shatnersbassoon

what do you recommend instead?

IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wield a chainsaw in an elevated position. Also, if you are interested in getting long planks out of the trunk, you would not want to cut it down progressively.

I think one of the blockers to this is a very high risk of bird strikes.

It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.

2 related expressions: 1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated. 2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.

But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*

If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".

`TELETUBBIES = TeletubbiesCheat` Intriguing... what does this do?

It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again

It's presented in Gigawatts here, but I expect the actual metric is probably something like "Gigawatts available for 99th centile of duration of demand peaks", as this would allow you to talk about capacity in the same units as grid supply and demand. The whole point of grid batteries is for near-instant availability, so total energy available is moot if you can't access it right away - therefore a metric of energy would be less useful. Anyway, that's my speculation.

There's quite a big difference between the DNA you leave in a forensic sense all around you (which would take a lot of effort and expense for someone to gather against your will) versus serving it up on a plate in a format that is trivially searchable for close matches against any relatives. The value is in the fact that millions of people's DNA is gathered in the same place in the same format, not the individual value of your DNA. It's a classic network effect.

Given the nature of the service, you should probably treat it as inherently pseudonymous. You're handing over irrevocable genetic data which will link you to relatives. Whatever their data protection assurances are, you have to imagine the worst case scenario - massive data leakage. And if this happens then you will in all likelihood be identifiable.

"When a failsafe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe."

J. Gall

> I'd like to see some stats to back this up, considering the IUCN has taken the bluefin off its "red list,"

No they haven't. Nothing gets taken off the Red List (e.g. the Brown Rat is on the Red List: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/19353/165118026). It's the Red List rating that matters, and Atlantic Bluefin is listed as Endangered. https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/21860/76599358

I like the Alan Partridge definition of brainstorming:

"An American technique where ideas are graded by how loudly the person who thought them up shouts"

(paraphrase)

If you read enough of those "day in the life" articles in newspapers about the daily routine of famous/successful people, you realise that they are probably complete fabrications. Even if it's not for competition purposes, convincing people that you do mad stuff like get up at 2am for a kale cleanse, followed by three hours of meditation is fun. And on top of that, it adds to the razzle-dazzle and gets people talking about you. That's why Michael Jackson pretended to sleep in an oxygen tent.

Not all our timber. In fact Scotland is ~73% self-sufficient in timber production. https://scotland.forestry.gov.uk/images/corporate/pdf/Hbook0...

I made this single page site to resolve this obvious question, with the ridiculously obscure answer. I had searched for half an hour, and eventually found the page by guessing the UK URL from the US URL.

Thomas Cromwell was the most prominent spymaster of Tudor times and letters to him feature heavily here. So not all of it is bulk surveillance, some of it seems to be old-fashioned human intelligence gathering.

My point is that the claims in these studies are held to high standards by detractors, but when it comes to the critiques, just saying "developing countries have high prevalence of worms" is nowhere near that standard.

^ 100%

Casually announcing that everyone in this city has worms on the basis of zero evidence and deciding you can therefore ignore this paper is not the win you think it is.

Oh yes, the Cambodia that didn't turn communist in the 70s and execute millions of people for wearing glasses? Totally disincentivized.

From the wired article: “It really boils my piss to be honest,” says Jack Hurley, a Leeds-based illustrator who says his main output is “daft seaside posters.”

If you know the step is there, you get used to avoiding tripping.

It's not the final step, it's the penultimate step. Also everything else in the castle is straight and true, which would imply they knew how to measure things accurately enough. It's also in more than one castle.

I think your mental model of a castle is not quite correct. It's not necessarily a simple stone box. A lot of roofs lead to higher points, or to walls.

Your mental model of what can happen in a castle is also not complete. It's not just sieges, there are any number of reasons someone could be chasing you. It could just be one assailant.

Finally, perhaps I didn't describe the step well enough. The step is not the top one, it is the second one down, and the face of it is around 2cm higher than all the other steps. It wouldn't make any difference to the drainage. Don't get angry that there are features of castles that are not adequately explained, and some people try to explain them.

-> Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either.

Right, so calling it a "myth", as in the headline, is incorrect. That would imply that you know it to be false. The author is taking the lack of evidence to mean that it can't be true.

And as for the burden of proof, as with any hypothesis, anyone is welcome to try to falsify it. I just don't believe that the evidence here has done that.

I don't think calling it a "myth" and "mythbusting" is agnostic. If the author was agnostic, they would call it a theory. The correct conclusion from the evidence is that we don't know. The incorrect conclusion is to say that it is a myth because there is no documentary evidence.

I think the documentation for medieval military architecture choices is extremely sparse. Most of the writers were monks, they weren't so interested in military matters.

The author is making an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" error.

I think this is the case. A siege is just one scenario out of many where someone could be attacking you in a castle. I have also been in several castles in UK where the penultimate step before the roof is deliberately 1 inch higher than all the others. The story is that if you were being chased up the stairs your attacker would trip over onto the roof and you could easily dispatch him. Would this author also claim the rationale of this feature as a myth, and that they just made the same measurement mistake in multiple castles?

Incidentally, if you're not aware of it, a 1 inch difference in stair height will almost certainly make you trip up. I did myself when I was climbing them at first.

Also the notion that once attackers were in a castle it's all over is not true. Late medieval castles were designed to be modular, layered and flexibly defensible. The enemy might get into one part, but you could retreat to another part and defend that. Might give you enough time to be relieved by an external force. Have a look at Caerphilly castle as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_Castle

Finally, it seems that no real explanation is given to the bias towards building clockwise staircases. Why would this be the case? Doesn't it just mean that wherever possible they would build the staircase clockwise because there was some inherent advantage?

You say "Objectives and Key Results" I say "Pre-emptive Hierarchical Blamestorming"

OKRs further entrench hierarchies in a way that is harmful to productivity and harmony. They allow for a whole middle layer of management that simply decomposes their KRs and passes them down. The people below them are ultimately the ones on the hook for delivering, and if the middle manager doesn't achieve their own KRs, they already have an agreement about which person that reports to them is to blame. In my organisation OKRs are being used as a sort of feudal system whereby the peasants work the land, but the credit is passed up the chain to the seigneur.