@tkinias British airports in general seem to be a combination of run-down grim and desperately commercial. London City is the best of the London ones because you aren't there long enough for the hard sell. (Also I used to live a pleasant cycle ride away from it.)
An addendum to my #BookHistory post about the 15C breviary using <ç> for <z>: It also shows up in 16C Italian inscriptions which affect a medieval style, like this one from Santa Maria Novella. But, notably, it never seems to be used in inscriptions which use roman letterforms.
The thing that’s got me thinking is how this movement ties, on the one hand, things like Latin and incense, and on the other, hard-line doctrinal rigidity and broadly right-wing politics.
I’m actually curious, though, if there is a place for Christians who want a liturgically rich service (yes to Latin and incense) but more progressive politics (yes to Liberation Theology, say?).
@tkinias Interesting thought. Maybe I would still be a Catholic if there were such a place. (Although that’s simplistic: the bells and smells weren’t that important to me, and my growing agnosticism was the real issue.)
Keeping your “ooh, I need to get this book” list in the form of open browser tabs is great and all—right up to the point where you inadvertently close the wrong browser tab.
Every so often I’ll think about the U.S. defense budget (around $880bn this year), and wonder where we’d be with power technology if even one percent of that money every year had been invested in fusion research. That would fund an ITER-scale project every two to three years.
I can't say I'm optimistic that it would have led to any sort of fusion power, but it could have encouraged more people to go into physics knowing there was a well funded jobs program for it.
Also, it's possible we might have a spinoff technology to show for it all.
For example, the VASIMR thruster that has been going nowhere for two decades was a spinoff from MCF research.
Maybe we could also have a Z-pinch spinoff thruster and a pulsed laser thruster going nowhere for decades.
I think that fusion research physicists actually have a pretty realistic idea of what the money would likely result in, but they know this won't get them the funding.
So, if this money isn't wasted of fusion research, I expect it would be wasted on some other field which is 2nd best at making duplicitous promises. Maybe solar freakin roadways.
The challenge is to figure out how to design and maintain a system that can disincentivize the B.S.
@RogerBW
how do you handle running your own mail, BTW?
Back in the day I just used to run my own sendmail on a server at my house, but I had to give that up somewhere in the 2000s because all the corporate and institutional e-mail systems would spamcan my messages. It seemed like there was no way to prove that my mail was legit if it was coming from a small indy server.
@tkinias I've been doing it since 1998 and even gmail admits that I'm me these days. Colo server so it's not in anybody's "residential IP range" blocks.
Musing about academic life: How do you protect your time when you teach evening courses?
Maybe it’s a ‘getting old’ thing, but man, I get really wiped out when I teach evening classes—because it’s so hard to be like “sorry I’m not available before noon” so it too often winds up being 10 or 12 hour days...
My spouse has accepted a position at the Harry Ransom Center at UT, so I will be moving to Austin and will be teaching for the UT History Dept next year.
I never in a million years imagined I’d be living in Texas, but this was too big a professional opportunity for my spouse. So as of August, I’ll apparently be a Longhorn 😮
It’s hard to get good numbers on the mass of a loaded merchant ship, because that’s not a figure that’s published. But if we take MV Dalí’s deadweight tonnage as a very rough ballpark, we’re talking about something on the order of 120 million kg. It hit the bridge at 8 kts, or around 4 m/s. That’s roughly the kinetic energy of a 2-tonne automobile at 1000 m/s or 3600 kph (2200 mph)—or a 40-tonne semi truck at around 800 kph (500 mph).
@nyrath
yeah, for a lot of the twentieth century, 10,000 tonnes DWT was a good-sized freighter—these monsters are just out of all proportion to the scale of older infrastucture @codrusofathens
@nyrath
I find it nearly impossible to get my head around that kind of momentum or energy, which is why I was playing with the math. A semi—something where I have a sense of its scale—at 800 kph is easier to grok than this monster at 8kts. @codrusofathens