On holiday in the Peak District, we saw signs advertising something called the "Manifold Show" (https://www.discoverashbourne.com/special-events/manifold-show).

The actual content of the show was very disappointing for mathematicians.

Any experts on tenancy law in the UK reading this? (Almost certainly not, alas, but I can hope.) My university-student daughter is getting treated badly by a letting agency -- I am aware that this is not exactly shocking news -- and one aspect of the relevant law looks severely broken to me.

Suppose landlord L has a property to let and prospective tenant T is interested. Then the following process is common. L requires T to pay a _holding deposit_ (and isn't allowed to have more than one T's holding deposit at once); once everyone's decided to move forward, L and T sign the tenancy agreement and T gets their holding deposit back and pays L a larger _tenancy deposit_; eventually T moves in and starts paying rent; even more eventually T moves out and the tenancy deposit is returned.

There are strict rules about a holding deposit. It can't be more than one week's rent and L has to pay it back within 7 days if they decide not to go ahead.

What this letting agency has done, which so far as I can tell _isn't strictly illegal_ though it obviously should be, is: require that T pay the _tenancy deposit_ before signing anything.

If this is legal then all the rules about holding deposits have _no effect_ because tenancy deposits are allowed to be bigger and the landlord can keep them for longer.

Relevant bits of law sometimes kinda-sorta seem to assume that if a tenancy deposit has been paid then an actual tenancy is happening but I can't find anything that makes it illegal to require it before that.

Am I missing something?

My employer is making an awful lot of redundancies this year, and I'm one of them.

No condolences necessary -- I'm fine financially and I have ample reason to think no one's been unhappy with the quality of my work so my ego is also OK.

I may well just settle into an early retirement, but if you're reading this and thinking "I have / my employer has / some work needing doing for which this guy would be perfect" then by all means get in touch.

(Things I have done include: software development, algorithm design, data analysis, general being-a-usefully-smart-person. Much of my career has been very broadly in position sensing -- inductive, capacitive, optical -- with a side order of image processing, but I've done a fair variety of other things too. Temporary, part-time, one-off contract work: all fine or better than fine.)

A happy Stanislav Petrov Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident) to all who celebrate it!

On this day in 1983, a sensible and brave person responded with common sense to what turned out to be a false early-warning-system report of an ICBM attack on the USSR, rather than following the official procedures which would likely have led to a nuclear war.

(I'm tempted to draw some general moral about not overreacting to things, but unfortunately every proverb has an equal and opposite antiproverb and sometimes the sensible and brave and world-saving thing is to react promptly and vigorously.)

There bizarrely doesn't seem to be a UK government petition asking them to reverse their classification of Palestine Action as a terrorist group, so I made one. Nothing at all happens until five people sign it here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/737065/sponsors/new?token=of4HgwdHoy62DM1ZciT3

[EDITED to add:] 17/5 supporters achieved, now waiting for approval. (3 more can still sign up before that.)

Note 1: It seems that it can take weeks for a petition to get approved, so maybe there are actually several in the works already. If you know of an earlier/better one, please ignore mine.

Note 2: The scope of the petition is strictly limited: P.A. should not be considered a terrorist organization. I am not claiming that they are a _good_ one.

Note 3: If you think P.A. is not a good organization and doesn't deserve favourable publicity then quite possibly you should prefer them _not_ to be classified as terrorists. I think they've got a lot more press and a lot more sympathy since they were so classified.

Note 4: P.A. should not be considered a terrorist organization because all they do is vandalize things. They don't kill or injure people or attempt to spread fear. They are surely a _criminal_ organization but not a _terrorist_ one.

Note 5: It shouldn't matter, but my position on the Gaza conflict is that Hamas are evil genocidal bastards who perpetrated an atrocity, and Netanyahu took advantage of this to launch a colossal and surely counterproductive massacre. War criminals, the lot of 'em. There should be a safe and secure Israel and free and un-oppressed Palestinians. I have no idea how to get there, but the present war is clearly moving in the wrong direction on both counts.

[EDITED to add:] Actual petition text in reply to this toot.

This may possibly be the finest bit of (phonetic) nominative determinism I have ever seen: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/quantum/people/dr-toby-cubitt

[EDITED to add:] For the benefit of anyone who doesn't feel like following the link, this is a professor of _quantum information_ who is literally called Qubit (though, alas, not spelled that way).

@timbray A few days ago you updated your "Google Memory Loss" post https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory to say that the problem is now fixed, and to thank a couple of Googlers for figuring out what was going on. ... But you don't say anything about what _was_ going on, or what they fixed, or how broadly whatever they fixed has been fixed. Do you plan to? (I hope so! It would be interesting.)