What sort of people will vote for Trump in 2020, if he lasts that long?

All serious historians agree that the Apollo programme of the 1960s and early 1970s was the highpoint of western civilisation.

Sometime in the middle of 2019, the UK will have a new prime minister. He¹ will have considerable power to control whether, when and how the UK leaves the EU.

An attempt to describe three well-known function calling conventions in terms of bindings.

I find the best way to think about this is to think in terms of bindings, rather than environments or frames, which are simply containers for bindings.

In 1990, Richard Gabriel gave a talk from which Jamie Zawinski later extracted a section called ‘worse is better’ which he distributed widely. It’s strange but, perhaps, interesting, how prescient this idea was.

In June 2017 I argued that people who voted for Trump were racists: I’m very unhappy with that conclusion.

The UK keeps its laws on vellum: this seems to be a ludicrously archaic thing to do: is it?

As card-carrying members of the liberal elite we have to understand why so many people are so cross. Obviously it is our fault: with our awful progressive views we have prospered at their expense and it is only natural that they should express their anger by supporting politicians who are explicitly racist and misogynistic. That’s just a natural reaction: the people we have oppressed so horribly aren’t actually racists and misogynists, no, they just support politicians who are. It’s all our fault¹.

Clarke’s third law is that

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It does not apply to organisations who want to intercept communications: if it’s claimed that they can do something which requires magic, then in fact they can’t do that.