Picked up the train tickets for our return trip to Scotland with bikes. That's a wad of 23 tickets printed. It is going to be fun for the train guards to look through.

Hiding/ignoring areas of high deprivation by averaging them together with very affluent areas is something I've been bothered about since I was at primary school.

If we were to compare nations+regions (i.e. ITL areas https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ukgeographies/eurostat) this would more readily show the gaps between the south of England and the rest of us. Let us see more easily how badly large areas of the north of England do compared to Scotland. You don't really see that when all of England gets averaged.

Take the example of "healthy life expectancy" https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/healthstatelifeexpectanciesuk/between2011to2013and2022to2024 The ONS top level summary starts by pointing out the differences between nations. So England has higher healthy life expectancies for men and women than the other nations. But, later on (if you read further) you find out that the North East, North West and Yorkshire & Humber all have lower healthy life expectancies than Wales/Scotland/Northern Ireland. Y&H has a comparable population size to Scotland.

Before I go further, this isn't a complaint about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. It isn't saying they don't have geographic disparities. This is me complaining that using the huge grouping of "England" can often be used to hide or obscure some things.

I often get a bit frustrated when the UK publishes statistics that compare the nations of the UK where an "England" figure (England having roughly 10 times more people than Scotland) hides the systemic geographic disparities within "England".

One might argue that Hanlon’s Razor itself is an incompetent/malicious thought-terminating cliché for dealing with rhetoric

Got my best time at #parkrun since 2019 (by 1 second) so I'm happy about that.

The UK constituency dashboards site now includes a note if an MP is not "active" in the House of Commons. This currently only applies to Zara Sultana who was suspended after calling the PM a liar
https://dashboard.constituencies.org.uk/E14001182/

Here's the Register reporting on the UK Biobank story https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/23/500k_biobank_volunteers_data_listed/

Contrast this with Ben Goldacre's OpenSafely which was specifically designed so that researchers never got access to individual's data. Instead they submitted "questions" (with code) that was peer reviewed (in the open) with explicit checks to make sure no PII came out in the answers. Then the code ran inside the data centre and the answers returned. By design it put technical and structural breaks between researchers and PII to avoid these sorts of problem being able to occur.

500,000 people's data is taken out of UK Biobank and put up for sale on Alibaba: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/news/a-message-to-our-participants-uk-biobank-data-security-update/

UK Biobank demonstrating exactly the reasons I objected to these sorts of "Trusted Research Environments" that seem to give way too much unearned trust to "researchers" assuming that "legal contracts" are good enough to stop bad behaviour. But a contract doesn't stop data being taken. So they are *now* trying to come up with ways to stop large files being extracted from their data centre.

The mission to get 100 women to walk on the Moon - without leaving Earth https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg0ynj902jo

If I'm making a poster for World Bee Day you can be sure that it'll include some hexagons.

Someone in my community has asked me if I'd make an A4 poster for World Bee Day on 20th May.

I started looking up information about bees and I found this Friends of the Earth bee identification guide: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/bee-identification-guide The question is, why didn't they call it "Bee or not a bee?"?

Our entire legal system is just layer upon layer of laws that get piled up on top of each other and we have different legal systems in different bits of the UK. I dread to think what awfulness that produces now that UK politicians are apparently using LLMs in drafting new laws.

The UK is complicated. More complicated than you're probably thinking. It is layer upon layer of exceptions.

For example, here's (most of) our inconsistent "geographies" https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/documents/763339ad98ce4cb78d53f509000876b6/about although this graphic doesn't show you that any of these can also be redefined with time too so, if you have data by geography, you also need to know which version of a specific geography that data is for.

There are now 13 Independent MPs. That's probably close to a record for the House of Commons.

(There are also 5 MPs that are the only MP for their Party)

We've had a few changes of MPs and affiliations since the last UK General Election.

I'm not entirely sure why the UK Parliament's Members API is only returning 649 MPs at the moment https://members-api.parliament.uk/api/Members/Search?House=1&IsCurrentMember=true&IsEligible=true It looks like it is Zara Sultana who is missing.

@fantasticlife Any ideas? I've now emailed softwareengineering.