Interesting Links for 27-03-2026

[andrewducker]

1. Rates and Wrongs: Fixing UK Tax Cliff Edges and Tapers

(tags:uk tax reform )

2. The UK is on course for Net Zero by 2050. With 64% of the population in favour

(tags:UK globalwarming GoodNews )

3. The Lord of the Rings: Toughest quiz ever (I got 14/30)

(tags:lot quiz )

4. Trail-hunting set to be banned in landmark crackdown

(tags:fox GoodNews uk labour )

5. False claims in a widely-cited paper. No corrections. No consequences. Welcome to the Business School.

(tags:research fraud OhForFucksSake )

6. The speaker of the House of Commons cannot make Keir Starmer answer MP's questions

(tags:politics questions )

7. How much would we get if we extracted North Sea Oil? (See top of page 4 of report - not much)

(tags:oil uk )

Comments

[original_aj]

I got 14 too!

[nancylebov]

I got 22.

[calimac]

Well, that was tough. But it was by John Garth, and I would expect nothing less learned from him. I got 25, and one of the errors was just a mental glitch on my part.

[jack]

Nice!

[jack]

Nice!!

[jack]

18.

Not bad! I don't know a lot of obscure stuff, but a lot of bits stuck with me.

My proudest moment in a Tolkien quiz was the Cambridge Tolkien society vs Oxford. I knew LOTR much much less well than a lot of friends who knew elvish moderately well etc. But for some reason, I always remembered that Sam's rope was 30 ells long, and that was a question no-one else knew.

[andrewducker]

Much better than me. And I re-read the book this year!

(Albeit in 10 minute chunks while falling asleep)

[lilysea]

Would extracting North Sea Oil seriously damage commercial fishing for eg cod and other edible fish?

Because I feel like the fisheries around Britain have enough trouble (due to overfishing in the 1970s/1980s/1990s) already.

[calimac]

For me, the easiest questions were mostly those about Tolkien writing the book rather than the sub-creation. Although some of the latter, like 16 and 20, seemed pretty damn easy to me. But the cleverest was 17, because that's something you're only likely to get right if you've already noticed this yourself. (I had.)

[calimac]

Good for you: you'd have beaten me also on that one. I have had the experience of knowing something no-one else did, and the panicked feeling in some cases of "dare I put myself forward here? What if I'm wrong?"

But there was one time on a trivia quiz - not a Tolkien one - where I held out valiantly against the combined insistence of the entire company, and I was right. The question was (and remember that we were all Americans) "Which state extends further north, Washington or Maine?" It looks like Maine on a lot of maps with curved-latitude projections, but it's Washington.

[channelpenguin]

Another 14 on the Tolkien quiz!

LOTR quiz

[wildeabandon]

I got 17, but there wasn't a single question where I was confident about the answer. (There were 12 where I felt like I was doing more than guessing blindly, of which I got 8 right, so either I was a bit lucky getting 9/18 on the rest, or I was remembering slightly more than I was conscious of).

Re: LOTR quiz

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, there were plenty where I had no idea at all.

[hilarita]

I got 24, with a couple of silly mistakes.

[nancylebov]

My head canon is that Orthanc is magically reinforced obsidian.