Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org

(exactly which green is the better green remains a little unclear, as they have decided the party visual guidelines must be kept secret from the masses - https://www.greenparty.org.uk/brand.html Labour used to do the same, but made them public recently. I'm sure there's a very clever reason at work, but all a bit odd.)

vital #UKpolitics update: the Green Party has rebranded, changing its preferred colour from "green" to "a bit more green".

Charles Babbage looks ahead from 1864 to foresee most of the discussions about chatGPT.

Read a novel yesterday explicitly set in 2020 & noting the context of the pandemic, and thinking about how rare it is.

Apropos of which, the foreword to a 1921 novel:

"This would make it rather difficult to know what to do with the graves of our dead."

From George Mackay Brown, 'An Orkney Tapestry'

Today's legislative footnote: in 1808, Parliament passed an Act explicitly allowing the Postmaster General to open some letters that could not be delivered to Hamburg, because there was a legal question about whether or not they were actually allowed to do so in order to return it to the sender

(s. 11 eventually realises that this problem might happen again so hastily generalises the solution to other future returned mail)

I think I have seen at least three films that start with this headline https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/22/heidi-horten-world-most-valuable-private-jewellery-collection-display-london-christies-geneva

Today's great legislative discovery: the Winfrith Heath Act 1957.

The Atomic Energy Authority decided to build a new research reactor, and found an empty bit of land in Dorset. Planning permission, tick. Council support, tick. Local consultation, tick.

Unfortunately, also, discovery that someone unknown may potentially hold "the right to graze three cattle and the right of common and turbary" over the site, tick.

(For me, the only effect was a delightedly bemused pause at the times an institution puts a mandatory "do you have grade C+ GCSE or equivalent..." tickbox on application forms rather than asking for details.

I mean, yes, there is a strictly factual answer to the question you're asking, but it is not the one either of us want me to say...)

The theory was that the SG coursework element took up a lot of time more or less repeating the same material, & stronger pupils would pretty much reliably pass the Higher anyway so you might as well focus on getting them A's in it.

This worked okay, but backfired a few years later - so I was told, I was long gone by then - in *exactly* the way you expect: surprised pupils with no qualifications in the two core subjects. Ooops.

All this talk of mandatory maths education reminds me of a weird experiment I was part of in the late nineties: skipping Standard Grade maths & English in order to get a term's head start on the Higher.

@LucasWerkmeister honestly was more thinking of the bit in the novels where the detective says "we'll be watching the ports, he can't get far...'

@bradpatrick Surprisingly difficult to get a handle on prices from the papers, but I think varied by route - the Atlantic passage would have had a greater mix of luxury down to steerage emigrants, whereas prices for the India routes were a bit narrower - eg this 1927 ad quoting £30 third, £66 first.

Not exactly the five hundred flights a day from Heathrow, but it's a pretty impressive level of connectivity.

(One interesting detail: the ads are all very emphatic about the sailing days but omit day of arrival - I guess if you booked a three-week passage, you knew what you were letting yourself in for. They also generally omit actual prices, which would have been exorbitant)

Today's idle curiosity: a century ago, if you wanted to leave London in a hurry and go far away, would there be a ship *tomorrow*?

Quick count of ads in one paper: between 11/4/1923 and 21/4/23 there were eleven passenger sailings from London to India/Australia/the Far East. Eight to the US/Canada/Caribbean. Double that easily if you took the train to Liverpool or Southampton and met your ship there.