Usernames that were already taken when I tried to register on Reddit

• OutOfMyElement
• ObviouslyNotAGolfer
• UrbanAchiever
• BrotherSeamus

Being Wrong

I enjoyed this paragraph from Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece on the reasons for, and consequences of, politicians’ love of certitude:

It is not clear why we enjoy certitude so much – certitude being the subjective experience of feeling certain. In contrast – as Kathryn Schulz observes in her wonderful book Being Wrong – there is simply no psychological experience of “being wrong” at all, only the lurching realisation of having been wrong until a moment ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of being wrong. Now I can claim that I’ve never experienced it.

Finally

I’ve finally found a way to make England habitable.

I’ve always been bewildered yet faintly impressed that the rest of the world can survive with Fanta as its primary, and often only, carbonated fruit drink. I don’t think I need to point out to people who have tasted it that Fanta is the juice of Nazis.

Seven Years On

While we’re still celebrating milestones, I have one of my own. I started this blog seven years ago, on January 7, 2003. Back then it was made of hand-coded HTML that lived on the servers of my university’s Internet Society.

I soon moved it to a self-made blogging platform on those same servers. From there it moved to a professional web host, on yet another custom blogging platform, and with its own domain. Most recently it moved to a new domain, and I finally gave up on maintaining my own software and migrated all the content to WordPress.

I’m quite happy that through all those software changes and server moves I still have every post I’ve ever written for this blog, right back to the very first one.

That first post was about the result of a little Web quiz that took details of my physical fitness, intelligence, education, and lifestyle and, through the twin magics of mathematics and making shit up, informed me that I was worth exactly $2,320,314. I would have hoped my organs alone could fetch that much or more, but I’m not the expert here.

Looking back on my first post I decided to see if that quiz was still online and, more importantly, if my value had changed at all. You’ll be delighted to hear that not only is the quiz still happily digesting humanity into currency, but I’ve gone up in value to an amazing $3,061,316. That’s an increase of nearly 32%. Maybe that’s not the biggest possible return over seven years, but at least it’s going up.