BoxOfRain

The notion that morning people are virtuous and evening people are lazy should have been shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave the instant that the electric light bulb was invente…

Technically in the UK a monarch can only rule with the consent of Parliament, but given our last experience of republicanism was a repressive Puritan state the idea is still somewhat tainted in the pu…

Personally I favour an apolitical head of state, I’m not too fussed whether they’re a figurehead monarchy like the UK or some other form of selection but I think giving a single politician kingly powe…

The diversity of philosophy in early Christianity is really interesting, I'd advise anyone from the most evangelical of Christians to the most evangelical of atheists to study it with an open (bu…

I'd go further than that, using Jesus's name to enslave and abuse for the benefit of private companies is nothing short of blasphemous. I have a lot of time for Jesus's teachings, but n…

To be fair, expecting reasonable responses from Twitter on any subject is a bit like panning for gold in an open sewer. The platform's whole premise is compressing things to the point it's…

Anecdotally speaking, in my corner of England social distancing went out of the window shortly after masks were mandated in shops.

Not to mention the effects on children who struggle with their hearing and need to lip-read, from a disability rights point of view I don't think it's quite as simple as "masking kids i…

Exactly, science is a process rather than a priesthood and we forget that at our peril.

Another big issue is stealability - as a cycle commuter I considered an electric conversion right up until I remembered my office is in one of Oxford's black spots for bike thefts (the whole area…

>minus all of the notification hell. I'm a huge believer in disabling any form of push notification. Nobody's software is entitled to my attention, I'll use it when I feel like it,…

Blimey you're not wrong. I reckon you can probably judge the quality of a comment section by the number and strength of the adjectives in it: a reasonable comments section would call somebody foo…

Also, even if you remove religion something else will surely take its place. It seems that notions of aggressive conventionality and "crush the unclean" are somewhat baked into a percentage …

Arguably scepticism towards the Euro as a currency and Britain wanting nothing to do with it after the crisis was a key pillar of Brexit, so I wouldn’t say it went down amazingly. I remember during th…

I strongly disagree, they're little more than pointless nagware designed as a fig leaf over the gaping privacy issues on the modern web. While I get the intention, it was clearly designed by peop…

I've never heard of this, cheers for the heads up! I'll definitely have a look into it.

My favourite ever OS theme was Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", that period of Aqua was just so cheerful and friendly compared to everything before or since. I'd love to be able to skin modern ma…

There's no such right and even if there was, it would lead to perverse situations such as Britain getting to claim Calais which is closer to London than Paris (94 miles versus 147!).

I don't think describing Britain as expansionist is accurate, in fact the remaining overseas territories were often considered a liability for the government rather than an asset. The reason Arge…

I'd love to visit all of the British Overseas Territories at some point, although I doubt I'll cross all of them off my list as a few of them are effectively off-limits to civilians.

There’s examples of it in English too, although it’s very old-fashioned. An example would be the rhyme with “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”.

Yeah I don't know what it is about QR codes but I'm really not a fan of the aesthetic they have. There's something cheap, mechanistic, institutional about them that I can't quite p…

Things like Napster have a long tradition dating back to the 1960s, in the UK the response to the paternalistic and stuffy state monopoly on music broadcasting was for people to put studios and transm…

I was quite impressed by Rory Stuart, it’s a shame he didn’t survive the political chaos of 2019 because ideology aside he seemed to have a wider worldview than his fellow passengers of the traditiona…