Ross Atkin Profile picture
Jan 7, 2019 3 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Hoping that #BrexitUncivilWar has made my mild obsession with Dominic Cummings and political Facebook ads mainstream. Here's a thing I wrote two years ago medium.com/@rossatkin/the… and here's a thread about why most people still haven't got the message
I'm really enjoying reading the #BrexitUncivilWar hashtag, especially the fact that some people like @DouglasCarswell and @darrengrimes_ who feature are participating.
Finally if you want some, kind of, Dominic Cummings 'fan/un-fan art' here are a two illustrations for the blogs I wrote about him. #BrexitUncivilWar Graphical illustration of D...Hand drawn comic. The first...

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More from @rossatkin

May 29
I designed a new street thing last year, and I’ve seen a few of them out in the wild now so I figured it was time tell you all about it! It’s a support for temporary road signs. It’s made from recycled plastic and replaces a steel A-frame and sandbag. 🧵1/ Photo of a traiangular road works sign with a black and white arrow below it supported on a plastic structure comprising a lozenge shaped base and a vertical post. The base and post are both dark grey but the ends of the base are panted yellow. The sign is on the edge of a footway.
The steel A-frames are pretty awful things and IMO they should never have started appearing on our footways because:

1. Long cane users can easily get their canes trapped (and possibly broken) between the legs 2/
Photo of a triangular road works sign on a steel A-frame with a sand bag hanging over a horizontal bar about 400mm above the ground. The sign is on the edge of a narrow footway
Photo of a rectangular 'PEDESTRIANS' arrow sign on a steel A-frame with a sand bag, positioned close to the building line on a wide footway
2. The sandbags can fall off, presenting a trip hazard and meaning the sign falls over (another trip hazard + missing sign)

3. The weight of the sandbags depends on how much sand was put in so there might not be enough weight to resist the wind loading causing more falls (2) 3/ Photo of a steel A-frame with a 'ROAD AHEAD CLOSED' sign on it fallen over on a road despite the presence of a possibly under-filled sand bag
Read 20 tweets
Oct 1, 2020
I’m so angry about this.
Thousands of disabled people's lives, which are already hard, are being made harder for literally no environmental benefit, because people who claim to advocate for the environment prefer crass rules of thumb to proper analysis bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…
I can’t believe that in 2020 someone from @ClientEarth is happy to say plastic straws are “some of the most pointless plastics out there”.

They have obviously never watched a person take 30 minutes to drink a cup of coffee through a straw because that’s the only way they can.
Even if they don’t know any affected disabled people, there is no way someone advocating about this issue could not have heard about the views of those affected. They’ve made the choice to dismiss other people’s lived experience because they believe the cause is more important.
Read 14 tweets
Sep 29, 2020
I don't know who needs to hear this but, acting on the opinions of a small number of individual scientists, on questions about which everyone acknowledges there is a huge amount of uncertainty is not the same as "following the science".
Not saying this to disparage any of the scientists advising the gov, who are doing their best in a difficult situation. More the tendency in the media to conflate what scientists think about open questions with 'science', which is a consensus position on well studied questions.
IMO, scientists are not necessarily the best placed to take practical decisions in situations of high uncertainty, as they are trained to defer judgement until they have enough data to draw robust conclusions. We are a years away from that point for this pandemic.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 14, 2020
I’m mainly doing this thread mainly as a marker to check back and see if I’m right, but here’s what I think is happening with all the theatrics around the Withdrawal Agreement at the moment.

It’s all about packaging. 📦
Packaging has a long lead time, and all the food producers have said that they need to order the packaging for the time after the transition period ends at the end of January, right now. businessinsider.com/brexit-food-co…
The government needs a way to let them know that the labelling requirements for food sold in NI and exported to the EU won't change after the transition period ends, without signalling their intention to negotiate an agreement with the EU that leaves the UK subject to EU rules.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 25, 2020
Random redditors from around the world have started dropping in and driving the little robot in this cardboard version of Wolfenstein 3D I've just finished and I feel like I'm definitely living in the future thecraftyrobot.net/blogs/projects…
I'm not going to lie, it's also slightly socially awkward.
Folks dropping in to play this all day today has been really fun. Most of them have had their webcams off but this gentleman from New Hampshire had his on and didn’t mind being videoed and posted.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 13, 2020
The folks who spent £400k on an ‘AI system’ to see what people are tweeting, whilst at the same time tabulating virus cases and locations by hand on paper, cosplaying NASA with ‘real time’ dashboards would definitely be funny if situation was less serious. thetimes.co.uk/article/domini…
Even if you accept that we might benefit from ‘mission control’ at the heart of government I worry that Cummings doesn’t understand the difference between scientists and engineers, attributing the successes of the latter to the former.
Mission control was a room full of engineers
It was also focused on a narrow, well defined objective and was monitoring + reacting to a narrow set of variables.

It’s a reasonable analogy for a unit controlling the virus but not government as a whole, that needs to watch everything.

Hedge fund prob more appropriate analogy
Read 4 tweets

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