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Every data project goes through an embryonic Wordle stage. There’s a point where you’ve spent a few hours futzing with code, are many more hours away from whatever you were trying to build, and feel

aw, screw it, let’s make some pictures

.

In that spirit: headlines from the Guardian and the Mail, these past couple of days:

Guardian

Mail

The somewhat less pointless use of the data will come When I Get Round To It™ — which, given current circumstances, might not be for quite some time.

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Multinational oil companies really have been eclipsed by their state-owned counterparts:

That’s ExxonMobil coming in at number 17, as the first private company. It’s 30 times smaller than Saudi Aramco by reserves, 20 times by production.

The Metropolitan Police are armed with bullets that the army wouldn’t be allowed to use.

Hollow-tipped bullets are designed to expand inside the body on impact, making them much more likely to kill whoever they hit. The generals of the 19th century decided that they were too lethal for war, despite British arguments that they were needed to stop ‘fanatical barbarian[s]’.

So they were banned under the 1899 Hague Convention**, along with chemical weapons and bombs thrown from airships. NATO still keeps to that, though perhaps few other armies do.

The police, through, are unaffected. So the Met used these these bullets to kill Jean Charles de Menezes, and this year they started using them more generally.

Now, there’s a decent argument that this isn’t as bad as it sounds. If a bullet is busy mashing your victim’s organs, it’s less likely to pass through and hit whoever is behind them. I thoroughly approve of not killing bystanders, but a little confused how that works alongside the policy of giving machine guns to the transport police

Or, more fundamentally: the UK police already kill about 90 people per year — let’s not make it any easier?

[disclaimer: I know nothing about guns, would be happy to never see one again in my life, and wish the police agreed]

The London Beer Flood occurred on 17 October 1814 in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. At the Meux and Company Brewery[1] on Tottenham Court Road,[1][2] a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets.

The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. Eight people drowned in the flood.

The brewery was eventually taken to court over the accident, but the disaster was

ruled to be an Act of God

by the judge and jury, leaving no one responsible

What kind of bonkers legalistic theology is that? God as lord of the storms I can see, stirring up hurricanes against the unholy and smiting his enemies with lightning. But

breaking beer vats

?!

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I’m moving back to London in 2 weeks.

I’ll be arriving on the July 4th. My birthday is on July 8th.

Combined, that’s sufficient excuse for a gathering of londoners I love.

Conveniently, mirabehn and mirrorshard are already organizing a readthrough in Finsbury Park on Sunday 10th. I’m going to hijack it.

So: let’s meet in Finsbury Park from noon that day. There will be food, and drink, and Shakespeare, and at least a 30% chance of sun. Those of you who don’t know the readthrough crowd can be overwhelmed by how lovely they are. Those of you who do — well, surely you’ll want to come anyway? Anybody with a hotline to God, please hint that sun would be really convenient

Details of location, plans in case of rain, etc, to follow once we’ve figured them out

Market volality provides information about a market. In just the same way as you learn what a gizmo does by applying different input to it, so you piece together the shape of a market by watching what happens under different circumstances. A market could seem utterly stable, until a little volatility reveals that it had always been at the edge of a precipice.

Tyler Cowen sees this in the fate of USian symphony orchestras after the financial crisis. The financial crisis pulled out much of their institutional support, thus showing how shallow was their backing. This caused secondary effects:

The initial negative shock of the crisis, among its other effects, caused donors and potential donors to see that support for these projects was weaker than they thought. Many of these donors are now less than keen to keep pouring money into losing endeavors. An unraveling process has set in. It’s not just the negative wealth effect, but new information has been revealed about popularity and sustainability of the underlying venture. Neither monetary nor fiscal stimulus will prove any kind of easy cure for these institutions or, potentially, for these jobs.

There is a well-known literature in finance about how trading, combined with the possibility of sudden price dips, causes market participants to learn the shape of the market demand curve and thus revalue the appropriate overall level of prices. The mere act of trading can generate market volatility. This kind of insight is not yet sufficiently appreciated in macroeconomics. The financial crisis caused us to see that many market institutions were on shakier ground than we had thought.

This is analogous to the ‘tipping-point’ understanding of political protest. Marches aren’t themselves important. But they show the strength of support, and so can win you the support of actors hedging their bets. So the time to march (leaving aside movement-building reasons) is when you believe that your support is greater than generally understood