Damian

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• Commented on Shrinking the world
  the smell of people issue with mosquitoes and why repellents don't work all that well The most important thing to know about DEET (and its ilk) is that it's really, really unpleasant to lick off a young lady's skin, particularly...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Well sure, I think if you start from the position that the UK simply doesn't have any IP law until it reenacts some, then the situation surely only gets better from there... That other usage of pasties reminds me of...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I've occasionally been a commenter in blogs overlapping various similar groups, and openly talked about how the USA would treat my natural law right to carry around a half-brick in a sock. Whether I'd get in trouble for swinging it...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I prefer Freedom Pasties. Is that something that happened since Cornish Pasties got PGI status? Actually, is that still a think in the UK since Brexit?...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Concert t-shirts have a high status that can easily offset a bit of wear. So long as the tour dates are still vaguely legible it's no matter whether there is more hole than fabric....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I have one reasonably nice dinner suit which is really just uniform for concerts with the choir I sing in, and I don't have another use for. I did have a reasonably nice interviews-weddings-and-funerals suit, but I forgot to re-bag...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Depending on the source, 3-5, 4-6, or 2-10 horses in a string are ranges I've read. I had the impression (probably from reading the Jack Weatherford biography of Genghis Khan a few years ago, that at least when riding as...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Flensburg was 20 km away Yes. I have discovered ancestors who lived in Groß Tromnau (in Pommerania, now Trumeje in north-central Poland), would have significant events like weddings and baptisms in the church in Marienwerder (now Kwidzyn), which is about...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Whelp, you say that, but I don't think it's true. I don't think even you believe it really follows....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  committing an anachronism The problem with this approach is that you automatically treat the many vocal anti-racists and anti-imperialists in Kipling's day as freaks and kooks, the way they were treated in their day. You can say the past is...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  I'm not convinced that figures describing partner violence by demographic groups are necessarily sound and that apparently significant correlations (as exist pretty clearly for income quintiles, e.g.) are real. I find it somewhat dubious that partner violence is less in...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Quite. Really the didactic response here is that the world can be divided between people who have committed brutal murders, and people who haven't done that yet. Sure capital punishment is the only guaranteed prevention for recidivism, but there's an...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I don't know exactly when it landed for me, probably the 16th. I finished the Tallis book I was reading, looked in my Kindle library and there it was. I'm 35% in as of now. It's good....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Well I just drove from Brisbane to Melbourne and back again, to collect a singleton puppy who'll rip off the hand that feeds her in the blink of an eye (or turn it into a pincushion anyway). We did see...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  I might grant you Adelaide, but I'd suggest even that is governed more by a cultivated vs broad class-related dynamic....
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  My favourite open source project that falls squarely into the sweet spot of what you describe here is a piece of software called Lilypond, which is a compiler for a markup language, a little like TeX, but for sheet music...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  When I heard you speaking (YouTube of conference speech I think) I didn't previously know much about Leeds so I sort of assumed that's how people there speak. On the other hand, if Leeds is more or less the same...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  Not just Tassie. I've never heard of a sticky tape brand called Durex, I assume someone was borrowing Charlie's sense of humour. While sticky tape is the general term that most people use, you hear people using brand names generically...
• Commented on Minor updates
  Great news! I hope it goes as smoothly as possible....
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  To make it worse, some shared terms mean different things Yes, don't even mention "thongs". There's a novel by (Australian writer) Nick Earls where one character filmed a handicam Bond parody as a teenager using a thong in lieu of...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I once spent a few years one week working out a baroque but workable process for getting reports out of Primavera in a way that could be imported into a billing system. This was after months of the Primavera master...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Looks like I was mistaken anyway, it's less like Google Glass and more like a "dash cam for your head"....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Random topic drift: I saw a Facebook ad today from Ray-Ban about a product developed jointly with Meta... essentially something that looks a lot like Google Glass....
• Commented on Minor updates
  And the truly horrific part is that before each change the parasite is telling the host what's coming, in loving, glowing detail. People become paladins and angels, exothermic saints and incandescent clergy just the change is is unexpectedly monstrous and...
• Commented on Place your bets
  My parents had a working farm for decades, and about 98% of the 'truck' work was done with a tiny two-seater Ford Ranger. My grandfather had a dairy farm for over 40 years, the last decade and a bit he...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Yeah, snap. :)...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I think maybe the point was that for these sort of machine learning applications we've been talking about, based on statistical associations in the "training" data, we'd essentially be going full circle on that question. The only way to avoid...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  An algorithm can be implemented as well by bureaucrats as by computers. Totally. The organisation is the machine. They used to say it was people, processes and tools, but really, from the outside you can't tell which is which. Certainly...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  One's used for knocking people out and the other is also a solvent. When you see two intent gentlemen who are obviously together in a crowd of young women, you ask yourself "which one is holding the chloroform", or perhaps...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Huzzah!...