Xena Woofier Princess
2026-Jun-13, Saturday 23:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistTomorrow we're meeting a dog we night dogsit while her human is away in a couple weeks.
It's someone from queer club whose dogsitter fell through at the last minute. Xena the dog is a yorkie/jack russell/Brussels griffon mix, so a shaggy adorable little dog and we're assured she's cuddly and easy to look after.
I'm excited to meet her.
Books Received, June 6 — June 12
2026-Jun-13, Saturday 08:28james_davis_nicoll
Ten books new to me. Eight fantasy (of which three are rpgs), one science fiction, and one non-fiction. At least three are series.
Books Received, June 6 — June 12
Which of these look interesting?
When Life Gives You Corpses by Lene D. Buttner (March 2027)
10 (32.3%)
A Storm of Dragons and Sorcery by Jeaniene Frost (March 2027)
3 (9.7%)
Tribes in the Dark by Wil Hutton, Logan Rollins, et al with art by Ghislain Barbe and Juan Ochoa (June 2026)
4 (12.9%)
The Seventh Banisher by A. K. Larkwood (March 2027)
9 (29.0%)
Anji in Shadow by Evan Leikam (January 2027)
5 (16.1%)
The Playful Lem by Stanislaw Lem (July 2026)
17 (54.8%)
Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Gamemaster’s Guide by Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (June 2026)
2 (6.5%)
Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Player’s Guide by Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (June 2026)
2 (6.5%)
A Song of Sugar Sparrows by Seanan McGuire (January 2027)
15 (48.4%)
The Thinking Animal: What Other Minds Reveal About Our Own by Nichola Raihani (February 2027)
19 (61.3%)
Some other option (see comments)
1 (3.2%)
Cats!
21 (67.7%)
New Musical Composition: “Ingenuity”
2026-Jun-13, Saturday 03:16![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed
It’s been a hot minute, as the kids no longer say, since I made an original musical composition; I’ve mostly been doing cover songs recently. But this evening I felt the urge to make something noisy and original, so I did what any musician would do for inspiration: I went to NASA’s “Sounds From Beyond” page and picked a recording from there to use as the basis for my composition.
Specifically, I used the “NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight” recording. I used the original recording as is, and then I also ran it through MIDI, sliced it up, pushed it up a couple of octaves, filtered it through effects and so on. In the final composition, everything you hear is derived from the Ingenuity recording except for the drums and the 808 bass. It’s amazing what you can do with public domain recordings from another planet.
The resulting track is noisy, weird, asymmetric and in 7/8 time, because that’s pretty much how the original recording sort of laid itself out. I like it. Maybe you will too.
— JS
I have written things!
2026-Jun-12, Friday 22:33shewhostaplesThe first one is simultaneously not really fic and extremely fic: it's a smutty sequel to faites-lui mes aveux, a somewhat chaste I wrote for
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
femslashex... getting on for eight years ago now, good grief. I'm not sure it makes much sense without the original original, but never mind.ardentes, folles, enfiévrées
(Neither of them are actually in French, and I translated pretty much everything I quoted, too.)
The second one is part of the magnificent weirdness that is
intoabar. Harriet Vane goes into a bar and meets Mercutio.through the long horror of that piteous night
I have a third fic in the works but it's been that way for a long time and I don't know when I'll get it finished. 11000 words and counting. I've also been working on some original original stuff, which again I am not sure that anyone else is going to want to read, and again, I don't care, I'm just glad to be writing.
Tortured Soul
2026-Jun-11, Thursday 21:26cosmolinguistI never did get used to the noise that the extractor fan in the bathroom makes.
But the other day, something went wrong with it so now it makes the most horrible sound, a loud high-pitched squeal. The others started describing it as "like there's a tortured soul trapped there." It makes me laugh but it is true.
Both of them have forgotten and had the startling experience of turning on the light...often first thing in the morning, which seems extra unfair! (D really made himself jump with this when he got up early last Saturday morning, poor lad.) I haven't avoided it out of any skill or smarts of mine, it's just that I never turn on the light this time of year.
I said for a while that I should put some tape over the light switch to help remind us, stop this from happening. But I only got around to it early this afternoon. Which is lucky, because only then did I realize that our cleaner was about to come over, and he -- very naturally! -- turns on the lights in the rooms he's cleaning. And he actually starts with the upstairs bathroom, so I did it almost in the nick of time!
By the time he turned up, I was back at my computer but it's near the front door so I could hear V catching up with him -- how's your son, don't bother cleaning the cooker because I took it apart and scrubbed it last night... I didn't hear it all but got the gist -- and I said "and the light switch!" and they told him "oh! yeah" and the next phrase I clearly heard was "it sounds like a tortured soul..."
Cathedral of bones: Inside the world’s largest, deepest, and oldest whale graveyard
2026-Jun-12, Friday 14:20strange_maps_feed
Life on Earth is older, stranger, and more grimly beautiful than we have time to consider most days. So take a moment to marvel over the recently discovered dark wonder that is the world’s oldest, deepest, and largest whale graveyard — a necropolis so vast it sounds less than a scientific find than the premise of a lost Jules Verne novel.
A vast gash off the coast of Australia
How old? The fossilized skull of a Pterocetus benguelae, an extinct species of beaked whale, has been dated to 5.26 million years ago — relatively shortly after our own ancestors had started to walk upright. And despite its advanced age, the cemetery is still open for business. New carcasses are being added to the Diamantina Fracture Zone, a vast gash in the ocean floor off the coast of southwestern Australia.
#/media/File:The_chinese_submersible_Fendouzhe_aboard_its_mother_ship_Tan_Suo_Yi_Hao.jpg){kind=link}
In a paper published in Nature in June, scientists who travelled to the area aboard the Chinese research vessel Tan Suo Yi Hao describe how their deep-diving submersible Fendouzhe made 32 dives into the zone, returning with a staggering inventory: 476 fossil cetaceans, as well as five active “whale-falls” (more on those later). The crew encountered their first bones near the zone’s deepest point, the Dordrecht Deep, partially buried in soft sediment and lightly glazed with black ferromanganese oxides. Then more fossils. Then hundreds more. The exploration turned into a census.
The Diamantina Zone is one of the most remote and extreme environments on Earth. Carved open between 60 and 50 million years ago, when Australia and Antarctica staged their slow, grinding tectonic divorce, it stretches some 750 miles (1,200 km) — about the length of California — and plunges to depths of about 4.5 miles (7 km). That’s farther from sea level than the summit of Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest mountain, rises above it.
It is an alien place where sunlight never reaches, and where the weight of the water is nearly 700 times greater than air pressure at sea level. If you could live long enough to experience it, it would feel like every stamp-sized part of your body had an adult African elephant sitting on it.
Like coins dropped in a bowl
Because of its V-shaped topography, the zone acts as a colossal geomorphic funnel, concentrating sinking whale carcasses like coins dropped in a bowl. The result is a fittingly giant necropolis for the giants of the ocean.
A pair of beaked whales photographed near the surface, off the Azorean island of Pico in 2017. Beaked whales are expert divers, and can go below 1,000 m in the hunt for their favorite food, squid. (Credit: Roland Edler, CC BY 4.0)
A so-called “whale fall” kickstarts one of the deep seas’ most dramatic transformations. On the ocean floor, the dead animal delivers an enormous amount of organic material to a world where food is extremely scarce. In the abyss, death is the ultimate act of generosity.
Specialized communities bloom on the fresh corpse: bone-eating worms, chemosynthetic clams that harvest energy from the sulphur released by decaying blubber, brittle stars, and ghostly sea daisies. Each carcass becomes a temporary oasis of life, before it dwindles to bare, mineralized bone. And then the ocean waits for the next one.
There is a profound, cyclical poetry to it. And the Diamantina Zone has been running this cycle for at least five million years.
How many whales have found their final resting place in this marine morgue? The paper hazards no guess for the total, but does remark that, “on the basis of submersible observations, the density of whale remains reaches up to 759.5 individuals per square kilometre.” (That would be 1,967 dead whales per square mile).
The fossils the scientists identified were mainly of the strap-toothed whale and Andrews’ beaked whale, two beaked whale species still plying these cold southern waters. They also discovered a previously unknown extinct species of beaked whale, appropriately named Pterocetus diamantinae.
Exposed on the seabed for millions of years
Beaked whales are champion deep divers, routinely descending beyond one kilometer (3,280 ft) in pursuit of squid. Foraging that deep is physiologically perilous, and whales that push their luck too far won’t make it back up to the surface. Those unlucky hunters likely make up a good share of the bones, slowly collecting sea dust at the bottom of the zone.
Those bones have resisted time for a wonderfully counterintuitive reason: They were barely buried at all. The zone’s extremely low sedimentation rate (0.05 to 0.55 cm per thousand years) means skeletons can stay exposed on the seabed for millions of years.
The Diamantina Zone is a reminder that the map of our world still holds secrets of terrifying scale. The team that discovered this place has barely scratched its surface.
In the years to come, the zone will likely attract not only dead whales but also boatloads of scientists, eager to explore more of this vast underwater cathedral made of countless whale bones, and the grim and gorgeous story that it tells.
Strange Maps #1294
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
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This article Cathedral of bones: Inside the world’s largest, deepest, and oldest whale graveyard is featured on Big Think.
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
2026-Jun-12, Friday 09:14james_davis_nicoll
Generic Asian Man Willis Wu dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy. If he's not careful, he might become Dead Asian Guy instead.
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Various & Sundry, 6/12/26
2026-Jun-12, Friday 12:40scalziwhatever_feedWhat? Friday again?
David Hockney, dead: Hockney was one of those artists who I didn’t know who they were until I was adult, and then realized I had been surrounded by his work all my life. This was in large part because Hockney, who was originally from England, was besotted with California, and as a result his work was part of the cultural landscape while I spent the first part of my life there. Even if I didn’t clock the name, he added to the vibe, so to speak. When you think of California pools, you think of David Hockney (even if the most famous pool painting was based off of one in France). His work always made me happy and maybe just a little bit wistful. That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind.
Jane Yolen, RIP: I knew Jane both socially — we were both writers of science fiction and fantasy, although her total remit was much wider than that — and also because we were colleagues, working together on SFWA committees and in other ways as well (she and I are both past presidents of SFWA as well). She was a delight in conversation, and sharp as the proverbial tack when it came to dealing with committee work, and in both of these aspects of her being I was glad to know her.
Jane does not need me to valorize her work, and with more than 400 books to her name, if I were to attempt I would be here a while. But I will note that SFWA gave her its Grand Master award, and she also received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and won a hefty shelf of awards, in genre and out of it. She deserved all of them. She will be sorely missed.
VISA is letting ChatGPT buy things for you: It’s a thing called “agentic shopping,” in which you can (presumably) tell ChatGPT something you want, and it goes off to find it for you and then makes the purchase without any further intervention from you, because, after all, you gave it your credit card and permission to use it. This is, I will tell you now, a spectacularly bad idea, and not just because “AI” follows directions less than perfectly due to the very nature of its architecture, and sooner than later it’s going to make a very expensive fuck-up that the user will be on the hook for because giving an “AI” your credit card number isn’t fraud, it’s just stupidity, and there are few legal consumer protections for that. It’s also a bad idea because it’s one more layer of obfuscation between you and the actual costs of things, which makes it that much harder to manage one’s finances.
And while I’m sure you are smart with your money, given the average credit card debt in the US is over $6k and climbing, and that most people carry card balances at extortionate rates, this is a really really bad idea for most consumers. Great for the credit card companies! But bad for actual humans.
Please do me a favor and never let an “AI” do your shopping for you. Please continue to be the person who pushes the button on purchases. This won’t necessarily save you from impulse shopping, says the man with 30 guitars, but at least you have to acknowledge what you’re doing. That’s something.
— JS
SNCF would sooner leave passengers stranded than make simple timetable adjustments
2026-Jun-12, Friday 12:00jon_worth_feed
In the Newsletter this week
Analysis: SNCF would sooner leave passengers stranded than make simple timetable adjustments
Bullshit Meter: Beograd - Zagreb - Ljubljana trains back and faster by 2029
Good week: New Cottbus - Legnica service from December 2026
Good week, possibly: Renfe to get a new website
Good journalism this week: FT long read about Deutsche Bahn's woes
Bad week: Modane - Oulx, €59 for a 29 minute trip
Very bad week: End of 2031 for Stuttgart's new station?
Elsewhere this week: VCD Magazin
Photo of the week: Tramway to Raeren
Calendar: Lehrte - Berlin line closure starts 5th February 2027
Newsletter 021, Friday 12th June 2026.
Subscriber-only newsletter, sent every Friday at 14:00 CET.
Beograd - Zagreb - Ljubljana trains back and faster by 2029
2026-Jun-12, Friday 11:55jon_worth_feed
Observer of rail in the Balkans Fabian Vendrig sent me this story about plans to have the infrastructure in place by 2029 to be able to run a Beograd - Zagreb - Ljubljana train with a reasonable trip time, pointing to the renovation of the Ruma - Šid section in Serbia as the reason for some optimism. This follows the contract award for the Novska - Dugo Selo renovation (that is currently the worst part of the corridor in Croatia).
Better infrastructure by 2029 to allow the service to happen is possible, but given the unwillingness of Croatian and Serbian railways to collaborate I am sorry but I do not yet fully believe this - although of course it is a good idea!
Interesting Links for 12-06-2026
2026-Jun-12, Friday 12:00andrewducker- 1. Davros envious after Russell T Davies successfully kills Doctor Who
- (tags:drwho funny satire bbc )
- 2. But are AIs conscious?
- (tags:ai consciousness comic funny )
- 3. What's happened to UK defence spending?
- (tags:uk military money government )
- 4. Digital Sovereignty Becomes An Imperative As the US Reads Dutch Emails
- (tags:usa netherlands spying email )
- 5. Please I Beg of You Do Not Use "AI" In Your Business Communications
- (tags:ai communication )
- ai,
- bbc,
- comic,
- communication,
- consciousness,
- drwho,
- email,
- funny,
- government,
- links,
- military,
- money,
- netherlands,
- satire,
- spying,
- uk,
- usa
Cautionary Tales – The Dunning Canoe-ger Effect
2026-Jun-12, Friday 05:01tim_harford_feedWhen John Darwin walks into a shop in London, it causes an instant stir. After all, John Darwin has been dead for five years. He claims to have amnesia, but everyone – from the police and the media to his insurance company – suspects he is lying. No one can prove a thing, until a young woman at home with her baby thinks of something everyone else has missed.
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Investigative journalist David Leigh and retired Detective Superintendent Tony Hutchinson wrote The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe: The astonishing true story of Anne Darwin and ‘Canoe Man’ John and their jaw-dropping deception. It became the basis for a four-part ITV drama of the same name, along with a documentary – The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe: The Real Story. David Leigh also worked with Anne Darwin to write her book, Out of My Depth.
The Darwins’ case is given another book-length treatment in Tammy Cohen’s Up The Creek Without a Paddle. This script also relied on contemporary news reporting in a range of outlets including The Times, The Independent, the BBC, the Mirror, The Sun, the Mail and The Standard.
For more on the origins of context collapse, see this post from danah boyd; recent research includes From context adaptation to context restoration: strategies, motivations, and decision rules of managing context collapse on WeChat by Pengxiang Li, Hichang Cho, Cuihua Shen and Hangchen Kong.
Jane Yolen (1939 - 2026)
2026-Jun-11, Thursday 17:48james_davis_nicoll"Author Jane Yolen (b.1939) died on June 11. She wrote books and novels for all ages, including Briar Rose, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Yolen won 2 Nebulas, a World Fantasy and was named Grand Master by SFPA, SFWA and World Fantasy. She served as SFWA President."
The Big Idea: Cynthia Pelayo
2026-Jun-11, Thursday 20:49scalziwhatever_feed
To be whisked away to Neverland was certainly the dream of many a child, but for Wendy Darling it was always a trap, rather than a paradise. Author Cynthia Pelayo discusses in her Big Idea how Wendy was a servant, not an equal to the Lost Boys, and takes us to revisit Wendy in her newest novel, It Came From Neverland.
CYNTHIA PELAYO:
Wendy Darling is the reason any of us even know about Neverland. We think this is Peter Pan’s story, but it’s not, not really. The only reason any of us even know about Neverland is because of Wendy Darling.
Let’s strip away the fairy dust and the pirates and the flying and the crocodile, and what do we have? A girl. A girl who was told that something magical was waiting for her on the other side. A girl who believed what she was being told. A girl who later learned she was lured with the promise of magic, yet found herself inside a trap instead.
J.M. Barrie introduced us to Peter Pan through The Little White Bird in 1902, and that little boy would go on to pique the public’s curiosity so much that Barrie revisited his story. Then came the play in 1904 and the novel in 1911. However, the reason the story works and the reason it continues to survive over a century later is because of Wendy. Without Wendy there would be no Neverland. No Tinkerbell. No Hook. No Lost Boys. Peter Pan without Wendy Darling is just a boy screaming into the dark. Wendy is the story, and Peter’s promise to her is the lie.
Peter tells her to come away with him, that she will never grow up, but what he means is something entirely different. What he wants is a mother, for the Lost Boys, and selfishly for himself. He wants someone to read to them, to mend their socks, to take care of them. Someone who will stay in that role, forever.
Yes, Wendy goes, because she is sweet and brave and kind and beautiful, and she is made up of stories. And perhaps it’s because of her kindness that she allows herself to trust, to trust in the possibility that maybe this is all real. Perhaps she even catches the hint that there is something wrong in this request to run away, but she overrides her own intuition for the possibility of magic and friendship. Quickly Wendy learns that the promise of eternal youth was just manipulation. It was all a story, and not a happily-ever-after kind. She was not brought to Neverland to take part in adventure, to be treated as a partner, or even as an equal. She was brought to Neverland to be a caretaker in a prison with no walls.
Wendy is every woman who has ever been told one thing and expected to be something else. That is the story that I needed to tell: The Girl Who Bravely and Beautifully Grew Up, Wendy.
I wanted to write a version of this story where we are provided with the accounts of Neverland directly from Wendy’s perspective, as an adult, after she has had time to process it all. I wanted her to be able to clearly name what happened to her, to accept that she was lied to, and then made out to be foolish and called unstable for the wounds inflicted on her by others. I wanted to tell the story where she lives with that trauma and learns that she is not defined by what happened to her.
In It Came From Neverland, Wendy is in her early 20s and she is working as a schoolteacher at an orphanage at the start of WWI in 1914. She also volunteers in the afternoon, reading to soldiers who have returned from the war. When one of her students goes missing, and a solider in a comma utters the words “Peter Pan,” she knows Peter has returned and she and her brothers must reunite to finally stop him from kidnapping more children.
This book is for every woman who was told she was special by someone who really meant that she was useful to them. For every woman who followed a beautiful story, later to learn it was only a cage.
And, for every single woman who told the truth about what happened to her, but was not believed, and she realized that no one was coming to save her, so she learned to save herself.
The only story that has ever truly mattered is Wendy’s.
It Came From Neverland: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Data: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
2026-Jun-11, Thursday 16:16tim_harford_feedWhat is the value of high-quality, trustworthy official statistics? Given the number of things that statistical agencies measure, we might expect that they have attempted to put a number on this too. In fact, they have often been rather coy. A UN report, “Promoting, Measuring and Communicating the Value of Official Statistics”, published in 2018, was packed with qualitative ideas about how statistics were useful: they were said to build trust in government, improve decision-making, promote equality and “help us understand who we are, have been and are becoming”. All reasonable enough, but cost-benefit analysis was thin on the ground.
A cynic might suggest this near silence speaks volumes. Maybe official statistics have little value? That was the radical view of Sir John Cowperthwaite, who was the financial secretary of Hong Kong throughout the 1960s, when it was a rapidly growing, laissez-faire British colony. Cowperthwaite thought the value of official statistics wasn’t merely minimal, but negative: he told the economist Milton Friedman that he didn’t collect economic data, because it would only encourage the Whitehall variety of mandarin to interfere.
In context, Cowperthwaite’s position was understandable: few economies were more at risk of clumsy meddling than Hong Kong, a colonial possession pursuing a libertarian path on the opposite side of the world from soft-left imperial rulers. Still, there are at least two weaknesses in his argument. The first is the hope that ignorance might restrain the interventionist impulses of governments. It might simply make those interventionist impulses clumsier. The second is the unexamined premise that only a government might find official statistics useful.
A report from the US National Academies last year argued otherwise. While governments do rely on official statistics for everything from political representation (often tied to population) to the inflation adjustment of pensions and other welfare payments, many organisations and individuals also rely on trustworthy statistics for anything from deciding where to locate a new storefront or warehouse to directly selling analysis based on government data. The National Academies reckons that the revenue of the “government data-intensive sector” in the US almost doubled between 2012 and 2022, to just shy of $800bn, a direct sign that somebody finds these numbers useful. For context, the total budget of all US statistical agencies and programmes in 2022 was $7.1bn.
But if you want to understand whether a thing is useful, you can always look at what happens when somebody breaks it. Call this the Joni Mitchell principle: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
The National Bureau of Economic Research’s new working paper “The Value of Reliable Statistics” comes from Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, Erica Groshen, a former boss of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and two scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-market think-tank. It studies the impact of one particular fracture: President Trump’s firing last August of Erika McEntarfer, head of the BLS, along with his simultaneous claim that, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
As I wrote at the time, this was a two-pronged attack on the credibility of the BLS. By attacking the institution’s record, Trump was damaging it in the eyes of his supporters, and, by replacing its leader in such a way, he was damaging it in the eyes of his opponents. Bloom and his colleagues do not try to measure the impact of Trump’s actions on the BLS’s capacity; it is the question of its credibility that interests them.
To measure this, the researchers look at the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, a dataset developed about 15 years ago by Bloom and others. The EPU measures uncertainty about the direction of economic policy by analysing the text in major US newspapers. It spikes when newspapers can talk of little else but how policymakers are causing confusion.
Unsurprisingly, the index sharply rose immediately after McEntarfer was fired. It fell back not long after, but as the researchers note, “even when the underlying rise in uncertainty is more persistent . . . the news cycle moves on”. Based on earlier research into the effect of uncertainty on investment and growth, the researchers suggest that the increase in economic uncertainty that week could have caused $104bn of economic damage and that up to 168,000 jobs could have been lost.
Those are large numbers, but as Bloom and colleagues freely admit, they are not good estimates of the impact of Trump’s words and actions because there were other reasons for the EPU to increase. The first and most obvious reason is that the trigger for McEntarfer’s firing was a large downward revision in the jobs numbers, which would itself have raised uncertainty even if Trump had done nothing. A Federal Reserve governor, Adriana Kugler, announced her resignation on the same day. All three events happened within hours of each other and all three could reasonably have been interpreted at the time as adding to a sense of chaos and pushing the EPU up.
After trying to isolate coverage only of McEntarfer’s firing, the researchers produced a preferred estimate of nearly $20bn of economic damage, resulting from the fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by the ejection and criticism of McEntarfer. It’s still fair to describe this estimate as itself highly uncertain. It is, after all, measuring what the newspapers found newsworthy. Generally, serious newspapers put stuff that matters on the front page, and when the news is about unpredictable economic policy that has generally been a bad sign. But sometimes newspapers get excited about things that don’t much matter; perhaps McEntarfer’s firing was one of those things. It is impossible to be sure.
The estimated damage from the affair, while a tiny sliver of US GDP, is about 25 times the entire budget of the BLS. This, perhaps, is the argument for investing in reliable statistics, and for not undermining them in the hope of fleeting partisan advantage: they do not cost very much relative to what they are trying to measure.
In the US, just over one dollar in a thousand of federal government spending goes to statistical agencies and other statistical programmes. The case for government-funded statistics is that it is worth spending one dollar in a thousand in the hope that the other $999 might be fractionally better used as a result.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 May 2026.
Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.
“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.” – Bill Bryson
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