Richard H

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• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "I doubt that the US's regulatory agencies do random safety checks on ships coming into the US. " The UK's Maritime & Coastguard Agency certainly do. See a recent TV series....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "they had “blade runner” right there, waiting eagerly for a chance. What a lack of imagination . :-(" The name's already taken: see MTB Blade Runner Two....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "Power supplies in UK cities are much more reliable, but we too, have gone or are going over to VOIP, with the possible consequent loss of anything remotely like emergency cover. " I'm slightly surprised that so many people seem...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  .. and then there's chlorine trifluoride: "... It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water - with which it reacts explosively."...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "I offer la Académie Française." You think les immortels are linguists? Wikipedia: "The Académie has included numerous politicians, lawyers, scientists, historians, philosophers, and senior Roman Catholic clergymen. Five French heads of state have been members [...] - and one foreign...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I'm not sure that's any more comprehensible. Benoît was formerly written Benoist (hence the circumflex) so now you have to explain what happened to the 's'. Also, French still has feminine Bénédicte, so why didn't she change in the same...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Mary M isn't the only religious figure to have become an adjective. Pity poor St Audrey, who was transmuted to tawdry. There's another weird Cambridge etymology just down the road in Bene't Street. Somehow Saint Benedict lost his 'dic'....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "I could be totally wrong about this." No, I think you're right. I could have been clearer; what I meant was that they are chronologically but not geographically sequential....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  'You can end up with addresses akin to “3rd building past number 372 on el thingy avenue, behind the shops of bin-Dibbler, upstairs number 19”.' In Japan, roads mostly don't have names (why would you name an empty space?) so...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "The important part is the "double-entry-keeping" method, invented in Venice 700 years ago." True. But how do you guarantee that both entries are consistently made? In a database transaction you do it by wrapping them in START TRANSACTION; and COMMIT;(or...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  "good luck if you use Excel at all: if you're not doing accountancy, you bloody well shouldn't, says I" IMHO if you're doing accountancy on my money, you shouldn't be using Excel either. You should be using commit/rollback operations on...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  Electric showers are common in the UK. See for example: https://www.diy.com/departments/bathroom/showers/electric-showers/DIY822109.cat None of the ones I have encountered in the UK has been in the least shocking, thanks to the IET Wiring Regulations BS 7671. Because it's in a bathroom,...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  "Your ancestors are just as guilty for the evils of slavery as my ancestors" Can't speak for Greg, but my ancestors at that period were wage slaves labouring in mines and mills, and didn't get to vote on that or...
• Commented on The coming storm
  The SE Asian script is 100% definitely Thai. I can [*] read it. [*] Up to a point, but with a working vocabulary of maybe 100 words, I generally don't know what it means :-(. Still useful for knowing whicxh...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Hindi (or maybe something else Indic), Thai and Chinese. I wonder if they are selling something astrological, ready for the forthcoming Chinese New Year?...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Sounds rather like the Antarctic to me......
• Commented on Worldcon in the news
  Thanks. No RSS or Atom feed, unfortunately. I do not need yet more emails clogging my inbox....
• Commented on Worldcon in the news
  If you want some really scathing lawyer comments, go over to Popehat Has Popehat moved again? The last thing I see on the substack site is an administrative announcement dated 12 January saying "moving to a new platform later this...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  But there are "virtual" geographic numbers too (don't know what the official term is), and "who-called-me" reverse lookup websites warn that "this number is a VOIP service so the caller may be anywhere...". At least in my area the giveaway...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  But there are "virtual" geographic numbers too (don't know what the official term is), and "who-called-me" reverse lookup websites warn that "this number is a VOIP service so the caller may be anywhere...". At least in my area the giveaway...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  My memory is that they cancelled Top Cat/Boss Cat! But you got a second chance to watch Doctor Who episode 1!...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  For the record, the company name is BAE Systems plc. British Aerospace plc (aka BAe) ceased to exist in 1999, though some Bristol taxi drivers still refer to the BAE Systems Filton site as "BAC", which denoted the British Aircraft...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  Knots were one of John Conway's interests, so he probably wrote something (relatively) accessible on the subject. There's this, for example: An enumeration of knots and links, and some of their algebraic properties. I remember a lecture aimed at non-mathematicians...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  Round these parts, the phone/SMS/website transaction doesn't require a meter at all, so that's the cheapest option. You phone or text following instructions displayed in the car park, to give them the car park ID, your car registration and payment...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  It already happens. Yes, in most of the world, vertical separation is in intervals of 10 "flight levels" where one FL corresponds to 100 feet, but in China, Mongolia, Russia and CIS they use "metric" flight levels based on multiples...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  As interesting as I found the guy's biography in Wikipedia, a link to the speech itself (or a translation into English for the linguistically challenged) would have been a bit more useful. The Russian is definitely needed, not a translation,...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  "Drag a few hundred k of library/framework bollocks into every web page in order to be able to do X with 3 lines of javascript instead of 5" still kind of grateful for jquery tho me too. Maybe because it's...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  3D printing is mostly about laying down a single material or maybe a few very similar materials in patterns. With emphasis on "down". The deposited material flows slightly before it solidifies, and that has to be accounted for in the...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  For anyone fancying a nostalgia trip, there's a not-too-inaccurate history of the Amstrad CPC64 in The Register....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Mad, or just mistranslated? We can't tell from that MSN article, which appears to be a content-free LLM production with added department of redundancy department word salad. Or it's Hitler's Wunderwaffe reborn....