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2025-04-22

Week 224: Oligarchic Space Dildo

I found a convenient zero-waste shop in Peckham. There are a few around, but none of them are anywhere I go regularly, so I’m delighted to find that I can take a short stroll from the office and get refills of beans and grains and pulses and all that good stuff.

Jeff Bezos sent the most phallic rocket ever built by man (and they’ve built a lot of phallic rockets) to the upper atmosphere for some kind of girlboss “astronaut” nonsense.

The last all-female spaceflight was over 60 years ago when Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6.

Tereshkova went up to 212 km and spent just short of three days off the earth.

You’re not an astronaut for spending 11 minutes and the annual CO₂ budget of a whole village to go 100 km up and down again, like some kind of inverse bungee jump. Get a grip.

I made hot cross buns, with a cross on and everything.

I based them on a recipe from BBC Food but used sourdough starter to leaven them overnight. The smell while they were cooking was amazing, and they tasted good as well.

The new pier for the new Rotherhithe electric cross-river ferry is nearly finished. I’m still waiting to find out how much it’s going to cost. Will it be free (as I have heard promised in the past), or will it continue to cost nearly £6 for a one-minute journey?

We watched If Only I Could Hibernate (2023), a beautiful and moving film about a talented boy living in poverty in the ger district of Ulaanbaatar. I’ve seldom felt quite so invested in the protagonist’s travails. Find a place to watch it if you can.

Trans women are women, regardless of what the UK Supreme Court may have determined within the specific and narrow context of the Equality Act 2010. It literally says in the judgement that they have not ruled on any definitions in a broader context:

It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010.

I also happen to think that it’s a bad decision, and that any attempt to make sex binary falls apart early on contact with the complicated realities of biology, but everyone who is interpreting the judgement as legally defining a woman is ignorant or malicious (ou pourquoi pas les deux ?).

Links for the week that was in it:

• Introducing Herb: A new HTML-Aware ERB Parser for smarting developer tooling. I already have a plan to use this for something.
• How to Setup QEMU Output to Console and Automate Using Shell Script.
• Sutton Hoo and Syria: The Anglo-Saxons Who Served in the Byzantine Army? Argues that there was direct contact between eastern Britain and Byzantium in the 6th century.
• Chamfered primitives for OpenSCAD.
• What’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup?
• Communing with Dead Voters. “Securing Labour’s future as an election winning machine that can bury the Tories and see off Reform will only happen if they strive to be capital’s master, not its handmaiden. And I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how unlikely that is.” Let this socially and fiscally regressive Labour Party fade away into ΠΑΣΟΚ irrelevance.
• Trump is halfway to making America a police state says the FT. “At around noon on April 14 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government […] Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man.”
• Tesla Accused of Hacking Odometers to Rip Off Customers. Nice car you’ve got there. It would be a shame if the odometer suddenly and inexplicably leapt past the 50,000 mile warranty threshold right when you have a problem with it.