Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
recent posts
- Did Stalin’s Purge of the Generals Really Hinder the Soviet War Effort?
- Vassily Grossman’s Noisy post-Soviet Interlopers
- Putting the Third Wave of anti-Trans Panic in its Historical Perspective
- The Bone Temple: A Clockwork Orange with zombies (without zombies)
- Shadows of the Firstcome: Unwelcome visitors
about
Category: Metashit
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My friend gave me a copy of Ready Player One to read on the plane back to Japan, but my airline tricked me into flying a 777 without reclining seats or accessible reading lights or wi-fi, so I didn’t get to finish it till today nor did I realize how enormously popular it is until…
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I am in London for a week doing some research with small area analysis, and on the weekend had a brief opportunity to actually see the city. As is traditional by now on my annual trips to London, I visited the World Wildlife Photography Exhibition (which was a bit weak this year, I thought), and…
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Today’s Guardian has an article on the UK Conservative Party’s “minority problem”: it’s inability to get a decent vote share from non-white British citizens. The article seems to be quite neutral on the issue of the Tory’s appeal and electoral strategies, at times even appearing to be pasting text from a Conservative pollster (at times…
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… Because they are so much more Dudalicious. In honour of the David Gilmour (not the guitarist!) school of teaching, from now on I will only use statistical techniques designed by men. Sure, I could use Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Models (GLLAMM), but just listen to the name of the damned thing. It’s like…
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Is it just me, or has the Guardian embarked on a project of excessive tastelessness[1]? In the last two days they have shown video footage of 17 people dying in a hot air balloon (apparently you can see people jumping to their deaths) and of a man being dragged to his death by a South…
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I discovered tonight that my blog has come to the attention of a Muslim scholar in the UK, in a piece he wrote about the UK census. Like me, this scholar noted the obssessive focus of the UK press on the growth of Islam, rather than the explosion of atheism[1]. Unlike me, the writer of…
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Today’s Guardian reports on an exchange of letters between Salman Rushdie and John le Carre, from 1997, in which they disagree vehemently about the limits of free speech. At this point in his career Rushdie was in hiding from Islamic fundamentalists, and le Carre was in trouble for criticizing Israel – which of course put…
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A couple of days ago Australia’s prime minister (PM) Julia Gillard found herself in the unprecedented position of having to host an extended news conference to hose down allegations of corruption from 17 years ago. A slightly abridged version of the news conference is available here, and it’s a barn-storming performance by Ms. Gillard that…
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The Washington Post (which I’ve started reading since I was interviewed for it) has a four page feature on storage unit auctions out today. It’s obviously written from a light-hearted perspective, overlaid with a touch of cynicism and fatalism about consumer culture and the current economic climate, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was…
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It’s come to my attention recently that I’ve never actually written a comments policy, or stated what my privacy policy is on this blog. Even though very few people visit this tiny part of the internet, it may surprise both of you to discover that I have actually had to enact an element of my…
Compromise and Conceit 