"Christian" nationalism
Unlike those trying to introduce the foreign ideology of “Christian nationalism” to the UK, I actually went to church today.In a very white area,the church was full of immigrants
Blog
Irrational philistine "education" has won.
I have just read a remarkably silly article in a popular news website. The apparently well educated author has decided her seven year old has to study towards job opportunities, and has reacted to AI by forcing the poor child to study “coding” (which AIs can do) instead of drama (which they cannot).
Tuition madness: are schools useless?
I got a spam phone call from a tuition seller, but it is a worrying symptom of the rise of tuition in the UK. He asked whether I had children at school, to which I truthfully, albeit misleadingly, answered “no” because I do not choose to send my daughter to school.
Teaching kids about money vs maths
People often say maths is useless in real life. it is boring, we do not use it, etc. We should teach useful skills to kids. I am writing this in response to a social media comment that kids should be taught about finance instead of things like Pythagoras’s theorem.
Does web design matter?
I recently visited the website of a amateur theatre company, and any web designer would say it is awful. Anyone with the slightest aesthetic sense will say it is ugly. As a user of the site, it is perfectly good and better than most sites a designer would like.
No progress in two and a half millennia?
This passage from (Pseudo-)Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians, the last sentence in particular, could have been written today, and it seems we cannot run things better now than then.
Racism is not one thing: experiences of different cultures
I have lived in two countries, and worked in another, on different continents, and been obviously ethnic minority in all three. I will start with my own birth certificate. It states my race. It states my parents races. This was regarded as normal and necessary until just three years ago.
Schools are failing, and flexible education is the answer
Schools have been deteriorating for many years, and lockdown hastened the crisis this caused - but the deterioration dates back many years, and the underlying cause is the stubborn focus on a Victorian model of education and the addiction to metrics. The solution lies in empowering pupils and parents.
Why CO? emissions will keep rising.
We have had many climate change agreements that have not changed anything. The greenwashing was inevitable and to be expected. This graph from Our World in Data says it all: there has been no change in trajectory.
Homeschooling tips from a home educator
My daughters were both home educated for many years (the younger one still is) and I want to share some things I have learned along the way with parents who find themselves temporarily home schooling because of lockdown.
There is no such thing as Home Education
The public view (shared by media and politicians) of home education often seems to be that it simultaneously means parents assiduously coaching children to get firsts in maths when they are 14 while simultaneously neglecting their education so they never get any qualifications. The problem is that they expect home education to exist in a way it simply does not.
You should not home educate because of covid
I am an advocate of home education, but I doubt one group of people currently switching are making the right decision. Not all, by any means: it depends on why and what you want.
Hodder CIE IGCSE Computer Science textbook corrections
My (then home educated) daughter used the Hodder Computer Science text book for CIE IGCSEs last year. It was good but we found a number of mistakes. It is still a current textbook so I am noting down some corrections.
The Geography of Covid
I cannot explain this map, but the clear division in compelling. A few lines divide the world into high, medium and low covid death rate countries and there are few exceptions in the high and low death rate areas.
Why we are never prepared for a crisis
From 2005 Sri Lanka has been well prepared for a tsunami, unfortunately it was entirely unprepared in 2004. From 2021 onwards I have do doubt that the world will we well prepared to deal with a pandemic. We are always ready to fight the last war..
Climate treaties cheat the environment.
Climate treaties suffer from a problem that is pervasive in our society. It is the same problem that is destroying British state schools, makes public sector out-sourcing fail, and cripples businesses. Once you set a numerical target, the metric becomes more important that what it measures.
Not just a CO2 shortage - the economy is broken
Shortages happen. A shortage of a gas that is vital to the manufacture of everything from beer to pain killers may look like just another unfortunate occurrence, but it is really a product of the way a “neo-liberal” economy works: globalisation and centralisation.
Django signals are evil
I was trying to figure out what a Django app was doing today. It turned out that the original developer had decided to monkey patch a third party app. I hardly need say that monkey patching is evil (i.e. a last resort), but one of the things I needed to check along the way was that there was no code being triggered by a (Django) signal, and the problems it causes are very similar to monkey patching.
Trump's immigration policy compared to the UK's
There has been near universal condemnation of Trump’s immigration policies, but it seems to be that they simply do in one stroke what most European countries have done incrementally. The UK is a fairly typical European country in this respect so lets see how it compares.
AirBNB hosts can block bad reviews - and my AirBNB horror story
If an AirBNB “host” needs to give a refund because the accommodation was terrible, they can block the bad review by cancelling instead of refunding. It does mean a 100% refund, but that is clearly preferable to bad reviews and AirBNB have confirmed that this is deliberate.