Mike Meredith

Comparing To 1930s Germany

Apr 012023

There has recently been some controversy regarding a certain football celebrity comparing current events – in particular the treatment of refugees looking to claim asylum – with the events in Germany in the 1930s. The first was just silly – suspending the celebrity for saying something that had nothing to do with his professional life.

The second is more serious and were objections from Jews comparing current events to the Holocaust. They certainly have a point – too many relatively trivial things get compared to the Holocaust. But in this case, they’re wrong.

First of all no mention was made of the Holocaust which strictly speaking began in 1942 with the enactment of the Final Solution (although many Jews were killed when Poland was invaded).

Secondly it specifically compared current events with events in 1930s Germany; not saying they are the same, but have certain similarities. Warning us that those who would daemonize certain groups – Socialist, Communists, Roma, and Jews in the case of 1930s Germany, Refugees (and Roma) in the case of the UK today – can become dangerous if ignored.

If the UK is sliding into fascism, warning about those signs indicating the slide is not only the responsible thing to do, but the thing every sensible person should be shouting about. And it is indeed the case.

And silencing such warnings with sensitivity about the Holocaust is very very wrong.

Why Do Vegan Substitutes Look Like Meat?

General No Responses »

Feb 162023

One of the things that keep cropping up whenever vegan food crops up in social media, is why does it always resemble meat? Or “faux meat” as I call it.

It doesn’t.

As a vegetarian of over 30 years (and thus aligned with vegans; even if I’m not a “good vegan”), I very rarely eat faux meat; and when I do it’s out of curiosity. Not to see how closely they resemble meat, but to see if they were a viable choice.

V* (meaning vegetarian and vegan) food doesn’t need a meat substitute. There’s plenty of fine choices out there that don’t miss the rotting corpses a bit.

So where does this belief come from? There’s three possible reasons why faux meat choices exist :-

New v*s miss certain meat dishes and seek faux meat to fill the gap in their diet. Fair enough.
Meat eaters who for one reason or another seek to swap out meat for a meat-free alternative. Fair enough.
Companies who market these products as being what v*s actually want. Whether they’re right or not kind of depends on how large groups 1&2 are.

Ducks swimming on water in a line. — Ducks In A Row

20mph Speed Limit and Prioritising Vulnerable Road Users Considered Harmful

General No Responses »

Feb 132023

(‘bad’ language ahead)

Bollocks.

Reducing the speed limit from 30mph to 20mph reduces the fatality of hitting a pedestrian or cyclist from 40% to 5%. Slower speeds are fundamentally safer on crowded urban roads, and small country lanes – everyone has more time to react and even in the worst case where a collision occurs, the accident is more survivable.

There are those who claim the lower speeds will slow them down – tough! That continually looking at the speedometer is more dangerous – get used to lower speeds. All of the excuses I have seen amount to selfishness.

And similarly the opposition to prioritising vulnerable road users – letting pedestrians cross at junctions, giving cyclists at least 1.5m of space when overtaking, etc. all amount to motorists’ entitlement. You aren’t more important, you don’t pay for the roads, and the safety of cyclists and pedestrians takes priority to your convenience.

Do Motorists Pay For The Roads?

General, Politics 1 Response »

Feb 092023

No.

There is something that certain entitled motorists keep banging on about – “road tax”. There hasn’t been a road tax since 1937; it’s currently called vehicle excise duty and the income (£8 billion) goes into the general taxation fund. It sounds like a lot, but is just a drop in the overall public spending budget. And it isn’t reserved for spending on roads.

And local roads are mostly paid for out of council tax – in other words the roads that cyclists and pedestrians actually use are paid for out of local taxes.

Which has an interesting side effect – a motorist on a local road is likely to be a local road user, but a significant proportion will be visitors. Meaning that they haven’t paid for the road. Whereas a cyclist or a pedestrian is more likely to be a local.

Meaning that on any road that isn’t a motorway, the cyclists and pedestrians pay more for that road than the motorist.

Posts leading out to the sea. — Into The Water; Stillness and Motion

Why Do Computers Suck At Maths?

Computing, General No Responses »

Feb 092023

Sometimes, computers seem to suck at maths :-

>>> 1.2 - 1.0
0.19999999999999996

To be fair, that’s a raw Python interface; an application intended for use as a calculator works a bit better :-

» qalc 
> 1.2 - 1.0

  1.2 − 1 = 0.2

The problem is related to low-level numeric types. Computers store numbers in a variety of different formats (called types by developers). Whole numbers (integers) are easy – just allocate a certain number of 8-bit bytes (more means you can store bigger numbers; but it takes more memory for each number) and you would have something that would store whole numbers with perfect accuracy.

Floating point (i.e. numbers with a ‘decimal’ point) on the other hand are much more a compromise between size and accuracy. Floating point in effect uses scientific notation for numbers – 1.23E23. So a number is split into two – the mantissa (effectively the bit before the “E”) and the exponent. Storing two numbers in 32-bits (single precision) limits the precision in which numbers are stored but is usually sufficient and allows a far larger range of numbers :-

>>> print("{:10.4f}".format(1.2 - 1.0)) 
    0.2000

In other words if you are using a low-level interface as a calculator, you can produce sensible output merely by writing your code properly. Or use a proper calculator program like qalc(ulator).

This is of course an over simplification and the Wikipedia article on single precision floating point goes into far more detail than I want to understand. Amongst other things I’ve glossed over is the problem of performing calculations in base 2 (binary) rather than base 10 (decimal).

Plus there are a whole bunch of other numeric types such as larger floating point types, decimal floating point, bignums (which use whatever memory is necessary to store a number), fixed point, etc.

Computers aren’t bad at maths; it is just you can trick them into making themselves look bad.

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