smackay

Thanks for the reference. There are quite a few writers railing against the current Professional Managerial Class (PMC). It's very interesting to see that their rise has quite a long history. Where things appear to have gone off the rails is that the PMC are now more interested in the management of perception than actually managing. The proposed solution is to get more competent managers but Burnham points out that the issue is likely more fundamental than that and a new social organisation may be required to deal with their shortcomings.

Be careful what you ask for. FIFA's Video assistant referee was supposed to banish controversial decisions in soccer matches forever. Instead, they simply replaced one form of controversial decisions with another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee

What use is a household robot if you cannot hand it any clothes?

Put them on drones and fly them off into the forest to count owls - when it's nice and quiet in the dead of night.

Here is a list of associate members, https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs... which also lays out some of the terms.

If you scroll down there's a list of countries which can participate and who are automatically eligible to apply for funding too. So the EU, at least bits of it, despite all the talk of gardens and jungles, is still a force for good in the world.

Proofreading is enormously expensive in time and, as a spouse, goodwill. More so if you have to proofread their colleagues papers as well, where the level of English can vary enormously.

Perhaps it's time to reimagine the scientific paper in a more terse format with more declarative statements and data rather than the mini-novel. That would make machine translation more tractable and may even lead to better tools to check assertions and search related work.

Oh yes. Walking up at night, scared, thinking there was something in the room. Childhood (well, teenage) memories I'll treasure to the end,

If you're using firefox, create a separate profile and add devdocs documentation to it. That keeps your docs isolated from general browsing and so you reduce the risk of the browser deleting it to free up space.

The only way by road into the Moine Peninsula would be along the A836 up through the centre of Sutherland. You'd probably need to upgrade the entire length of road to be able to accommodate heavy loads and take out any tight turns. Possibly more practical would be to build a port in Loch Eriboll and ship absolutely everything in. The expense, in either case, would be eye-watering. In short that BBC article is one long on imagination and short on everything else.

The Portuguese Space Agency (yes, there is one, Go Portugal) recently ran a competition for teens to fly with Air Zero G. Thirty kids, including my son (majority were girls), shipped out today for the Air Force base at Beja. They fly on Friday.

The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up.

That means the real opportunities with the switch to electrifying transportation, like moving freight traffic to rail will not be seized as that would entail even more spending. Instead we are stuck with the problem that every solution to climate change is along the same lines of "just like before but this time with electricity".

For a species that has given so much and has been pivotal in the development of humanity, it's time we repaid the debt and granted them freedom in perpetuity.

Female and male US Olympic athletes live 5 years longer than their general population counterparts: a study of 8124 former US Olympians

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/4/206

It would be very cool to have network of these listening to calls while birds are migrating at night. With a large enough network you'd get an amazing way to visualise large scale movements which are generally completely invisible. Wiring up the eastern seaboard around Massachusetts, southern Spain, the vast steppes around the Caspian Sea or pretty much anywhere else would be incredible.

This is the wrong way to look at it. If Syrian refugees had the media coverage Ukrainian ones do there'd be job boards for them and much more besides. People are reacting to the magnitude of the perceived crisis. Peoples' compassion pretty much knows no borders.

If there is any finger-pointing to be done then it's at the mainstream media not at how individuals or groups are trying to help human beings in need.

Except for viewers in Scotland.

I can't say anything on whether NATO attacked Libya but it's members certainly dabble in the various conflicts trying to extract advantage. I had a conversation with a "systems thinker" of British origin who straight out said that he was involved in a group that were distributing cell phones to members of the population of Libya so they could call in air strikes against government forces. Apart from the obvious problem of getting NATO to do the dirty work to remove your enemies no matter that faction they belonged to the most striking thing was the arrogance and ease with which this person justified their position. It was a reflection of the thinking from 100 years ago where the British assumed everything they did was with God's blessing and Johnny Foreigner needed to do what they were told or suffer the consequences.

After the ScotWind giveaway, it's widely expected that water will be next.

Scotland is a sovereign nation which is currently in a long term "marriage" with England through the Treaty of Union. It's not trying secede from the United Kingdom in as much as it's trying to get a divorce - not unlike Brexit. As a result while many people draw parallels with the situation in Catalonia it's not the same. The Spanish government has little to fear from the breakup of the United Kingdom and likely has much to gain. As member of the European Union Scotland has a lot of natural resources from fish to energy which would benefit other EU members.

The fundamental problem is that there is no separation of powers between the government and the judiciary as you might find in most (all?) modern democracies. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) acts as the governments lawyers and the prosecution service. Most of the accusers in the trial of Alex Salmond, for which he was acquitted on all charges, are close associates of the leadership of the Scottish National Party which are currently in power in the devolved parliament. The risks are clear and obvious.

Craig Murray, friend of Julian Assange, was just released from a Scottish prison for the crime of jigsaw identification of some of the accusers in the trial of former First Minister, Alex Salmond despite the fact that many journalists from mainstream media had published information that allowed their readers to identify some of the accusers explicitly.

So it's not just a problem of dictatorships in second or third world countries. But then again, maybe it is.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

The author's posts on Django are always worth reading. They're way more detailed than the run-of-the-mill rehash of the Django documentation that most blogs contain and there's always a nugget of "I never knew that" in them.

Black beans are another example. There are various brands available here. The expensive ones had more/all beans that were black in colour while the cheaper, particularly store brands, were all dark brown. Presumably there are different grades of beans so the price of the can was a predictor of the colour of the contents. Now when you open a can, regardless of brand, they are almost universally dark brown.

I have a Scottish Werewolf in Scotland story and a ghost story associated with a lighthouse...

When I lived up in Caithness myself and couple of others would go out ringing (banding) storm-petrels at night next to Noss Lighthouse, near Wick. We'd setup mist nets on the cliff-top and tapes played of birds calling at a colony. That would attract petrels passing at sea and they'd get caught in the nets. One night, in between checking the nets, we were sitting there when a loud and frightening snarl come out of the pitch black darkness, close-by. After nearly shitting our pants we grabbed torches and poles we used to erect the nets and searched the area. Nothing was found. It was a few months later we found out that one of the lighthouse keepers nearby kept a Great Dane, which he used to let out at night. We only found out this because the dog had attacked someone, in a pub of all places.

Another supernatural experience at the same place. I was walking down the road to the lighthouse alone, again out catching storm-petrels. It's was deathly quiet and suddenly I could hear footsteps behind me. I stopped, they stopped. I'd start walking again and the footsteps would follow. This raised the hairs on my neck but a search with a torch revealed nothing. It's the closest thing I've come to a ghostly experience and at the time a little unsettling. It was only later I realised I was probably hearing my own footsteps echoing off the dry-stone wall that ran along side the road.

Wouldn't you have to rescind the concept that corporations can act as individuals as well?

I'm not sure whether this is a legal, moral or philosophical position but in the spirit of no taxation without representation then it seems right that all political lobbying by corporations would have to be ended as well.

This is an idea that has been extensively explored since 1996, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_sensor_nodes

It's a pity that the theme is now surveillance as the utility of sensor networks is rather high. Perhaps larger devices that could roam the planet and especially the oceans would be to better to spend money on. There's so much to learn yet we waste the opportunity snooping on each other.

Spotless Starlings here in Lisbon are already mimicking the location beeps from rentable Scooters.

Easy enough to find, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership but very interesting. The essential detail being "The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees" which gives you some idea of the company's motivations.

The GDS, even today, has an intrinsic beauty to it. It's really a marvel of engineering, though not the prettiest.

A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines.

Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds

This is perhaps the existential crisis that engineering in all its forms has to deal with. Much of the Western ethos and certainly engineering culture in general is about making life better. Instead, our only task now is making it more profitable.