Doug Clow

We do know from intervention/RCT studies that taking a bit exercise is broadly good for you. We don't know the effect of telling the population to stop short walks in favour of long ones. It's quite possible they would stop the short ones but not actually do to the long ones. That'd be much worse.

If you follow a bunch of people over time, you'd *expect* that the people who were more physically active would die less, because being sick impairs mobility. You can't fully control for this because you only have imperfect measures of the variables you actually care about.

That paper that was reported as saying you should stop taking short walks vs fewer long ones has been bothering me and the excellent Kevin McConway has written up a fair and thorough explanation of why: www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-react...
tl;dr really hard to get causal out of observational

Oh no. Oh no no no. We could have eliminated cervical cancer in this generation! This was one of my go-to examples of the triumphs of modern medicine. The chances of that are ebbing away, thanks to vaccine hesitancy and our collapsed public health infrastructure. Genuinely upset about this.

There’s bacon and hotdogs in the replies as further zoom levels but you don’t make those (mostly) out of a pig’s nose. I like the version that goes:
🐖
🐷
🐽
⚫️

Or a time-travelling bull, or semen sample? Yeah I guess an older bull is more likely. Good name for one, solid-sounding.

I believe so, and I believe it may have been this specific bull: www.stgen.com/sire-directo...

Well done everyone, you’ve all done e really well this week! You have made it through everything to another weekend. Go you! Hope you have a good one.

A black background decorated with gold illustrations of branches, stars, swords, ravens, and tiny ghost shapes. In the centre, bold text reads: “BIRDS BUT THEY GET SPOOKIER EACH TIME.” Two ravens perch on bare branches at the bottom, with candles glowing beside them.

Birds but they get spookier each time. 🎃👻

Enter if you dare...🚪

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

11/11

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
10/

OZYMANDIAS
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said, 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
9/

[later]

8/

- You know what? Maybe you're right. If even you, old friend, are struggling, so will others. Fine. I'll chisel a sign. I've been wanting a way to ridicule the way he gave himself over-inflated job titles. I'll do something bitingly sarcastic, so there's no mistaking it.
7/

- Yes. Yes. It's ... it's really quite conceptual. How will anyone seeing it even know it's Ozymandias?
6/

- Yes. In a level location just off the main route so travellers will see it. The installation site reflects the dry & lifeless state in which he left our agriculture. The installation itself places him in ruins, like his reputation. In granite, so all will know for eternity.
5/

- The visage is frowning and wrinkling its lip. I wanted to render his sneering approach more physiognomically apparent.
- Right. And you're carting it out to the desert?
4/

- Yes. But I keep telling you. It's not to honour him. It's mockery. That's why the form is incomplete, expressing a profound lack of wholeness, and an absence of heart.
- Yeah. I hate to say this, but that half a face doesn't look much like him.
3/

- Yes. And a pedestal.
- Another conceptual one, eh?
- Yes, another conceptual one.
- Have you really done a sculpture to honour the worst irrigation engineer we've ever had? The one who messed up the works so badly it brought our mighty agricultural industry to despair?
2/

Superb. I have an earlier work previously posted on the Other place:

THE THEME OF THE WORK IS HUBRIS

- Hello! Oh, loaded your vast new sculpture up on to the carts already, I see.
- Yes, all good to go. Very proud of this one.
- It is ... vast. And it's ... it's just the legs and half a head?
1/

The aim of the policy to build lots of houses was to reduce house prices. I don’t understand why it is taking so long to realise that companies who sell houses are never going to be all-in on such a plan. To say nothing of the noisy-public outrage if they were to be successful.

“Azure is down, work is probably done for the day, let’s have a sneaky game … oh no”

PSA: There's what seems to be a bad outage at Microsoft Azure. As with last week's Amazon AWS outage, a lot of cloud services are dependent on it, so there are a lot of issues with services you may not expect to be related.

Katzenworld - Cats vs Dogs: Data Reveals UK Pet Ownership Written by Marc-André for Katzenworld

What a fun concept! How are you working that out? I can see a pet sitting service estimates 513k cats in London. Cats Protection estimates 10m owned cats in the country: we’d need >20% in London to beat Brum/Mcr’s ~2m people.
www.homesitters.co.uk/katzenworld-...
www.cats.org.uk/about-cp/cat...

Oh, very smart.

The year after I left school I was startled to receive a birthday card apparently signed by all my former teachers and more besides. Turned out to be from a friend who was resitting A levels and was showing off his (impressive) forgery skills.

The one and only time I skipped school, I planned it with care: stealth routes on and off site, lessons missed had a supply teacher (=substitute) so they wouldn't notice. But at afternoon registration we were summoned by the Deputy Head. How had we been rumbled?! There'd been a fire drill.

And co-conspirators T. Yves, Jules, and Gâteaux-Ez.

In favour of judges?!

bsky.app/profile/wolv...

Yikes, that is not good! As in genuinely terrible - from the outside it looks like the NHS needs more effective management and that sounds very ineffective. Much sympathy, and strength to your arm in doing what you can to change it.
(I am feeling very lucky about my current gig right now.)

I can sympathise with this greatly, but also want to remind myself that if you’re a manager (and you’re being effective), meetings are a really important part of your work.