"Because they're morons"

Mark Blyth's take on the Brexit vote is harsh, bleak and and it isn't new. But it's as true now as it ever was.

Of course, the use of the phrase "morons" will provoke the usual tedious accusations about Remainer elitists sneering at the views of ordinary people. But if you listen, this is a more nuanced explanation of what happened and the "morons" in question include the UK's political and media elite who incubated the stupidity.

As for Mark himself, he didn't get where he is today because he belongs to some privileged elite. In his own words:

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1967. I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense a “welfare kid”. Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Now check out the first three minutes or so of this video (if I've done this right, it should start playing about 49' 40" in):

Random photoblogging

Idly scrolling through the snaps on my phone's camera...

Sculpture on a mound above Furzton Lake, Milton Keynes. The lake and surroundings are well-tended, but the mound has become a bit overgrown, giving this scene a faint air of those neglected Soviet-era sculptures in the former Eastern Bloc.

Although he's too young to know about Twitter, my son drew this picture of a rampaging robot flame-breathing egg in school, which sums up the state of the Twittersphere with uncanny accuracy.

Chickens. Because everything is better with chickens.

After seeing this I went home, took the vase of flowers off the mantelpiece and replaced it with a hammer drill.

Caledecotte Lake, Milton Keynes, in the evening sun.

The offspring hits peak peak in Peak District.

Snow in Newport Pagnell. Not remarkable in itself, but this was the beginning of March, for crying out loud.

"Destination community wet"

No - me neither. Sounds more like random output from AI Weirdness or Botnik than something written by an actual human. It's getting hard to tell these days, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness pointed out recently:

These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell. 1/12 https://t.co/4wVxfraqZS

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 14, 2018

When you find yourself wondering whether what you just read was written by a bot or just by a human pretending to be a bot pretending to be a human, maybe it's time to give up and go to the pub. If so, the Dolphin's OK and no wetter than the average pub, despite what it says on the brewery's web site.

How not to communicate with parents, part 2

A while back, I had a bit of a go at my kid's school and its use of social media.  To be fair, it does do something to do with social media at least approximately right. The school's Home School Agreement is worded fairly reasonably:

"Respect the school through the individual and joint use of social media including the posting of pictures following a school event."

"Respect" is a bit ambiguous and weaselly, but you could interpret this to mean "Use social media responsibly, don't post pictures of other people's kids, or blurt out confidential information better discussed with staff in private, or say anything defamatory - in short, we expect you to behave like a reasonable adult", in which case, fair enough.

At least it's better than the Home School Agreements some other schools try to enforce. For example:

"Parents will ... Not make reference to the school on social networking sites."

There are things a school would quite rightly want to control - I've already mentioned a few examples. But a social networking ban on mentioning the school that your child goes to, ever, under any circumstances? Is it just me, or isn't that a bit unreasonable?

Parent: "Little Topsy is loving Year Four at Sunnybrook Community School* and doing really well!"

School: "You're in breach of your Home School Agreement. Don't let this happen again!"

Parent: "So proud of young Timmy for winning the Sunnybrook Community School inter-house athletics cup!"

School: "We warned you..."

* A name I just made up - any resemblance to any actual school of that name, if one exists, is entirely coincidental.