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Posted by Tim Harford

Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel – the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch – in fact, early true crime? A hit book – The Truth About Hansel and Gretel – said that historical records pointed to the story being based on fact. Are we too quick to dismiss the truth behind tall stories? Or are we always falling for tales that are too good to be true?

This episode was first released in 2021. For bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes conversations, our monthly newsletter and ad-free listening, please take a look at the Cautionary Club.

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Further reading and listening

Hans Traxler’s book is, of course, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel – unfortunately it is available only in German. An excellent starting point to understand the hoax is Jordan Todorov’s article for Atlas Obscura. Paul Berczeller’s documentary about Takako Konishi is This Is a True Story.

The study of the effectiveness of flagging satire is R Kelly Garrett, Shannon Poulsen, Flagging Facebook Falsehoods: Self-Identified Humor Warnings Outperform Fact Checker and Peer Warnings, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 24, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 240–258, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz012

Costume Pieces

Oct. 30th, 2025 09:27 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
I found the wig for Julie's Halloween costume at Spirit Halloween today. Gretchen has been working doggedly on the costume. This *may* just mean that she is working hard to keep the costume bits away from Calvin, The Very Hungry Dog. But the costume is nearly done.

It is also nearly Halloween. This is going to be a close race.

Thankful Thursday

Oct. 30th, 2025 07:18 pm
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[personal profile] mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

  • The return (yesterday) of my housemates. In large part because I am back to taking care of two cats in one room, rather than four cats in three rooms on two floors.
  • Dishwashers. I don't think I've ever mentioned dishwashers, but they are certainly worthty of gratitude.
  • Along those lines, having a clothes washer and dryer that I can get to without having to leave the house/apartment/wherever-I'm-living.
  • My trusty Edirol UA-25 audio interface. NO thanks to the flaky USB connector on my laptop.
  • Finding out that the biopsies taken at my gastroscopy all came out normal. They checked for several things which I don't have to worry about now.

In defence of digital ID

Oct. 30th, 2025 04:31 pm
[syndicated profile] tim_harford_feed

Posted by Tim Harford

In the late 1930s, a Dutch civil servant, Jacobus Lentz, designed a near-unforgeable identity card. In 1940, the Dutch government rejected his proposal as too intrusive. Weeks later, Germany occupied the Netherlands and Lentz travelled to Berlin to pitch his idea. The Nazis loved it, and it became as much a tool of the Holocaust as barbed wire or Zyklon B.

In the hands of a totalitarian regime, an identity card can be a horrifying tool for control. It is no surprise then, that Lentz’s brainchild has cast a shadow over the UK’s efforts to introduce digital ID. It should not. Digital ID, if done right, could strengthen our civil liberties rather than undermining them.

First, let’s realise that digital ID is not a compulsory identity card. You can have either one without the other: Denmark, for example, has a digital ID system without a compulsory ID card; in contrast, Lentz’s identity card became a tool for oppression before digital computers existed.

The simplest form of a digital ID system is that every resident should have a unique number. Different parts of the UK government have assigned me a passport number, an NHS number, a Unique Taxpayer Reference number, a National Insurance number, a driving licence number and, no doubt, various other numbers are floating around too. Introducing a digital ID could be as modest a step as gradually replacing this motley bunch with a single number for each resident.

This doesn’t require a big centralised database; indeed, it doesn’t significantly change what the state knows about me. The tax authorities don’t need my medical records and my doctor doesn’t need to see my tax returns, but it would be handy for all of them to use the same unique number to connect me with their records about me. It should allow services to be joined up, from the basics (not having to tell every government agency when I move house) to more ambitious steps, such as ensuring that child benefit is automatically paid when the birth of a baby is registered.

It’s possible to go further than rationalising all these different official numbers. But further in which direction? Andrew Whitby, author of The Sum of the People, a history of censuses and population registers, tells me that we should ask “what data is collected, how it is stored, and what constraints there are on its use”.

That is fair; in fact, a well-designed digital ID could go a long way to clarifying such questions and strengthening the protection of our liberties. How? Here it is worth considering the potential for abuse and fraud in the current system. I lose track of the number of institutions who have received copies of my utility bills, my bank statement or my passport because there is no simpler or more convenient way for me to demonstrate some basic fact about myself such as my address or that I am old enough to vote.

A cleverer system is summarised in a recent working paper by the computer scientist Steven Bellovin. It could work like this: I log into a government website or app using my digital ID and password, and I request a temporary cryptographic token attesting to some minimal fact about me. (What kind of fact? That I am over 18. That I have a legal right to work. That I have no criminal record. My verified address. That I have a recognised disability. There are all kinds of things I might want to be able to prove, without also revealing every other detail about myself.)

The app would issue the token, which I could then immediately use. In some cases it would be a seamless digital handshake behind the screen of my computer browser. Or the token might generate a barcode on my smartphone, which could be scanned by a landlord letting out a flat or an employer giving me a job. None of this is very different from what happens when I use a credit card.

Beyond this sheer convenience, a token-based ID system provides protections both against identity theft and state surveillance. Identity theft is harder because I can prove what needs to be proved without circulating scans of my passport and bank statements. State surveillance is harder because these cryptographic tokens reveal minimal information: I don’t need to tell the government that I want to watch fetish videos, I just need to request an encrypted token attesting that I am an adult.

That all sounds rather splendid. But couldn’t we have the convenience and security of such a system on a more ad-hoc basis, without a single universal ID number? No. We might like the idea of a system that, for example, allows users to privately verify their age before being allowed to access social media, pornography or alcohol, yet does nothing else. But as Bellovin explains, such a system would be full of holes without a single digital ID system to back it up.

Digital ID is, of course, about more than administrative convenience: it allows the denial of services to people who have no right to them, such as irregular migrants; it also prevents the arbitrary denial of services to people who do have a right to them. The Windrush scandal showed all too clearly that rights for the vulnerable are at risk without a modern identification system. The scandal saw people who had lived for decades in the UK, and who had every right to continue, deported or threatened with deportation because neither they nor the government had the documents to prove it. It is foolish to believe that holes in the population register really protect the innocent.

There is a defeatist argument for digital ID, namely that it does no harm because our privacy is already hopelessly compromised. There is some truth in that. But what that argument misses is that a well-designed digital ID offers us an opportunity to take some of that privacy back by minimising the need to share too much information, and by clearly specifying our rights — including the right to know which information has been accessed, by which authority, and why. (If the state needs covert access, a court order would be required.)

In the hands of a truly oppressive government, such protections would mean little. Nobody should be complacent about such a prospect. But oppressive governments have many other technologies at their disposal. Nobody is proposing the abolition of the telephone, the index card or the lockable door, no matter how convenient they were to the Gestapo and the KGB. It is important to ask how any technology might be abused in the wrong hands. But that cannot be the only question we ask, especially since the best defence against authoritarianism is not to cripple the functioning of liberal states, but to make them work better. Digital ID might just help with that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 Oct 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Re-Tired

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:04 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
I do not normally drive Gretchen's minivan, but -- of course! -- it came with us to OVFF. And when I went out to fetch lunch on Sunday, I looked at the tread on the front tires and said "That is some sad looking tread."

Today, the van went to Sam's Club and got a new set of four tires installed. There was likely some more life left in the rear tires, but it seemed better to replace the set. And since Sam's Club (in theory, at least -- we'll see what happens in practice) offers free tire rotations for tires that are bought and installed there, I will be taking it over there on a regular schedule for those rotations.

Since the van will be going to GAFilk with me in January if everything goes according to plan, I am *highly* in favor of tires with good tread. :)

Who Hath a Book

Oct. 29th, 2025 03:23 pm
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[personal profile] filkferengi
Who hath a book
Has friends at hand,
And gold and gear
At his command;

And rich estates,
If he but look,
Are held by him
Who hath a book.

Who hath a book
Has but to read
And he may be
A king indeed;

His Kingdom is
His inglenook;
All this is his
Who hath a book.

Wilbur D. Nesbit

This week on FilkCast

Oct. 28th, 2025 07:06 pm
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[personal profile] ericcoleman
Anne McCaffrey, Tania Opland & Mike Freeman, Jim Thorne, Carol Ferraro & Barisha Letterman, Random Fractions, Linda Melnick, Bill Sutton, Meg Davis, Dan The Bard, Ju Honisch & Katy Droege-Macdonald, Jordin Kare, Puzzlebox

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

Lonesome Star

Oct. 28th, 2025 04:52 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
I was on the way back from dropping K off at Ball State and was looking for ways to stay awake while driving. Although I had already written a song for this year's OVFF songwriting contest (Theme: Steer by the stars), I thought about what I might have written if I didn't already have a useful pair of songs to add a third part to with "Four Stars", which I posted several weeks ago. And I got the chorus for this together and sang it over and over again until I got to a gas station where I could write it down. :)

When I was done, I decided I liked this song better, so I entered it in the songwriting contest. And although it didn't place, it was fun to get up there and sing it and see people tapping along to it and singing along with the choruses.

And if nothing else, it is another exemplar for Brenda to use as she looks at *her* Bill, who seems to have more of a problem coming up with romantic songs. :)

I hope you like it!
Lyrics inside... )
[syndicated profile] tim_harford_feed

Posted by Tim Harford

Last week, Cautionary Tales told the tragic story of Derek Bentley, exploring Britain’s troubled relationship with capital punishment. Across the Atlantic, Revisionist History has also been scrutinising what it means for a state to try to execute a person. For this bonus episode, Malcolm Gladwell joins Tim Harford to discuss his new series The Alabama Murders, and to confront the disturbing truth behind the death penalty in America today. 

For bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes conversations, our monthly newsletter and ad-free listening, please take a look at the Cautionary Club.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Back From OVFF

Oct. 27th, 2025 10:24 pm
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[personal profile] billroper
We got back from OVFF at about 1 AM last night, which is causing me to strongly contemplate the wisdom of staying over for the Sunday Dead Dog. But that wasn't really an option once the kids were in school. This will not be true next year.

But this was *this* year and Gretchen and I both had a great time. Gretchen didn't do any singing, because her knees were bothering her greatly, but she had a lot of good conversations as did I. And although I didn't manage to spend a lot of time in the open filking because of schedules and dealer table, I *did* get to sing six different songs from the stage, three with Amy accompanying me, and two by the greatly missed Tom Smith during the Pegasus Concert. That makes a pretty good weekend of singing all by itself. :)

We also sold a goodly number of copies of the new "Amy & Me" album and a good number of "Liftoff to Landing" as well, which bulked up the sales considerably over last year. This is also a good thing. :)

But it was good to see friends. And new people! I am in favor of new people, because they make the whole affair more interesting.

We are still catching up on sleep, so I think I will head in that direction now.

Done Since 2025-10-19

Oct. 26th, 2025 08:55 pm
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[personal profile] mdlbear

A better week than I was expecting? N, G, and m are at OVFF, and I'm left here with the cats (modulo the housekeeper on Saturday mornings, and j on the weekends), but it's been magageable, and not too lonely. (I'm usually somewhat isolated down here on the ground floor anyway.) The main extra work was the two extra litter boxen, and feeding Brooklyn (who I swear is part hobbit -- four meals a day). (Cricket eats only kibble, so it's just a matter of making sure her bin stays filled.)

Also, I've taken six walks (though none longer than .7km), ordered some of my favorite groceries (including fish-other-than-salmon and bread-other-than-plain), and gotten a fair amount of work done on the HyperSpace Express website. In particular, the Books page, from which you can find out where to get N's book, The World As It Ought to Be, and subscribe to her newsletter.

And I have somehow managed to log a two-year streak in Duolingo. For what that's worth. Lately that hasn't been much.

I have gotten somewhat less done yesterday and today, because OVFF over Zoom.

Those of us with hidden disabilities may be interested in the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower Official website Disabilities index, search (The list is extensive.)

For those of us who couldn't get to OVFF, here are the 2025 Pegasus Award winners:

Best Villain Song: "The Evil Eyeball," Sibylle Machat
Best Hero Song: "The Ones Who Walked Away," Beth Kinderman
Best Performer: The Blibbering Humdingers
Best Writer/Composer: Eric Distad
Best Classic Filk Song: "Merry Meet," Steve Macdonald
Best Filk Song: "One Small Boat," Marilisa Valtazanou

Notes & links, as usual )

Doctor Who and the Rapture

Oct. 25th, 2025 12:24 am
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[personal profile] bunsen_h
The Rapture really happened a month ago, just as many had foretold.  But as soon as the people disappeared, so too did all physical evidence of their ever having existed, and all memories of them.  All of the catastrophic damage that resulted from the vanishing of machine operators, vehicle drivers, controllers of generating stations, etc. was erased.  It's just as though a massive alien invasion occurred and then ended.  Everyone left behind now believes that the whole thing was merely a mass delusion.
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