andrewducker | Interesting Links for 21-01-2020

andrewducker

Technical Debt Is Like a Tetris Game: (tags:Tetris programming design )
The messages in recent Doctor Who are *terrible": (tags:drwho writing OhForFucksSake )
Gibraltar considers joining EU's Schengen open borders area to ease damage from Brexit: (tags:Gibraltar borders europe )
"And he asked specifically for eggs" - linguistic diversity in 15th century England: (tags:language history )
When there was no electricity in India, how did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?: (tags:india temperature history uk military )
Upgrading existing railways instead of building HS2 would mean no functioning railways at the weekends for 15 years: (tags:transport railways uk )
Just amazing acrobatics: (tags:amazing video )
Clearview app lets strangers find your name, info with snap of a photo: (tags:faces recognition surveillance )
The wisdom of Martin Luther King: (tags:history racism USA quotes )
People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life: (tags:work trust society success polls )
Jess Phillips on trans women: (tags:transgender LGBT women Labour )
One reason why trans women can sometimes look more "feminine" than most women: (tags:LGBT transgender OhForFucksSake women )
Brexit: UK to decide on Gibraltar-EU travel deal: (tags:UK Europe Gibraltar )
The Y2038 problem is already causing problems: (tags:date bug doom )
Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot: (tags:robots military )
The amount that Poland's borders have moved around (and on occasion ceased to exist) is fascinating: (tags:Poland maps animation video )
Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions: (tags:deafness disability porn )

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3858914.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cmcmck

While in 15th century Kent you'd have needed to ask for 'oyen' (in other regions that meant 'eyes').

This stuff fascinates me! :o)

From:

danieldwilliam

It also fascinates my mum who says her grandparents spoke an English dialect with lots of different plurals, syntax and verbs.

From:

cmcmck

Do you know which one they spoke?

From:

danieldwilliam

I'm afraid I don't. She grew up in the Cotswolds (Golden Valleys area) and most of her family were deeply local but I think one of her grandfathers or great grandfathers might have come from Yorkshire.

From:

cmcmck

Although I'm a Kenting, I have West Midlands and northeastern grandparents so ended up with all sorts of bits of odd dialect which often confuses people. :o)

From:

danieldwilliam

The article on robot tanks sparked quite an interesting discussion about crime rates in the 1980's and lead in petrol in my office.

From:

andrewducker

Interesting. Care to elaborate?

From:

danieldwilliam

We got chatting about 1980's films with AI (War Games, Terminator and RoboCop. One of my younger colleagues asked if crime was really that much of a problem in the 1980's that RoboCop seemed like a potential future path.

I said, yes, quoted some stats eg murder rate in New York and mentioned that one of the contendors for the cause of the fall in violent crime was the removal of lead from petrol.

The conversation has now moved on to how Monopoly is more like Fight Club than a boardgame.

From:

dewline

This is specific to the USA as of 2018, so it's two years old as well. But it's directly related.

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/

From:

danieldwilliam

Oh that was interesting. Thank you.

From:

andrewducker

Ah yes, that makes sense.

I remember "White Flight" from the horrors of the inner city.

From:

danieldwilliam

I'm uncertain about Jess Philips as Labour Leader. (Fortunately my dad, a well connected Labour member told me not to worry too much about anyone other than Starmer.)

She was my second favourite until her position on trans rights got more attention.

But the whole thing really crystallised for me that I'm buggered if I understand sex and gender well enough to have an opinion much beyond "I would like it if people were less horrid to each other."

From:

andrewducker

Topic for discussion tonight?

From:

cmcmck

Oh to be a fly on the wall when you two get going (although we're not next in Edinburgh until May).

From:

danieldwilliam

Do feel welcome to come and join us when you are up, if convenient. Mostly we check in about our respective children, shout "BREXIT ARRGH!" and Andy asks me how my robots are keeping and I tell him that they are still very busy.

From:

danieldwilliam

If you like. I'm not sure that we're going to shed any light on the issue but I'm more than happy to talk around it.

To sum up my confusion. I was already unsure what gender is (or was) and where it came from. To the point where I was wondering if it was a useful concept at all.

I was more confident about sex. At least more confident that "we" understood what sex was and that sex was more complicated than a simple binary and probably more complicated than I understood.

I wondered if there is a demonstratable causal link between sex and gender that operates outside of culture i.e. I wondered if one is born with a particular set of genes then one is more likely to behave in ways associated with our concepts of gender. I was uncertain about this. The science seems ambiguous. Even the economics is ambiguous. (Ambiguous to the point where I wondered if we as a species had replaced some genetics with memetics and how we would tell if we had.)

Over the last few years I've become less certain about gender and less certain about sex and remained uncertain about the link, if any, between the two.

I know what I would politically like the answers to be. Well, I say I know. I'm not sure know is the right word. I'm not sure that the politics lines up neatly with the science.

Mostly I'm counting my blessings that I'm not directly personally affected. It's about time that something good happened to a straight, cis, white guy.

From:

autopope

I'd just like to note that what we are attracted to, and what we see ourselves as being, are two orthogonal axes on some (hypothetical) graph. And I think this is where a lot of the sex/gender confusion creeps in, at least wrt. understanding how other people think of it.

From:

danieldwilliam

Yes, that can only add to the add to the lack of clarity.

I think we're just having to get used to there being a lack of clarity about how people show up and get comfortable with a state of ambiguity.

From:

danieldwilliam

My mum gets very excited about the plural of eggs. She I think lived just over some linguistic border where, for example, plurals for some groups of nouns were en rather than es, so egg, eggen, ox, oxen etc.

Generally I find if I talk slowly and loudly and point firmly enough people make an effort to completely misunderstand you in a way that causes maximum delay, confusion and frustration.

From:

cmcmck

Here in Shropshire it's 'heggs' and someone selling them is a 'heggler'.:o)

I'm married to a Stirling dialect speaker, so.............

From:

danieldwilliam

I'm mostly enjoying Doctor Who. Mostly because the Captain is enjoying it. I'm finding Whittaker's portrayal of the Doctor a little less grating. But mostly I'm not in anyway taking it seriously as a body of work. Mostly because it does keep doing things like Orphan-55 making not much sense but that being solved by having the Doctor make a speach at the end of programme which everyone, including Laurance Fox can agree with.

From:

andrewducker

Yes, I haven't seen that episode, but the write-up above that thread, and that they didn't sell the speech at all in the run up seems like staggeringly bad writing.

From:

danieldwilliam

A thing I learned during my economics post-grad is that the question of HOW much value is created is different to the question of WHO appropriates that value. At the moment, in the West, I think we have both a problem of value creation but (mostly) a problem of value appropriation.

I'm not surprised people are less likely to buy in to the current system.

From:

andrewducker

I'd love to know if it was ever thus, and the propaganda was working better, or if things have actually gotten worse.

(I'm fairly sure it's the latter, and that the division was fairer in the 70s)

From:

dewline

And we have a "Never let the division be fair ever again!" movement amongst the more militant and stupid amongst the 0.1% crowd right now.

From:

danieldwilliam

I think it's swung both ways over time. It takes a while for the politics to catch up with the economics I think.

And, yes, what Dewline says too.

From:

dewline

I worry about the consequences of this, whatever's decided. Partly because the new Line 1 train set-up is having its teething-pain months here in Ottawa, so we're already questioning the value of having built the thing at all. The Phase 2 expansions of the O-Train network are now under construction across the city, despite it being the "dead" of winter; Some elements of the construction process can be carried out now anyway so they're getting what they can done now.

If I understand right, HS2 is intended as an upgrade to an existing network?

From:

andrewducker

It's a new High Speed line that would run in parallel to the existing lower speed lines. This would mean more capacity on the old lines because you're not trying to deal with trains overtaking each other, or leaving big gaps.

Good writeup here. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/20/taking-a-look-at-hs2s-huge-old-oak-common-station/

From:

dewline

Thank you for this.

The point that write-up makes about capacity is something that OC Transpo and Ottawa City Hall ignored, I think: we need these new trains, not to replace the buses that were running through the downtown Transitway corridors - much to the annoyance of local business owners and residents - but in addition to the buses.

From:

cmcmck

When I was seeing the pshrink first up I wore a skirt assuming that'd be what was expected by a male pshrink- I had a pleasant surprise when I realised he wasn't expecting that sort of thing and didn't even flinch when I mentioned my love of big bikes.

Sat here in jeans and jumper forty odd years later (although I have no objection to skirts when the mood is upon me and it's a fair bit warmer) still loving big bikes! :o)

From:

andrewducker

I'm glad you got a good one!

From:

momentsmusicaux

What's a PO, and why didn't they understand tech debt in the first place as part of their job?

From:

andrewducker

The "O" stands for Owner, from context, and in my experience there's very little training for business people in that kind of thing.

From:

momentsmusicaux

Ahhh right that makes sense. I was thinking it was something like Project Orgasmator or something.

From:

naath

Product Owner; who may or may not be technical.

From:

elf

Not mentioned in the Technical Debt article: That a company owner who bought out another company may be exceedingly unwilling to pay back the technical debt he somehow thought wasn't included in an existing product.

Startup owners may be convinced that, at some point, you have to put serious work (defined as money and hours) into restructuring rather than improving, and that only the people who work on code will ever notice. The long-term benefit will be, "next year when the OS/browser/ISP updates itself, we'll still function." But if the startup was doing well and then got sold to another company, and the original owners are long gone, the new owners may be very unhappy with "you need to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on invisible work that won't make anything run better; it'll just make this able to function at all in two years."

...Instead, they may look into quick patches, adding a few bells and whistles, and reselling it to the next sucker down the line.

(See also: History of Tumblr.)