@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

RobertJackson58585858

@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai

Family History, AncestryDNA, rubbish DIY, rubbish DIY guitars, coffee, leftish politics.😎
Colourblindness😭
Sobriety🙄
Enjoyed A level maths 50 years ago, still do!

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RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Today let's spread the love!

@ someone in the comments who has made your Mastodon experience better, a little explanation as to why would be awesome too! You are welcome to do more than one.

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

@geneapleau for running the Mastodon sessions.

Through her efforts we have a growing presence on Mastodon, sharing successes, struggles and failures, techniques, wrinkles and cheats.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

So, we went to visit my husband's family that are Anti-Vax Horse Medicine people, because we felt bad for avoiding them for nearly 5 years, and guess what:

WE BOTH HAVE COVID!

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

Coddle yourselves beyond when you start to feel better ... took me ages to get back to half normal, let alone right.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Today's theme is Normal!

You can take this test to see how "Normal" you are, and also how radically left wing you are! LOL Please share the results if you feel like it, or do nothing at all, because it really doesn't matter!

https://www.idrlabs.com/4-axes/test.php

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

Woke lefty ... I concur.
Mostly "normal" ... k.
The gender axis ... I, er, really??!!

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Alright, after all this talk of ketchup/catsup, I need to know:

What are the Top 5 Condiments you have to have in your kitchen?

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

Just Worcester Sauce
Aka Worcestershire Sauce
Aka Lea & Perrins.

johncarlosbaez, to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Chemistry is like physics where the particles have personalities - and chemists love talking about the really nasty ones. It makes for fun reading, like Derek Lowe's column "Things I Won't Work With". For example, bromine compounds:

"Most any working chemist will immediately recognize bromine because we don't commonly encounter too many opaque red liquids with a fog of corrosive orange fumes above them in the container. Which is good."

And that's just plain bromine. Then we get compounds like bromine fluorine dioxide.

"You have now prepared the colorless solid bromine fluorine dioxide. What to do with it? Well, what you don't do is let it warm up too far past +10C, because it's almost certainly going to explode. Keep that phrase in mind, it's going to come in handy in this sort of work. Prof. Seppelt, as the first person with a reliable supply of the pure stuff, set forth to react it with a whole list of things and has produced a whole string of weird compounds with brow-furrowing crystal structures. I don't even know what to call these beasts."

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/higher-states-bromine

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@johncarlosbaez @ChateauErin

I've not considered this classification of human activities ... Those which impact us from inside our brains and those from outside.

A quick ponder is asking me if Russell's Paradox applies ...

...
...

philpem, to random
@philpem@digipres.club avatar

"Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming."

Savage, but justified.

Page 17-18,
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/file/872/download?token=_FC526YV

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@ret @philpem

Thank you for posting the link to the appendix. I clicked it about 3 hours ago & have been gripped by it.

My career before retirement was carrying out branch audits ... on a wholly manual handwritten system ... for an insurance company that had 2000 collectors knocking on doors week after week.

I can't comprehend the complexity of the computer systems at the Post Office but the "timing differences" and failures of control accounts are utterly stark.

Again ... Thank you.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Sometimes it feels like I'm this animal that has all these weird emotions that my brain and body are just not evolved enough to handle. I'm doing the best I can, I just know more stuff than I have the capacity to reckon. Understanding my place in the Universe and knowing that it is both significant and completely insignificant at the same time, is the strangest feeling. Seriously, who put me in charge of my own meaning?!

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr @maxleibman

Me too!

We share DNA 👍

mastodonmigration, to threads
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online avatar

Update of the Threads news from yesterday. You can now follow Threads account @mosseri from within Mastodon provided your server does not block @threads.net. Just now the first posts showed up. Threads has said that this is a one way READ-ONLY capability, however you seem to be able to reply to the post, so it is not clear where the reply goes.

This raises some data privacy and content rights question. See next comment...

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@mastodonmigration

I'm largely ignorant of the technical stuff ... but I noticed the cookie pop up when I clicked on the person on threads whose account we can look at ... we can limit their use of cookies to "Essential" but cannot "reject all" as for more and more websites. (Am in UK, but my instance Masto ai is based in the EU).

RobertJackson58585858, to random
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

One of my expressive paintings for awareness day. Not previously inflicted upon Mastodon.

I use reds, greens, oranges, browns and yellows interchangeably merely as shades of each other. I use them as the mood takes me.

A bucolic abstraction from a happy late summer pre pandemic.

8% of men and 2% of women will see pretty well what I see.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Since I've talked a lot about change today, I'll ask a question about it:

If you've changed something in your life or about yourself, how did you do it, and why?

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

When I was finally made redundant from my accounting job I took a part time History of Art course. Had never looked at the arts before. Just numbers.
It took a while for me to realise artists have considered all aspects of life from time immemorial.
That art in its different guises served different purposes ... contemporary conceptual art helped me through the deaths of my parents.
I didn't expect that. I wouldn't have believed it either.

RobertJackson58585858, to Horizon
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar


Have just started watching the committee hearing ... "There is a risk that some post masters who HAVE engaged in fraud will be acquitted/compensated" ... seems like a slow smearing of post masters ... needs to be nipped in the bud.

RobertJackson58585858, to UKpolitics
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

The reason the PPE story hurts is simple. We were all involved, one way or other, keeping our families and our communities safe from the virus.

The local Women's Institute made cloth face masks for volunteers to wear. The volunteers were doing food shopping for nurses and staff at our doctor's surgery.

Me/neighbours were asked for donations of knicker elastic as the makers had run out. I emptied out my mom's sewing basket.

We saved more lives than Baroness Mone £££

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

So, who should play the Beatles in the Biopics?

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@RickiTarr

No idea ... but actors who understand the subtleties of regional English accents and the fact they can vary from one side of town to the other.

ColinTheMathmo, (edited ) to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

[I'm not asking for advice ... please don't try to help me]

OK, so ...

Trying to assist to to things on the computer. These are things that they are absolutely capable of, and will (I believe) greatly enhance their quality of life.

Then Oh. My. God.

The misconceptions are f'n unbelievably. The way they think things work, the things they believe happen when they perform certain operations, it's just ... inconceivable.

I've started to unpick some of what's going on, and it's horrendous.

To start ...

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@CenturyAvocado @ddrake @ColinTheMathmo

Companies trying to encourage us to do less on paper and more online really don't help themselves by strongarming us.

My bank recently wanted to stop paper bank statements. If we needed them on paper we could have them. But they insisted we wait until the date they'd turned them off and then phone up to turn them back on.

Otoh we could go online early and turn them off immediately.

Strong arm stuff isn't good for business. Really it isn't.

RobertJackson58585858, to random
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

DavidKButler, to random
@DavidKButler@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Here is a tweet of mine from 2019 that is still relevant to me.

A fear I find hard to articulate:
When we do "fun maths" activities and then the kids go back to their usual classrooms and do the usual things, are we just emphasising that the "fun maths" isn't real maths and the real maths is the not-fun bit?

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@christianp @DavidKButler

Gentlemen, 50 years ago I did maths at Warwick. Looked forward keenly to topology after seeing some "fun" stuff.

In one of the topology lectures he said with his back to us "I can write on the board faster than you can take notes".

Because that's all it was. No handwavy "this is what we're trying to distinguish when we talk of ..... Spaces compared with ..... Spaces".

Just appalling, in hindsight.

But we knew no better.

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@DavidKButler @christianp

Also, I suppose, it depends in part what is considered "fun" ... I recall being on holiday before university with my parents & they had a bottle of Mateus Rosé Portuguese wine in its uniquely shaped bottle ... I sat there happily trying to calculate its volume with calculus.

Some would say it's an application.

nsummers12345, to random
@nsummers12345@mastodon.social avatar

AAARRGGHH Bisto !!

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@nsummers12345

My decorator has detected certain "incidents" conveniently forgotten over the years.

One of my late mother's tended to involve one of those pressure cookers with little weights on that, if lifted off before it cooled, tended to shoot brussel sprouts in the air.

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@nsummers12345

I bet the conversation around Bisto getting on the ceiling was worth listening to :))

RobertJackson58585858, to dystopia
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

https://janeactsandchats.com/2024/05/16/the-prisoner-now/

A blog by Jane Merrow about Patrick McGoohan and his UK 1960s TV series Dangerman and the better known one: The Prisoner, in which she took part.



RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

:(

RobertJackson58585858, to random
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

Wen, to animals
@Wen@mastodon.scot avatar

Acrobatic cats

Impressive acrobatics, but I am deeply suspicious as to how they were achieved - launching places just are not there. No cat appears to ‘perform' more than once 🤔

People might remember a photograph of a cheetah hunting baboon and catching it in the open. Guess what - it was staged and the animals released from cages in a carefully prepared arena. The bar steward who ‘took the photo’ got away with it.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/dec/30/acrobatic-cats-inspired-by-salvador-dali-in-pictures

RobertJackson58585858,
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

@Wen

I view all animal photographs posted on social media with considerable suspicion especially those which anthropomorphise (make seemingly human) emotions between animals.

Was first shocked by the wired frog examples.

One strike and block is my rule for dodgy animal pics and videos ... mainly because I don't like my emotions being manipulated!

RobertJackson58585858, to random
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

https://youtu.be/qnmTcE5-HpI?si=9rINFLP11b0MY4y9

On braids ... Including hair braids!

I wondered how they were handled :))

RobertJackson58585858, to random
@RobertJackson58585858@masto.ai avatar

Two items of clothing ... pullover and slacks ... have been sitting on a bedroom chair for months awaiting a button and a darn.

Proudly have done both.

Yet more proudly done without extracting blood nor sewing the two together nor sewing either to my shorts, shirt, vest or pants.

The latter, by sheer numbers of ways it could go wrong, is astonishing.

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