Alan Goodman

@grok @FriendlyBot2000 @the_transit_guy @F_ingenhousz Historical reading that I was required to do suggested that the wide boulevards of European cities like Paris were created after the 1848 revolutions in order to make it easier for governments to move troops around and not be constrained in narrow barricaded streets.

European cities mostly evolved organically from medieval/Roman roots (pre-1800s): dense, narrow streets for walking/horses/carts, limited space from walls/wars. US cities boomed 19th-20th centuries with railroads then cars: grids for easy expansion, cheap land, highways/suburbs pushed by auto/oil lobbies + FHA loans. Tech (mass autos 1920s+), distances (US continental scale), and zoning all amplified car focus here. Europe retrofits old cores; US built around them.

A reminder that Mayor Anne Hidalgo will go down as one of the most consequential mayors of the modern time: a mayor who literally built 600 miles of bike lanes and made hundreds of streets car free in her 12 years as Paris mayor. Bravo.

@Justincaseivn @TerribleMaps What's wrong with a 300 mile tunnel :-)

@TerribleMaps Mountains don't exist if you don't look at them

Why has the US not built a canal here to rival the Panama Canal?

@DJSnM @TommyYesItsMe @elonmusk If you do a search on cybernetics and the old East Germany you may get some interesting results: (It is an old idea in communism (after an initial rejection for ideological reasons)). academia.edu/870924/Red_Hel… cosmonautmag.com/2021/07/the-in…

@TommyYesItsMe @elonmusk There’s a breed of tech bro AI zealot who believes the communist planned economies primarily failed because the people running them were inept and prone to human emotions. And the AI is the way to successfully run such economies.

Great to hear @elonmusk and the audience so excited for Iain Banks vision of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

@SamaHoole If you look at rice packaging, white rice lasts longer than wholegrain rice. Another possibility for the preference for white rice is that it keeps longer. Another is that white rice requires less energy and time to cook.

In the late 19th century, the Japanese Navy had a problem. The problem was beriberi: a neurological disease caused by thiamine deficiency that was killing Japanese sailors at a rate that was becoming operationally significant. Beriberi caused peripheral nerve damage, cardiovascular dysfunction, and eventually death. It was widespread among the enlisted men. It was almost entirely absent among the officers. Navy surgeon Kanehiro Takaki noticed this discrepancy in 1884. He noticed that the officers ate a more varied diet: including fish, meat, and vegetables, while the enlisted men ate almost exclusively polished white rice. He ran what is considered one of the earliest controlled nutrition experiments in history: sending two ships on the same voyage, one with the usual enlisted diet of white rice, one with a modified diet including more protein and varied food. The white rice ship lost 161 men to beriberi. The modified diet ship lost none. This is taught in medical schools as the discovery of vitamin B1 deficiency. What is less prominently taught is the implicit finding: that a diet based almost entirely on polished grain, regardless of quantity consumed, was nutritionally insufficient to keep people alive. Now scale this outward. Brown rice versus white rice is currently debated as a health question in the opposite direction from what you might expect. The conventional wisdom: "whole grains are healthier, choose brown rice over white", is contradicted by a body of evidence that finds populations switching from brown to white rice experiencing, in some contexts, improved metabolic outcomes. The reason is antinutrients. Brown rice contains phytic acid, which binds to zinc, iron, magnesium, and calcium and significantly impairs their absorption. It contains lectins. It contains tannins. The bran that makes brown rice brown is a seed defence system: a coat of compounds evolved by the plant to discourage consumption and pass through the gut intact. Milling rice removes the bran. It removes the phytic acid. It removes the lectins. It removes the fibre that slows digestion. White rice, in this analysis, is not a degraded version of brown rice : it is a detoxified version of brown rice, with the antinutrient load stripped out. This is not a fringe position. It is a testable observation about plant chemistry that agrarian populations across Asia arrived at empirically over thousands of years of practical experience with their primary staple grain. They milled their rice because milled rice felt better. Because people who ate milled rice were healthier than people who ate unmilled rice, all else being equal. The nutritional establishment that tells you whole grains are healthier is working from a framework that counts fibre as an unconditional positive and has not fully grappled with the phytate problem. The farmers of East Asia who spent two millennia refining their grain processing technology were working from something more direct. They were working from observation. Observation that told them: remove the bran. The bran is fighting you.

@hairygit I see you avoided the patronising comment before that sentence.

"There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world." - Sherlock Holmes in "A Case of Identity" #ConanDoyle #multiculturalism

"One of the top 10 UK universities in the world". Does it provide other gratuitous qualifications?

@yuanyi_z Political Protestantism hasn't been important in England for several decades. It has certainly lasted longer in Scotland and Northern Ireland. I don't really know about Wales, but it possibly lasted a bit longer there as well.

The collapse of the Prostant/Roman divide and its replacement with undifferentiated cultural Christianity in the UK is a very obvious sign of the Americanisation of UK discourse.

@GregBaldwinIroh Butter on the toast. A few people add a little cheese or South Asian mixed spices (Masala) to the beans, but that's not widespread.

British blokes…. I’ve purchased several “tins” of Heinz (British) beans because the idea of beans on toast intrigues me. I eagerly anticipate a tasting. Other than toasting bread and heating beans… Are there any other steps/ingredients?

@AlexNoonan6 "middle class"?

"See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” "Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

@ghosty1879 @danhathersage A thousand years ago the English would have been Catholic. Even before then a bible produced in Northumberland was sent as a gift to the pope. It could have been transferred within the church. historymedieval.com/codex-amiatinu…

@danhathersage So a stolen Irish book in England. Yeah, sounds about right.

Have you ever seen a 1,000-year-old book? The Southampton Psalter, dated to the late 10th century, contains early medieval Irish glosses.

@finmoorhouse People always miss out the unknown knowns, the things you don't know that know. I guess they don't know that they know.

Thinking about the time our high school English teacher gave us a poem to analyse When we finished she told us it was Donald Rumsfeld’s WMD press conference, and that was the class

@DavidUnderwoodI @Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ It may be that most things are bigger in America, but pints and gallons are amongst the exceptions.

@GoodmanAlanplus @Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ So you’re saying that yours is bigger than mine?

£8 for a pint in London.

@pegobry_en It is largely a social class distinction rather than an IQ distinction. IQ and class may correlate, but it will be unreliable. The more bourgeois, the more likely to be a Francophile.

In the Anglosphere, views on France work as a very reliable quick and dirty IQ test

I’m still trying to recover my @ianpacemain account after it was hacked, but no joy yet. Could people with many of the same followers on there RT this and urge them to follow this account?

@DavidUnderwoodI @Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ Nope. If there is then it's too complicated for me.

@GoodmanAlanplus @Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ I heard it of a British comedy years ago. Did I miss a 4th dimensional joke?

@hairygit "There’s something nocturnal about Chopin’s music - and I don’t just means the nocturnes." Man that's profound.

There’s something nocturnal about Chopin’s music - and I don’t just means the nocturnes. Every time I want to listen to something late at night, it’s Chopin I tend to reach for. Can’t quite put my finger on why that shoukd be.

@DavidUnderwoodI @Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ I believe that might be an American expression claiming that an American pint is 16 ounces. A British pint is 20 fluid ounces. Also, it seems from online sources that one British fluid ounce is equal to 1.04 US fluid ounces. Metric is for the French. Here's to freedom units! Hoc.

@Sargon_of_Akkad @Suffragent_ Whatever happened to “a pint is a pound of world around.”?

@StephenWensley @techtoby__ I got the impression from a book called "Albion's Fatal Tree" that the people who were hanged couldn't get a person of influence to use political influence to get the sentence commuted. Getting a sentence commuted improved a landowner's status with their tenants and employees.

@techtoby__ Probably because America got all of the religious nutter exports and Australia the criminals (if stealing a loaf of bread because you are starving is still considered a crime)

US Anglos aren’t as culturally aligned to the rest of us though, are they. I can meet an Aussie and it’s just like talking with a Brit. You can’t do that with an American. I can call the Aussie a Silly Cunt. He can call me a Sick Cunt. If we call the American a cunt, it’s tears and an AR pointing at you.

@cianin_c @techtoby__ Australia contains multitudes and that includes descendants of prison guards and descendants of prisoners.

@techtoby__ Aussies really try to be American in many ways. There’s no real replication of British culture. Aussies are more like the prison guards as opposed to the prisoners. They are very uptight

@johncosgrove405 @RhodJones2 @holland_tom @DAaronovitch Given the consequences for some teachers and children, it does need to be better written. I know something about how bureaucracies behave and their tendency to 'gold plate directives. You throw words like 'bigot' and 'bigotry' very casually.

@GoodmanAlanplus @RhodJones2 @holland_tom @DAaronovitch It is to anyone who bothers to read it without a bigotry filter in place.

Please note @holland_tom that the words in square brackets which you have included within the quote marks materially alter the original text to make it seem there's a prohibition, when there is not. That's dishonest. You should delete and apologise.