softgrow

We are going to have to deprecate an idiom or two. "I'm in two minds about something" now gives the wrong meaning.

The economics of bookstores in Japan favours the shop owner much more than other places. Books are sold on consignment, you order books and pay the wholesaler once sold. Book doesn't sell, not your problem, return it to wholesaler. Publishers are also allowed to fix pricing on a new book. So you could make money but not a lot as the store owner pays freight.

2006 presentation from member of Japanese Book Publishers Association (English language) https://www.jbpa.or.jp/en/pdf/bookmarket.pdf or more recent from 2022 https://www.jbpa.or.jp/en/pdf/presentaionatTIBE2022.pdf, Both linked from https://www.jbpa.or.jp/en/index.html

At school studying typing there was a class of 66 all manual typewriters except for the two electrics. If you were good and had some spare time, you were given printed instructions to type particular characters and returns. Sometimes shift into red ink. Do it properly and you got an image. So maybe pre ASCII art?

There is a similar trap in walking the Thames path through London. Some is privately owned and you are made to not feel welcome, odd rules, buttons to press etc. Guardian has a 2015 piece https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/24/private-londo...

Maybe we are solving the wrong problem? Should it be, where at the economies of scale in "building places for people to live in". I'd be interested to hear from others about relative costs for high rise, multi-family dwellings, double storey dwellings and so on relative to single-storey single-family dwellings.

I had a taste of OReilly books through ACM/IEEE. A few years pass and I'm working on some obscure legacy code and a book saved me. Needed it in a hurry so signed up for OReilly books for a year even though only needed it for four weeks. I have renewed it since and enjoy it, being able to dip into topics, just for fun, written by people telling a story. The long form of a book is quite different from SO and new books keep coming out. I'm hooked.

Reading the translation of the talk, public transport vehicles have a persistent MAC but for private cars the MAC address changes every 15 minutes.

To understand speeding you need to understand the concept of "speed choice". Everyone chooses how fast to drive, only those who choose above the speed limit are speeding. If your environment gets you to choose a speed below the speed limit you won't break the law. Your choice can be influenced by many factors such as:

* narrow looking roadway * speed limit signs * your car has self driving * what everybody else is doing * speed limiter on your car * curvy road * bad weather * male or female * risk appetite * driving experience * experience of that route * perceived risk of getting caught

If you fix "speed choice" the problem of speeding diminishes.

If you ring for the ambulance, (Australian context), you will be told what to do! The telephony scripts have first aid baked in. The paramedic will come (not necessarily with an ambulance) and start appropriate definitive treatment as good as what you will get in a hospital. A consequence of a stroke is a cardiac arrest. If you are driving you won't know and won't do CPR.

The 1996 movie Transpotting still gives me shivers up my spine by putting someone in a car and drop at ER rather than calling for help. Too many people die needlessly, even today, when well meaning people load shooting victims, stroke victims and heart attacks etc into their car and drive to ER without asking their local emergency services for advice.

PS. You can't 100% of the time get to ER faster than the ambulance. There are more ambulances than emergency rooms by number. If an ambulance is at the county hospital they'll be faster than you.

I'd really like a rejection physical letter back saying thankyou for application but no thanks signed by a human. I put some effort in to applying, they could at least exert some effort coming back, rather than simply ghosting. A reasonable barrier to bots collecting CV's.

I hope the students can choose to use their own wifi at home if they have it, much better service for them. Depending on how it's setup, the cellular contract may be not be that crippling. When enterprises buy thousands of services they pool data across the SIM's and get quite reasonable rates for what is used, be it a fleet of IOT devices with low usage or laptops with some high usage. If you are just buying one service, you are really at a disadvantage compared to enterprise deals.

As documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs google search for "times new roman font" and the results are returned in that font. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Times+New+Roman+Font for the lazy). Looks terrible on my screen.

I don't think my taxes/insurance costs/donations to charity are high enough. London (donation funded) has a helicopter service that attends 6 serious trauma cases a day. Denmark, Germany and others has a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service which delivers a senior doctor and paramedic. It probably doesn't scale well.

Basic issues like overhead powerlines make life difficult for helicopters. They are used in rural Australia as an alternative to road, but only due to time saving. In a city, well you get a road ambulance/paramedic/medical team.

The (Melbourne) Victorian Ambulance Cardiac Arrest Registry claims third best in the world in out of hospital cardiac arrest.

Sounds like Hatzolah Melbourne, https://hatzolah.org.au since 1994

Since 1998, in Melbourne for anything that might need a defibrillator a fire engine is sent at the same time as the ambulance (EMR Emergency Medical Response Program). https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2002/177/6/cardiac-arrests-tr... Medical Journal of Australia article. There is also GoodSAM https://www.ambulance.vic.gov.au/goodsam/ for individual helpers

Worse still, I loathe screenshots of text on a website. Please make text is text so it works with a screen reader, can cut and paste etc.

Less of it about now but used for multilingual websites for the secondary language, particularly if non-latin alphabet. Will no-one think of Unicode!

I watched the film and was surprised when it moved on from gambling and scams. Initially thought it was aimed at avoiding being scammed of your hard earned cash by shysters. I wonder if there is a film produced at the time about that?

At least it has a steering wheel. Wait until that disappears to be replaced by a joystick or worse still a USB port, bring your own mouse.

Fire and rescue appliances are a bit of a problematic thing to buy as they never go very far and are retired with low mileages.

In my Australian State, South Australia, this a huge contrast with police who buy new from the manufacturer, get a three or maybe five year service contract from the manufacturer and then sell them when the warranty expires and they've done around 100,000 km (60,000 miles). So no servicing worries and they get some tax benefits so it works for them.

Ambulances have less mileage and my guess is retire after 10 years. Ambulances are very standardised so can swap metro and country vehicles to get value from the asset. There was a "twin life" ambulance (http://www.old-ambulance.com/Twin-Life.htm) that had a long life rear bit on a light truck chassis so swap out the motor bit two or three times every 200,000kms, but these days vans are used. There was much sadness in the ambulance fleet buying community when Ford discontinued the F150 type chassis in Australia.

But your average (fire/rescue) appliance in the city or country has low mileage. In the city plenty of use but never have to drive far. In the country not much use but do drive further but end up the same a very old vehicle without much mileage on the clock. Trailers can be even older 50 or 60 years before retirement. Another issue with a fire appliance is they carry water which is heavy, three tonnes is a pretty common load. And have other readers have mentioned a monopoly on manufacture wouldn't help.

It's in Table 1, of the paper. The "safe" night-time level for the bottom 50% of the population is surprising low, 0-1.21 lux. I've been sleeping for years with 10-20 lux (inner city, blinds open so I can enjoy the city lights). Maybe I'll need to close the blinds?

I'm glad that Shanghai has moved to the next level in public transportation in meeting customer demand. Most cities don't have the funds to buy smallish buses and labour available as drivers. They don't have the money or willpower to get frequencies to turn up and go levels (ie frequent) and leave people with long walks to widely spaced routes.

https://kakaku.com (A shopping comparison and review site) has menus not as long as McMaster-Car (down the left side), then more menus in the body and tabs thrown in to boot when you reach a product. Each product page is jam packed with more information. A lot of information yes, good design, not so sure.

It is better, has underground, overground and is womble free. Also has planes and current weather effect (raining).

I built a very bright light source using a lamp stand from Ikea and the brightest, narrowest beam LED reflector I could find from my big box hardware store. The project works and gave about 10,000 lux but had a few drawbacks. After reading a book for a while a got a headache. The slightest imperfection (read dirt) in the arms of the armchair becomes super obvious. When I look at my right arm holding the book, it's so bright I'm sure I can see veins and arteries. I ended up getting a lamp less bright and that's great for sewing/electronics/fine work but there are limits for how bright you might want to go indoors. I kept the too bright globe for demonstration purposes.

Surprisingly or not, isn't a very new idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_light-emitting_diod...

Note that extending the lifetime is key to taking advantage of their lower base material cost. Lot of work needed there.

Correction QLD publishes, NSW has bits and pieces due to FOI requests.

Ditto NSW in Australia (but not all states).

Strictly speaking there is a strong suggestion backed by forensic geneology as to who it is, but the Police haven't confirmed it. But for most people it's Carl Webb and not a spy or something more exotic and the ID is enough.

And once it is released you'll know and the mystery will be gone. I (Australian) was very enthused when the "Somerton man" was resolved. But it took away mystery and wonder from me which actually gave me joy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerton_Man

Years ago at uni, one group chose as their control systems term project to take a known bad speaker (2 inch from transistor radio), measure its response, then build an inverse function to make it perfect using an analog computer. Don't know what the result was but they did have fun.

Hi fm2606, I left ambulances in 1991. Probably was 1986 when we got Lifepack 5 (the first one that came in under $12000 AUD and totally manual, the lifepack 3 was in limited use from I think 1983 but way too expensive to have more than two for my city (1M people), cost was a real barrier). On introduction the only thing we had for conductivity was a gel. After a year or two the gel pads came out. The "us kids" was really a comment about my amazement at after more recently being trained in AED and the darn thing does everything for you. It has a whole lot of technologies that simply weren't available then (recognise rhythms, text to speech, record rhythms to storage etc etc). So much cheaper, lighter, don't need spare batteries, and seeing the huge change that technology has brought. (P.S. We were ignorant in the 80's. No gloves, no hard hats, had to wear ties and a fancy cap. No reflective wear except for bright yellow raincoats that we only wore to stay dry.)