Livre d'Or

Organizing teaching resources

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 19:36:32 GMT

So the first online course of our giant international Covid training project is live: behold The power of genomics to understand the Covid-19 pandemic.

I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.

Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.

I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.

Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.

I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.

What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.

And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.

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Birthday

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 21:02:37 GMT

I am generally not feeling sparkly or enthusiastic, for probably obvious reasons. It's my 43^rd birthday in ten days and I haven't even started organizing anything. So I'm going to resort to asking the the internet to make my decisions for me like we're back in the 2000s.

View Poll: Birthday

Considerations:

We are in a really hellacious omicron wave, with cases both nationally and locally higher than they have ever been previously during the pandemic. I'm not going to do anything involving travel or indoor socializing, and I'm not even sure I should be doing outdoor socializing, especially not if it involves increasing the risk to employees.
It's the middle of Christmas, specifically the bank holiday after the Christmas weekend; lots of people who might otherwise want to hang out with me are going to be busy.
December in the South of England is usually cold but not unbearably so; I expect temperatures of around 5-10°C, so it's possible (though not really pleasant) to socialize outdoors if you have a decent coat, but it's also quite likely to be windy or raining.

The ever-wonderful ghoti_mhic_uait has arranged a fun birthday-related activity for a couple of days later, involving an outdoor light show. That might still be cancelled because of plague, but I'm reasonably hopeful that I will get a birthday treat even if I ignore the actual day.

On some level I am aware that I shouldn't listen to generally low mood after months and months of hermitting and gradually draining away any hope of the plague situation improving at all. I almost certainly will feel better if I have some kind of social contact, but I'm desperately short of motivation and energy to arrange anything. I don't really fancy a cold miserable outdoor gathering, and I don't really fancy yet another video call even though I really enjoyed the one I did for my 42^nd.

Anyway, what should I do? Words of encouragement greatly appreciated

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Communication

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 14:38:31 GMT

So, are there any real, non-parody guides or even training for how to communicate effectively with autistic people?

I've read up lots on the topic and I am completely convinced by the double empathy model of autism. I also think it's morally correct that it should be up to non-autistic* people to adapt our communication appropriately, rather than making the autistic minority do all the work. That means I need to figure out what I should be doing.

I could just search for information but I am wary of searches being swamped by guides for adults in positions of authority on how to force autistic kids to act more "normal". Which is the exact opposite of what I want, I want to communicate with autistic adults in an ethical, non coercive way.

I don't want to be just sitting here demanding to be educated. So here's what I've gleaned from my own reading, and what I'm already doing, and where I'm getting stuck. Of course I do understand that all autistic people are individuals and have their own preferences, I'm not looking for the magic cheat code that will solve all communication. And I'm lucky enough to have some autistic people in my life who very tolerantly put up with my communication style as it currently is, but I'd still like to do better.

Eye contact: I think I'm ok with "not staring at people's eyeballs". Or at least, if someone requests no eye contact I have sufficient practice at changing my usual habits to go along with that. If someone hasn't mentioned that they're autistic and usually masks by forcing themselves to endure eye contact, or faking it, I might well not realize though. And avoiding eye contact isn't a good default because lots of non-autistic people do genuinely find that rude.

Monologues / infodumps: It really doesn't come naturally to me to just absorb a big chunk of information without interrupting or asking questions or even making polite encouraging noises to signal attention and interest. This doesn't mean that I find it boring when people speak at length about their special interests, not at all, but as a neurotypical person when I'm interested in something my instinct is to be noisy about expressing that interest and I have read that this can make it harder for autistic people to talk. One possible solution would be for me to do something with my hands while the person's talking, such as playing a low-attention clicky game on my phone. In general I find it easier to listen when I'm physically active anyway. Again, I can't do this as a default because many non-autistic people find it rude if you fidget and don't directly respond to what they're saying, so it would have to be by agreement.

Verbal bias: I don't in principle believe that talking with words is a better means of communication than any other. If someone preferred to type at me even when we were in the same room, I would have no problem with it, but nobody has ever actually asked me to do that. I don't sign and AFAIK none of my autistic friends prefer sign over spoken language.

Sensory environment: Often I don't have control over whether there are bad noises, bad lighting, distracting smells, uncomfortable furniture etc that might make communication harder. I think trying to sort this out proactively is a bit hopeless because there's no way I'd be able to guess what constitutes a good or bad sensory environment for a particular person. I could try to make it more clear that I'm happy to make any changes that are in my power, I'm not going to roll my eyes if someone asks me to change something that's bothering them but not affecting me.

There's a thing about auditory processing I've sometimes found: personally, I find it easy to pick out salient information from background noise, and I've noticed that many autistic friends can't really do this, so they often like to have the TV or music turned up higher than I find physically comfortable, such that it's loud enough to hear over non-informative (and possibly uncomfortable?) background noises. So this might be an example where I as a more privileged person am in a position to adapt, I could have conversations in uncomfortable-to-me rooms where everybody has to raise their voice to be heard over the music and other conversations, as opposed to making autistic people endure rooms that to me are pleasantly quiet but they struggle to make out the words or are made uncomfortable by background noise that I just tune out. However this goes against the received wisdom which suggests that autistic people are likely to be more negatively affected by "noise" than non-autistic people. My suspicion is that the definition of "noise" is too general and I need to be more specific, but IDK.

Stimming: I think I'm mostly not disturbed by things like flapping or rocking but perhaps I do react negatively in some way that's perceptible even if I think I'm fine with it. Basically I can't just say it's safe to stim around me unless I can actually demonstrate it and I'm not sure how to do that.

The part where I'm most stuck is on the content of what's being talked about. I keep reading lots of autistic people who complain that the rest of society is terrible at this, but in ways that I can't work out how to remediate. For example, the idea that "autistic people always say what they mean". This is impossible on its face because there isn't a one-to-one mapping between words and meanings! If it were really true that autistic people prefer to avoid metaphors and idioms, I could do that to some extent but almost all of language is somewhat metaphorical, and also I don't actually think that description is true. I've never met an autistic person who takes language literally in the manner of a scriptwriter's stereotype of how a robot or computer with no world knowledge might communicate.

"Autistic communication is functional, not social signalling". Well, for a start if that were true I wouldn't have learned it from parody articles about neurotypical communication defects! But also IME known-to-me autistic people are far more likely than people I believe not to be autistic to be upset if I correct them on a matter of fact or propose a different way of achieving a goal. Far more likely to assume I'm angry with them or disapproving of their choices when I just express my own preference. And it's only with known-autistic people that I've experienced major communication breakdowns because they said 'I'm really happy that you're doing this thing' when actually they meant they hated the thing and wanted me to stop. It is true that a non-autistic person might not confront me directly and ask me to change my behaviour; if they came from a guess/offer culture they might ask in a roundabout way, something like: oh, I read this article which suggested some people might find it annoying when people do the thing... Or if they were non-autistic but from an ask culture, they might pad out their request with reassurances: it's nothing personal, it's just me, I know you don't mean to cause a problem, but would you mind terribly doing something else instead... But although neither the ask nor the guess approach is direct, purely functional communication, they're at least not the opposite of what the person actually wants.

I can certainly try not to make inferences that go beyond the actual words expressed, based on my likely incorrect interpretation of facial expression or tone of voice. Even if I'm making a conscious effort to listen to someone's words and not read anything in, I'm sure I'm picking up non-verbal cues without meaning to. Or equally I may fail to spell out something which I thought would be an obvious interpretation but actually comes across as expecting mind-reading.

I feel there are two options here, both of which reflect badly on me. One is that I've massively misunderstood what autistic people actually find desirable in terms of communication, which is likely because the whole double empathy problem is precisely that non-autistic people constantly misunderstand autistic people. The second is that most autistic people I know have already gone so far to adapt their communication to me that they're already massively uncomfortable. For example, perhaps they are making a huge effort to tell polite lies and chat about trivial things and employ figurative language because that's what non-autistic people expect. So if I assume a person is communicating in the mode they feel most comfortable with, but in fact they're code-switching to communicate in the socially accepted way, I'm going to get things even further wrong.

Also, because I'm part of the non-autistic majority, I am in some ways Schroedinger's neuro-supremacist. Like, I might say it's totally fine to be direct with me and say what you mean, but there's a threat that I'm going to judge or bully or even abuse people if they do drop the mask and communicate without going to a big effort to make me feel more comfortable. It might be that when I make a factual correction, I'm following the pattern of past bullies who would weaponize an error against an autistic person. So even though autistic people say they want people to just tell them if they're wrong about something, they mean they want trustworthy fellow autistic people to be direct with them, but it's not going to work if I try that.

I'm not sure if it's even legitimate to ask this, but if you were able to change something about the way I communicate to be better for autistic people, what would you (want me to) change? Do you know of any resources aimed at teaching non-autistic people to do better, that use a neurodiversity type model and centre autistic people?

*Note on terminology: I have some autistic friends who insist that the opposite of 'autistic' is 'allistic', and some autistic friends who find 'allistic' offensive and strongly prefer 'neurotypical', and both those views are completely valid but I'm going with 'non-autistic' as the least-bad compromise for how to describe myself.

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Safety things

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 16:12:53 GMT

I'm asking specific questions here and not looking for general speculation and chat about the topics. Ideally I would like UK-relevant answers too; sorry that makes this post boring for some of my audience.

Does anyone have a known good, personally recommended source of FFP2/3 masks? I can Quack as well as anyone else but I know there are a lot of fake masks out there. I also would ideally rather not import them from the other side of the world, and that includes drop-shipping.
Has anyone seen a study about rates of Covid transmission between vaccinated adults and unvaccinated children? I am not looking for general information, much less opinions, about whether Covid is "dangerous" to children or not, I want some actual data about how likely I am to infect the children in my bubble, if I start relaxing my own boundaries now that I'm (well, will be by Tuesday) double vaccinated.
Indirectly pandemic-related: does anyone have any recommendations for bike lights? I've been using cheap, removable LED ones which are fine for short urban trips. But I'm not nearly as confident about going back to public transport as I had hoped to be after second vaccine, plus my OSOs now live a 10-mile, and not very well lit, cycle trip from here. I am worried about getting over-fancy lights because if they're expensive then they or the whole bike are more likely to get stolen. It probably makes sense to have lights that are permanently attached to the bike frame, but I'm not very confident in my DIY skills - if you've added your own lights post-market, how difficult is it, would you say? (Thank you seekingferret for spontaneously suggesting something; I might well go for what you recommended but I am hoping for some UK-specific suggestions if possible.)

TIA, people. I'm bored of this so bored. But since our leadership have surrendered to the virus, I need to figure out how to carve out some kind of life for myself.

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Tech is passing me by

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:37:29 GMT

I have been trying to play Minecraft with the kids. I love the idea of playing, exploring and building and fighting in a shared world, it's basically the dream. But in practice I absolutely cannot get it to work reliably. I am starting to wonder whether I'm turning into the 21st century equivalent of middle-aged people who need to get small children to program the video recorder for them!

It's not just me, two other adults who work professionally with computers have tried and got nowhere. And the children sort of know how to achieve what they want to, but not how to debug it when it doesn't work. I, and my more technically adept partners, have tried searching for suggestions, but there's such a morass of extremely out-of-date stuff, guides that either assume you're on Windows or are unclear about which versions their information applies to, and people trying to extract money from you in more or less shady ways. I just don't have the right search terms to distinguish all the different versions (which are sometimes called 'editions') or between the different types of multiplayer, the realms and servers and I don't know what else.

I'm guessing some of you must play, either in your own right or in order to be companionable with children. Do you have any suggestions for where I should be looking? We've had games where it randomly takes four or five tries to connect and then it works fine, and games where we've spent an hour trying every combination we can think of and either it claims that the host player isn't online (when we're in the same room and can perfectly well see that they are), or the game is visible but when I try to join it times out with a very uninformative error message (Unable to join game or something equally bland and hard to search for.)

Thankfully the children have reached the developmental stage where this kind of frustration and disappointment isn't massively upsetting, but I still feel kind of bad when we make an appointment to play together and all the time is taken up fruitlessly trying to connect to the game. I am starting to feel really stupid, though; this is a game played by millions of under-10s, surely it can't be this difficult?

I'm willing to throw money at the problem if needed, but I can't even work out what sort of premium service, if any, would make this easier.

Halp?!

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Please help make my courses awesome

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 10:44:46 GMT

So back in that weird twilight zone between the Before Times and the Time of Isolation, I asked for volunteers to beta read a new free online course I was producing at work. During the weird 10 months since, we have been working somewhat interruptedly on new material, and we now have two new courses for release in the coming weeks. I'm looking for beta testers again.

The two courses are at approximately opposite ends of the spectrum of what we do. Course A is a very gentle introduction to scripting and the command line, aimed at life scientists with little computing background, or at least little experience with Linux and Free Software. You don't need any real biology to test this course, but if you hate science you probably won't find it an enjoyable experience. In terms of Linux experience we would like some testers who, like our target audience, have never worked in a command line, and some who understand the technical part enough to spot errors in the code or the explanations.

Course B is a broad overview of why genomics has lately become important in medicine as well as science, mainly aimed at GPs. It assumes a clinical audience, and uses a lot of unglossed medical jargon. It doesn't explain the basic biology, just jumps straight in to modern cutting-edge genomics. You probably need some interest in medicine and at least high school biology, but if it's too technical for a generally scientifically literate but non-specialist person that's something we'd want to fix.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through a whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

Course A (intro to Bioinformatics) is a bit of a rush job and if you volunteer you need to be available to get your comments back to us by the end of next week. Course B (genomics for GPs) needs testers in the next couple of weeks and will still have to be done on a fairly tight turnaround.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Last year I had way more volunteers than I actually had space for, so thank you all for being awesome. Since there are two courses concerned I can now take on up to 8 people. I will give priority to people who wanted to help before but were turned away since we had too many volunteers.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested.

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Software recommendations

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 12:20:14 GMT

Can anyone suggest to me:

A text editor / word processor that runs under Linux and handles Hebrew and bidirectional text?

A period and menstrual cycle tracking app where all the data is local only and never transmitted to the cloud?

Text editor:
Must have:

Copes with Unicode Hebrew, including vowels and other punctuation.
Allows Hebrew keyboard input rather than having to paste in one letter at a time
Works on Ubuntu 20
Does the right thing with mixed Roman and Hebrew text in the same document.
Displays words in the order I type

Desirable:

Saves in a file format that other people can open including on Windows and Mac computers
Free Software (as in freedom, don't mind paying money for it)
Copes with different sized text within the same document
If not a full GUI, at least the ability to navigate through the document with a mouse and select text to delete, edit or move. I'm used to WYSIWYG but I can live without if the other features are present

The problem I have right now is that most things I've tried apart from LibreOffice can't cope with Hebrew text at all, or if they can just about manage plain letters, can't deal with punctuation. But LibreOffice has some really bizarre bugs: no matter how often I manually set the language to Hebrew, every time I actually type in Hebrew it reverts to Hindi, and uses a font that, well, I'm amazed it works for Hebrew at all since it's meant for Devanagari, but it doesn't work for pointed Hebrew very well.

And more seriously, it just randomly changes the text direction mid typing, even for a block that is entirely in Hebrew. That means I have almost no control over the word order, if I try to type a sentence or a list, there's a good chance that it will randomly move the fifth word to the beginning of the sentence, or start a new line above instead of below the last item, and even copying and pasting text into the right place doesn't work. Also, whenever I save the file and reopen it, it moves a bunch of words around. Not just in position on the screen, which is annoying but I can live with it, it changes their order within sentences. Even copy-pasting from a high quality Unicode source doesn't work reliably.

My current workaround is a) reformat everything and if necessary move words back to the right place every time I open the document and whenever the weird direction bug shows up b) keep saving multiple versions as PDF, which at least doesn't mess up the formatting and word order, even if it's essentially not editable. This is really frustrating!

Period tracker
Must have:

Runs on Android or Linux
Has the option to store all data offline and never ever put it on anybody else's computer. It's not like my period data is super top secret, just I feel uncomfortable with advertisers getting hold of it. So I don't need high security, just local storage.

Desirable:

Not overly cutesie wootsy
Gender inclusive if possible; I am in fact a cis woman so I'm not going to be hurt personally by being assumed to be one, but I would rather support an option that doesn't harm non-women who have periods.
Doesn't insist on tracking, or otherwise nag me about, my weight.
Allows me to ignore fertility-related inferences. I just want to track my periods as health data for my own use, I'm not trying to get pregnant, and in as far as I'm TTA cycle tracking isn't the major part of my strategy. I want something that reminds me I'm close to ovulation, without assuming, yay, now is a great time to have sex and make babies! nor, danger danger you might get pregnant!

Current solution: just a spreadsheet. This is probably good enough but if anybody has knowledge of something else more convenient that would be great. I'm happy with any business model except selling medical data, and specifically don't mind paying money for this.

I don't mind social bonding by chatting generally about related software, but I am mainly looking for actual suggestions that meet my requirements. Please don't bother telling me I should use a different operating system though. I'm not really interested in opinions about Ubuntu, Linux or Android.

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Tiny new person

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 18:27:10 GMT

So my partners and metamour had a baby this week! It's very exciting, but also very weird because we are quarantined apart. I had been a bit nervous and a lot excited about forming a relationship with a child from birth (I suppose that was the case with my siblings, but the period when I was aged 2-6 doesn't count in quite the same way.) But now that's not really going to happen; I'm planning to carry on waving to her from 2m away, but babies don't bond to people who occasionally wave from 2m away.

There's no point being sad about no baby cuddles; I'm already properly sad about having to stay physically distanced from my actual partners and the middle two children whom I miss desperately. Family life during a a pandemic is weird, but that's hardly news.

I started spending extended time with her older siblings when they were 2 1/2 and 6 (now 8 and 11). The thing I found most difficult about interacting with younger children is how emotionally intense they are. Does anyone have any advice (from personal experience or theoretical knowledge) about how to cope when people you care about find every small setback or frustration devastatingly upsetting? It's something I want to do better this time. Note that I don't want advice on how to prevent small children from inconveniently expressing emotions around me, I just want to find better ways of handling my own feelings.

It's probably a skill worth learning in general, because with a terrifying global pandemic everybody is more emotionally on edge than usual. And of course it's something that all parents must manage somehow. I just... don't see it talked about a lot in eg parenting guides.

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Beta readers?

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:12:22 GMT

ETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.

My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.

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More joy

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 18:42:22 GMT

Everything is on fire, and besides I had half my tooth removed today. (Which is particularly annoying because it means I have to go to hospital to have the other half removed.)

So I reckon it's time for some sharing of joy. If you feel like participating, please add to the comments something that made you smile recently. Or an offer or request for something that might bring you more joy.

I'll start: Here's a really clever mashup of Paint it black with Back to black performed by a singer with a gorgeous voice. Thanks to cragdu for linking to it.

I can offer you recommendations if you pick a topic (eg books, music, people to follow on DW). Or I can send you or your favourite cause a small amount of money if you give me a convenient method of transferring it.

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Technical rabbinic text question

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 18:34:54 GMT

So does anyone know anything about the prohibition on writing down halachot / writing down the oral Torah? Behind the cut is deeply technical stuff, and I'm sufficiently confused about it that I don't think I can explain if you can't follow my description. But there's quite a few people reading this who are likely to know more about the topic than I do, so I'm posting about it to ask for help.

cjwatson tracked some of it down to Temura 14a-b, which is a tractate I hadn't even heard of (I assumed at first it was a typo for Terumah). We tried to learn it (well, from the Steinsaltz translation, it's far beyond my Gemara skills to do it properly). It's a very complicated sugya about technicalities of sacrifices, except buried in middle there's this really interesting bit about what can and can't be written down.

The bit we're most excited to understand is this:

Rather, Rav Yosef said: The meal offering accompanying the libations may be sacrificed at night, and therefore one should delete from this baraita the item: 'Meal offering that accompanies the libations', from the list of the offerings that may not be brought at night.

When Rav Dimi ascended from Babylonia to Eretz Yisrael, he found Rav Yirmeya sitting and saying in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: From where is it derived that libations that come with an animal offering may be sacrificed only in the day? The verse states: “These you shall offer to the Lord in your appointed seasons, beside your vows, and your voluntary offerings, and your burnt offerings, and your meal offerings, and your libations, and your peace offerings” (Numbers 29:39). The juxtaposition of these two items teaches that just as peace offerings may be sacrificed only during the day, so too libations may be sacrificed only during the day.

Rav Dimi said to Rav Yirmeya: If I find someone who can write this opinion in a letter, I will send it to Rav Yosef in Babylonia, and in light of this ruling he will not delete the phrase: The meal offering that accompanies the libations, from the baraita. [...]

The Gemara raises a difficulty with regard to Rav Dimi’s suggestion to write this opinion in a letter. And even if he had someone to write a letter for him, would it have been possible to send it? But didn’t Rabbi Abba, son of Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba, say that Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Those who write halakhot are considered like those who burn the Torah, and one who learns from written halakhot does not receive the reward of studying Torah. Evidently, it is prohibited to send halakhot in letters.

Before resolving the difficulty, the Gemara further discusses the prohibition of writing down the Torah: Rabbi Yehuda bar Naḥmani, the disseminator for Reish Lakish, expounded as follows: One verse says: “Write you these words,” and one verse says, i.e., it states later in that same verse: “For by the mouth of these words” (Exodus 34:27). These phrases serve to say to you: Words that were taught orally you may not recite in writing, and words that are written you may not recite orally, i.e., by heart.

And furthermore, the school of Rabbi Yishmael taught: The word “these” in the command “write you these words” serves to emphasize that these words, i.e., those recorded in the Written Law, you may write, but you may not write halakhot, i.e., the mishnayot and the rest of the Oral Law.

They said in response to the question of how Rav Dimi could propose writing down the halakha in a letter: Perhaps with regard to a new matter it is different, i.e., it might be permitted to write down new material so that it not be forgotten. One proof for this suggestion is that Rabbi Yoḥanan and Reish Lakish would read from a scroll of aggada, containing the words of the Sages, on Shabbat. And they did so because they taught as follows: Since one cannot remember the Oral Law without writing it down, it is permitted to violate the halakha, as derived from the verse: “It is time to work for the Lord; they have made void your Torah” (Psalms 119:126). They said it is better to uproot a single halakha of the Torah, i.e., the prohibition of writing down the Oral Torah, and thereby ensure that the Torah is not forgotten from the Jewish people entirely.

I have a number of questions about this:

What's going on with the relationship between Babylonia and Palestine at this point?

Is the discussion implying that they aren't sure of the fidelity of transmission of baraitot?

Is writing a letter explaining a point of interpretation really the same as writing down halachot?

I have just been learning that the Rambam invented the modern conception of Torah min haShamayim, that is the idea that God directly dictated the content of all the Oral Torah to Moses on Sinai. According to my teacher R' Mark Solomon, at the time of the Talmud the mainstream view was that the Oral Torah came from God's revelation in the more narrow sense that God gave the rabbis the ability and right to interpret the written Torah. What's the conception of revelation being discussed here?

The example from Exodus seems to completely contradict the conclusion about not writing down Torah transmitted orally, because God explicitly spoke the words to Moses, and explicitly commanded Moses to write down what God spoke! But maybe God speaking to Moses doesn't count, since that was the method by which we received what became the Written Torah anyway.

Is the Gemara implying that R' Yoḥanan and Reish Lakish derived halacha, or more specifically the basis to make an exception to halacha, from Psalms? That's not supposed to happen.

This whole discussion is in the Gemara because it got written down! So what on earth was the redactor thinking when they wrote down a big discussion about how it's forbidden to write down halachot?

How did we get from here to the post-Talmudic tradition of writing down all the things in all possible circumstances?

Does anyone know this Gemara? Or is there anyone with better Gemara skills than me who would be willing to help me sort it out? Further, does anyone know where we should be looking in the halachic material to work out how this prohibition on writing down the Oral Torah was developed?

Help?

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The world film project

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 10:41:49 GMT

So jack and I hatched a plan to expand our cultural horizons by watching films from as many different countries as possible. We're working our way down the list of countries from the biggest by population. I don't expect we'll get very far; we don't watch more than half a dozen films in a typical year. But even if we watch films from 20 new countries we wouldn't have seen otherwise, that's still a win.

Of course, we ran into an edge case at the very first step because it turns out that a lot of famous "Chinese" films are in fact made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And I'm reasonably convinced that Taiwan ought to be defined as a separate country, and HK probably too. We ended up with House of flying daggers, directed by Yimou Zhang, which is at least partly Chinese from China.

I enjoyed House of flying daggers. I loved the stylized and very beautiful martial arts scenes, and the amazing costumes, and the chemistry between Jin and Mei. And I loved the first two thirds of the plot, where everybody is multiply double-crossing everybody else. I particularly liked that Mei gets to be a hyper-competent martial arts fighter, not just a damsel. What I didn't love was the ending where it turns into a stupid love triangle, and Mei ends up sacrificing herself for no particularly meaningful cause, since the jealous man who is in love with her kills her true love anyway and it doesn't particularly help the rebellion.

We plan to watch an Indian film this evening. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend? I have a somewhat low tolerance for explicit onscreen violence, and for a date we'd prefer films that aren't about horribly depressing bits of history. Otherwise, even if it's a really obvious classic there's a pretty high chance I haven't seen it, though jack might have (we didn't pick Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for China, since he's already seen that.) Equally we've left it a bit late to plan, so ideally something we can stream instantly this evening, rather than something we'd need to order from the internet.

(I wouldn't say no to recommendations from the next several large countries. I think we can probably come up with an US American film on our own, but I have no idea what's good from Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan or Nigeria.)

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Learning help?

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 20:58:07 GMT

Three topics about learning I'd like some advice on:

How do you learn from videos, especially taking notes? My current online course, which I'm really enjoying, has videos as well as texts. In theory I approve of this because people who aren't 40+ hyperlexics generally prefer and learn better from videos. But for me personally, it's a slog. It took me about 6 hours to take notes on a 2-hour documentary this week, including a lot of going back over it to get accurate quotes. That's not really sustainable, quite aside from the fact that I'm frustrated by how much less information is conveyed in 2 hours of video that I would read in that time period.

jack suggested I should try using two computers, one to screen the video and one to type and take notes, rather than tabbing between the video and my notes all the time. That seems excessive, but maybe it's the right answer.

I'm trying to teach myself Arabic. Does anyone have any good resources? I'm completely frustrated with the beta course on Duolingo; it's possible it may improve someday but right now it's too far from ready. There's a really good deck on Memrise, How to read Arabic which is logically organized and has a real human pronouncing all the words clearly. I still need more practice to get fluent at actually reading. But I also want to move on beyond just matching symbols to sounds and learn the language as a language. I think I have a leg-up because I know Hebrew, a reasonably closely related Semitic language.

I am looking for: an explanation of grammar, not just something that teaches inductively by looking at lots of examples. I get the impression Arabic is moderately complicated and also I just prefer learning rules as well as working bottom-up. Some kind of resource to practise really simple sentences, perhaps a video with very simplified language and maybe even subtitles. Or a book aimed at young children first learning to read. It doesn't need to be gamified particularly, but a series of exercises that I can work through so I get practice at applying rules and skills starting from really easy and building up. I wouldn't at all mind getting a textbook, but if there's anything free of cost online that's also great.

I'm probably more interested in Modern Standard Arabic but I have no objections to picking up some Classical or using resources aimed at building Qur'an fluency. I do want to be a bit careful to avoid either intruding on something that isn't really meant for non-Muslims, or on the other hand anything with a lot of nationalist or fundamentalist propaganda mixed in with the language learning.

The remaining two points are to do with programming and I'm not sure I even know enough to know what I'm asking for, so helping me to formulate the question would be a good start.

I want to learn how to do servers. I described this as a basic intro to sysadminning but I'm not sure it's quite that. But to be able to set up my email and web hosting properly rather than just ignorantly copying code with no idea what it does. And just having a clue about how different computers in different physical locations talk to each other, and maybe a very basic grasp of security stuff.

cjwatson suggested maybe I need some Unix programming, and I think that might be part of what I'm looking for, but mostly I want to understand principles. Otherwise I end up learning a lot of syntax for commands, but still having no idea where or in what context I'm supposed to type those commands.

Anyway I can't find courses that teach it, it all seems to be about programming languages. Which is also something I want to learn about, but I have plenty of options for learning how to code, so that's not what I'm asking about here.

Partners' kid is excited about "programming a game". And it seems like most of what he means by that is creating interactive fiction, he has some really cool descriptions of the story he wants the player to experience. I don't know if there is any kind of system that exists to allow complete beginners to put together elements to tell a story (not just text, indeed ideally not primarily text, mostly graphics). I wonder if maybe Twine is the answer? Anyone have any experience? He has some knowledge of Scratch and some of Minecraft, but I think there's too big a gap between what he can imagine and what he can implement in those environments.

Several of his adults are professional programmers so they're teaching him actual coding. But I wonder if there's a tool for creating something that might be approximately playable, without having to spend several years learning foundational skills first? Or possibly a way that an adult can relatively quickly implement some of his designs, other than actually coding an entire game? I mean, maybe not, maybe that's an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe someone knows of something that might be relevant?

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Who wants to give me careers advice?

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 20:16:04 GMT

So two years ago I left my tenured academic job because it was making me miserable and requiring me to commute 300 miles a week. And I took up a fixed term job working on an interesting project about using modern teaching methods to make sure all students, including minorities, have a good experience at university. The project has come to an end, and it has been pretty much everything I hoped for; my CV is much more interesting and diverse now, and includes some leadership experience.

So I'm able to apply for a much wider range of jobs, and more senior jobs, now. And I'm sometimes getting shortlisted but so far nobody actually wants to offer me a job. So I'm going to be out of work from the end of the month, and I don't know what to do next.

I genuinely don't know what job I'm looking for. In fact, I don't think there exists a standard job title or career path for people like me.

My highest priority in a job is that I want a lot of autonomy and a lot of variety. I've found that the easiest way to get that is academia, and therefore I've worked in academia my entire adult life. Also, I really really enjoy teaching, and I would like a job that includes at least some teaching and preferably a lot. I'm certainly willing to consider jobs outside academia if I get to decide what I want to do each day between interesting options, and if any organization at all is willing to hire me with zero experience other than in universities.

I'm 40 and thus probably around half way through my career. I'm in principle willing to retrain, but it would have to be definitely the right thing, I don't want to spend a lot of time and money on more education just for the sake of it. I'd really rather get a job that uses the skills and knowledge I already have. That's quite a variety of stuff; although my career has been pretty linear, I've picked up a lot of really eclectic skills along the way, especially through volunteering.

I'm good at:

Teaching (any age and level)
Causing disparate groups of people to bond together into a community with a common purpose
Research (most of my experience is in natural science, but I have two years of professional level education research and I'm generically good at finding out and analysing information)
Communication, not only with people like me, but higher ups, people from very different backgrounds, and just about anyone really.

The second point is the most difficult to fit into a job niche. Lots of people are good at teaching, research and communication, but very few people cause communities the way I do. All the good jobs I've had have been in institutions that value that, and I don't get those jobs unless people count volunteer experience as experience.

I'm not very good at: physically demanding stuff, or anything that requires me to do boring but attention-requiring work. I think I'm at least potentially competent at management, more technical management that is focused on a particular skill or task than general management of people and orgs, and I have some leadership skills (see: community creation). But I don't have a lot of formal experience of the sorts of things that tick hiring people's boxes as 'management' or 'leadership'.

I want to do something at least vaguely socially beneficial, though I think very few possible employers are totally morally pure. I am willing to work more than 40 hours a week only if it's genuinely a one-off crisis; I strongly prefer not to be doing that regularly. I don't drive at all, and I would really like a commute of half an hour or less by bike, or an hour or less by public transport. I'm in principle ok with working from home, but I am a giant extrovert and I thrive more in jobs where I get to talk to other humans regularly.

Those things are all priorities over salary, but I'm currently on £40K and I could get by on less than that but would rather not be massively financially constrained. If nothing else because most of my social circle including several of my partners earn quite a bit more than I do. But equally, I'm from a generation and background that have lead to not carrying any debt, and I don't have any dependants, so I can afford to prioritize other things than income.

I would be somewhat willing to go back to a traditional academic job in bioscience, but it's definitely not my first choice. And also I don't think I'd actually land such a job, because I don't have a particularly stellar CV and mainstream academic jobs are ridiculously competitive. Equally I'm very willing to consider something completely out of left field, which is why I'm making this an open post and asking for any suggestions.

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Celebrating Jack

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 20:51:11 GMT

So my lovely husband had a birthday, and we had a tasting menu at Navadhanya. I'm really pleased ghoti_mhic_uait discovered a restaurant which is so well suited to our tastes. We had a bottle of Indian white wine, and I should probably be less surprised that Indian wine exists, but it was merely pleasant rather than exciting. I think in future I will go back to drinking their extremely exciting passion-fruit and chilli lassi.

Then at the weekend we had a birthday party; we seem to be reliably hitting really good house parties these days. Lots of people from different bits of our social group, lots of really good interactions and conversations.

The third part of celebrating jack is that he asked for a spa treat for his birthday. Does anyone have any recommendations at least vaguely local to Cambridge?

I've never really found the idea of a spa appealing so I don't know anything about it. Ideally we want to avoid anything too far in the "woo" direction; we're looking for someone who is going to do nice things to muscles, not chakras or auras or chi or that sort of thing. I don't really want to join in with the massage because I have some mild but annoying trauma around massage, but if it's possible to pay for a couple of hours of hanging out in a nice relaxing environment then I could keep jack company.

The most plausible option I've found so far is The Glassworks. They don't seem to offer the option of just paying for spa time, though. I would be glad to hear if anyone's been there and can tell us personally if it's any good.

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Cultural exchange

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 10:20:27 GMT

One of the things I love about my job is that when you're helping people to redesign their teaching they ask you for advice about all kinds of random things. This one I think I need to crowdsource:

My colleague is running an exchange trip where she's taking some of her students to Washington DC along with some students from a Southern US state. She wants to take some small gifts / prizes for the American students.

So my question to American or American-knowledgeable friends is, if you were an American college student, what small, inexpensive, transportable item would you be excited to receive from English visitors? Are there any (snack) foods you think of as excitingly and exotically British?

And to my compatriots, what should my colleague take that will seem like a nice souvenir of England or the UK? Particularly, can you think of anything that is typical of Cambridge the town but isn't about Cambridge Uni?

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Excel help?

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:21:23 GMT

I have a spreadsheet with approx forty thousand rows. Around 6000 of them are irrelevant - they're mixed in with the rest, but are identifiable based on data in one of the columns. The data covers three years. The years are not recorded as proper dates, but as plain text saying things like 2015/16.

My task is that for each year, I need to count the unique values in one of the columns. This column contains only text, no blanks. It's not made out of meaningful English words, but serial numbers containing letters and digits. The values in each column are repeated anywhere from 1 to 60 times; I just want to know how many different serial numbers there are, not overall, but separately for each year.

Year	Serial Number	Flag
2015/16	AAA111	Relevant
2015/16	AAA128	Irrelevant
2016/17	AAA111	Irrelevant
2016/17	AAB139	Relevant
2016/17	AAA111	Relevant

My own knowledge of Excel, supplemented by searching for things like Excel count unique values, isn't quite sufficient. Anything that involves doing this semi-manually (eg sorting the columns then counting by hand) is unfeasible over tens of thousands of rows. Anything automated needs to not make Excel choke with a large-ish spreadsheet.

I tried following the instructions in this official Microsoft article, and it's not quite working for my case. As soon as I try to filter a column by unique values only, it overrides the filter I started with for taking out the 6000 rows marked 'irrelevant' in a different column. Even worse than that, instead of copying the roughly 10,000 cells in the same column that I tried to select, it copies a whole chunk of the spreadsheet with several columns and I'm not sure exactly how it's related to the area I selected. The second method, count using functions, I don't understand well enough to try, and since the method I thought I understood behaved very unexpectedly, I don't want to start blindly pasting in a formula I really won't be able to debug.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach this?

(The reason why I'm trying to wrangle this myself rather than delegating it to someone who has relevant expertise is, well, annoying work politics. But the fact remains that I need to do it.)

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Recorder

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:20:47 GMT

So the wonderful amazing ghoti_mhic_uait gave me a proper alto recorder as an afikoman present. I am slightly awkward about it because an actual musical instrument is a bit bigger than the sorts of things my family generally expect as Passover presents – it's a gift-giving occasion, yes, but it's not anything like on the scale of Christmas. But I am also really really happy, it's the most absolutely perfect present.

My parents aren't particularly musical, but they come from the sort of background where making sure your children get music tuition is expected. So my dad got a more knowledgeable colleague to help him pick out a piano and we ended up with one of rather better quality than most not very talented primary school kids get to practise on. And we had piano lessons with a nice lady who came to our house and was super patient when we were haphazard about practising. And also did a sterling job of explaining Western music history to a curious Jewish kid who needed a lot of Christian background culture unpacking. I mainly remember being completely bemused by the concept of "perfect" time where 3/4 time signatures are more holy, because more trinitarian, than 4/4.

I probably started piano lessons too early, in some ways; I know that there's value in teaching very young children music when their brains are still plastic enough to learn easily, but the piano is hard, and I didn't have much discipline. My lessons weren't supplemented by ever listening to music, because my congenitally deaf mother can't really hear recorded music and my father chose not to play it in the house out of respect to her, so my brain didn't in fact get accustomed to what music was supposed to sound like. I did get one real benefit, though: by the time I started doing group music lessons at school, I could already read music. At six or so, I was running smack into the horrible discovery that I really can't sing in tune, and that therefore people find my singing unpleasant to listen to, which I've been sad about ever since. But when I was handed a descant recorder, the standard way that schools in middle-class areas used to introduce children to music, I wasn't the worst in the class any more. And I sometimes got to participate in ensemble playing, and sometimes was allowed to play the instrumental backup in shows, instead of always being asked to keep quiet while the more musical children were singing.

For some reason I persisted with piano lessons, though I didn't have any particular love for playing. It was just what you did, I think. And when I went into secondary school I started having lessons with a peripatetic teacher who gave lessons on school premises during school lunchtimes. After several years of weekly lessons throughout primary school, I was good enough that I could actually play pieces that sounded pleasant to my own ears, and started to play for my own enjoyment rather than because an adult told me to. Those piano lessons were really really good for me, because the teacher completely understood that I never going to be any kind of musical performer, not even an amateur one, but saw music as worthwhile for its own sake. So she helped me to develop my own musical tastes, and to start to interpret music beyond just playing the correct notes in the correct order. And more importantly, she taught me the meta-skills of how to practise, how to work at a physical skill, how to deal with something that required work before I could get it even partly right, and how to fail. (I failed a lot of music exams because even as a piano player there's always an oral section which requires you to be able to sing in tune.) Given I was a ridiculous academic over-achiever, this stuff was immensely good for me. I don't think we knew the terms in those days, but it was a total growth mindset thing. I didn't have my self-worth tied up with being "good at" piano or getting high marks in exams, but I did learn that if you practised properly you could turn an ugly sound into a pleasing sound, and that was more direct, real feedback than any amount of praise or A grades.

I also learned flute for a little while, mainly because I like the sound of flutes. I didn't hate it, but also didn't really get anywhere with it; having 10 years of experience in piano fingering and knowing music theory leapfrogged me over the really steep part of the learning curve, and my teachers were perfectly nice and supportive, but I never really got deeply into it. And I had singing lessons, which my parents very kindly arranged in order to try to correct my problems with carrying a tune. In fact I learned a whole wide range of very other useful skills around vocal technique, and fell in love with Fauré and otherwise got a really good grounding in choral music, and my singing teacher was the first person I ever came out to (in the context of singing love songs addressed to beautiful women). I never really fixed the problem with singing in tune, maybe got a bit less terrible, but the singing benefited me in quite different ways from the one it was intended to help with.

So when we did ensemble music, I still wasn't allowed to sing, even in the chorus, and generally the music teacher did the actual piano accompaniment so piano wasn't an option. But I was classified as one of the musical girls, since I was having music lessons on three different instruments, and struggling through my music grades albeit not very brilliantly. Which meant I was supposed to play a "proper" instrument rather than being relegated to the triangle. And that defaulted to being the alto recorder, which was considered slightly more prestigious than the mere descant.

When I left school, I wanted to keep up with piano, but pianos are not very readily available when you're living the transient student life. And also not very suitable for just casual music making with friends, since a piano usually isn't available, and also because for some pigheaded reason I'd spent all my time learning to play classical solos not very well, rather than picking up more sociable skills such as accompanying or improvising. My little sister ended up taking our childhood piano; she isn't an academic, so she settled down in a permanent home of her own with space for it much earlier than I did.

So for the last 20 years I've had this regret that, still being unable to sing well enough to subject other people to my voice, I can't really join in with people who are playing and singing together. I mean, I sometimes do anyway, because I agree with the philosophical idea that everybody should be able to make music even if they're not very good at it, and sometimes people don't mind if I'm out of tune. But it's always a huge effort to push the embarrassment at how terrible I sound, and it's not very internally satisfying when I sound bad to my own ears, no matter how tolerant and supportive my lovely friends are. And I've always had in the back of my mind that getting back into recorder is probably the solution to this. Recorders are portable, and I can direct my efforts towards playing things like song accompaniments rather than more showy solo stuff, and a recorder is fairly easy to keep in tune even if you don't have a good sense of pitch.

But I have never quite dared to do this. It's sort of hard to say why; if I verbalize it it's something like, I don't deserve to have a musical instrument cos I'm no good at music. But that is complete nonsense when I take it out and examine it; there's not a limited supply of musical instruments, I'm not depriving anyone more talented than I am if I play the recorder too. Anyway, my girlfriend giving me a recorder as a present completely broke down all the completely irrational blocks that were getting in the way of playing. And now I'm playing music again!

It's hard to describe just how happy this is making me. It seems I got far enough with recorder and more general musical skills that even after 20-year gap, I can pick up the instrument again and more or less play. I still have a muscle memory for what to do with my mouth and fingers, and I know, oh, after all those wonderful just for its own sake piano lessons I know, how to take a piece of music and learn it until I can play it recognizably.

Also we're living in the future and the internet has all the music available. I found a bunch of websites with beginners' tunes, nursery rhymes and folk songs and so on, and then ghoti_mhic_uait pointed me to the amazing Petrucci library which contains masses and masses of scores of stuff that's in the public domain. It's a bit hard to search, I still haven't quite managed to get it to spit out just recorder solos rather than everything that has a recorder involved at all. So I've been playing a Händel Sonata (Opus 1 #11 in F major) and I've nearly got it apart from a few tricky fast passages, so that it actually sounds like Händel and not a bunch of unconnected notes. And there's a Telemann piece I'm starting on too...

And I'm allowed to play the recorder. Just like I learned with piano all those years ago, I don't have to be a brilliant performing soloist, I can just play because I want to. And with work, with amazingly satisfying work, better than any video game, I can get to the point where my playing sounds at least pleasant. But I do in fact want to focus on more social sorts of playing, not learning a bunch of sonatas to a mediocre standard.

So does anyone have any recs of social sorts of music? Melodies of songs, perhaps, or even something aimed directly for people who want to play recorder to accompany singers? The readthrough people have a songbook, right, with dots in? Would it be possible to obtain a copy? I'm happy to pay for music but I'm spoilt for choice so I need some ideas first. And I am somewhat interested in online tutorials though I think I can mostly learn fine just by practising pieces, cos it turns out I know how do that. I like baroque music a lot, and there happens to be quite a lot available for recorder, but I am not wedded to only playing baroque, any style is fine, and I'm quite positively interested in recorder versions of pop music, if that exists. (And if it's set for descant, well, all that rusty music theory means that I do in fact know how to transpose.)

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Book recommendations for teenaged boys?

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 19:10:07 GMT

So my two former bar mitzvah students want to carry on with Hebrew now they've both completed their ceremonies. They've said they'd like to do a bit more conversational modern Hebrew as well as just practising prayerbook reading. Does anyone have any recommendations for textbooks?

The boys are 13 and 15, both reasonably academically able and reasonably committed. They can read fairly fluently, but have very little vocab or grammar at the moment. They're also extremely busy and probably won't have huge amounts of time for practice in between their fortnightly lessons. My options at the moment are:
The textbook recommended by the GCSE exam board. I'd generally like the boys to be thinking about GCSE sort of level, not that they hugely have to pass exams but as a streching, but attainable, target. The problem is that the book looks incredibly dated and dull and I don't feel inspired to teach from it!

Or Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew. I think this is basically aimed at beginners, but beginners who are university students or otherwise quite advanced in general language skills. It's really quite heavy on grammar, and might be overkill for a couple of years of informal lessons for teenagers.

I can't find anything I like better than these two options. I don't want a course that is primarily audio for self-learning, because I'm going to be there teaching and keeping up reading fluency is a big priority. And I don't want just a vocab list or beginners' dictionary. The younger boy suggested using a tourist phrasebook, which might work but ideally I'd like something more like a textbook and less like lists of phrases to rote learn.

Secondly, I still have not succeeded in giving the younger lad his bar mitzvah present, because everything I could think of is out of print and not for sale for reasonable money. I would like to give him a good work of popular non-fiction, something enjoyable to read but also informative. He's quite interested in politics and world affairs, which is a subject I know little about. And he's pretty bright but not especially precocious, I think he'd get more out of something accessible or even aimed at teenagers, than something hardcore academic.

I'm thinking something about the level of Jared Diamond's Guns, germs and steel, except not that because I'm now aware that Diamond not only plays fast and loose with scholarly accuracy, he conducted some rather unethical ethnographic research and published identifying stories about his subjects without their permission. And I have in mind that there used to be a journalist who did short programmes on Radio 4 about US politics and culture, and that he died a few years ago (?) and that prior to that he had written a book of anecdotes that this young man might enjoy, but that's not enough information to shake his name out of Google, does anyone have any clue whom I'm talking about?

So. Anyone who's taught conversational Hebrew, any recs? And in a less specialist query, what's the most interesting popular non-fiction book you've read lately?

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Evil spammers

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 20:39:19 GMT

So something is sending vast quantities of spam from my email address. Does anyone have any advice?

I have an email address that I use on websites I really don't trust, especially the kind where they are prone to displaying your email address in the clear. And it turns out I was right not to trust them, because some time yesterday evening I started getting absolutely floods (more than a hundred mails per hour) of bounce messages suggesting that this honeytrap email address had been sending out Viagra spam.

I have ended up turning off that email address altogether, because I couldn't cope with that many bounce messages. I only use it for authentication with dodgy websites, and for Facebook notifications. I would prefer FB didn't know my email address at all, and since they must have one, I don't really care whether I receive email notifications when someone tags me or they just randomly decide I haven't interacted with their site in revenue-generating ways recently.

But is there anything else I can do? Firstly to protect myself, and secondly to be socially responsible and prevent people from getting spammed in my name?

I think, but I don't know, that the spam machine is just inserting my email address into the "from" field, it doesn't actually have access to any accounts I own. Is there any way I can verify that this hunch is correct?

Is there any way I can reactivate the email address but not get thousands of bounce messages due to the spam apparently originating from it? Maybe just waiting a while, or is the the address hopelessly contaminated forever? This isn't a high priority, but it would be somewhat convenient to have access to that email address.

If I create a new honeytrap email address, is there any way I can prevent this from happening again? Probably not, but perhaps plus addressing or something similar would work?

Can I do anything at all to stop the spammers? I assume not, because they're not actually sending email from anything I control, just pretending that they're doing so. I'm also a bit scared that this problem may lead to my whole domain getting blacklisted, but again, I may just have to accept that this could happen and probably there isn't anything I can do.

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Changing my mind

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 17:04:39 GMT

I aspire to be the kind of person who thinks for myself and most importantly changes my views when I learn new information. And that means I spend some amount of time worrying about whether I'm actually living up to that. There are lots of pressures pushing people, including me, towards opinions that are not based on evidence and convincing reasoning. The biggest one is probably conformity, I do have a strong drive to hold opinions that match the accepted ideas in my social circle. And that's a bit self-reinforcing, because I'm likely to be friends with people I broadly agree with and then when I hear arguments from people I already like I'm more likely to be swayed by them. Plus there's all the usual biases, I'm more skeptical of evidence for ideas I disagree with and relatively receptive to arguments that support views I already hold. And like many people I find changing my mind a bit scary because it implies repudiating the person I once was who held the now discarded view.

Part of the reason this came to mind lately was that some people were passing round a link to Scott Alexander's persuasion experiment. I find Scott Alexander very annoying for a lot of reasons, particularly his whining about how a feminist was mean to him one time and therefore feminism and all of social justice are an evil cult. But he does sometimes have some useful things to say and one thing I do admire about him is that he's quite committed to being precisely the sort of person who does update his ideas based on rationally examined evidence. And that's not my major goal in life but it is something I care about.

So anyway, I tried reading a lightly randomized essay aimed at convincing me to be scared of what the Rationality crowd call AI threat. And I was not at all persuaded, because although I did my best to be open-minded about the idea that I should be scared of the development of an all powerful, self-improving AI bent on the destruction of humanity, I find the concept so obviously ludicrous that no amount of writing in a pseudo-academic style with footnoted citations was going to shift my position. Plus I'm prejudiced against Alexander (as far as I know he didn't write the essay, but he promoted it) and fear of a powerful, destructive AI monster is a trope that I already associate with my negative feelings towards the Less Wrong / New Atheist / Rationality set. I think it's exactly an example of the kind of errors you make when you over-estimate your own intelligence and try to understand the world just by thinking really hard and without actually engaging with existing scholarship.

This did lead to a bit of self-doubt: am I just losing my ability to change my mind? Should I in fact be worrying about AI threat and I'm just blocking myself from doing so because I don't want to challenge my existing views and biases? (Actually I think the whole debate is directly analogous to Pascal's Wager: the fact that a clever person can invent an outcome that would basically be infinitely bad doesn't mean either that that outcome is likely, or that we should spend maximal amounts of energy trying to avoid that bad outcome.)

Then I did change a previously held belief, because people on my Tumblr dashboard were talking about this meta-analysis of studies about the effects of punishing children by spanking. Unfortunately the study is paywalled and I can't quickly find the Tumblr post where someone had put up a pirate version of the full paper. But basically Gershoff convinced me that there is a clear evidence base against spanking, given that she found lots of studies with small but reproducible negative long-term outcomes and essentially no studies with statistically meaningful benefits. But I don't really feel proud of myself for changing my view here, because for one thing basically all my friends are against any kind of corporal punishment so I'm just removing what was previously an outlier belief and replacing it with the group consensus. And for another it's a completely abstract question since I don't have or plan to have children so it makes no difference how I regard the arguments about childrearing practices. Besides, siderea and rmc28 had already half convinced me when I mentioned the issue before. So it was really quite easy for me to shut up the critical voice in my head pointing out that Gershoff has based her whole academic career around campaigning against corporal punishment and psychology has a replication crisis and a meta-analysis can be cherry-picked... You know what, self, that's as good a meta-analysis as plenty that you'd unquestioningly accept if they didn't require you to change your opinion, so there's no need to be overly picky about this one.

So those are the two extremes. I'm unpersuaded by an article espousing a view I think is not just wrong, but ridiculous, and more so because it's written in a style and associated with a group I disapprove of. I'm persuaded by a peer-reviewed meta-analysis to change a view I was only mildly committed to anyway to one which is more aligned with my social group. What I'd like from my readers, if you'd like to play along, is for you to persuade me of some new ideas. Please send me links to arguments you find persuasive on issues you expect me to disagree with. (I'm also quite interested to discover what you think I might find objectionable; I think I've been pretty open about my opinions here over the years, but of course everybody will have their own impressions and assumptions about me.)

I've turned off screening for anon comments, so if you think your views might be met with social opprobium please feel free to offer arguments without saying who you are.

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Conflict styles

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 14:51:14 GMT

Tangentially to this Captain Awkward letter, where the answer mentions that the writer's half-sister may have a different conflict style from hers, I started thinking about classifying conflict styles. It feels something like the Ask / Offer distinction in styles of communication (sometimes called Ask / Guess). It's useful to know that there is more than one way of doing it, and people whose style is different from yours are not necessarily terrible awful people who can't communicate respectfully.

The problem is I'm not sure there are two distinct approaches to conflict, or even what elements should be considered in defining conflict style. Like, JenniferP distinguishes between people who stick to the point of what the argument is actually about from people who bring up every grievance and character flaw they have with the person they're arguing with. And put like that it just sounds foolish; why would any reasonable person bring up something they're resentful about from years ago instead of staying on topic? But sometimes it just isn't that obvious what the "topic" is. Take the stereotype of the married couple who argue about how to squeeze the toothpaste or the position of the toilet seat; most likely the core issue isn't that, it's people not feeling respected, and if you were to insist that the only correct way to argue is to keep to the initial subject of the toothpaste or the toilet, you would never be able to address that. Like Ask vs Offer, there are healthy and also dysfunctional ways of applying both the stick to the subject approach and the broader grievances approach.

There are other axes of difference brought up in the discussion, and that came into my mind thinking about it. I don't exactly have snappy names for the tendencies, but some examples might be: immediate and explosive conflict versus sulking and resentment; yelling and swearing versus trying to keep everything civil and non-emotional; arguing in person and when upset and angry, versus waiting until one is calmer and possibly preferring a less real-time medium such as writing. And all of those seem to line up roughly, I wouldn't be surprised if you could divide people into those who prefer to act out their emotions and those who want to minimize expressions of anger. I mean, in an ideal world there would never be any conflict, people would negotiate everything and always come to the most satisfactory solutions by consensus, but I think that's not a reasonable standard for most humans in most relationships, so I'm interested in how best to handle things when something has already gone wrong, when there is hurt and anger.

My family of origin tend to be quite shouty and quite open about expressing emotions, and also go back to being best of friends once the immediate fight has blown over. So I get really agitated when someone who is upset with me refuses to speak to me and doesn't directly tell me what's wrong. Though intellectually I can see that sometimes it really is better to put a discussion off until a better time, and hopefully skip the yelling at eachother part. Equally, when someone is angry at me, I'm often reasonably good, though not perfect, at not shouting back, and it's easy to pat myself on the back and feel like I'm a nice person who de-escalates conflicts, but many people feel like I'm not really taking their anger seriously if I remain relatively calm, and I may be denying them the catharsis of a proper argument. So in that sense I'm on the other side of the fence compared to when I feel rejected if someone cuts me off because they don't trust themselves to be kind while upset.

An extreme example is the whole non-violent communication thing. I generally find sense in the advice that it's more constructive to talk about people's behaviour rather than their personality, using I-statements like: when you do this thing that annoys me, I feel disrespected, instead of accusations like: you're so annoying and you don't respect me! But I've also seen serious arguments that NVC can hurt people, especially when power dynamics are taken into account. Just as yelling and verbal aggression can be used to intimidate and bully and even abuse, so can insisting that people must repress their emotions and refusing to listen to them unless they can demonstrate exactly the right words and the right affect.

So help me refine my ideas? What variations in conflict style have I not thought of? What approaches to conflict and argument do you find most productive? I mean, assuming that the arguers are already upset and you can't just magically all get along. Are there any ways of arguing that you think are just bad and should always be avoided?

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Love

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 12:08:56 GMT

It's 15 Av today, which is a Jewish love festival with a rather tenuous Rabbinic origin. And here I am very happy and in love, so I shall talk about that a bit.

I have the most amazing wonderful husband. We celebrated our first calendar anniversary this year, four years since getting married on 29^th February, and eight since getting together on the previous Leap Day.

One surprising thing that's happened is that several people we know or who are second-degree connected to us have been inspired by our custom wedding contract. Some people have commissioned something with a similar design, often from our own hatam_soferet, and some people have even used our own very personal text (with permission). Even though we wrote it just for us, it seems to resonate with what at least some people want from their marriages. Recently, we learned that it is even being used as an option in a ketubah shop - it's up there with the variant ketubah texts composed by such greats as R' Saul Lieberman and R' Elliot Dorff, as a secular, gender neutral, potentially poly-friendly alternative for people who don't want the traditional Jewish contract. And look how pretty the artist has made it! I love that she's used Picard and Crusher as her example couple in one of the versions.

Our first anniversary gift was supposed to be making details from our illuminated contract into mugs, and it's taken us a while to get round to organizing it. So anyway, does anyone have any recommendations for suppliers of custom mugs? We want a site that has reasonable flexibility in design, not just fitting to a standard template, and we're looking for one-off products just for us, not setting up a shop like Zazzle or similar.

Another heartwarming bit of validation recently was a comment from azurelunatic on alexseanchai's love meme: you have found a model of relationship and being that makes you happy, and have gone after it with both hands and an open and willing heart. Thank you so very much for saying that, Azz. I... generally expect most of my circles to be relatively accepting of poly, but I don't expect to be praised for being devoted to my quad, so I was really really moved by that.

I think in some ways we're playing relationships on the easy setting. Polyamory brings its own complications and the risk of prejudice and judgementalism, of course, but that's very much mitigated because we live in the Cambridge bubble and half our friendship group are poly, and we have access to lots of friendly supportive queer-friendly non-skeevy poly groups not made up of our personal friends, if we need that. At the same time, we look quite a lot like a pair of opposite sex, fairly conventional couples, which isn't even about passing, we actually are that, it's just that we have relationships with eachother as well. Most of our parents are broadly accepting, and anyway we're at a life stage where we're not hugely dependent on parents' approval. Our partners' children have been amazingly welcoming to me and jack, including being really patient with my general cluelessness with children. And they're really generous about giving us space to nurture our various relationships, even when that has to be balanced with time when they get their parents' undivided attention; indeed, they are sometimes concerned that jack and cjwatson aren't romantic enough together (read: at all!)

And there's all the practical stuff, we all have reasonably good to excellent health, we're reasonably well off financially, we have jobs that allow enough flexibility to fit the relationships in. Starting the relationship in our mid-30s, with enough relationship experience behind us to have a reasonable clue what we're doing, but not too much in the way of horrible damage from past bad relationships, has been really beneficial. The children are the children of exactly the people that society and bureaucracy expect to be their parents, so we don't have to fight to get parental relationships acknowledged. Yes, we are going to suffer because of Brexit, since jack and I are only British citizens and it's going to be a real challenge to find a way we can all live together in Europe. But that's very minor compared to couples where one partner isn't a British citizen at all, let alone a poly group where relationships don't have any legal recognition.

Anyway, I can look at all those advantages and be grateful for them, but I can also feel really proud that over a year and a half we've built up a really solid, really mutually supportive and joyful relationship. Not that it's been completely plain sailing the whole time, but the positives far far outweigh the difficulties. We're even getting better at spending more time actually together than we spend on scheduling!

Maybe I'm a tiny bit sad that I'm here spending 15^th Av on my own, writing DW posts about how much I love my people instead of walking arm-in-arm in the moonlight telling eachother directly. But cjwatson is coming to visit for a few days next week while ghoti is off having adventures, and after that we have a bank holiday weekend when we can all be together and that will be very very good for my happiness.

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Crowdsourcing travel

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:42:32 GMT

So if you had a week in Ireland, what would you prioritize doing? Where would you go?

So I keep meaning to do the thing where I take a random few days to travel in Europe, only I never get round to organizing it. But this time darcydodo prompted me, as she's in Dublin for a conference and has a few days to travel afterwards. So this is the plan for the last week in June. And we really do need to get it sorted out fairly fast as we've left it somewhat late.

I'm arriving in Dublin Saturday evening, via rail+sail from Holyhead, which I'm quite looking forward to. We have all of Sunday through Wednesday as yet unscheduled, and I'm flying to Stansted Thursday evening. (I would rather not fly, but given I'm trying to get to the east of England, rail isn't quite feasible.) Darcy is going to hire a car, though she's a bit nervous of driving on the left. And we're aiming to head out of the capital on Sunday, stay in one or maybe two places we can use as a base for day trips, and have maybe a day or so in Dublin at the end.

I asked Darcy to give me an idea where she wants to go so I could go ahead and look for accommodation, but she said she's overwhelmed by choice. So I'm asking the internet for ideas. We're interested in history, especially older history, and in walking in the countryside though probably not serious hiking. And we like food, though we're somewhat less interested in beer or whiskey than some tourists in Ireland might be. We're both Jewish, but we're not exactly going to boycott Christianity related tourism, that would be a bit of a strange attitude to take to visiting Ireland. I've spent a very little time in Dublin before, a couple of day trips only, and I don't think Darcy's ever been to Ireland. So don't be afraid to suggest the absolutely obvious things.

So, what should we see? Where is a good general area to use as a base for travelling? If you happen to know a specific company / establishment that would be a good place to stay, please do share. And any general advice would be appreciated.

Also, if you would like a postcard, please tell me your address. Poll answers are only viewable to me. International is fine; I'm planning to use a postcard sending app that works for most countries. And don't assume I already know your address, I'll use this post as my postcard-sending checklist:

View Poll: Address

I'm a bit nervous about going travelling with my ex; I mean, I am extremely grateful that we're still friends, but I have a slight hesitation about a week with just the two of us visiting places that like to advertise how romantic they are. I worry it's a bit like with adult siblings falling back into the pattern of how they used to interact as teenagers. But actually I'm sure we'll be fine and the worst that will happen is that I'll feel a bit heart-sore at being reminded of what might have been.

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Ethical capitalism

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:22:39 GMT

Lots of people don't believe in ethical capitalism, for various reasons. Maybe they think capitalism is inherently unethical as a system and if you participate in it at all you're tainted. Or they think that consumer choices don't really have important ethical consequences. Or they think it's unfair that the extra costs of ethical business practices should be borne by the consumer, meaning that buying ethically becomes a kind of luxury. Or they are Effective Altruists who hold that that the good that can be done by buying the cheapest possible goods and spending the difference on efficient charities that cure childhood illnesses in the developing world outweighs the harm done by increasing the profit of companies that exploit their workers. And all of those criticisms have some merit, but I'm still an idealistic capitalist at heart, so I still worry about these issues.

One place where it's particularly acute is electronics. I am not the kind of ascetic who could live without a smartphone, and I worry a lot about the resource and labour implications of buying the things frequently. But right now my trusty three-year-old Galaxy Note II is on its way to becoming unusable as its battery won't hold charge any more. I am reluctant to replace it with a new shiny phone, though it may come down to that because as mentioned I am not prepared to live without my mobile phone, and if I can only use it when plugged in then I basically don't have a mobile phone any more.

So, I would like some advice:
I'm currently managing by just keeping the phone attached to an external battery, and in some ways I'm minded to just carry on like that, but it's more than doubling the size and weight I'm carrying around, so probably not a long-term solution.

My preferred option in many ways is to replace the battery. I really hate the idea of throwing away an otherwise perfectly good phone because of battery problems, and repairing fits very much better with my values than replacing. Does anyone know if it's possible, or at least how to find out whether it's possible, to replace the battery in a Samsung Galaxy Note II? If it is possible, there is the question of cost; it might be more ethical, but it's not very sensible, to spend the entire cost of a new phone in replacing the battery in a phone that has been far superseded by Moore's Law, and is getting kind of elderly anyway.

If replacing the battery is unfeasible or ridiculously expensive, my next favourite choice is probably to buy a second-hand phone. That way I'm at least not directly contributing to destroying the environment by mining for rare metals, nor to exploitation if not outright enslavement of people extracting the materials, manufacturing the phones, and disposing of the toxic waste when a perfectly functional phone is thrown away because it's not the latest model any more. I mean, it's coming up to Passover, not contributing to slavery is particularly prominent in my mind. The problem is that in a context of built-in obsolescence, a second-hand phone may be pretty much on its last legs even if it's only a year old. And I'm always nervous that many second-hand outlets are really fencing operations; I don't especially want to buy a stolen phone, that's not really more ethical than buying a new one. Perhaps a good compromise would be to buy a manufacture refurbished phone or ex-display one from a reputable company, rather than a rando on eBay or a pawn shop. Does anyone know any trustworthy retail outlets for refurbed phones?

Or I could try buying a phone marketed as ethical, such as the Fairphone. I really like the idea that they're concerned about sourcing their materials ethically as well as having decent labour conditions for the actual manufacture of the phone, though I have heard mixed things about whether they really live up to their hype. But even if they're not substantially more ethical than their rivals in those respects, they do have one clear ethical advantage which is that the phone is designed to be able to be repaired and parts replaced / upgraded in a modular way. That really helps to offset the problem of phones which die after only a couple of years of use. The major downside of the Fairphone is that €500 is quite a bit more than I'm happy to spend on a phone, especially one with a fairly limited feature set. Also, the fact that the phone can in theory be repaired does not mean that I personally will have the skills to repair it, nor that anyone will be prepared to service the phone for me for a reasonable price. And I have heard rumours that Fairphones tend to be unreliable; I would in some ways rather have a phone that just doesn't break, than one that is in theory easy to repair, especially if that 'easy' doesn't translate to 'possible' in the real world.

The other phone that people have recommended as ethical is the OnePlus aka Wileyfox Swift. That's certainly a much better balance of price and features than the Fairphone. But the main reason that it's ethical is that it uses Free software, namely versions of Android without all Google's proprietary bumf and privacy breaking stuff. I am broadly in favour of Free software and broadly negative towards Google, but it's not an ethical principle I'm passionate about. And I'm kind of heavily entangled in the Google Android™ ecosystem for my apps. Now, many of them I could live without; a high proportion are just games, but I do enjoy having pocket games for long journeys, and my partners' children enjoy playing games on my phone as a way of interacting with me that's fairly undemanding for both of us. So, can anyone tell me, how easy is it to use a range of apps on CyanogenMod and similar Free OSes?

I have nebulous thoughts about updating to latest versions of Android or Free equivalent. (I'm probably not going to jump ship to iOS or Windows at this point; there aren't any real ethical upsides to balance the inconvenience of changing.) Like, on the one hand I don't like it when the software I'm used to keeps updating all the time, and I especially don't like the way that contributes to built-in obsolescence as later versions of the OS are designed for newer phones, forcing me to upgrade the hardware when I otherwise wouldn't bother. But obviously there are security considerations against running old, unsupported versions of an OS, so it's not clear cut. It's probably a bad idea to buy a new phone that doesn't have the latest Android, and possibly a bad idea to buy one that doesn't receive updates as they are released.

OK, so however I decide to acquire it I need an actual handset. I'm grumpy about this because I really like my current phone, but it doesn't seem like the Galaxy Note range is really being marketed any more, and I'm in two minds about deliberately buying a slightly less out-of-date phone in preference to a new one. Anyway, I'd be glad of advice on choosing a model even if you don't have much opinion about the ethics.

Desiderata:

Price: Under £200 ideally, maybe up to £300 if that really makes a difference to features and particularly to how long I'm likely to be able to keep the phone running.
Reasonable processor. I'm thinking 2GB RAM really, if I have a new phone there's no point in it being already underpowered.
Decent screen real estate. Apparently phones are being marketed with edge dimensions in mm instead of screen diagonals in inches these days, which is more sensible, but I'm used to the old way, so I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for. I would like at least a 5.5'' screen in old money, as I've got used to my chunky Galaxy Note. But it's possible that I can get away with 5' given the high resolution of a mid-range modern phone.
Reasonably robust hardware, and ideally replaceable battery, so I don't end up in this situation again in another couple of years.
Plausible battery life. I mean, I know no smartphone is ever going to last much longer than a day on a single charge, but a few hours of operation would be nice, and other things being equal I'll pick the phone with the longer battery life.
Pleasant text entry method. I really really like the stylus on my Galaxy note, that combined with Swype makes typing on a touchscreen bearable. Does anyone know if it's possible to use a stylus on a phone not specifically designed for that?

I don't care about:

Status symbol phones that will make me look impressive to people who care about brands.
Pocketability. Most of my clothes don't have pockets anyway so a smaller phone is no better than a bigger one. And I don't think any phone is small enough for me to use entirely one-handed anyway, so I'd rather have a bigger screen than a smaller form-factor.
High-end graphics for playing really intensive games or watching videos, I'm a strictly casual gamer and I can't see myself watching videos on my phone.
Features designed for using the phone as a media player.
Camera quality. The phone should have a camera, but it doesn't have to be a particularly great one.

Options in consideration:

Nexus 5, which is reckoned to be good value for the features you get, and will keep its OS up to date (which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, see above). A bit physically smaller than I'd ideally like, and even more Google-infested than the average Android phone. Also right at the top end of my budget.
OnePlusX, which is a nice big phone, comes in cheaper than the Nexus 5, and lets me escape from Google. But that is only the answer if I can use apps with it because I am bad at trading off between privacy and convenience.
Motorola Moto G3, which everybody says is the best relatively cheap full featured smartphone. If I'm going to stick with Google Android I'm very tempted by that in spite of the smaller screen size.
Asus ZenFone. This is the only one that tempts me that's under £100. I trust Asus as a manufacturer, and this is a bit lacking in features but not actually dire for the price. It's probably just a bit too old to be sensible, though.
One of the midrange Samsung phones, possibly the Galaxy J5 but I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the models with tiny differences. I have got on well with my Galaxy Note and yes, Samsung versions of Android are a bit bloatware-ish but not unbearably so. The S6 is almost certainly out of my budget, the S5 Neo is an option if I don't mind deliberately buying an older model.
LG G3. Again, it's spending a fair amount of money on last year's phone, but it's cheaper than the Nexus 5 with what look to me like comparable features. I've never had an LG phone - any experience or opinions, anyone?
When I type my preferences into online tools, they keep recommending me a thing I've never heard of called the Huawei Honor 5X. This is the cheapest phone easily available with a screen bigger than 5', and the features look pretty good for the price. It has some weird version of Android which is supposed to be "easy to use" – I think possibly the target market is older and non-geeky users. Anyone have any opinions on this one?

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