Dork Scratchings

Credit: Noah Scalin In the news This week the UK's biggest investment fund - the National Employment Savings Trust - has decided to divest from fossil fuels .  Their chief investment officer Mark Fawcett said "Just like coronavirus, climate change poses serious risks to both our savers and their investments, [...] It has the potential to cause catastrophic damage and completely disrupt our way of life. No one wants to save throughout their life to retire into a world devastated by climate change." This is in contrast to what the pensions minister Guy Opperman has said.  He thinks we should "nudge , cajole or vote" companies into becoming sustainable and that holding shares is the right thing to do. They can't both be right, and they're not.  Mark Fawcett is right and Guy Opperman is wrong.  Here's why: How are oil companies valued? It is fairly easy to show that the market valuation of an oil company is simply the price of the oil they have in res...

I've discovered an excellent tool in asciiflow.com .  The website makes it really easy to create ASCII box diagrams like this They put these things in fruit machines you know! This is ideal for source code banners, which I think should contain helpful documentation - but most programmers think it's a good place for the COPYRIGHT information and nothing else. But wait! we can make it beautifuller... and easier to read... by replacing some of the ASCII characters with ones available in UTF-8: There!  Isn't that better?  (Although some purists may object to non-ASCII characters in your code base.) SOURCE CODE: #!/usr/bin/python2 # coding: utf-8 # + gets converted in different ways depending on it's 4 neighbours # # . N . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 3 set if N in "+|<>" # W + E { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 2 set if S in "+|<>" # . S . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 1 set if W in "+-^v" # { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 0 set if E ...

Earlier today I emailed an old acquaintance on a climate change related subject$^*$.  He almost certainly did not want to hear what I had to say, and tagged the following to the end of his reply: P.S.: Did you know: https://carbonliteracy.com/ the-carbon-cost-of-an-email/ I looked up that page and found the claim (without any supporting evidence) that a typical email generates 4g CO2e emissions while a spam email is typically around 0.3g CO2e. This struck me as nonsense.  I've worked in telecoms for most of the last 20 years and I know that most links require the same power whether they are transmitting user data or simply transmitting to maintain synchronization.  However, you don't need to know anything about Ethernet or ADSL to show that this is complete garbage.  Let's do some arithmetic: a spam email is around 1KB an hour of Netflix is around 1GB the network and servers don't really care what's in the data so we can safely assume if "carbonliteracy"...

Here's me and a few friends yesterday helping to deliver demands to the Cambridge colleges that are still investing in fossil fuels  (i.e. all except Clare Hall and Queen's). I'm the one in the T-Rex costume... These are the demands we delivered: And here's a T-Rex explaining to a Brontosaurus the concept of logarithms as we pass the Whipple Museum on the way to Darwin College.  The Whipple Museum has a lovely example of Napier's Bones, a calculating device invented by the discoverer of logarithms.