Or: should you keep that tape?

It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken bricks.

Or: you can’t buy history, however much money you have.

Or, a theory about the mess we’re in.

In the old, more innocent days of the internet — the days when people naïvely assumed that nazis were figures from a dark past, fading slowly into history — people who were very pedantic about prescriptive rules of grammar were often called ‘grammar nazis’. We did not think, then, that grammar nazis might be unconsciously encouraging actual nazis. But I think they were, and are.

MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, seems like a good idea: what’s not to like about being able to send arbitrary data by email? In 1996, when I wrote the below, I didn’t think it was.

Duplicacy is a backup tool. It may possibly have good uses, but if you are using it on a Mac it is probably not actually making backups.

A comment to this excellent post by Sabine Hossenfelder¹

I think that it’s easy to deride the ‘let’s just do what we’ve already done, but an order of magnitude bigger/better/more expensive’ (BBME). But really it’s more subtle.

Or: Hi-Fi and the death of truth.

Or: the Cummings-Johnson effect.

I thought it would be interesting to get an idea of how many people will die because Dominic Cummings thought it was fine to ignore the lockdown rules, and Boris Johnson agreed with him. So I wrote a program to explore this Cummings-Johnson effect.