Andrew C Stuart

@JohnConstableRA @Drewrachpage I have curated my back catalog into a sock puppet account: @AndrewStuartArt twitter.com/AndrewStuartArt

@BovrilG The trick is to say "my mother had one of those" until there is only one left

Mrs Bovril has spent three hours this evening trying to choose between virtually identical beds

@tc1415 The keen ones they send to Brussels to watch the horse-trading between the French and the Germans. Then write a report on how the result is in our national interest.

It means ministers and civil servants have to think less. They can just sit next to the fax machine waiting for Brussels to send the next set of instructions along.

It is just to painful for an engineer to make an aesthetic choice. If it's not in the 'spec', not worth thinking about, let alone fighting for. So they default to auto-CAD minimalism and off-white.

@BarbaraRich_law @OBEhizele What's the point of a psychological assessment? Aren't there brain experts who can tell the difference between the genuinely sorry and the demonically possessed?

@OBEhizele It especially takes account of the possibility of rehabilitation of young offenders. It isn’t surprising that this sentence has caused the furore that it has, and it may be that expectations of rehabilitation are thoroughly naive here, but we shouldn’t jettison them universally

It reflects a justice system that prioritises rehabilitation over punishment (and this shift started decades ago). This is ultimately a philosophical matter. Britain must decide how it wants its justice system to function, and communicate that moral vision clearly to the public.

Conflicted by what closedpubs.co.uk/london/sw1_bel… says. If King Street (A) where is the nave on the left? Great George Street wasn't moved. My poor overlay of the 1870 map can't marry every building but good enough. I prefer south of Central Hall (B). Parliament Sq expanded east not north. @KHendrickson91

@EchoesofEmpire_ Trying to work out which pub. That’s st Margaret’s in the background so it must be roughly where Central Hall now stands

British Army recruiting sergeants outside a public house at Westminster, 1877

@StevenEdginton Come on, the opportunity for a Bantu Suchet is just too rich. Watching them being unable to resist will be too much 😅

Can the BBC leave Agatha Christie alone? It would be much better if the David Suchet series was just repeated endlessly than allow the BBC to drive its sledgehammer through the IP. Christie, a conservative with famously "non-woke" books, would be appalled by BBC adaptations.

@Nina_Power_ Half the worry is not knowing what's next, so I feel better now.

Hey, it’s fine. Labour still have three years to, I dunno, abolish parks, occlude the sun, sell your home to Blackrock, tax your pet (“Pet Zero”), & mandate eunuchism, cannibalism and the sale of children and grandparents into slavery.

@thebowlerhatman Digging out an old memory, Jack Hargreaves maybe. I think a cock horse is a horse lent to a team pulling heavy wagons, as an extra for a long ascent. It would be ridden back by a boy or teen at the end of the day.

This is Fabulous!!

The surest sign someone has a comfortable life is they’ll invent new forms of victimhood.

@drrollergator @SwipeWright @MrAndyNgo Or, be like Jeson Flores and get deported while on bail for massive fraud and keep it all. 😅

@SwipeWright @MrAndyNgo THAT CALCULUS ASSUMES THE PERP KEEPS THE MONEY IT'S A DIFFERENT PAYOFF STRUCTURE IN NOT JOHN NASH IS GRADING UR WORK

Would you voluntarily serve 4 years in prison for $1.6 million dollars? That's $400K/year. When the benefits for committing a crime far exceed the costs, you can expect more people to choose crime. This light sentence is practically an advertisement to potential fraudsters.

@SO3_Clausewitz Paying contract writers. Contract law all the way down.

What are we even doing anymore?

Insane that humans might reach Mars before HS2 reaches the North.

@PaulinusOfTrier I don't know if I should believe everything on the Internet, but I'm going to believe this one. 😅

Many people are unaware that the stars on the EU flag are the twelve stars that crown the Blessed Virgin Mary, alluded to in Revelation 12:1. I learned this by chance when I was working for an EU institution. Every Wednesday there was a Mass held in an office. It was, frankly, an awful Mass; so bad that I once complained about the use of earthenware vessels. Most of the faithful attending it were close to retirement age, except the youthful forty-year-old with a guitar who, in place of the Agnus, would give a rousing chorus of Hevenu Shalom Alechem. I attended because it was at least some vestige of Catholicism surviving in the faithless sea of EU Institutions. But I stopped when, days after the election of Pope Benedict, the Dominican priest preached against the new Pope. Anyhow, one day a colleague who was unable to attend that day gave me a very heavy bag full of documents and asked me to pass it to one of the people who attended the Mass. I did not know him but I found him after the Mass and handed it over. "Excellent!" He said. "These are the documents relating to the history of the EU Flag." So I, who have never been famous for my diplomatic skills, asked him how it was possible to write so much about such an uninteresting flag. He drew himself up and said with injured dignity "It is not an uninteresting flag. I was on the Committee that designed it!" And then he explained that it was indeed Our Lady's diadem.

@JACKGUYANDERTON So odd. If you put yourself forward for selection you either a) stand by everything you once wrote, or b) scrub it well before media scrutiny. It shouldn't be a surprise.

It’s no wonder ordinary people don’t want to get involved in politics. Robert’s a decent bloke who’s spent his life having a laugh and speaking his mind. He hasn’t spent every waking moment imagining that some gutter journalist would trawl through his social media comments.

@RenaissRewind Love to see you guys plodding up and down a ridge and furrow with a pair of unhappy oxen, come rain or shine.

All of us on medieval twitter are eventually going to make a historically accurate village

@s8mb Sorry, I wasn't aiming at you, but the wider discourse

@AndrewCStuart Huh? That's not what I said at all.

Completely agree with this. Except when the historicity is the point, anachronistically diverse casting is just as sensible as anachronistically modern language and makeup. This is obviously true for myths, but historical dramas like "The Great" can do it well too – a Mean Girls-style depiction of Catherine the Great's court was much more effective by drawing on modern language, behaviour and actors to make the focus the character dynamics and plot, not the historicity. Where it fails is in things like "Wolf Hall" where the historical authenticity is a large part of the point. slowboring.com/p/a-diverse-od…

@holland_tom Bullets?

Bullet holes left by Cromwell’s troops after they used Norham Church for target practice

@g_shullenberger @willjmjones Plenty in the Magisterium on false gods, etc

Decades ago, the Catholic Church helped establish a taboo around cloning that still holds firm. Pope Leo should aim to do the same when it comes to superintelligence, argues @willjmjones: compactmag.com/article/how-th…

@anchoredso37497 The tyranny of microstates. I've pondered the smallest possible Library of Babel. Consider using only Dr Seuss's 50 distinct words and it must fit in a stadium. I think the 'books' could be no longer than a short sentence. (Don't have the combinatorics to work it exactly)

The Infinite Monkey Theorem—What It Actually Says: “A monkey hitting keys randomly for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce any given text—including Shakespeare or the encyclopedia.” This sounds like it defeats the design inference. It doesn’t for three reasons: 1) Infinity is doing all the work. 2) The universe is not infinite. It is approximately 13.8 billion years old. 3) The number of possible keystrokes a monkey could produce in the entire age of the universe—typing one key per second—is roughly: ~4 × 10¹⁷ keystrokes. The encyclopedia requires 244 million consecutive correct characters. The probability of getting just the first 30 characters correct consecutively: 1 in 50³⁰ = 1 in 10⁵¹ So, there aren’t enough monkeys, enough time, or enough universes to make this happen by chance at any meaningful probability. The theorem is mathematically true but physically irrelevant. Hilariously, 100 monkeys makes it worse, not better. 100 monkeys typing simultaneously gives you 100 times more attempts—which sounds helpful until you realize you need to close a gap of 10⁵¹ or more. Multiplying your attempts by 100 when you need 10⁵¹ is like taking one step toward a destination 10⁴⁹ light years away and declaring meaningful progress.

A perfect system 👌