Ralph Corderoy

Sapere aude.

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

Think this is the first silicon bug I've had a hand in finding.
The NXP KE06 Arm Cortex-M0+ SoC has a SysTick timer where CLKSOURCE=0 should be a core_clock÷16, like other family members, but NXP have confirmed it's ÷8. SysTick_Config() does CLKSOURCE=1
https://t.co/wmALzSdecu

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

The image is worth a read; written by R. V. Jones. https://t.co/qHMb0sqtCf

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

yeah you can guess who else sent that to me this am!
the whole story is amazing -- we actually used convoys in the Napoleonic war but in WW1 the Admiralty created fake stats to make themselves look good, then forgot they were fake and used them to argue convoys couldn't work, then a junior Ben Warner examined them and saw they were fake and went to higher ups saying - the stats are fake convoys will work - and the admirals went mad!

text this am from ex no10: this photo from the RVJ book [i sent] is more useful to covid than the covid Inquiry

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

If you, or someone you love, has

cancer,
B12 deficiency,
kidney dialysis
or a stent

you need to know they they must now avoid ALL white flour.

They also need to check wholemeal and even gluten free products which also contain folic acid.

Sign this petition to stop it being mandated in flour:

https://t.co/OgdjkgUBHW

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@ClareCraigPath You have to check every ingredients label for anything slightly complex. Pork pie: wheat flour with folic. Macaroni cheese ready meal: ditto. Folic flour hasn't reached every product yet, some list fortified flour without it, but I expect those to dwindle. https://t.co/jS6lUuJtu8

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@MrRBourne @SteveBakerFRSA Academics shift left before reaching the top, and few sell a million books.
Friedrich #Hayek's ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’ essay better explains the attraction. The free PDF of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ has it at the back, page 105.
https://t.co/gpXxDZSN3Y

[Louis Mosley @louismosley]

The Met Commissioner has now set out what this decision means: 500-700 officers and staff taken out of frontline services, and a London less safe than it would have been.

Palantir has ~1000 people in London. We are ready to help. The Met wants our help. The Mayor has blocked it.

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

A rant. There’s a misunderstanding about just how short the government’s Defence Investment Plan will fall, when we do finally see it. Sadly, it’s so much worse than the general conception.

It’s not just the gap between the £28billon that the chiefs asked for and the £13.5bn Rachel Reeves is offering. The chiefs’ £28bn was actually just the minimum they think defence needs to get through the next four years. To pay for the full transformation that the SDR prescribes, and insists is vital, I’m told internal MoD estimates put the real sum needed at 4.5 or 5% of GDP (which btw is also NATO’s new annual spending target). The UK currently only spends 2.3% of its GDP on defence, rising to 2.5% next April.

In cash terms, that means defence actually needs an extra £60bn, and not just over 4 years but EVERY year. That’s the true scale of the task, and what our allies like Germany and Poland are now well on their way towards. So the Treasury/No10’s current sticking plaster offer is not just woefully thin, it doesn’t even touch the sides.

To defend Britain properly in the frightening modern world that we now live, the next Prime Minister (Burnham, Badenoch or Farage) is going to have to start all over again. And unlike the current government, they will have to have this debate publicly and honestly.

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@ChrisLew300 @afneil The YouTube playlist is: https://t.co/VjdwE2oftK

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@TrekChris @afneil Here's the YouTube playlist; you can get to the channel from there: https://t.co/VjdwE2oftK

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@RichardsMask @afneil The YouTube playlist is https://t.co/VjdwE2oftK

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@thetrocro @odellxyz Bitcoin's naming is off elsewhere too. ‘Custody’ for a wallet sounds safe, but it's really a ‘confidence’ wallet needing trust in a second party compared to a ‘sovereign’ wallet. Just the term ‘non-custodial wallet’ is off-putting even without knowing the meaning.

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@mattwridley When was the political decision that the self-titled IRA were not to be treated like an enemy army? Then it would be expected for our army's soldiers to ambush attack theirs. Much of the problem stems from treating them as criminals to be policed as civilians. Asymmetric warfare.

[Rod D. Martin @RodDMartin]

🧵 China’s population collapse is now mathematically irreversible.

There simply aren’t enough women left of childbearing age.

Even if the fertility rate magically returned to replacement level (2.1 children per woman) tomorrow, the country would still lose more than 40% of its population by 2100.

It won't. The real number is 75%. There's nothing like it in history. 🧵

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

It communicates with us using a 23-watt transmitter.
Less than a refrigerator light bulb.

The signal takes 22 hours to reach us, traveling at the speed of light.

By the time it arrives, it's 20 billion times weaker than the power of a digital watch battery.

NASA's Deep Space Network picks it up using 70-meter dish antennas cooled to near absolute zero to reduce electronic noise.

The engineering required to hear a 23-watt signal from 24 billion km away is arguably more impressive than the spacecraft itself.

Launched 1977.
Still transmitting.
Still being heard.

We built something that works perfectly, 47 years later, in conditions no one has ever tested in.

That's what engineering for the long term looks like.

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@Handre This explanation from the @BankofEngland is often referred to by @SteveBakerFRSA, including when he points out fractional reserve's original meaning doesn't apply today: regulations and a bank's assets constrain its lending. https://t.co/oPosgrHKlY

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@btclg_podcast @SteveBakerFRSA My YouTube comment's gone, so here's the Bank of England report Steve mentions on how the UK banks create money. Though I couldn't find the copy of his ‘aide memoir’ which he passed to Mark Carney at the @CobdenCentre. https://t.co/oPosgrHKlY

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@RupertLowe10 Rupert, a PAYE suggestion: have employee payslips include all employer costs, e.g. employer's NI, with totals showing the voter how much: tax they're really paying the Government; and their cost to the employer. https://t.co/u9ji3OTH0u

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

Why can't public health understand risk?

Their optimistic claim is that mandating folic acid in our flour might prevent 200 cases of neural tube defects in pregnancy a year.

But with 70M people in UK that is a chance of benefit of 1 in 350,000.

BUT

69.5 million of us have NO POSSIBILITY OF BENEFIT.

For those people it is ALL risk.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A Yorkshire pudding was originally called a dripping pudding because the batter was placed in a tin underneath the roast as it turned on the spit. Beef fat dripped down. The batter caught it. The result puffed enormous and crisp and was eaten first, with gravy, to take the edge off the appetite before the meat arrived.

That is no longer how anyone makes Yorkshire pudding.

Most modern recipes now reach for sunflower or rapeseed oil, because someone decided the fat that built the dish was dangerous. The pudding comes out flatter, paler, and sadder, and the physics tells you why: dripping smokes hot enough to shock the batter skyward, seed oil does not. We swapped the fat that works for the fat that was advertised at us, and the pudding has been collapsing ever since.

The recipe:

- Plain flour, 140g.
- Eggs, 4 large.
- Whole milk, 200ml.
- A pinch of salt.

Whisk smooth. Rest in the fridge overnight if you can be bothered.

Heat a muffin tin in the oven at 230C with a generous tablespoon of beef dripping in each well. Wait until the dripping is smoking.

Pour in the batter. Do not open the oven for 20 minutes.

They will rise like cathedrals.

Your grandmother knew this without a thermometer or a single word of food science. We have both and produce worse puddings. Use the dripping.

[Ralph Corderoy @RalphCorderoy]

@mattwridley For those of us who have never heard of Doggerland: https://t.co/fTlqxiwccc

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

Another MP who desperately needs my free energy training

Intermittent renewables will NEVER be cheaper

They require backup
They require more expensive real time balancing
They require orders of magnitude more grid infrastructure than conventional generation
And they STILL require massive subsidies

All of that gets added to bills and is the reason bills are going up not down