English pedant and RP speaker here. Jabs is a colloquialism in British English, but the BBC website is riddled with grammatical and vocabulary errors daily and rarely rises above a secondary (high school) reading level.
Just finished ‘On the law of speaking freely’ Adam Tomkins - an excellent survey covering the US, UK and EU. In the middle of: Adventurers, David Howarth, an account of the beginnings of the East India Company, and Witch Wood, a delightful historical novel by John Buchan set in c16th Scotland. Just started: The House of War, the struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate, Simon Mayall. All good so far!
Ploughing isn’t quite mowing, of course, but the great Rabbie Burns tilled the same furrow in To A Mouse:
On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,
November, 1785
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ requet;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuing,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves and stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear
This ONS series is a poster child for ‘data is theory laden’. Nobody is ‘deprived’. And as OP notes, these gerrymandered patches do not capture rich and poor areas as seen by our own lyin’ eyes. Slice the data differently, you would have very different results.
This is so ridiculously childish. DHH’s politics should be entirely irrelevant. Ruby on Rails is not left or right wing, it’s a framework for building websites. Anyone with an ounce of sense will choose a framework on the technical merits. If you’re so caught up in school yard politics that you can’t bear to use the work of someone you consider to be a right wing technologist, build your own or use something else. But also: Look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are being juvenile and try growing up a bit. We can hold different opinions in a pluralist society and still get along. (And while I disagree with a great deal in DHH’s essays, the notion that he is fascist is puerile and frankly offensive in itself).
Apologies. Not a very HackerNews style comment. Please forgive a moment of irritation with the OP in the midst of a heavy cold.. should have taken a deep breath!
Salzberg states several times that one should browse in 'private' or 'incognito' mode to stop 3rd party tracking. This is false.
Incognito mode stops data such as web history and cookies being stored on the computer you are using - it is good (enough) for obscuring what sites you have visited from other people who may have access to your computer. (It may not defeat a deep forensic search, it might save you from family embarrassment).
Incognito mode does not hide any data at all from your ISP, your DNS server, or the web servers you visit - it does not do anything to defeat 3rd party tracking.
An error of this magnitude does make me wonder whether any of his other propositions are true at all.
> it does not do anything to defeat 3rd party tracking
It does reduce the footprint of data able to be correlated across browser restarts, which is not nothing, but is much less than most people assume.
So everything you do on this visit can be correlated, but when you close your browser and then come back, you're a new person not associated with your previous visit.
Some politics books I've read or re-read this year:
Fall Out - Tim Shipman, on of his astonishingly detailed quartet on Britain's exit from the EU;
Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli, magisterial yet readable;
Boris Johnson's memoir Unleashed, great fun if you like his tone;
Colonialism, a Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar, an antidote to the more ahistorical versions of the BLM narrative.
The Notebook - A history of thinking on paper, Roland Allen - a joyful romp through the notebook's history;
Elusive - How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of Mass, Frank Close - a nice account of the discovery of the Higgs Boson, with perhaps too much biography of Higgs, who after all as a lecturer at Edinburgh was not a thrill-seeker.
Carlo Rovelli's White Holes, implausible but beautifully written.
For the value of ‘best’ that includes (a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and (b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right, here are some in no particular order:
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke
Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
(These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level)
The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle
Darkness at Noon,
Arthur Koestler
The Glass Bead Game,
Hermann Hesse
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
Diaries, Samuel Pepys
Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Lonely Sea and the Sky,
Francis Chichester
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
Bevis, Richard Jeffries
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith
The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
Hitch-22, essaysChristopher Hitchens
Collected Essays, William Hazlitt
Venice, Martin Gayford
The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch
Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.
