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Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)

Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.

Moved out of TCL and into Python in 2001. Perl was big at the time. But Python had REPL and numeric/numarray which swung it in my case.

(Worked out well I suppose? Almost 1/4 century and still using Python)

Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this:

Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings to make structured programs out of Unix processes. To compare them to a text file is like writing that a program needs no variables because it can read all the values it needs from an input data file when it needs them.

Environment variables are precisely to be used in situation where sub-processes need to be passed information in a way that is not necessarily affecting subsequent calls to that subprocess from another section of a program. Sometime the subprocesses are sequences of nested shells, and sometimes other more complex programs, but the same idea applies.

No need to go as far as Africa. Basic landline telephones spread into poorer/more rural parts of Europe only in 1980s and 1990s. Until then it was either taking the bus to see people in person, or sending a letter....

E.g. quick search revealed this pamphlet from 1988 Spain, showing that ~30% of households did not at time yet have a telephone: https://www.telefonica.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/202...

Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.

Exactly this. But you don't really want to bundle straight away -- think about the exact problem you have and then solve exactly that problem. After you've sorted a few problems like this think if a bundled platform is useful.

“studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” -> Ended up being a very important (and largerly solvable!) problem in ground-based astronomy

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than at start.

Generally not a big fan of Amazon-world, but if you don't mind reading older books kindle is good value I think. My 30pence copy of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" was very good value, and has not yet mysteriously disappeared from my Kindles!

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA.

Which/why did they remove the book?

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really difficult for the modern authors though).

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

Its great for when people need to be in the loop, looking at the data, maybe loading in Excel etc. (I use it myself...). But not enough humans around for 21 GB/s

Yes, but if you have decades of data, what turns on having to wait for a minute or 10 minutes to convert it?

I think these would add only small amount of information (and in a DB would be modelled as joins). Only adds lots of data if done very inefficiently.

Humans generate decisions / text information at rates of ~bytes per second at most. There is barely enough humans around to generate 21GB/s of information even if all they did was make financial decisions!

So 21 GB/s would be solely algos talking to algos... Given all the investment in the algos, surely they don't need to be exchanging CSV around?

There is also https://tiddlywiki.com/ that you can save anywhere

Maybe that would be enough. But the belt-and-braces approach of superglue with silica gel bags in a closed jar, in a fridge, seems to work well and has meant the superglue is still usable when I end up needing it....

I reuse ones I find in consumer goods by putting them into a jar, together with open superglue bottle(s), and putting the jar into fridge. Not a scientific study, but it does seem to keep the glue for longer then just fridge.

> "A lack of vigilance and discipline"

I would agree, and perhaps add that strictest discipline is need in answering the question: could we just get on with our job using existing software?

In some places "coding" has a become and end to itself

This is a good and subtle point of law -- The City of London is a corporation "by prescription".

But while it was created by neither statue nor royal charter, I doubt the parliament could not end it if it so decided....

But do general people know who is a scientist and who isn't? How do they find out?

It isn't by membership of a learned society, it isn't if they are working at a university. There is no simple way for a general person to know if somebody is a scientist.

The whole episode is a nice and timely reminder of the difficulty of the society as a whole in dealing with scientists and understanding which ones are good, which ones can be trusted, etc. Academic societies such as the RS help, but as this shows they are by no means perfect, and can be gamed and manipulated when the stakes are high enough. It is a real challenge though -- how do you trust a scientist without having to learn all the science they are telling you about?

There is a good dimensional analysis package `ezunits` in Maxima. Very useful for working through equations and then sometimes generating the c/fortran code directly from Maxima is fine.

"Filing" is distinct from "Filling". In this context "filing" means lodging the papers with the court, and that typically has an immediate automatic legal effect (the Automatic Stay).

Can confirm (but not recommend) that a VW Sharan will ford a stream (or at least quite deeply flooded road) with only the loss of the plastic engine heat shield from underneath.

I think daily bin collection was normal in London until the mid 1990s or so. Also post was delivered twice a day and picked up from post boxes at least three times a day!

Big rail supporter here, but the HS2 project execution lost all sense of cost. For context the, the total receipts from all passenger rail in UK are around £10b (https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rai...). For a single new line to require a £100bn investment, i.e., 10x of total gross receipts of the entire industry, is just disproportionate.

On a quick scan does not seem to mention mercury delay lines which were a liquid memory technology commonly used in early days of electronic computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory#Mercury_dela... .

Photo of what the system in Cambridge UK with Maurice Wilkes next to it:

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/...