Very cool, if true

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.

Only 78 days until Christmas!
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

1. Fears grow that high diesel prices could lead to more cyclists

(tags:cycling satire inflation cars funny )

2. Tucker Carlson's defence of WWII Germany forces Britain to endure brief period of agreeing with Jacob Rees-Mogg

(tags:satire politics history UK funny )

You'll never guess where we went today.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

The number of people I've seen who have taken "The pension triple lock is becoming a double lock" to mean "The state pension is going to reduce in value" is really worrying, from a reading comprehension point of view.