Whose party?
I'm not hugely a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. I'll defend him when he's attacked, especially when people repeat the vile slander that he's antisemitic. I do think he's the best leader the Labour Party has had since Michael Foot. But honestly, that isn't saying much.
He is, as Tony Benn said, a signpost, not a weathercock: a person of principle, whose principles do not change. But he's also stubborn, sometimes unnecessarily belligerent, not a good communicator, and not, I think, a fast thinker. And he's old — older than me — and I think it's time for our generation to get out of the way.
A letter to John Cooper MP on gaza
I've written another letter to my (Conservative) MP about Gaza. In the lead up to the debate on the petition 'Urgently fulfil humanitarian obligations to Gaza' a lot of us are going to have to do something similar. I'm posting this so that you can take advantage of the research I have done, but please, write your own letter to your own MP. Multiple copies of the same letter have much less effect than an equal number of different letters.
Also, I haven't hit all the beats here: there's something I meant to write, that in the moment I forgot, and I'd be grateful if other people managed to get it into their letters.
On Terrorism, and Genocide
On Terrorism, and Genocide
What am I doing?
Don't know, don't care
I first wrote about the principle 'don't know, don't care' in my essay Post-scarcity software in February 2006 — which is to say, twenty years ago. There's a lot wrong with that essay, seen from this perspective; my thoughts have moved on a fair bit. But there's far more right than there is wrong.
Firstly, everyone who uses software already uses the principle 'don't know, don't care'. We have to. The code we write (almost always) is built on top of libraries. We use libraries rather than reinventing everything ourselves for reasons of cognitive overload: we cannot keep all the details of all the layers of software under us in our heads and still have room for our own work. We don't know, and don't care, exactly what goes on inside the library code, provided the contract expressed by the API is delivered and the performance is acceptable. If the API contract isn't delivered, we file a bug report. If the performance isn't acceptable, we typically look for an alternative library.
Flying out the hayloft
Ever since I built the cattle shed, and added the derrick to the front of it to allow bales to be hoisted up, I've thought that would make a very cool place to do a suspension. But it's also an extremely dodgy place to do a suspension, because the derrick is a Douglas fir beam 150x50mm cantilevered out of the front of the shed, with a pigtail hook screwed into it. Vertically below the derrick is a concrete ramp. Any fall onto that ramp could cause serious injury.
So there are two problems here: one is having a sufficient safety line in case the primary lift hoist fails — either because the tackle itself fails (unlikely) or the derrick fails (somewhat less unlikely); and the other is getting the person to be suspended up there. The answer to the second problem is in essence simple: you could just hoist the person up from the ground. But, given that there's a doorway right there, you don't have to.