noneeeed

Yes, it's been a big issue here.

I've not been actively tracking the price of eggs, but I know it's causing a lot of problems for egg producers.

I'd forgotten all about that film, it was delightful.

Ah, well now I feel old :D

Likewise. I will happily work in the vast majority of legal industries in the UK, they all have varying degrees of social good about them. I might not get a warm fuzzy feeling about all of them, but a job's a job.

But I won't touch gambling, especially in the UK. It a nasty, predatory industry that preys on people. They know they are doing it, but they hide behind BS excuses and empty promises, and time after time investigations clearly show they intentionally goad on problem gamblers.

To be clear, this isn't a moral objection to people gambling. If you enjoy it, and are in control, then have fun. It's the companies, they are scum.

Thanks, I had no idea. It was the standard when I was growing up in the UK.

It looks like it is no longer standard issue here.

Oh hey fellow Bathonain!

I've worked at a lot of places in my career, you've not narrowed it down :D

Thanks for the reminder. At some point I should try and get BathCamp going again.

Likewise. I grew up in the UK and there was no pushback at all from what I remember.

Although I do remember school being very strict about anyone whacking someone elses BCG arm.

What's the issue with the BCG? My understanding was that it had been sucessful, is that a bit of a myth?

Hah, very true. I never drive there for a reason.

I live in Bath, so quite a bit smaller than Bristol, but I really apprecaite the fact that we can be in the city centre in half an hour, or in the countryside in 15 minutes.

If I didn't live in Bath I'd probably live in Bristol, it's a great city. And I absolutely agree that it's kind of the perfect size for a metropolitan area.

I think a lot of London is saved by having so many parks, and so many large parks and commons. I know Paris has a lot less green space than London and when I visited I definitely felt that.

I was just writing about these when I saw your comment.

The museum at the Roman Baths has some of these on display. If you visit Bath and are interested in history* then the Baths are well worth a visit. The whole site is rather larger than it appears on the surface.

* Tbh, if you are are not interested in history (or architecture) you are probably not visiting Bath.

This absolutely isn't looking down on people. I didn't say that people couldn't do these things. I am absolutely ignorant of how the vast majority of the world actually works. I would never look down on someone because they don't know something. I get very annoyed with my fellow techies and the way they seem to assume that non-technical people are stupid for not understanding things that they themselves see as simple and obvious.

Of course people can learn anything. It's that we tend to not realise that we don't know this stuff, and so we underestimate the difficulty/complexity of them. This often leads to people actually looking down dismissively on other people's jobs, as they assume they must be simple or easy, because they have never done them. You get endless political commentry on how people doing certain jobs don't deserve to be paid well because what they do appears "simple". Train drivers are a classic example. It's a job that is a lot harder and more involved than it appears at first.

For a while I worked in the rail industry. That was full of things that were way more complex and involved than I had ever realised. Things that seemed simple on the surface had decades of refinement and subtlety to them born of experience.

Your example is a great one. The principals of the flushing toilet with a siphon flush, ballcock and an S-bend outflow are not complex, but a lot of people have no idea what pressing a flush down actually does to get the water into the bowl, how it refills or what the S-bend is actually for (it's more than just the smell, sewer gas is explosive). It's the reason that a lot of people don't tackle more DIY jobs, they suddenly realise they don't understand it. But it's also why YouTube is so great, because these things are all learnable.

In the event of a societal collapse, I sometimes think that preserving all the instructional YouTube videos would be our best hope for rebuilding :D

I love this comic.

There's an idea in psychology called the illusion of explanitory depth. It's the idea that everyone has much more confidence in their understanding of how things work, even the most mundane and apparantly simple things, than is warranted. In turn we tend to hugely underestimate the difficulty, complexity and skill in jobs we have never done.

The world is absolutely full of utterly prosaic objects that are far more sophisticated that we imagine, either in their function and design or in their manufacture.

Most people overestimate how well they would cope in some post-apocalyptic world. But I think even many people who regard themselves as prepared, underestimate how much skill and sheer effort is involved in making really simple things like rope. To do more than just scrape by you would need to reconstruct a society of specialists, it won't be the rugged individualists.

There is a decent BBC documentary "The Secret History of Writing" which is all about the origins of writing. If you are interested in how it developed in all its different forms it's worth a watch.

I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.

Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.

I'm ok with video calls, but likewise, I've been wondering about a change of career if every dev job is going to be sat at home staring at the same walls every day.

Phone calls are the ones I find hardest. There's no body language to work with, but also it's instantaneous. I never insist on people having their cameras on at work, especially for group calls, I know many people don't like it. But I'm always a bit sad when cameras are off for a one-to-one call, I just find conversation much harder like that.

True. Meet always shows you your camera view before you start the call, it would be nice to have two buttons when joining, one with your camera on and one off.

Either way, it would be nice if they put a bit more effort into these things. Video calling could be much nicer for a lot of people with a little bit of effort.

Interesting that I have almost always done item 1 from the beginning of using video calls (which was before covid hit).

I generally shrink the window so that individual video feeds are no more than a couple of inches high on my monitor, which is about 3 feet away from my face. Any bigger feels uncomfortably close. There's nothing more offputting that a call that fullscreens the other single participant, especially on a large display.

It amazes me that after all this time the various video conferencing systems still have default behaviours that make their products less pleasant to use. You would have thought they would have at least made an effort to get people to customise the behaviour to their liking. Instead they persist with defaults that people hate but don't realise they can change. I don't think I've ever met someone who likes to see themself through an entire call, but this is the default on all the ones I've ever used and I have to turn it off.

We use Google Meet and this is one of the big things I miss from Zoom, there appears to be no way to turn the self view off. On every call I have to turn it off manually.

I find that a lot of people who say they turn their camera off say they do it because they don't like watching themselves on screen, and don't realise this is optional. Personally I think all the video call systems should turn it off by default, I've never understood what purpose seeing yourself all the time is supposed to have. It would be like having a meeting room full of mirrors.

I love In Our Time so much. I often wonder who, if anyone, could take over from Melvin when he's gone.

They have another article about a more conventional tunnel idea that addresses that issue. They were well aware of the issue. The only way to make this work at that time would have been something like Brunel's atmospheric railway. That was plagued by issues when in the open, goodness knows what it would have been like to run underground for such a long distance.

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/in-depth/this-week-in-...

We really don't appreciate how little time we get with our parents once we grow up and move away. It comes in snatches and moments, and then they are no more.

I wish I'd spent more quality time with mine while I could. I feel like I didn't start really talking to my dad until the last few years of his life. I didn't realise how much I had to ask them both until they were gone.

Yeah, I don't think it was mentioned when I was diagnosed, but the pharmacist asked about it when I next went to buy some more. That was a very sad day.

I miss being able to take Night Nurse and then sleep like a baby.

Yep! OTC medicines here are really limited. Although you can always get something stronger from the pharmacist.

I remember being ill in Switzerland and getting something for a nasty cold. I have no idea what it was other than magic in pill form.

I've noticed that in the UK all phenylephrine based OTC medications also contain paracetamol (acetaminophen) and often caffine. They are just an expensive way to buy two very cheap compounds with an added bit of placebo effect from the flashy packaging.

I can't take pseudoephedrine due to high blood pressure and I've found that the most effective thing for me, especially at night, is paracetamol, a blast from a nasal spray, and one of those nasal strips that help keep your nostrels open a bit more. It's not quite up there with the real Sudafed, but it's generally enough to get me a good night's sleep.

For anyone thinking of visitng Petra, try and allow more than a couple of hours. When we went it was for two days, going in and out each day. A lot of people just go down the entry canyon, take a look at the Treasury (the bit in Indiana Jones) and head back. But the site itself is much larger. If you are up for a decent walk there are parts that I thought were much more impressive and interesting up the hills. Some of the scenary around there is stunning.

Also, if you can do down in the evening, that's great too.

Jordan as a whole was a really interesting place to visit.

There were a lot of repeats when I was a kid (80-90s). Shows like Thunderbirds and the like were mainstays of my TV watching.

They were really good for their time, and hadn't really aged too badly by the 80s and 90s, so it made good financial sense to repeat them. Combine that with the money to be made from toys and it was a much better deal than forking out for new programmes.

What do/did you use your Hololens for?

I tried out the first gen version at a meetup and it was really nifty (the latency was fantastic), but I just couldn't work out what anyone would use it for in real life, it seemed too limited to be useful.

The interesting thing for me is how this mission underscore the difference between SpaceX and other space companies. SpaceX have become an entire commercial space agency, able to supply everything from the rockets and capsules, to the ground operations and even the space suites and to do that in a complete package.

If you have enough money you can ring them up and say "I want to go into space" and they can make that happen. That is a pretty big deal.

Hah, I had something similar when travelling in Norway. The keyboard was almost identical but I think two keys were the other way round.

It took me far too long to work out why I kept miss-typing things.