Status-Q

Like many of you, no doubt, we've been stocking up on the necessary goods to tide us over the Christmas period.

However, Rose tested positive for Covid yesterday, so our most important stocks now look like this:

Rose isn't suffering much, and we were planning a fairly quiet Christmas anyway, so it's not a bad time for it to happen!

I'm still showing negative, so am being sent out promptly to do any shopping before that dreaded second pink line appears on my tests too. And that means that I am in full control of the purchasing of the brandy cream which you might have spotted in the top right of my picture. Ho ho ho!

Now, I've always liked to consider myself something of a connoisseur of mince pies, and, in the absence of proper home-made ones, I have to say that those carrying Heston Blumenthal's brand in Waitrose have been consistently good over the years. This year is no exception. I wouldn't know Herr Blumenthal (or any other celebrity chef) if I bumped into him in the street, but his pies, this year coming in a larger-than-usual format with a 'lemon twist' are decidedly tasty. And they have an important characteristic for those who, like me, are the sole consumer in the household: they stand up rather well to being microwaved. Herr B might be shocked at the suggestion, but you really can't heat up an oven just to warm an individual mince pie. Not two or three times per day. No, 15-20 secs on 600W is the only viable solution, unless, I guess, you have an always-on Aga. Mmm. I always thought there must be a raison-d'être for those, even in the modern age... Perhaps for next Christmas...

Anyway, mince pies can, of course, be improved even further with a topping of brandy cream, and here too, Waitrose has come up trumps this year with their Courvoisier-infused extra-thick variety. I've always considered brandy cream superior to brandy butter and I'm discovering that even their smallest pot is still sufficient to extend to a variety of other uses after the mince pies have been exhausted. Porridge, for example, will certainly benefit from a dollop of it, alongside the brown sugar and blueberries.

But the thing that made me seriously consider starting a petition to Waitrose, asking them to stock it all year round and not just at Christmas, was a couple of evenings ago when I first tried it with hot chocolate. Oh my word! (as they would say down under).

Make yourself a proper hot chocolate (which means using hot milk - none of this water-based nonsense). Use an electric blender or whisk to dissolve the chocolate beans, flakes or whatever -- these are rather good -- and then finish it off with a decent-sized floating island of extra thick brandy cream, before putting your feet up in front of Crooks Anonymous or Where Eagles Dare, and you can be sure of a jolly good evening.

Even if you do have Covid.

For those who haven't been following all the fun activity on Twitter recently, the platform has been going through, shall we say, some challenges!

For example, Elon Musk, the advocate of complete freedom of speech, has been blocking the accounts of people who even referred to a system that tracked the location of his private jet, despite the fact that it's based on publicly-available data. He's particularly got a grudge against journalists, which is ironic since they're generally the ones who are the most fond of Twitter.

But the latest move is even more amusing. Musk is clearly concerned about the very significant exodus of Twitter users to platforms such as Mastodon (which is causing mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal to publish How to use Mastodon articles).

In the last few days, people started to notice that any attempts to post a tweet containing a link to a Mastodon account have been blocked. So you can't directly say on Twitter, 'In future you can find me on Mastodon here....', at least not with a link as well. I had to employ some technical tricks to bypass their checks in one of my test Tweets! Others have done similar things - Ben Gracewood suggests that you can just make a QR code of your Mastodon link and post that...

Well, Twitter has now published a new official policy on the 'Promotion of alternative social platforms' from which the following are excerpts:

We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter.

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

Prohibited platforms:

• Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
• 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

People have pointed out that Twitter is quite happy to promote itself, and Twitter content, on its Facebook page, which does rather smack of hypocrisy. And of course, you can happily link to Twitter content from Mastodon and almost any other system on the net.

So I was delighted to discover that back in June, one of Elon's tweets contained the following:

It's great fun watching this -- a good pre-Christmas drama worthy of a future movie, no doubt. In the past, I've been willing to smile at most of Musk's eccentricities and cut him a lot of slack, partly because he has still, in my opinion, managed to do more than any man living to combat climate change. But there is a certain feeling of Greek tragedy to the last few weeks.

Still, it's could be easy to read too much into this. Mastodon is growing fast - I think the last figure I saw was over 8M users, but Twitter's millions are considerably more numerous. While it's no longer a hip place to be, it's not going away any time soon (unless it goes suddenly bankrupt!) My account there is now approaching 15 years old, and I still have it, though I can certainly imagine that I might not have one by this time next year.

And I wouldn't have any withdrawal symptoms if it went away. At the start of the Covid lockdown, I was concerned that I might end up spending too much time on social media, so I used Apple's ScreenTime facility to limit my combined viewing of Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn on all my devices to a total of 15 mins per day. (I don't do TikTok, and I deleted my Facebook account years ago after my 2017 New Year's Resolution was to be Facebook-free and I found life got better as a result, so they were the services that mattered.) I still have that limit in place, though at present it doesn't include my new Mastodon apps!

I wonder what 2023 will hold for the world of social media. Blogs, email and RSS feeds, of course, will continue to operate quite happily, and they at least will certainly still be here as next Christmas approaches.

Update, a couple of hours later:

Wow - interesting things now happening on Elon's Twitter feed....

The poll has 11 hours to run. Now, it may be largely symbolic, because if he stopped running it, but continued owning it... I wonder, if he stepped down, whether the share price would rise enough for him to be able to sell it within too great a loss?

Anyway, I'm left with the difficult voting choice: if Musk stays, we might end up with a world without Twitter, which I think would probably be a better place.
On the other hand, we'd probably still have a Twitter, but it would be his kind of Twitter, which would be worse...

In general, I think a reversion to the old Twitter would be the best, so I voted for his departure in that hope. There's something to be said for the devil you know.

The devil being Twitter, in this case. I guess that needs clarification...

Spotted this on Twitter. It's five years old, but I think it's great!

And I liked the comment below it by Kevin Leroux:

Marty! You've got to get Joseph and Mary to kiss at the Bethlehem Ball tonight or it's all ruined!

Paul Graham is a writer I've long admired.

I remember hearing him speak at one of Tim O'Reilly's original 'Foo Camps' in California, and, in that small group setting, he told us about some research he'd been doing, and was drawing some interesting conclusions - but he had stopped because he realised he'd never be able to publish it.

If it were true, it would have general interest, but he discovered (late in the process) that it would also apply disproportionately to certain ethnic groups and would therefore probably be branded as racist, even though he had had no knowledge of the connection with ethnicity when he started researching it. So he stopped working on it, and turned his mind to other things.

I wonder if he had this in mind when he wrote this excellent essay on the modern concept of heresy.

"A heresy", he says, "is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished."

Here's an excerpt:

For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used: to end a discussion.

If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.

The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.

It's nicely written, and he very carefully avoids mentioning any specific examples of modern 'heresies', because, "I want this essay to work in the future, not just now."

Worth reading and considering carefully.

Thanks to John Naughton for the link.

I came across a pleasing but unusual usage of a common English word today:

"Mother was urgent that the marriage should take place soon."

This is a somewhat archaic but perfectly valid sentence. If somebody urges something, they are urgent about it, in the same way that someone who hesitates is hesitant.

But you'll have to have a pretty good dictionary to find references to that usage; my Concise OED only hints at it, and you have to go to a more substantial version, such as the Shorter OED, to get an actual example of it being used that way.

I know that one of the reasons you read Status-Q is to appear more erudite at evening parties, so I thought you might wish to impress your friends by adopting this turn of phrase.

It came, by the way, from Agatha Christie's autobiography, which I've long considered to be one of her best books. Recommended.

Someone on Mastodon pointed out a useful thing today:

One mile per gallon is exactly the same thing as one furlong per pint.

So if anyone quotes their fuel consumption in furlongs-per-pint, you'll now know what it means. Pleasingly, this works even in America.

Once you've impressed your friends at the pub with that one, you can point out that one mile per gallon is about 3 leagues per firkin.

I like the instructions on a French device I've just bought:

1. How to put the battery?

1) Turn the lid of battery's room counterclockwisely and remove it. ...

If counterclockwisely isn't a word, I think it should be.

While I don't really have very strong feelings about whether or not we should have a monarchy now, I do believe that if you're going to have one, then ours has been about as good as you could get! It's not at all clear to me that countries that have got rid of theirs have, as a rule, received something much better in exchange.

So with that in mind, and being aware of history in the making, I settled down to watch some of Her Majesty's funeral today, and got hooked... and gosh, it was rather well done, wasn't it? It's very pleasing to think that, after recent embarrassments like Brexit and Boris, there are some things of which we as a nation can still be proud. The combined ranks of the BBC, the Crown, the Church of England and Their Majesties' Armed Forces can pull off some impressive stuff when they set their minds to it.

My mind, of course, also kept drifting to the technical achievements. The wonderful camera angles, with no other cameras in view. The enormously long but very slow zooms vertically down from the ceiling of the Abbey. The shallow depth of focus on the jewels atop the crown. The very great depth of focus over Winston Churchill's shoulder as his statue looked down on the passers-by below. The synchronisation of marching video and drum-beat audio, when the cameras must often have been far enough away to delay the audio by a noticeable amount. (I realised after a while they probably had radio mics near the drummers so as to transmit the audio at the speed of light instead.) It's hard enough for most of us just getting the audio levels right when recording a single bagpiper. To pull off this kind of production at any time is quite a feat, but to do it live, spread across an entire capital, and pretty much flawlessly... well, count me impressed. If the Duke of Norfolk didn't already have a duchy, he would have deserved one for organising this! But this was mostly the achievement of thousands of anonymous and very skilled people.

Then I wondered, too, how many bytes of data iPlayer had to cope with today, and took my hat off again to whomever was responsible for keeping those millions(?) of livestreams going for hours on end. It really wouldn't have been the time for unexpected network load to crash your routers, or for sudden reboots caused by unexpected software updates. I bet the technical team are breathing a sigh of relief tonight!

This was the first occasion I had actually sat down and watched any live TV in a very long time. The last time, I think, might have been when the armoured cars started rolling into Iraq in search of those weapons of mass destruction... So that would have been... 2003... nearly 20 years ago. Gosh again! I do watch lots of things on a television screen, but they're almost all movies, or recordings or streamings of shows that other people discovered a decade ago and we're only just getting around to binge-viewing now! We've been in this house for five years and I haven't got around to connecting the TV to the aerial yet, so we watched today's events on iPlayer -- which was probably higher resolution anyway -- and it looked fabulous rendered by AppleTV on our nice 4K TV.

And that's remarkable in itself. The last event of its kind -- the funeral of George VI -- was the first royal procession to be broadcast on television. Grainy, black-and-white, low-resolution cathode-ray-tube- & valve-powered television... and so few people owned a receiver then that almost everybody would have had to follow in audio-only form on the radio, and then read about it a day or two later in the papers. How things have changed, in one reign.

I wish King Charles a long and happy life, but when his time does eventually come, I expect we'll be viewing it in some sort of fully-immersive holographic projection. Though, as my friend Tim pointed out when I suggested it on Twitter, fully-immersive holographic projection will probably turn out to be just a fad. Remember 3D TV?

But in either case, I hope it's still produced by the BBC.

I'm glad to see that Douglas Adams's influence continues. I asked OpenAI, "How many roads must a man walk down?"

I think Douglas would have approved.

A couple of years ago, my friend Richard Morrison posted this graph, which I now think about whenever I go on vacation:

One way to increase the height of the second bump is to write lots of blog posts when you get back, but it's a welcome distraction from the process of getting my unread emails back down to double-digits. :-)