Note that conscription in the UK ended in 1960, because of how many conscripts died in the Korean War. So you would have to be at least 83 years old to have experienced conscription. I will happily listen to the opinion of any politician who is older than 83 on this point since they are speaking from experience, any politician younger than 83 can fuck off and go to hell
You might think they were preparing for a war with Russia, where a conscript army would definitely be very useful for defending the varpourised radioactive crater where the UK used to be. But as far as I can tell they haven't actually said anything about Russia, the rhetoric around it is entirely about attacking young people
On 20th June, I'll be in Glasgow for the workshop "Towards improving the accessibility of the mathematical sciences for visually impaired people", talking about my work on Chirun (https://chirun.org.uk/)
If any mathstonauts will be in Glasgow that day, it'll be nice to meet you!
@jer_gib@julesh I'm sticking with this one. If you listen to how people speak, including people of your generation and older and even in Oxford, you basically never hear “whom" in accusative position. Imagine somebody actually saying “I don't know whom you're talking about” out loud, it sounds incredibly jarring to me. I reckon the only version anybody at all actually uses consistently is following a preposition "to”, as though English had a dative case... and it's not 1024 any more
I've been marking like crazy from the wrong pile 😭 I mistakenly thought the emails about the urgent deadline for 5th year projects were talking about 4th year projects
The most common proposal I hear is to abolish winter time and use summer time all year, which would mean the sun comes up around 10am here in midwinter, absolutely incredible idea
Funny observation: "pre-optics" (that's what we call optics without quotienting out a coend, they're 1-cells of a bicategory) technically might not exist for size reasons if you're being overly pedantic, but they're trivial to implement in basically any programming language. Meanwhile optics exist under very weak set-theoretic assumptions but are impossible to implement in the vast majority of programming languages, you need explicit existential types
there once was a lamp that could turn anyone into a woman by merely standing in its light. people came from far and wide to see it, but to their dismay the lamp was rarely lit. for this lamp ran on a special fuel, and that fuel was heavily guarded. it had all been gathered up and stored in a fortress, and that fortress had only one way in or out, through a big iron gate. the only way to get the fuel was to get permission from the person in charge of the gate, the girl light gas keep gate boss.
Blind reviewing: author doesn't know who the reviewer is, reviewer knows who the author is (eg. most peer review)
Double blind reviewing: author doesn't know who the reviewer is, reviewer doesn't know who the author is (eg. some peer review)
Reverse blind reviewing: author knows who the reviewer is, reviewer doesn't know who the author is (eg. some assessment marking)
@SvenGeier Hopefully we can reach a point where papers are written, reviewed, edited and read exclusively by AI, freeing up human beings to actually get some research done
I love this picture comparing different telescopes. Space telescopes are sexy - but the really big telescopes are down here. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is so big you might miss it: 100 meters across. Unfortunately the European Southern Observatory wimped out and decided to build a merely Extremely Large Telescope instead.
Radio telescopes are even bigger. The 305-meter dish at Arecibo is famous. In 2020 scientists decided to shut it down after it was damaged by a hurricane and two earthquakes and two important cables snapped. But before they could even shut it down, more cables snapped and the support structure, antenna, and dome assembly fell into the dish, destroying the whole thing.
Luckily in 2016 the Chinese had built an even larger radio dish in Guizhou: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. It's the largest one shown here. But in Russia there's a radio telescope 576 meters across - not a dish, but a bunch of separate structures.
Every single bullet point here represents a software engineer who would be barred from professional practice in literally every single other field of engineering https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/