vmilner

Gooey blob!

The ZX spectrum tapes were great near the end, though you realised that top price games were reaching the magazines so quickly that it clearly _was_ near the end.

Yes - certainly the Uk experience in the Thatcher era was to reduce income tax by increasing sales taxes. (The overall tax burden for the average family increased slightly over Margaret Thatcher’s administration). Subsequent labour governments didn’t/couldn’t reverse the process.

I’ve never understood why left leaning governments don’t get rid of it. Or why the EU is so pro it.

BBC Radio did a great dramatisation of Espedair Street (80s Scottish Rock band story)

In these days of 100GB games I’m still in awe of how much fun I had from a game stored in 128KB (SimCity on the ZX Spectrum in 1990). And it was perfectly playable in 48KB.

It’s kilometres specifically that I hear used rarely in the Uk. Other SI units are relatively common I agree.

Metres and mm I hear a lot but kilometres very little - mainly because of miles on road signs. I guess the last reference I remember is to 5K runs.

I can’t remember when I last heard a Brit of any age use kilometres in any context.

I live on a road where all the houses on one side were built first and numbered 1 2 3 4... The houses on the other side were built later and have names and no numbers.

“The map that changed the world”

Also brilliant - story of of how the first geology map was created by finding differently evolved fossils.

Andrea Riseborough plays her brilliantly in the wonderful Death of Stalin movie.

I loved these as a 70s/80s kid - favourites being Time Traveller, Voice from Space and Invisible Boy. I’m surprised they all made it to the UK but all the children’s libraries seemed to have them.

I thought that was from the Fast Show for a moment...

“With my reputation?”

Red Dwarf was there first...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

If Dahl were alive I think we can assume he would either veto this if legally able to, or loudly tell the public to read the original editions. I’m surprised his estate haven’t objected to be honest.

(EDIT: Apparently Netflix own the Roald Dahl copyrights now...)

"tarball (tar archive)

While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby."

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguag...

I'm genuinely fascinated by how this came to be written. Were there brainstorming sessions where people threw out random word associations to show willing, combined with a fear from the rest of the group of accusations of racism for calling it out as arrant nonsense?

It gives us evidence (for the above discussion) that the term “brown bag lunch” has actually been documented as harmful by someone - and wasn’t just made up as a stick to beat diversity initiatives with.

I would argue it also gives an indication of how “mission creep” works.

(A well-used term like “tarball” now being deemed potentially offensive, presumably because it sounds like “tarbaby”, even though it’s obviously just referring to a bundle of files archived with the “tar” command.)

Well, it (brown bag lunch) made the Stanford harmful language list. I agree there is enough moronic content on that list to give the impression that the writers were playing false-flag games. But I’m prepared to believe they were sincere.

I’m not getting a 5.

I’d be quite happy for my students to use the terms “tarball”, “git master branch”, and “American”. Am I getting a 5?

> (and every single British prime minister since Thatcher went to boarding school)

I don’t think Major,May or Truss did - state grammar schools and private schools yes, but I don’t believe they were boarding schools - but I may have missed something.

“We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

- Jean-Claude Juncker 1999

Horseradish may be a counterexample.

For years I read the word “Albeit” in my head as the sound “al-bite” and did not realise that other people were reading it as “all be it”. (I thought that they were reading something _written_ as “all be it”.) Clearly “albeit” is a contracted form of “all be it”, but my brain hadn’t clicked to this.

I made one of these in 1985 on my parents dining table. I had no idea Martin Gardners books were laying the ground for a maths science career. Those books (picked up at random from the public library) were the Numberphile (etc) videos of the 80s - particularly for kids whose family had no science background.

I’m wondering how many encyclopaedias make the cut. Bound to be something in any large one that gets it banned.

Something else I’ve found extremely useful in getting into maths topics is the Princeton Companion to Mathematics - it doesn’t have exercises but gives excellent overview essays of a wide range of maths topics - expensive to buy (mine was a present) but should be available in academic libraries, say.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Tim...

I’m reading and like Thomas Garrity’s “All the mathematics you missed (but need for graduate school)” which is this but for people who did a bachelors degree but missed certain areas (or forgot them).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Math-You-Missed-Graduate/dp/100...

I’m now puzzled as to how I’ve managed to buy Simon and Schuster audiobooks in mp3 form without DRM from audiobookstore.com.