amazon's own AI, was basically never. Their data only went back a year, but it was never above £32.

That seemed weird to me - I thought that if you showed something as reduced then it had to have been on sale for the full price within the last few weeks. So I went and checked some more detailed data where I discovered that it had been £50. For lots of very short periods - for example literally between 1:41 and 3:03 in the morning. Which strikes me as not actually compliant. Certainly not in Europe, where the comparison price is the lowest price in the 30 days before the "sale" started.

1. Israeli settlers attack European diplomatic cars in West Bank and beat French mayor

(tags:Israel terrorism Palestine )

2. 9 of my more formative albums

(tags:music history )

There's an article here on the fact that Labour has promised to build seven new towns and there are no sign of them.

And I would actually like to be sympathetic, because that kind of thing takes an absolute age with huge amounts of upfront work to get the legalities and purchasing in place, dealing with consultations and reviews and inquiries, before you finally get an actual new town.

What doesn't take an actual age is putting up a web page saying "We promised X. The steps are A, B, and C. We've done A. B is due in November 2026, and C will be done by May 2027." and adding in a bunch of FAQs about it.

It doesn't need to be perfect. But that level of transparency is the kind of thing that would make a real difference. Rather than getting newspaper articles saying "Labour promised a thing! Where is it? The opposition say it's never going to be done!" you'd have a single place you could go to to see what the government has promised and what's happening with it.

Searching for official statements on the New Towns programme all that is available is the original proposal and a consultation that closed in May. Give me a project page and a list of tasks completed, or with due dates, and it would absolutely change the conversation.

1. Arthur's Seat gallery begins construction at Dynamic Earth

(tags:edinburgh volcano science museums )

2. Man nostalgic for simpler times when his fridge didn't need protection from international cybercrime

(tags:satire funny technology hacking )

1. Secret of Orange Cats Finally Revealed After 60-Year Search

(tags:cats colour genetics )

2. The people who use AI to deal with difficult family members (and ex-members)

(tags:ai society communication )

3. A majority of Brits want a rejoin referendum within 5 years (and what they think of the various options)

(tags:uk europe polls GoodNews )

4. We're finally unlocking the biggest mysteries of the clitoris

(tags:clitoris )

5. French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack

(tags:hacking security )

6. Did Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres cause Russian bot activity to plummet?

(tags:Russia propaganda technology Ukraine war )

7. Trump's Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear

(tags:politics corruption USA Ukraine Russia war )

8. Epic Games reportedly pivoting to "AI first" game development model

(tags:ai games art software )

1. The BBC continues to be institutionally transphobic

(tags:LGBT transgender bbc bigotry )

2. The mother of dinosaurs (awesome sculptures)

(tags:dinosaurs sculpture )

3. Majority of Christian nationalists in Britain rarely go to church

(tags:religion fascism UK racism bigotry )

4. Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers

(tags:bots drones Russia Ukraine war )

A couple of months ago I started getting the occasional 15 minute gaps to myself in the evening*, and felt up to returning to my play-through of Dark Souls 3**. And I reached the point where I was fighting a very-late game boss, who arrives on a dragon, and got stuck. After a dozen or so attempts I could defeat the dragon, and eventually, about a month a go, I reached the point where I could defeat the dragon without taking any damage. But I was darned if I could beat the rider.  I recorded this to show Jane at the time:



As you can see, I do a pretty good job of defeating the King Of The Storm (although I can now do it about twice as fast) and then I last 25 seconds of not doing any damage before being annihilated.

Well, *today* in an attempt I sadly didn't record***, I killed both of them.  And then sat there trembling for about 30 seconds while the adrenaline wore off.

Next up: the DLC. I hear that the land is peaceful, its inhabitants kind.  I'm sure everyone will be lovely to me.


* I'm not at the moment, as Gideon wants me to play either board games or Roblox with him every evening.
** Technically a re-play, as I restarted with a strength build after getting 95% of the way through with a Pyromancer and realising that I was leaning too much on help for the trickier bits.
*** my 6th, I think, while Jane took the kids swimming - we're alternating who gets a couple of hours with no children each week.

I first encountered ignosticism over a decade ago, and it's made some discussions much easier, basically because I refuse to engage with them unless the conversation looks to actually be useful.

The basic idea behind ignosticism is that discussions of "God" are meaningless unless the term is defined, and that the vast majority of the time the usage is so vague that you literally do not have enough information to have a meaningful discussion.

There is a solution to this - before you can discuss God you need to define what you mean by the word, pinning it down enough that there is mutual understanding of what the question is actually asking. Sadly, it turns out, most of the time people are very bad at explaining what they mean by the term, and you can safely conclude that without going back to basics and defining terms the conversation isn't going anywhere. If the person you're discussing things with doesn't have *some* kind of coherent meaning behind what they say then communication is impossible.

Once I saw this for religion, it became obvious that this was true of a whole host of discussions people have, and so they have also ended up on the "Will not discuss this unless people can define their terms" list. This most frequently includes more nebulous ideas like "Meaning", but also reminds me that there are plenty of terms* where there are multiple (or nebulous) meanings to words (or the meanings have changed over time), and I want to know what a actually person means before getting too caught up in a discussion. If nothing else because sometimes people use the same word with two different meanings in the same conversation, allowing them to unreasonably "win" an argument.

So now there are whole areas of discussion I overhear that I just stay out of, and many discussions where I am much more alert for them devolving into language/logic games rather than fruitful exchanges of views. It's definitely helped a lot.

* Examples include "Consciousness", "Free Will", "Zionism", "Respect", or "Bimonthly".

Having blogged incessantly about Brexit back when it was just an exciting* event to look forward to**, I felt that I should write something about the possibilities now that we might be going to do something sensible about it.

The newspapers have been very excitable recently about the polls showing that Andy Burnham might not have to be burned at the stake for saying that Brexit is not entirely awesome. They've finally noticed that the polls are not in favour of Brexit. They don't seem to have noticed that the polls came out against Brexit as soon as mid 2017, and have been in favour of rejoining for five years now, presumably because it wasn't politically expedient to notice that.

In any case, we now have a prime minister who is in favour of some kind of closer relationship with the EU. What might that look like? Well, for a start, there might not be an answer that makes everyone happy. Public support for a closer union *without* rejoining is really popular, 73:15 (+58 net support), with rejoining the EU is popular, but less so - 59:32 (+27 net support)***, while if you ask people whether they would be up for rejoining if it meant losing our opt-outs (i.e. we'd have to join the Europ and Schengen) then support drops to 35:43 (-8 net support). So, if the EU say "We'll pretend that the last decade never happened, you can have everything you had before" then huzzah, all returns to normal. But if they say "Sure, we'll let you back in, but you aren't going to be super-special any more, you'll just be an average member of the EU" then there might not be support for it. On ther other hand, support for staying out (or getting *further* out is even lower (-21 and -41 respectively)****.

Support is there for rejoining the Customs Union or the Single Market. But the customs union alone doesn't shift the economic dial that far, and rejoining the single market without rejoining the EU really does make us a rule-taker. We'd be in the same situation as EFTA countries, signing up to EU rules we have no control over, in exchange for some opt-outs. Which might be where we end up for a while.

There's also the sticking point that the EU is not going to put up with us changing our minds all the time. And we recently had a situation where for over a year our bloody stupid voting system meant we'd have had a Reform majority, who would have pulled us straight back out, even though they never had more than 1/3 of the overall vote. So if we want the EU to accept a more stable situation in the UK then we're going to have to stop electing our governments in a way that provides massive swings in control over trivial changes in actual voter behaviour.

Now, I'm in favour of rejoining, but I'd also like people to end up with a possibility they can live with, with the possibility that we don't oscillate in and out of the EU because people hold a grudge. So if I was running the country what I'd do here is to go to the EU and discuss what kind of deal might be made on rejoining. And then I'd have a referendum using IRV***** which had multiple options, including things not changing, an EFTA-like relationship, rejoining the EU with our opt-outs (if there's any chance of that), and full-on joining the Euro/Schengen. And then let people rank them, and see which one gathers majority support.  And have people argue over multiple options rather than "YES VS NO" would hopefully give us a slightly more nuanced discussion, and an answer which actually told us what people really wanted.

* Horrifying
** Dread
*** Both figures from here 
**** See the graph 2/3 of the way down here entitled "What relationship with the EU do Britons support?", and the section directly above it.
***** Voting experts in the back row who are about to mention Condorcet or Arrow Theorem, please don't.