TimK65

Thank you for this! Images weren't loading for me, either.

"Vad himla pratar du om?"? I in my turn have never heard that expression before, so who's zoomin' who, baby?

"Friday 3 July 2026" (yes, I elected to spell out the month) also has the advantage of not requiring commas for legibility ("Friday, July 3, 2026" being common in the US).

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

Road and car design are an important part of the problem, but so is car culture, which is all in the head.

Um. I got 18 Unc / 82 Youth.

I'm about to turn 61. What is happening? (I guess that's a pretty unc question. Oh well.)

This doesn't fully accord with my intuition, but I absolutely believe that the best course of action is listed: USE A CALENDAR DATE!

Back in 1997 I was assigned to convert a legacy SAS 5 application to SAS 6.

Let's just say that the original programmer had adopted MANY of the techniques in the linked post. The first thing I did was to go through all the code and convert it to only have one statement per line. eye roll

That would imply that their annual budget was £1.8e14, which I seriously doubt.

Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.

Very nice! I think we're confusing route length and track length, though.

Motorists are incredibly fragile. I'm glad Paris has had a mayor who could stand up to their entitled whinging.

I use a search engine if I can more or less precisely describe what I want in a few words.

If I find that I really need to be more extensively descriptive, or to actually ask a question, I'll use an LLM, but that's pretty rare.

Here's an example of the latter that I did yesterday (this is Google Gemini):

"Hello! There is a poetic device where one line of a poem can be read both as the continuation of the previous line and as the first part of the following line. What is that called?"

"Hello! That poetic device is called an anastrophe or sometimes a hyperbaton, but these terms are more generally used for the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses in a sentence.

"While anastrophe or hyperbaton can create the effect you're describing, there isn't one single, widely recognized term specifically for a line that functions as both the end of one thought and the beginning of another in the way you've described.

"However, the effect you're describing is closely related to the idea of enjambment (also known as "run-on lines"). Enjambment is when a line of poetry ends without punctuation or a natural pause, and the thought continues onto the next line.

"..."

I proceeded to provide an example, saying "Points if you know what song this is ;-)", and Gemini confidently misidentified the song. (The correct song is "Black Cow" by Steely Dan; Gemini told me that the lyrics I'd quoted were from Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," which doesn't contain any lyrics that even resemble what I'd quoted.)

Yep, I learned the terms IPL and IML ("Initial Microprogram Load," more akin to a cold boot) when I worked on an IBM midrange system running DOS/VSE back in the 1980s.

It's a diagram, not a map.

The old "map" isn't geographically accurate, either.

This was Vignelli's original plan, which the MTA never followed through on.

What is this "metrocard" of which you speak?

(It's going away at the end of this year.)

From the linked article: "Additionally, a reference to your post is 'fanned out' to your followers so they can see it in their Timelines."

So not the content, just a sort of link to it.

The complete polish is the author's very point, alongside the fact that most software products never get that complete polish.

I believe that historically, the primary group of people who are "not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" are diplomatic personnel from other countries. Those people actually are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

I live in Stockholm. Dwells on the commuter rail system here -- formerly at Stockholm Central, now at the new (2017) Stockholm City underground commuter station -- are scheduled for 3 minutes and have been for decades.

The commuter rail service here is a bit of a basket case, but that has nothing to do with through-running practices, which make the system much better than it otherwise would be.

Many times I've stood in front of the displays in the Exit Concourse at Penn. As soon as they post the track for your train, you can just go downstairs to the platform.

More than once I've stood in the line at Washington Union and said loudly, "If I wanted to fly, I'd fly."

I'm 100% with you on this. It's idiotic.

There are three uses of the word "drop," all of which are correct.

The latter-day meaning of "drop" is an abomination.

Or the assumption that these people are traveling by car? That's by no means necessarily true; DC has pretty good public transportation, and there is even a Metro station in Deanwood.

I live similarly (in the Stockholm suburbs), but I live near a metro station, and there is a reasonably good, not too expensive chain grocery next to the metro station. I get lots of things there, but there are a few things I need that they don't have, and for those things, I travel (by public transportation) to larger stores farther away.

On the one hand, haroldp is correct in that the automobile-centered infrastructure enables the coercion of people to travel farther to shop for groceries. But that point doesn't really contradict the article; this coercion is also enabled by the failure to enforce laws that are on the books. I'd argue that there are far, far too few independent groceries in Stockholm, for example, for reasons that have nothing to do with the transportation infrastructure and everything to do with the lack of effective antitrust legislation, or lack of enforcement (I actually don't know which it is).

No, but only because it illegally coerces its suppliers into giving it sweetheart deals with lower wholesale prices, and nobody is enforcing the law to stop it from doing so. As the article explains, the reason for most of the price differential between large grocery store chains and small independent stores is that suppliers, forced to artificially reduce the prices they charge the large chains, have to recover that loss by charging higher prices to small stores.

Also, traveling to a store that's farther away isn't free. The trip has a marginal money cost and, more importantly, a time cost.

Way to spit in the faces of disabled people!

It's worth noting that San Francisco has a long tradition of public nudity, so the naked guy probably shouldn't necessarily be included here, unless there was another reason to do so.

I have a somewhat related theory about English in Europe: The smaller countries are better at English partly because they subtitle rather than dubbing. That means that when they see English-language movies or watch English-language television, they're hearing English rather than their native language. I think this helps people maintain some level of English proficiency years after they leave school.

(I'm American, living in Stockholm, by the way.)