timthorn

In the UK, whoever gives birth to the child is the mother.

It's notable just how many of the shows called out in this thread have links to the Cambridge Footlights. Certainly not all, but perhaps a third have cast who came through that club.

The Lost Scientists of WWII is a good read telling the stories of a number of scientists who applied to the British for asylum but who didn't make it: https://worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0436

Have you misread that paragraph? It's saying that heat pumps are popularly known not to release such gases.

I never knew 'Eezer, but do pass on my thanks to Rich for some brilliant tunes from my younger years!

When EE launched 5G in the UK, they took out a full page ad with a massive headline saying simply "A real crowd pleaser"

One of the best adverts for a long time - if you knew about the technical advantages of 5G, it had a real double meaning.

If you knew 90s British dance music, it had a further humourous double meaning promoting the telco (an oblique reference to The Shamen's Ebenezer Goode)

Some more detail: https://www.iata.org/en/services/compliance/contactless-trav...

Yup, one of these: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32523/Acorn-Teletext...

I think officially, we called it ticker tape, as in stock ticker - it was originally used to record stock prices transmit by telegraph.

It's still singular. Maths is just a contraction of mathematics, but without an apostrophe.

Richard Turner (one of the authors) gave a talk on how AI weather prediction works to the Cambridge Philosophical Society around 18 months ago. A recording is available here: https://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/quiet-ai-revolution-weather-f...

Next lecture will be delivered later this afternoon :)

The Cambridge University History of Maths society is a fantastic resource - almost all the lectures are live streamed: https://hom.soc.srcf.net/

And I think that B&W made sense as back then, there would have been a number of monochrome portable computers still in service.

Which was hosted by the Centre for Computing History!

Internet Thruway from Nortel allowed multiple ISPs to use the same local termination hardware; If I remember the details correctly, different national numbers could be terminated on the same box, with the subsequent IP traffic routed to the correct ISP.

I was working for one of the telco equipment firms around that time. We made a box that would terminate TDM trunks and had it in the lab.

I was installing Windows 2000 on a PC in the lab (manual disk swapping required) when, hidden behind another rack, several shelves full of physical modems all started calling the box at once, speakers on.

Yes, the Intelligent Network was the big thing in the 1990s. It allowed for routing as you describe as well as calling cards and many other features: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Network

It doesn't even need a wire - wet string is enough: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...

Going off on a tangent, but what's the point of washing an orange?

Interesting quite how many of them are third sector organisations rather than for-profit businesses.

It marked the end of playtime at our school. We were 30 miles west of Heathrow and as it went overhead, still climbing from takeoff, it would have interrupted lessons.

It was usually pretty punctual, but every now and then we got an extended break.

Obligatory reminder about Micro Men, the BBC4 docudrama about Sinclair vs Acorn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men

If you want to go a step further, here's one built from discrete transistors: https://www.megaprocessor.com/

Isn't that what everyone says about their hometown? :)

JLR is based in the metro area of Britain's second city. It's not exactly the middle of nowhere. Rolls Royce is in Derby, on the edge of the Peak District with much to offer. Much cheaper housing with more space available. And unlike in London, driving a car isn't hounded by terminal congestion.

British weather is great. Enough rain to keep the land green and pleasant, temperatures that don't get too hot nor too cold - the very definition of temperate.

Reminds me of the racing games for the ZX Spectrum. They exploited the rubber keyboard and recommended the use of a large roll of Sellotape pressed on to the computer as a steering wheel.

This is effectively how Pluto was discovered (not cross-eyed, but with a tool to help): https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/finding-pluto-b...

The order of the addresses was linked to the Coloured Books and needed translation to interwork with SMTP, and eventually the users needed to change their addresses. The point being, that anyone involved in UK scientific computing will have been aware of the UK protocols - many will have been involved in their creation and maintenance.

The humour comes from a (non-risqué) double entendre.