Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Flight Lieutenant, did you really submit your flight plan with the callsign "Biggles'); DROP TABLE Airports;"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/12/military-aircraft-reportedly-blamed-for-uk-air-traffic-control-outage

Just play it cool, nobody's noticed so far, blending right in, you've got this...

Starting to hit aurora season...we're on the declining side of the Sun's activity cycle right now, but should still be some fairly good displays now that it's actually getting dark. (Timelapse vid from 2024, the thing darting around is a military helicopter doing tracer-fire training.)

@overholt@glammr.us I was working in an academic bookshop when a French Lit student returned a "faulty book" where everything was bound as normal but every other page was still attached along the opposite end to the spine, e.g. page 1 to page 2, page 4 to page 5, and so on. Took it to the boss who explained it was in the style of the original book, cheaper to bind and print, the reader would slice the pages as they read, plus it creates an automatic bookmark on the first read. Kind of cool in a way.

@quixoticgeek@social.v.st @afewbugs@social.coop @MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social An Edinburgh pub in the 90s, "The Library" had walls lined with fake bookshelves. Including the toilet doors, identical apart from the fact that one was all female authors and the other all male, with no other signs. Unless you knew they were there they were near impossible to find in a hurry. The regulars were quite good at spotting a specifically panicked expression and pointing folk the right way.

@matildalove@wetdry.world @rgarner@mastodon.social We've clearly read the same bash.org thread... It's always a marvel to me, For a pendulum hanging quite free, Each tick and each tock of a grandfather clock Is 2Pi(sqrt(L/g)). I still mention this to students at that level (even though it's an approximation). A mosquito was heard to exclaim, "A chemist has poisoned my brain!" The cause of its sorrow Was paradichloro- Diphenyltrichloroethane [EDIT: Corrected bracketing on 2Pi(sqrt(L/g)), thanks Anton]

This is another favourite paper: all but one of the 30 authors is 9 or 10 years old, the other is their primary school teacher. But it's a legitimate paper, refereed and accepted by a journal, about what bees remember. The crayon diagrams are awesome. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21177694/ (Or just search "Blackawton bees" if the link is being glitchy)

Northern Highland #Scotland folk: if you live near a beach it could be worth looking for fulgerite tomorrow, patches of sand that have been hit by lightning. If you (very gently, they're fragile!) dig down you may find a branch-like structure where the lightning fused the sand into a kind of glass. Rare, special thing to find.

@MicroSFF@mastodon.art I'm a fan of NightTrips. I initially feel lethargic, then fall unconcious for about 8 hours, and am mostly paralysed during it. I have vivid hallucinations on and off during this period, which can vary from utterly joyful to absolutely horrific, and I lose all ability to distinguish them from reality, no matter how weird they are. Luckily for me I tend to enjoy the ones I remember, but short-term amnesia is a common side effect that wipes many. I usually recover with a mild stimulant.

@ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu @quixoticgeek@social.v.st @raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie @catsalad@infosec.exchange @jdblair@hachyderm.io @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange I worked in a bistro/nightclub where the card machine was set up to allow customers to add a tip. Late at night a fairly tipsy customer brought me a receipt, demanding to know why we'd charged her nearly £10k for a round of drinks. She'd tipped me her PIN, which started with a 9. Amazed the transaction even went through.

@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io I ran websites for a company that ran pubs and nightclubs in the 2010s. We sold monthly advertising slots on each website to drinks brands. They paid a hell of a lot more on a CPM basis than cookie based ads, and probably got a lot more direct sales. Fake KPI style metrics are a huge fraud.

@petergleick@fediscience.org If the point is to reduce the hordes at the doors of the executive bunkers when it all goes to shit in the next few decades, then yeah, that makes sense.

Nice opportunity to introduce them to the concept of reading a scientific paper- "you're not expected to understand all of it, just let it wash over you and see what you pick up". It helps that this is from the physics-communication side of things. (When I've done this before it's been Wigner's "Unreasonable Effectiveness", but hey, if they have an interest...) https://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.2761

@Nickiquote@mstdn.social There's an apocryphal(?) story of a diner who got a bit mixed up and asked for "Three Mile Island Dressing". They were brought a bottle of Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of Tabasco.

@davep@infosec.exchange Incredibly laboured, overly niche, 11/10, well played.

Reminded of this, because of one of J's projects: Mark Everett, of the rock band Eels, looks into the work of his dad, Hugh Everett III, the proposer of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quite bittersweet in places, goes into his father's early death. https://vimeo.com/58603054

@xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Yeah, right, so rabbits just feed on some kind of "captured sunlight" and hop around making more rabbits on that basis?

@AndorianSoup@mastodon.social And whether the rolled up gunpowder in cloth was named for the ground meat in skin, or vice versa? [edit] Ahh, from Latin "salsicus", cured with salt, via French, so they had sausages but named a military device after that. An earlier dictionary included an English language variant: Sawsidge, A Pudding made of Capons guts, Porke, and Spice, &c. [Cockeram, English Dictionarie, 1623]

Does make me wonder if there were facsimile copies available in the 1980s, or whether Curtis/Elton actually got their hands on an original at some point and went looking for funny words that were missing.

@alda@topspicy.social Also, it's a computer that can't reliably do basic mathematics.

@streetartutopia@mastodon.online That's very much not the Scottish flag ;) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@jrm@spacey.space @rgarner@mastodon.social But only included line five.

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net @ascentale@sfba.social @streetmeme@cycle.town @bikenite@fedigroups.social Clue is in the name: it's easiest on a slope (say, a velodrome track), but any slope will do. Steeper the easier. Bring the bike to a near standstill, pointing *slightly* uphill. If you do nothing it'll roll back a little, but very little pressure on a pedal will make it roll forward. The slope amplifies the balancing effect, you can stay upright using only a few cm of forward/back travel to compensate. Fun skill when you get the hang of it.

@Wen@mastodon.scot @clickhere@mastodon.ie Yup, top tip. Call the police, only smash the window yourself if they haven't turned up and the dog's life seems to be in danger. (With kids, if there's any suggestion they're in trouble, I'd have less patience. Still call the police though.)

@xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Next you'll tell me it's all just driven by gravity.

@xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Oh, that will be crystal clear as soon as we've sorted out the concept of time.

@twobiscuits@graz.social @ifixcoinops@retro.social Now imagine 1990s Dreamweaver trying to cope with widescreen to mobile and everything in between. This is software that would upload a different version of a single gif for every time it was used on a page. I've worked for enough people who had a "pixel perfect" idea of their website, usually done in photoshop, who expected *exactly* that on every device, down to line breaks. Couldn't grasp page flow.

@mahadevank@mastodon.social @vicgrinberg@mastodon.social Fun fact: the phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" (don't discard the useful along with a mostly useless whole) derives from the era of Kepler and Brahe. They were still casting horoscopes for rich people because it paid for the observatories that created modern astronomy.

@jesshurch@mastodon.scot @spytfyre@mastodon.scot @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Tartan Army is particularly good in that respect. But not as good as 6 Nations rugby fans. After a particularly nice night running an Edinburgh pub hosting Wales fans I asked a Welsh colleague how to say "goodnight and thank you" in Welsh. He Lied To Me. My repeated "nostar cariad" was met with grins and hugs from many, many large men. And many lovely ladies. Turns out it roughly translates as "goodnight my sweetheart".

@jesshurch@mastodon.scot @spytfyre@mastodon.scot @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Oh, definitely Tim taking the piss, but in a good way. 6 Nations crowds (particularly the Welsh and Irish, but also the rest) are the best pub customers in Edinburgh. They spend, they're fun, they *actively reduce trouble* because they have a reputation they're proud of. And they put up with young bar managers calling them "sweetie" ;)

@sennoma@chaos.social @Wen@mastodon.scot Funny way to spell, and censor, "Dog"?

@Wen@mastodon.scot @clickhere@mastodon.ie I'll admit I thought twice about boosting, for those who would take it too seriously, hence the quote. But I got it :)

@Wen@mastodon.scot @clickhere@mastodon.ie Good use-case for quote-boosts!

@xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party 👍😂

@Susibryant@mastodon.social @gedeonm@mastodon.social @mausmalone@mastodon.social @matt@oslo.town Entirely depends on your local authority here, and how they process the recycling.

@gedeonm@mastodon.social @mausmalone@mastodon.social @matt@oslo.town For a good few years here the plastic in the bottle was recycleable, but the cap wasn't, so we had to remove them. Particularly annoying as you can't use the vacuum pressure to keep the bottle squished flat and save space.

@davidnjoku@mastodon.world Toilet.

@Dalillama@tsukihi.me Kind of important when you are still going up against French troops on a regular basis though. See also "bayonet".

@Dalillama@tsukihi.me Not like we don't have a history of loan words though, he said being hoisted by his own petard while sat on a verandah in his pyjamas.

Don't get me wrong, machine learning is an incredibly useful tool in many fields, but I don't think it can mitigate the LLM based "no, seriously, intelligent" economic crash that's coming.

@nixCraft@mastodon.social Not falling for that, narc.

@lunarloony@dosgame.club @xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Go on then ;)

Today I learned.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYdXa_yp0fc

@lunarloony@dosgame.club @xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Nah, not moving upward, just constantly expanding. Spherically, you flerfs. (Genuinely is a hypothesis, and isn't all that far from Dark Energy ideas, just more "concentrated" and easily disprovable.)

@lunarloony@dosgame.club @xerge@mastodon.nl @geekysteven@beige.party Well, yes, that's precisely how it works. The Moon is obviously expanding too, but accelerating away from us to maintain angular size in the sky. That's why it was easy for the Apollo astronauts to get there in the 60s, it was much closer.

@davep@infosec.exchange I think that beats "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

@davidnjoku@mastodon.world Do I have to go to the ceremony?

@MarcAbrahams@mstdn.science You can just buy blackboard paint if it comes to that...and the venue has a wall. But I'll grant you, shiny brass fittings add a certain style.