You have presumably seen the storm in a little red cup over Elon Musk's offer to send about $6 billion to the World Food Program if “WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger”. Of course the Director of the WFP pointed out that the headline misrepresented him, natch, and that $6 billion “will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation.”

And he has now come up with an itemised budget.

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My former self just reminded me that it is 10 years since Google dumped Reader, “likely,” as I surmised then, “to send us all scurrying to Google Plus”. Which, of course, it dumped a few years later.

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It is nice to know that some of my stuff is being read, and good to be encouraged too. Before I delve into histograms and the like, though, I think I need to play more with Python's split method. This may enable me to remove the front matter from each blog post, in order to get a more accurate picture of how long the actual content is. And it will not be difficult.

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As ever, it is much easier for me to learn things by doing. I’ve been mulling the idea of a topic-based index to this site, which will take a fair amount of doing, but as preparation I need to know which of the thousands of posts are worth including. Probably they’re going to be relatively long, maybe more than 500 words. There’s obviously no way I am going to open each one to check, so I need a little script. A fine way to learn a bit more Python.

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Everyone is keen to spend their budget before the end of the year, and who am I to argue. It has bitten into my fun time, but not completely. I fixed my podcast scrobbling script, and ordered a new computer.

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