And I was the galley slave Who lost his heart when the ship went down
Pensilva, Cornwall, UK
Joined September 2015
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Just a quick word about my support for Ukraine, which I make no secret of but some people clearly object to (continued).
Graham Giles retweeted
In 2017, Corbyn came within a few thousand votes of being Prime Minister. He was promising to renationalise rail, energy and water, end austerity, invest in the NHS and build 100,000 council homes a year.
Nine years later, the NHS is in crisis, rail is being slowly renationalised anyway, energy bills have hit record highs and the housing crisis is worse than ever.
Was he ahead of his time?
Do you remember Reggie Bosanquet? Bursting out laughing in the middle of an item about the great bustards nearly ended his career.
Graham Giles retweeted
Hannah Spencer: "Someone shat on the floor."
Every single Labour MP: "What's wrong with shitting on the floor? Some times we work long hours. We are perfectly within our rights to shit on the floor."
Graham Giles retweeted
Should MPs be allowed to drink on the job?
Hannah Spencer thinks not. Many, predominately male, MPs [and Andrew Neil] fiercely disagree.
Spoiler alert: no, of course, MPs should not be allowed to drink at work.
Yes, there's history and yes, there's precedent, sitting alongside nine subsidised bars on the Parliamentary estate, but really, no one should be drinking at work.
Let alone those who we've elected to be our representatives in the House of Commons and to bring new laws into place on our behalf.
Back in the olden days, when I ran bars in London, we'd often be offered drinks from generous customers. It was far more preferable for a punter to say “get one for yourself” than to offer a cash tip. And that was cool.
I wouldn't let my team drink behind the bar though. They could bank their drinks, and we'd have some after the doors closed, but not on shift — even on a quiet night.
Booze dulls your senses, it hampers your judgement and can lead to mistakes. When you're behind a very busy bar with rows of people trying to grab your attention, it's easy to get your orders wrong and key in the wrong things on the till, leading to cash or stock shortages.
But more importantly, when you're working in that environment, you have to be constantly on alert for danger. Spiking. Attacks. Thefts. Fights.
When you've had a drink or two, it lowers your alertness and things get missed.
I get that Parliament isn't exactly the same hustle as Belushis Camden on a Saturday night, but the same principles apply.
Things are missed. Standards are lowered.
Before my move to the nightlife world of London, I was in IT, specifically, the IT Manager for an executive search company in London Bridge. We used to go to the pub at lunchtime on a Friday [sometimes a Monday].
We did that because we knew on a Friday afternoon, it didn't matter that our productivity dropped off a cliff; it was a coast to the weekend and, for most, a return to the pub.
It was a good time. Fun and frivolity on a Friday.
But very little got done because we couldn't be bothered after a couple of pints. Work became the secondary consideration.
And this is where we find our MPs.
They may claim that a couple of glasses of wine or two pints at lunch, doesn't affect them, but it does. Of course it does.
Shouldn't we expect those officials that we elected to represent us, to be able to navigate a 'long day' without getting on the booze?
I'd say it should be mandatory.
MPs don't attend Parliament every day, some do weeks at a time without showing up to their jobs <cough> Farage </cough>.
Even if a dedicated MP turned up for their four-day working week, for which they receive almost £100,000, I fully believe that they should be able to navigate that time without drinking on the job.
Oh, and the Green Party drugs policy is a total red herring. A weak distraction from a serious issue.
Welcome to a new week of nonsense in politics.
Happy Monday. 😊
Graham Giles retweeted
Thing about the whole drinking MPs thing, is that lots have never had a serious job (some have). Lots of “consulting” and pretend jobs that pay a lot of £££, or even real ones but all involving boozy lunches etc.
So they won’t think it’s weird. Whereas, to most of us, it’s really NOT a thing.
Graham Giles retweeted
I’m a head chef in a bar restaurant, as a member of the management team, I get free food and drinks, however I’m not allowed to drink whilst working.
Is my job more important than an MP?
Graham Giles retweeted
You could shear a sheep in May.
It takes ten minutes. She is grateful. The fleece keeps you warm for forty years. When you're done, you bury it, and it becomes soil within three years.
Or, for ethical reasons, you could choose one of the alternatives.
Cotton. Requires 10,000 litres of water per jumper. The Aral Sea is now mostly dust because the Soviet Union diverted its rivers to grow it. But the jumper is "natural."
Polyester. Crude oil, extruded into thread. Sheds 700,000 microplastic fibres per wash. Lasts in landfill until approximately the year 2226. But "vegan."
Acrylic. Petrochemical, manufactured using a solvent the EU has classified as a reproductive hazard. Marketed as "cruelty-free." The cruelty is in the supply chain.
Bamboo. The plant is innocent. The fabric is bamboo viscose, dissolved in carbon disulphide in a Chinese chemical plant whose workers have elevated rates of psychosis. But it has a leaf on the label.
Hemp. Genuinely fine. Most of what is sold as hemp is a polyester blend, sold at four times the price.
Recycled polyester. Still sheds microplastics. Still ends up in landfill. Made from plastic bottles that could have been recycled into more bottles. The fashion industry has been quiet about this.
Vegan leather. Plastic. Reliably. Always.
Lab-grown fibres. Genetically modified bacteria fed on glucose syrup in a steel tank, in a factory powered by natural gas, packaged in plastic, shipped from California. Funded by venture capital. Not yet profitable.
Or you could shear the sheep in May. She'd appreciate it. The jumper would last forty years. The grass would grow back the same.
But of course, the sheep is the unethical option.
Graham Giles retweeted
Buying a car, for many, will be the largest purchase they ever make (not being able to afford a home), one that they are, ostensibly, forced to make + it's the worst investment you will ever make.
The gov't forces highways, stroads and parking lots on us, and we can't afford it.
Graham Giles retweeted
England is home to one of the rarest habitats on Earth.
Chalk streams are crystal-clear rivers formed by water filtered slowly through chalk hills and aquifers.
They stay cool, clean, and remarkably clear, which is why they are so beautiful.
There are only around 200 chalk streams in the world, and most of them are in England.
You’ll find them mainly in southern and eastern England, especially in counties such as Hampshire, Wiltshire, Kent and Norfolk.
Famous examples include the Test, Itchen, Kennet and Lambourn.
They are an extraordinary part of our countryside, rare, fragile, and worth protecting.
Had you seen a chalk stream before?
#EnglishLandscape #EnglishCountryside #EnglishHeritage
Graham Giles retweeted
Bachelor: I'm going to solve climate change!
Masters: I'm dedicated to developing new carbon capture technologies.
First-year PhD: Studying ocean currents is important; it might help us predict future climate patterns!
Fourth-year PhD: I am opening a bakery.
Graham Giles retweeted
Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska solved a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for over 400 years. Even Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton couldn’t crack it.
We live in a three-dimensional world, but Maryna solved a puzzle in an eight-dimensional space—something that’s very hard even to imagine.
She was born in Kyiv, studied at Taras Shevchenko University, worked in Bonn and Berlin, and at just 33 became a professor in Lausanne.
So what was the problem? It’s about how to pack identical spheres as tightly as possible in space. This question was first asked by Kepler back in 1611. Over time, scientists found answers for two and three dimensions—but not for eight.
Maryna proved that in eight dimensions, the densest packing is formed by a special mathematical structure called a lattice. What’s even more amazing is that she did it in just 23 pages, while earlier attempts took hundreds.
In 2022, she was awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. She became only the second woman in history to receive it.
Today, Maryna Viazovska works in Lausanne, supports Ukrainian mathematicians, and brings pride to Ukraine with her achievements.
Graham Giles retweeted
Hunter-gatherers lived under "Primitive Communism" for around 300,000 years. It's what made us who we are.
This snippet from my new book, "DEMOCRACY: A User's Guide", shows that such a system still works for the !Kung today.
Get your copy here:
smarturl.it/Democracy
Graham Giles retweeted
An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.
I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.
His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.
Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.
Here's the story almost nobody tells you.
Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.
The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.
The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.
For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.
Strang inverted the entire curriculum.
He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.
His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.
The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.
For 62 years.
The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.
Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.
His final lecture was in May 2023.
The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.
His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.
That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.
The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.
20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.
The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.
The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.
Graham Giles retweeted
A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work.
His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing.
In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen.
Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years.
His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired.
He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow.
The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one.
The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed.
The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else.
The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices.
He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake.
He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day.
The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword.
Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82.
The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.
Graham Giles retweeted
Some of the best people I know are nondescript. Physical appearance is no indicator of moral value or worth — it’s an accident of genetics. And some breathtakingly beautiful people are the worst, bitchiest people I’ve ever encountered. arianesherine.substack.com/p…
Graham Giles retweeted
Soviet chandelier factories received production quotas measured in tons, not quality or function. Factory managers responded rationally to the incentive structure: they packed chandeliers with extra metal, concrete, and lead weights to hit their tonnage targets. The heavier the chandelier, the better their performance metrics looked to central planners in Moscow.
Apartment dwellers across the USSR paid the price. Chandeliers weighing hundreds of pounds crashed through ceilings, destroying furniture and injuring families below. Reports from the 1970s and 1980s document dozens of ceiling collapses in Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow as these industrial monstrosities proved too heavy for residential construction. Factory managers got their bonuses while citizens dodged falling light fixtures.
The system worked exactly as designed. When you divorce production decisions from market prices and consumer preferences, you get perverse outcomes. Central planners measured success through crude metrics they could track from their desks, not through the satisfaction of end users. Factory managers optimized for the measurement system, not for making chandeliers that actually functioned as lighting.
You see identical dynamics today wherever bureaucrats substitute their judgment for market mechanisms. Public school systems optimize for standardized test scores rather than education. Hospitals game Medicare reimbursement codes rather than focus on patient outcomes. Police departments chase arrest quotas rather than reducing crime. The Soviet chandelier problem lives on in every corner of the administrative state.
The market solves the chandelier problem instantly through profit and loss. Customers refuse to buy chandeliers that destroy their homes, driving bad producers out of business and rewarding those who build functional products.
Graham Giles retweeted
In one of my local fb groups for a nearby small town, about once every 2-3 months the local milkman advertises for 14-15 year olds to help him on his round.
He gets very defensive if asked what he’s paying and downright aggressive if anyone points out that he has to keep finding new kids to do his grunt work that regularly. Apparently kids these days have no work ethic.
Graham Giles retweeted
In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore.
They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute.
Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry."
He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns.
He asked: "Can I collect my other things?"
They said yes.
He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days.
When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through.
The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive.
60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth:
On what the war did to him:
"We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought."
Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed.
"Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did."
"But it changed us."
"What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?"
When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes.
"Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?"
On learning languages to lead:
Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English.
The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay.
"So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien."
"Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default."
His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him.
"I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding."
By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent.
"Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them."
"That came respect."
It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them.
On fighting the Communists:
The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born.
"Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization."
They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns.
Lee stood up and said no.
"They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages."
English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each.
"When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath."
"But it was a fight for survival. Life or death."
On where trust comes from:
"It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'"
"But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference."
"Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore."
On IQ vs EQ:
Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader?
"IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions."
"But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings."
"If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good."
He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120."
But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly.
"He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know."
"So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate."
On corruption:
Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime.
"When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed."
"We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent."
He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio.
"I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself."
One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee.
"I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer."
The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price."
"It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions."
On consistency:
Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches.
He asked them: what was the dominant theme?
All three said the same thing: consistency.
"What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear."
"That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do."
On delivering results:
"We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals."
"Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000."
"Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value."
"But that was planned."
Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own.
"So we give everybody a stake."
On changing culture slowly:
Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it.
"Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots."
Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English.
"They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched."
It took 16 years.
"I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack."
On whether leadership can be taught:
Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature.
Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?"
He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time."
Lee's version:
"Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so."
"He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family."
"You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it."
"But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble."
On sustaining yourself:
Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership.
"If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope."
"But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you."
"When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind."
"If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit."
In his later years, he learned to meditate.
"At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind."
"Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide."
This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined.
Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.
