Hamstertron

So the other day the brain worms finally infected my dad and he actually said out loud with his mouth "What is a woman?", confirming that his media diet has more unhinged right-wing misinformation than I would like. I guess this post is kinda my response to him, but uninterrupted, which would not be possible on the phone.

The problem with the "What is a woman?" question is that it comes with a load of programming from rightoids but when lefties hear it, it has no context, and that's how it's used as a gotcha. They have a context in mind and use it to ridicule answers that don't fit with it. Before I get into the "What is a woman?" thing completely I first want to ask another question that I think illustrates the point I'm going to make. The question is "What is the sky?".

If you ask a really small child this question you will get an answer that involve pointing up and they may embellish the answer with the colour blue or grey or "clouds" but the jist is that it's that stuff above us. Are the stars in the sky? Yes. What's above the sky? Nothing, everything above us is sky (paraphrasing).

If you ask a slightly older child then, as you drill into the details, the answer changes. The answers become more thought out, more sophisticated. Are stars in the sky? No. What's above the sky? Space. So space is separate to the sky? Yes.

So now we're in an aeroplane, cruising at 10,000 feet. Is there sky above us? Yes. Is there sky below us? (Hesitation), yes I suppose. So as we come in to land and we're losing altitude when do we stop being in the sky? Some people will say when the wheels touch the runway. Others will introduce these caveats that boil down to the sky being the part of the atmosphere where you can move unimpeded and without the risk of crashing into a tree or a building or some powerlines or whatever. Crashing into other sky-users doesn't count.

So here we are with a definition of the sky that becomes more sophisticated and detailed not only as the cognitive ability of a person improves but also as we ask questions about the boundaries of the definition. The real thing this illustrates is that the sky has a kind of folk, communal definition because it is an imprecise term. It's not a scientific term. You can't talk about the sky to a meteorologist when discussing the weather, for example, it has no meaning. At best they may be able to predict what colour it might be but to them the atmosphere isn't a homogenous blob of air that you can label with a single word. It is a roiling, layered system of chaos with warm fronts, cold fronts, areas of pressure and so on. A word like "sky" simply has no use, it serves no purpose in the vocabulary and in their work.

In fact when learning science all through my school career I had to keep revisiting definitions I thought were settles. In junior school I learned atoms were made out of protons, neutrons and were circled by electrons. In secondary school I learned that the electrons lived in shells. In further education I learned that the shell thing was a simplification for kids and electrons actually lived at energy levels and if you pumped them with energy (such as heat) they would absorb that energy and jump up a level or two, but would eventually drop back down, releasing the energy as they did so. This is the mechanism by which certain chemicals can change the colour of the flame if you throw them on a fire. (e.g. malachite turns fire green, rubidium turns it red or whatever).

When I got to university they explained energy levels are a simplification for teenagers. Electrons aren't solid nor do they exist at a point in space. Instead an electron is a region of space where you have a high probability of detecting a negative charge. Oh and it sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle.

I'm sure if I went on to do a PhD I would have had to revisit even that definition (something, something, string theory, 12-dimensions, p-branes etc)

So... "What is a woman?" eh?

The answer conservatives have in mind is booba and vagine bearing baby makers who stay at home to raise kids and cook and clean.

And this is the big gotcha. They use words like "tradition" and "common sense" or "natural law" or something invoking some religious texts to make it seem like the most obvious thing in the world and that anyone who argues with them is the recipient of the "woke mind-virus". In reality, the booba-vagine-babies-homemaking thing is the definition that is the most childish, most simple, least sophisticated and most detached from reality. The irony is they already know women who are single, or don't/can't have kids or have gone through menopause or hysterectomies.

Of course it's only partially to do with women, and mainly to do with shitting on trans people. But in doing so they are revealing their own shitty attitudes to women, too. Get in the kitchen and make some babies! Oh and here are some derogatory terms for people who don't marry, have babies etc

As they say in Scotland, "git tae fuck".

It was pretty rich of my dad to dare speak such nonsense to me. Given that my parents divorced and I lived with him in my teenage years I really wanted to say something like "Well, I heard the older generation say that cooking and cleaning and bringing up children is womens work, and sewing and getting emotional and crying is womanly behaviour. And since I've seen you do all of those things when I lived with you, why don't you tell me what a woman is, since you clearly are one according to that definition". I would genuinely be interested in his answer (although it may possibly be "fuck off, you're always such a smug cunt"). The reason I want to say that to him is because it highlights the first issue with "What is a woman?" - it has no context and relies on conflating biology and roles in society. Of course, when you do this it becomes as useless as the word "sky" (or "fish" if you are aware of the "What is a fish?" discourse), too vague to use in a scientific context, but vague enough it can kinda mean whatever you want. This is why they don't ask "What is a female?". That has a more specific definition rooted in biology and as such it doesn't serve their disingenuous purposes.

But even simple biological definitions are fucked, like how my high school definition of electrons was fucked. A biological female being someone with pregnancy equipment and XX chromosomes is still an oversimplified explanation because there are many factors that affect how your sex expresses itself. See this Scientific American article for more info: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beyond-xx-and-xy-the-extraordinary-complexity-of-sex-determination/

And I am not even going to get into gender identity and gender expression (in this post, at least).

I'm not even sure what the purpose of this post is. Perhaps it's like those times you think of a measured or witty comeback hours after the argument is over. Perhaps it's so I can send another family member to read this instead of spending yet more precious seconds of my life explaining why they don't get to say something astoundingly stupid, like what an infant would say, but also be butthurt about how research suggests people who have less education and empathy tend to be more conservative. Ultimately, like most of the things I write on Tumblr, it's a dump of the ideas which have been seething, rent free, in my ADHD brain so I can store them here instead of in the place where I need to store my kids birthdays and my passwords for work stuff. And for that I can only apologise. <3

Audio version of this post if you'd rather listen than read:

As a programmer, timezones are one of those things that cause you endless misery. It's not because viewing the world though the lens of a logic machine makes things miserable, rather it exposes the stupidity and illogic of the human world.

Before the internet I didn't care about timezones. I come from peasants who couldn't afford international travel. I had no contacts overseas. GMT was all I needed and my life was simple.

As I progressed in my programming career I eventually had to build systems for a multinational corporation that were available in the UK, Europe and America simultaneously. Almost immediately I was given a requirement that users saw system events in their local timezone. After discussing with my colleagues how to store and translate times it became obvious that the most simple thing to do was store all times as Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) and only translate that into a timezone when it needed to be displayed on screen. All maths around time intervals between events would be calculated using UTC. All we needed to do was store a user's local timezone and we were good to go.

However as these systems expanded to other countries I noticed that timezones had some quirks. They didn't match up to lines of longitude on the earth, so knowing someone's latitude and longitude didn't let you calculate which timezone they're in. You have to figure out what administrative area they are in and look it up.

Sometimes countries will use a timezone to match a neighbour with whom they do a lot of business or have some sort of cultural connection. For example Spain is on the same line of Longitude as the UK, but it uses Central European Time (CET) instead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Likewise All the countries north and south of Belarus are GMT+2, but Belarus itself uses the same timezone as it's ally Russia; GMT + 3.

Some countries are so large they straddle multiple timezones. Australia rolls with it and has three (ok, five-ish) timezones. India is spread across the GMT +5 and +6 timezones but uses a single timezone where this is averaged out at GMT +5:30. Again there's no way you could calculate this, you have to look it up.

Worse still countries sometimes change their timezone! Samoa swapped from GMT -12 to GMT +13, the other side of the international date line so it could integrate better with Tonga, New Zealand and Australia. Have a look at this creative commons timezone map for how messed up it all is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/World_Time_Zones_Map.svg

In the age of the internet we have exposure to videogames and media where release times and server downtimes, and group play sessions are published using a specific timezone. Players have to do the legwork to translate this into something meaningful for them.

I play a little Planetside 2 and our ops night times are published in GMT and CET but we have players outside those times (e.g. from India) who still have to translate. Game patch time are always in Pacific Standard Time (PST) which is like GMT+8 but sometimes it's British Summer Time (BST) and I can never remember what that does... is PST like BST + 9 or +7?

And then of course you have the philosophical question of "What time is it at the north pole?". If all the lines of longitude converge at the north pole and you're standing at that point, what time is it? The answer becomes vague, since your left foot and right buttcheek are 12 hours apart. All you can say for sure is which two days it is, since the international date line defines the most recent day of the year but everywhere else is on the day before.

There is a solution to the madness

Abolish timezones and just use the international date line to start new calendar days. Everywhere on the planet just tracks how many hours since the start of the global day. No timezones, only Earth Time. This means that if a new patch for Planetside 2 is released at 19:00 Earth Time, then it's the same 19:00 for everyone at once. All clocks on earth are synchronised and say the same time. If I say we're playing at 15:00, then that is also the same 15:00 for everyone. If someone says "call me at 04:00" then no matter where either of us are on the Earth, we're talking about the same moment in time.

Now, obviously, not everywhere has daylight at the same time. After all the timezones were roughly based on 12:00 being when the sun was directly overhead. This allowed technologically unsophisticated, unconnected societies to schedule their days. In the new system, astronomical midday is important. After all you can only work 09:00 - 17:00 if astronomical midday is 12:00.

So, like the timezone offset, we still need an extra piece of information if we want to deal with different geographic regions. What time is midday? In France, astronomical midday is 11:00, in New York it's 16:00. This one piece of information lets you know how the structure of the day fits into Earth time.

The working day: If you wake up at 07:00, start work at 09:00, finish at 17:00 and are in bed for 22:00 then you know wherever you go on Earth those things have the following offset from astronomical midday:

Wake up: Midday -5

Start Work: Midday -3

End Work: Midday +5

Go to bed: Midday +10

The best thing is you don't need to memorise this because you can just figure it out when you need to. If you work then you already know these. The only thing you need to know is the astronomical midday of a particular location. And you only need to know that if you care when people are awake and at work or if you are traveling there. As an exercise Imagine you are traveling somewhere where their midday is 17:00. When does their working day start and end? Easy, right? Minus three and plus five. They work 14:00 to 23:00. If you want to extrapolate more then their midnight is 05:00 so you want to be in bed before that. I know this bit seems more complex than timezones but I promise you it isn't at all. This is a new way of seeing time but we gain more in simplicity than we lose to complexity.

Plus we are on the verge of becoming a multi-planet species. Can you imagine how insanely complex coordinating communication between multiple worlds, each with their own set of timezones will become?! No, we end the madness now. Each planet has their own global time. If it's 12:00 on Earth, then it's 12:00 everywhere on earth. If it's 12:00 on Mars, it's 12:00 everywhere on Mars. Keep it simple!

Today I am staggered by the lack of vision displayed by our politicians. Here in the UK we have had a cost-of-living crisis where the price of everything is rising at a rate that massively outpaces worker pay. One of the things that is driving this crisis is the war triggered by the invasion of Ukraine. This has disrupted Russian gas supplies into Europe and the energy providers have capitalised on this opportunity to raise prices. Electricity prices are up, gas prices are up, it's all up.

Onshore energy production is being expanded by a nuclear power station: Hinckley Point C. French national energy company EDF is building it and they stand to be the primary entity who will benefit from it financially. Brexiteers are strangely silent on all this cash coming out of our economy and disappearing to France. More recently the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced we need more gas-fired power stations. This is in stark contrast to Scotland, who reported producing 113% of their energy from wind and hydro in 2022. That's correct: 13% more power than they needed.

But even if we carry on as we are, the UK could find themselves embroiled in an armed conflict in the next decade or so. We're living in an era where targetting civilian infrastructure is a war crime however that doesn't prevent certain nations from targetting it anyway. Our most likely adversary in such a conflict is one of these nations. Hinckley Point C could be a target, as could any other power infrastructure such as the suggested new gas stations.

Ideally our power generation and distribution network would be resilient in a way that has more in common with the internet. Designed by DARPA to resist sections being nuked, it reroutes messages around newly-formed holes in the network to where they need to go. Any node in the network can create a message and send it to any other node.

A multi-tier, distributed power generation system I have been thinking about for a while would have this resilience built-in. My idea would allow every individual and perhaps the whole coutry to have energy independence. Power would be produced and consumed domestically, no need for foreign supplies or foreign companies owning the infrastructure.

The core element of this would be individual houses, rigged with solar panels and batteries. Nothing world changing so far, but this is only the lowest tier.

The next tier is to connect the batteries of houses on a street such that they balance the stored energy between them. Each house would be smart enough to reserve enough power for its needs but allow power stored beyond that reserve threshold to be transmitted to neighbouring batteries if they were below their threshold. If you think of two houses, one very busy with a family of five and the other very quiet with a stereotypical little old lady widow living on her own, these two houses have very different energy usage profiles. Both houses may be able to charge their batteries to 100% during the day but the family house needs 120% of the battery power, whereas the widow's house only needs 30%. The family's system could ask the widow's system for her spare power. The widow's system would oblige until it was reduced to 30% charge, the threshold for that particular house.

The goal of this system is not to buy and sell or hoard electricity. The goal is to provide everyone with the electricity they need, transmitted over the shortest distance possible.

A whole street connected in this way is the second tier. The mixed levels of consumption allow the over-producers to supply the over-consumers so everyone's needs are met. The third tier would be to repeat this between adjacent streets, perhaps with a dedicated street-level battery array. Thus the model scales up to neighbourhoods, boroughs and whole towns, with each town connected to its neighbours and so on. Every component of every tier is able to request power from its peers and donate surplus power to its peers.

Potentially we would no longer need a national grid as it exists today, nor would we need dedicated power stations, at least not for residential use. The reality is that 85% of the electricity consumption in the UK is industrial or commercial. Given that this is based on solar generation, converting 15% of the UK's power usge to be carbon-free is a big win. It means existing green power can be redirected to industry and our least green generators that are no longer needed can be decomissioned.

If this initiative could be publically owned then there is the potential for it to be payed for through taxation, essentially making electricity free, especially if you are raising taxes on huge corporations rather than individuals. Britain has a history of people living and dying in energy poverty so a distributed power system such as this would have a transformative effect on society. The economy would benefit from people spending their money elsewhere rather than on energy bills.

The downside of such a plan is the scale. I am certain that this requires more solar panels than exist in the world. I am also certain that making solar panels has an impact on the environment, too, but that is often out of sight, overseas. It would be irresponsible to trade the reduction of quality of life elsewhere for a gain in our own.

Perhaps we need to do a little more groundwork before such a system can be a reality. We need to make solar panel production more sustainable, such as the promising research being made in perovskite solar. We also need a major technological jump in energy storage technology as currently, the amount of batteries needed would involve an unholy amount of lithium, the mining and extraction of which has been outsourced to countries with poor environmental standards, much to their detriment.

We've always had this conflict between organic growth and designed things. At what point do we try and organise the organic? I grew up in the UK in the 1980's and this was the post-decimalisation period. Britain had officially adopted the metric system however all the adults who had lived most of their lives dealing with the Imperial system had a hard time breaking their habits and use the new system. Consequently I learned neither system properly. I knew there were 1000 grams in a kilogram and 1000 metres in a kilometer, but this was "head knowledge" and I had no idea how heavy a kilogram was or how far a kilometer was. Neither did I have any concept of how many pounds went into a stone of weight, nor how it felt to hold such masses. The same for how long a yard or mile is and how I couldn't apply them to the distance between landmarks important to me: my mum's house, my gran's house, my school, the shops, the local tube station. I measured those distances in minutes taken to travel them.

Eventually I learned the metric system but was baffled as to why we still talked about height in feet and inches, weight in stones and distance in miles (and therefore speed in miles per hour).

Later in my life I went back and learned the Imperial system. I was rather surprised people were not happy to ditch Imperial in favour for a system where the numbers scale sensibly. Bearing in mind metric money is 100 pence in the pound, metric weights were 1000 grams in a kilogram, 1000 kilos in a tonne. Compare to the clownshow of imperial units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

So Imperial vs Metric is a good example of an organic system versus a designed system. The thing is I love the Imperial system because it tells a story of people creating a practical system that has a direct relevance to them, and you can see how horses and carts, the industrial revolution and automation gave people such increased capability that they had to tack on units of a higher scale to the end of their hand-rolled system. The downside is after a century of accumulating cruft the system was complex and unintuitive. The numbers make no sense, the names of the units make no sense. Compare to the other system where, if you learn the word "kilo" means 1000, then you intuitively know a kilometer is 1000 meters or a kilogram is 1000 grams. The name literally tells you what it is and its relationship to smaller or larger units.

Here we come to the crux of my idea. The calendar. It's old and has cruft because it grew organically. There's no intuitive way to know how many days are in a month. You have to memorise it, often people do this with some sort of mnemonic like the "30 days have September, April, June and November..." but most people have to repeat it to themselves all their lives because we just don't need that info often enough. Typically you only care about how many days are in a month once a year! How about we make all the months the same length? How about we move a day from some of the 31-day months and give them to February? We started with four 30-day months, now we have 7!

I propose we move the 31st day from the remaining five months in to a special five day long year end/new year festival period. Mandatory public holidays. Six days long on a leap year.

So this is what it would look like:

Bonus points for moving July and August so they're the 11th and 12th months, since "Octo" means 8 so October should actually be the 8th month if you think names should mean something (and Nov = 9, Dec = 10)

I am a programmer. A Software Engineer, actually. It says so on my degree. Don't worry, it's only a 2.2, I don't have my head up my arse about it. I used to love programming. In my first jobs in my twenties I could talk to someone about some programming they needed doing, sketch some diagrams in my A4 ruled notebook, grab a cup of tea and just go at it until it was finished. Hours would pass but I would maintain focus until I finished or ran out of time and had to roll it over to the next working day. I loved it.

In 2023 things are very different. I grab a ticket from a Jira board and move it from the Sprint Backlog column to the In Progress column, I grab a cup of coffee, I create a branch in my repository for my work, I write some tests that become like a contract for how my code should behave, I then write the code, I stop to run the tests, I push my branch to Github and create a merge request, I go back to Jira and put my ticket in the Code Review column. I'm now waiting for someone to review my code and also for the pipeline to build and test my code. I might review someone else's code while I wait, or I might see what's happening in Slack, or even check my email. I don't love this. I don't hate it per se, but it's kinda unsatisfactory in a way I can't quite put my finger on.

Until today that is.

I realised I love walking my dog more than I love programming. I thought this was a weird realisation to have since I've always regarded programming as a form of self-expression and therefore inherently of more value than just walking down a street. I had to self-interrogate as to what it was, exactly, that brought me enjoyment.

It's winter now so it's dark out and today was especially cold for where I live in the UK. This means I tend not to see many other people out on the streets although those I do see are disproportionally also dog walking. When I walk my dog I maintain a brisk pace, partially for my own health but also to make sure my very good boy has burned off some energy otherwise he gets naughty in the evenings, stealing socks off the clothes airer, chewing on magazines and suchlike. So this combination of a steady, brisk pace alone in the dark had a hypnotic effect. I lose perception of time and almost feel like I'm gliding. I enjoy watching my dog as if from the perspective of a paraglider being towed by a big, fast wolf. I reach a flow state.

That's it - the flow state! I used to do that all the time when programming in my younger years. I would become one with the code. I would see the matrix! I could hold it all in my head. Sometimes I would debug things in my mind on the long walk home, making a note on my dumb-phone in the form of a draft SMS message.

Now re-read that second paragraph and you'll see it, too. The modern workflow is actively hostile to the flow state. Constant context switching and enforced gaps in your day while you wait for other things to finish. It's annoying like speed bumps in the road. I spend a big chunk of my day bored, with plenty of work to do but I'm not allowed to get on with it. One time I picked up a second ticket to work on while I was waiting for the first ticket to get done and the scrum master scolded me as if I were a naughty child!

So I have accepted that what was once my passion is now just a job to me and I will have to rekindle that passion elsewhere. Right now I am very much enjoying my little fluffy friend, my adopted son, my foxy little teddy wolf, my very good boy...

If you are a lefty, non-conservative and you have righty, conservative types in your orbit I have found the ideal topic that helps you determine whether they are serious thinkers or just cruel bullies.

The topic is providing supported housing to the homeless.

It's a perfect topic because we have a significant amount of evidence showing that when the state provides housing and support for addiction and mental health, the cost is much lower than just continual policing of this population. The studies (from the Nordics) show that it is much more expensive to police the homeless than it is to provide housing and access to support such as social workers, medical people who can help the residents kick drug habits and the like, therapists and people who can offer key skills training. In places that have given out free housing and nothing else, those programmes typically fail for individuals with drug habits, so the extra support is really important.

Small-c conservatives typically want to lower government spending so a supported housing policy is perfect - you combat a social problem by spending up to 20% less money than just siccing the police on hobos or waiting for them to die in their thirties. Many of the people who go through these programs convert back into being taxpayers although I haven't found any studies that examine the "Return on Investment" their tax brings in versus the cost of rehabilitating them.

So here's the part where you can tell if someone is a classic conservative or a compassionless meanie. A "Voight-Kampf" test, if you know Blade Runner. You just run this by them. The number of people in my orbit that fail this test is pretty depressing. They all fail it in the same way - they wouldn't want this policy enacted because they think homeless people are in that state because of some failure on their part and therefore they don't deserve help. Especially not if "I'm paying for it". Ironic for people who bleat out "facts dont care about feelings" yes?

Boom - now you know: They're just dickheads and can just go fuck themselves. It's up to you if you want to keep chipping away trying to root out the conservative brain-worms but like most infections you can only really treat it in the very early stages before it gets a foothold. A selfish individual only comes close to a cure when they are on the receiving end of some conservative injustice, like if they are homeless themselves and are asking for help which doesn't exist.

For every hour you spend debating with them or trying to convince them of the cruelty, prejudice and lies that make up the fabric of their talking points they are watching five hours of Tucker Carlson, Paul Joseph Watson and Matt Walsh. It's worth knowing who they're listening to because a lot of these individuals end up doing bad or hypocritical things like fucking kids, moving their hedge fund to europe after promoting brexit or secretly getting a covid vaccine when publicly advocating against it. It's fantastic to be able to say "What are you listening to that nonce for? Looking for tips on how to fuck 12 year olds? lol, read a newspaper or something" because ridicule is the only way to engage with people who talk shit.

So remember, some people are conservatives, and that's ok. You can respect them even if you disagree. But some people are cunservatives and are a waste of your time if you try and enagage with them politically. If they're your family, by all means keep sending christmas cards and pictures of your kids growing up if you feel like it but accept that you cannot change that which doesn't want to be changed, especially if they look down at you for your views. Pity them though because it's a childish, simplistic viewpoint that prevents them from enjoying the world as it really is. It's a form of mental handicap that denies them the ability to grow intellectually and keeps them in a state of fear and anger. That's why their media is always singling out groups for them to despise. I'm british so in our history we had in the 1980's gays, in the 1990's single mothers, in the 2000's we had poor people, in the 2010's we had foreigners and in the 2020's it's now:

lefties, despite having a right-wing Tory government in power for the last 12 years

"Remoaners", i.e. traitors

the EU, i.e. still foreigners

...who are to blame for all our ills. And they always do this to conceal the truth, that it is the conservatives who are to blame for the degradation in the quality of living for all normal people.