Fish tombstone

Too much pictureless text recently.
Not enough randomness.

Did some (very rare) gardening on the holiday Monday. Uncovered my goldfish's tombstone.

Looks like tippex is a pretty long-lasting medium - monumental sculptors take note.

So close :-D

I asked the children: How many years do you think Jeremiah said the people would be in exile for?
Child: 10
Me: More than that...
Child: 20
Me: More than that...
Child: 30...
Me: More than that...
Child: 40 
Me: More than that...
Child: 50 
Me: More than that...
Child: 60 
Me: More than that...
Child: 75

Freewill AND predestination

The Jews were sent back from exile, to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, because this was common Persian political policy - to rebuild temples in conquered lands, in order to curry favour with their many gods.

The Jews were sent back from exile, to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, because the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah.

Both of these statements are equally true.

Pinterest - all is forgiven!

After my moaning yesterday, it turns out there is a new (very un-obvious) feature on Pinterest.

Near the top right of the page is a little icon that looks like two people.

Click that, and you only see pins from people you actually follow.

This seems like the ideal solution - people can pick what they prefer.

(Would be even better if this kind of personalisation was at the permissions level - so you didn't need to give companies the permission to profile you, and then choose to not use it - still, it's much better than most companies, who force you to 'benefit' from their profiling whether you like it or not, in the name of personalisation.)

'Necessary'

One of the criteria under the new Data Protection regulations, for recording someone's data, is that it's 'necessary'.

Here's an excerpt from Pinterest's new privacy policy - it is mandatory to agree to this:

We use the information we collect to provide the Service to you. We commit to showing you content that’s relevant, interesting and personal to you. In order to do that, it’s necessary for us to use your information to: [...]

• Recommend Pins, boards, topics or categories you might like based on your activity on Pinterest. For example, if we see you’re into cooking, we may suggest food-related Pins, boards or people that we think you might like or show you food-related ads.

[...] It is also fundamental to the nature of the Service we provide. In short, it’s necessary for us to do these things in order to make the Service relevant, interesting and personal to you like we promised, and it’s in both of our interests for us to do that.

This is not 'necessary' - if you're trying to make it 'relevant', 'interesting' and 'personal' you should respect the wishes of the many users who can find relevant interesting personal stuff themselves and do not want you to recommend stuff to them (and have told you so, repeatedly).

Grrrrrrrr...

Btw, here's my Privacy Policy. I suspect it doesn't dot all the legal i's, and cross all the lagal t's. What it does do, however, is follow the spirit of the law - that people's info should not be used for things they do not want.

[Edit - Pinterest is not as bad as I thought - here's how.]

Wedding banquet

And yet another old one I've finished off - the parable of the wedding banquet from Matthew.

Pure coincidence that the prince and princess look very like another royal wedding that happened today ;-)

Fairy development

Yes, I know it's not GDPR, but I've finally solved the main problem with these fairy dolls, that I have been puzzling over for ages: how to add features.

This is also a much easier way to do the hair.

I just used old ink pads left over from the church library - when I do it for real I'll need to get new ones and more hair colours.