gvurrdon

That depends on the distance and the manner of loading. Smoothbore muskets are inaccurate, aren't they? Hence the need for 18th century armies to fire big volleys in order to get any hits. A part of this is that the manner of loading, particularly under the stress of combat, causes variation in the powder charge. The amount of fouling increases as more shots are taken. The loose-fitting ball bounces up the barrel and will leave on slightly-varying trajectories. Hitting a man-sized target at 50 yards is difficul. But, if you take such a musket to a modern meeting (e.g. https://www.mlagb.com/) and load it carefully with a patched ball and well-measured charge, under relaxed conditions, with the bore swabbed for a consistent amount of fouling, then they become sufficiently accurate for tight (a few inches) groups at 50 yards. Pistols are much the same; loaded carefully, as I assume would happen before a duel, and they are very accurate. Of course, if the seconds were sloppy and used an undersized unpatched ball, and the distance was more than 10 paces, I'd expect inaccuracy. Some rascals had their pistols rifled until within an inch or two of the muzzle so it wouldn't be noticed on a casual inspection.

The pistols are not necessarily any less accurate than a modern one, in my experience. But, of course, marksmanship with handguns at further than a few paces is often difficult.

I'd guess the big danger for duelists would have been damage to internal organs or deep wounds becoming infected. Bullets could do this, as could the smallsword, a purely thrusting weapon which would have been the sword used in the 18th century. McBane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McBane) wrote of the difference between cutting and thrusting swords "the smallsword kills, yet you might take fifty cuts and not be disabled".

If McBane was telling the truth he certainly managed to get away with a large number of duels, though.

This is indeed a total pain. I’d like to find some other means of handling music in Mac and iPhone to get around it.

I just received as a gift a hand-made harness for attaching a hot water bottle to one's chest or back. It is rather effective.

https://pothies.co.uk/hotwater-bottle-carrier-from-pothies/

Cinemas as well - I remember in the mid-late 70s the smoking section of the local cinema was to the left and in front of where my family usually sat. As the film progressed we could see the smoke drifting up into the lights of the projector.

Cleaning is indeed quite easy and could indeed be done with a bit of hot water and soap. It can take a while, though. I've heard that about the sale of these guns in the US. Presumably there's not much demand given the prevalence of better modern designs. Over here, an original antique revolver of that period could also be posted directly to a purchaser who could hold it without a licence, as long as they weren't a known criminal. If the owner wanted to fire it they would need a licence. I am reminded that there are a small number of modern revolvers using smokeless powder that have been converted to a loading mechanism resembling that of the mid-19th century. These are also legal here.

http://www.westlakeengineering.com/products/

We do still have some handguns, such as single-shot flintlocks, muzzle-loading revolvers of 1850s design, and some modern handguns which have been extended with long barrels and counterweights to make them >= 60cm in length (IIRC). I think that these aren't very common at all compared with shortguns and rifles though. From what I've heard, when modern handguns were banned some shooters switched to modern reproductions of the mid-19th century models only to find that they didn't much like the cleaning (black powder makes a lot of mess), fiddling and slow loading that goes along with these guns.

https://www.henrykrank.com/guns/muzzle-loading-guns/

There's a scene in the 1979 film Scum (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079871/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0) where one of the warders in a young offenders' institution allows a bullied inmate to be framed by his peers and punishes him.

When I saw that (not long after it was released) I thought how well that captured the spirit of many school interactions, where bullies would blame their victim and the teachers would fall for it.

I have seen ChatGPT mentioned on Twitter from time to time, but no-one who has done so has ever posted a link (that I have seen).

This stuff is great. The host of "Jazz Club" is actually a musician, and wrote this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/11/john-thomson-l...

I'm an amateur jazz musician myself (in rural England), and the people I know locally who've seen these sketches also like them. But, when I've mentioned them to Americans they do not seem to be at all amused, and are sometimes rather offended; I'm not sure why.

Assuming this refers to https://chat.openai.com/, it's rather difficult to try it out. After creating an account it demanded a phone number. Of course, I will not supply my own, and temporary ones I tried were either recognised as such or rejected has having already been used.

I've heard them referred to as the "tin snail" in the UK, but I'm not sure how common that is. I had one of the last ones, in the early 1990s; it was a bit of a pain to maintain.

I would agree - the round edges are a PITA. The glass back makes it very slippery as well. I'm using an 8 Plus still as it has TouchID (I find FaceID far too creepy) and a large screen, which helps with my failing eyesight. It would be excellent to have something like this but with flat edges.

I work with two of them at the moment. One is planning to apply for a PhD studentship soon, but the other does not intend to do so.

This is also important for jazz. Should I wish, for example, to find albums where a particular bassist is playing then this would be rather difficult unless they happen to be the leader for that particular recording. Also, it would be particularly helpful to have subgenres, e.g. jazz -> post bop, jazz -> free, etc.

Oxford, UK | £33-44k full time | Possible remote/flexible (UK only) | Web development (mostly Vue.js).

This post is for the ongoing development of FAIRsharing (https://fairsharing.org). It's an academic salary, but holidays, pension etc. are good.

Please feel free to make any informal enquiries via contact@fairsharing.org.

https://my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.d...

Strange, indeed. A "sorry, no thanks, good luck elsewhere" email would have been fine. Feedback would have been very useful but I suspect they'd be reluctant to offer any.

> Then a bunch of weird generic scenarios - what have you done that fits this scenario and how did you handle it.

That part was particularly frustrating; often I couldn't think of anything relevant to the specific wording. At least you got a rejection letter, though. Multiple interviews over >1 day and I had to log in to the Amazon Jobs account to see my application's status had changed to "no longer under consideration".

There's a lot of "ye olde business logic" in what I'm building, for people who often change their mind about what they want. A Rails API (with Postgres and Elasticsearch) makes this fairly easy to handle, especially with the limited staff we have. A Vue.js client provides the fancy UI the users want.

I very much agree; particularly as I may wish to hear particular bassists and they are usually not listed as the band leader. It would also be useful to able to add multiple tags, both "jazz" and "post bop", for example.

That first was a good book - there's still a copy on my shelf in the office, I think, though I've not had chance to go there in person to check recently.

Perl was extremely popular 20+ years ago in biology; I made the jump from the lab bench to bioinformatics with Perl and Bioperl (https://bioperl.org/). But, after a while I discovered Ruby, and later Python, and moved on, also switching to other fields. The presence of Perl and a "proper" terminal on Mac OS X back then was a big draw in encouraging bioinformaticians to use it (well, that is my recollection, anyway).

40-60 minutes each way for me, occasionally worse. One colleague did have 2+ hours each way (train via London) and so he was permitted to come into the office once per week, even pre-covid.

I was also slightly perplexed by the recent trouble "master". I'd not have thought of it in the context of slavery at all - the term that I'd understand would be a "slave owner".

For me, it's a somewhat archaic term for "teacher", especially for something like fencing (https://sirwilliamhope.org/Library/Hope/ScotsFencingMaster/) or dancing (https://playforddances.com/). At my school, if you had forgotten to bring your prep (homework) to a lesson then a trip to the masters' common room at break time to hand it in would be necessary (it was a very traditional school, and this was a few decades ago).

There's been controversy about the word in other communities with which I've been involved over the past couple of decades, though again not related to slavery. In this case it's considered rude and or arrogant to refer to yourself as a "master" if teaching certain skills, as the word has connotations of considerable expertise and is not so widely known any more as meaning that one teaches. So, a "fencing master" would be interpreted not as a teacher but as one of the world's greatest sword fighters.

The usual complaints I get (as an admin of an instance) are: 1. "Hard to search"/"Can't find anything". 2. Off-topic responses because people post in whatever the most recent thread they used happens to be (results in (1)). I like it, though, due to having some similarities to a forum.

The street on which I live is probably about 900 years old. The houses have been rebuild many times, but there is still wood in some houses here that's been dated to the 1530s. My own house only dates to c. 1870-80, though it's made of recycled stone and wood, presumably from the house known from records to have been on the same site in 1620. Apparently, there was considerable demolition and new builds/rebuilding in the town in the 1870s. All the houses in the street have chimneys, and there's a ready supply of wood locally, either gathered from the countryside or purchased from one of the many suppliers. Unsurprisingly, fires/stoves are frequently used for heating, and there's usually a smell of smoke outside in winter. My house originally had three flues; one for the kitchen range (now blocked off and the range replaced with a sink), one in the master bedroom (blocked off with the fireplace merely decorative) and one in the main living room (fitted with a modern stove).

It's great; I've used it for over a decade. These days it's only on my servers, though, due to lack of time. I'd very much like something along the lines of Sabayon with OpenRC for my laptop (currently using Fedora/KDE).

So it would seem - I'd not noticed that. Thanks.

Indeed, it's very much the same thing. I have brought up the similarity to email, but it's been of limited help. I'm hoping that moving posts between topics will become possible at some point, which will allow me to clean things up.

I've found it very effective after deploying a local version for our team. One issue: Some users get confused over streams and topics, often posting anything in whatever was the last topic they accessed rather than going to the correct topic or starting a new one. These same users also say they can't find anything via search.