Travelwithofs retweeted
“I wouldn’t be able to teach my kids to swim where I learn because the water had been polluted by raw sewage that’d make them sick.”
- In 1995, only 46% of English bathing waters met today’s minimum standard. In 2025, 93% did.
- In 1988, only 65% of bathing waters met the far lower minimum standards of the time.
- This is unsurprising. In the 80s, sewage was routinely discharged into the sea. (Not in exceptional circumstances, but as a matter of practice.)
- In Brighton where I live, almost all sewage was pumped directly into the sea without biological treatment until the 2010s.
- Until relatively recently, there was essentially no monitoring of storm overflow discharges of sewage.
- Some bathing waters have got worse since 2019, but will still be far better than they were in 80/90s
- The number of bathing waters classified as poor has increased, but that’s because they are newly classed as bathing waters.
- £12bn is being spent over the next five years to halve the number of storm overflows.
Travelwithofs retweeted
The extent of the PISA gap between England + other western European countries is extraordinary.
In reading, the 25% most disadvantaged pupils in England outperformed the average for *all* students in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway etc...
A decade ago there was no gap
New post out:
England's schools are now the second highest performing in the world outside the far east, according to the PISA study.
Is this because of policy? Attitude to technology? Cultural factors like immigration? And where can we still improve?
samf.substack.com/p/why-engl…
Travelwithofs retweeted
Tonight I think a lot of journalists should read the @samaritans guidelines before posting/tweeting/writing
media.samaritans.org/documen…
Travelwithofs retweeted
So frustrating. Arday's study includes interviews that never happened and states analysis was based on qualitative coding that also never happened.
So even if @aljhlester is correct, Arday still fabricated a study and falsified data - which is way worse than plagiarism
Travelwithofs retweeted
watching professional academics just fabricate or hallucinate a different, less serious set of charges in real time is so demoralizing. there is no sense in which it is remotely acceptable to take quotes from someone else's interview and pass them off as *your* interview
unavailable
Travelwithofs retweeted
Gonna get roasted on Argentina Twitter for this take.
slowboring.com/p/great-speec…
Travelwithofs retweeted
It is pretty devastating to grasp that medieval people loved their children just as much as we do, when 40% of them died before they were ten years old. The past is more horrifying than we can imagine.
It is often claimed that medieval people did not love their children. This is completely false.
worksinprogress.co/issue/did…
Some facts about childhood in medieval England:
- Parents made vast sacrifices for their children and expected little in return. Supporting a child took about 15 percent of average income, and most children left home at just the age that they might have become net economic assets;
- Medieval families were quite small: the average child had one living sibling, like the average child in England today;
- The Church thought that foetuses were ensouled at quickening, not conception, so early-term abortion was not treated as homicide. This remained the case until the nineteenth century;
- The English government repeatedly banned football to focus boys on archery practice (it was ignored);
- There is extensive evidence that medieval parents adored their children and were devastated when they died, which they often did. High infant mortality was just as horrible for medieval people as it would be for us.
My review of Nicholas Orme's wonderful book, Medieval Children.
Travelwithofs retweeted
It’s a myth you “didn’t need AC” in most of Europe 30-40 years ago. Yes summers have become hotter but the difference over time is modest compared with the geographical differences.
Travelwithofs retweeted
Depending on the definition, maybe 3-5% of the US population is smart but seriously mentally unstable. That group heavily selects into politics, though. So maybe you're getting more like 10-15% among certain political types. That's enough to have a real influence on movements.
Travelwithofs retweeted
I think it's really bad when people leak group chats like this online or to news outlets.
MPs need to be able to communicate without constantly fearing the public eye on them.
Travelwithofs retweeted
One of my favorite Napoleon moments is when he was exiled to Elba and singlehandedly turned it around in less than a year, he was just That Guy
Travelwithofs retweeted
The odds of having dementia at age 85 were close to 1 in 3 in the 80s; now they are 1 in 10.
I don’t think we have a great explanation: better cardiovascular health, diet, and education are often mentioned. Good news nonetheless.
Carnall Farrar. (2025, March 27). Dementia trends.
Travelwithofs retweeted
I analysed the 2023 local election results - this is a real thing:
⬇️Every position lower on the ballot within your party costs you ~1.2 percentage points of vote share.
⬆️Being an incumbent is worth ~1.7 percentage points, so being 2nd instead of 1st wipes out 70% of the incumbancy advantage.
🚻The effect hits men and women equally
(Worth noting “Jeffery” is fairly high up the alphabet. DMs open for marriage offers)
Travelwithofs retweeted
Looking at the results across Wandsworth, the results don't seem unfair across parties. But they're definitely unfair within them - because a Tory called Adrian Aaronson has a much better chance of getting elected than Zelda Zygmundson, all the way down the list. But there's more
Travelwithofs retweeted
And in the wards with only two candidates, like Falconbrook, the AB order happened 17 times out of 20!
Travelwithofs retweeted
If voting was random, you'd expect the ABC order within parties one in six times - 13 times across Wandsworth. Instead, it happened 38 times. Which may not sound like much of a distortion. But the odds of it happening naturally are (says ChatGPT) about 1 in 20 billion.
Travelwithofs retweeted
The effect is just as noticeable when the parties aren't bunched together. In Furzedown, for example, the leading four parties went ABC, ACB, ABC, ABC. What are the chances?
Travelwithofs retweeted
Here are the top six candidates from the ward where I live, Battersea Park in Wandsworth. Notice anything? They're in perfect alphabetical order. The same happened when I checked out another ward where a friend was standing, Wandsworth Town.
