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wibble
@wibble@ohai.social
mastodon 4.7.2Formerly: schoolteacher, academic editor, helpdesk operator, database designer, project manager, crate-catcher and tree-surgeon's assistant.
Interests: #ClassicalMusic, #StringQuartets, #Physics, #Biology, #Fiction, #Trees and #Ideas.
All photos (if not credited separately): @wibble@ohai.social, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Interests: #trees, #birds, #ideas and sometimes #TheArchers
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11 Posts
Joined December 17, 2025
Mostly in:
London UK
Also Procrastinating At:
Replying to
@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange I visited North Carolina once and found The Land of the Free weirdly keen on constantly watching and ignoring people all at once, a feeling I'd only felt before in East Berlin which, at the time, was also obsessed with flags.
Replying to
@edgeofeurope @infobeautiful I expect that'd be "fourscore and twelve", because "fourscore and a dozen" would sound ridiculous.
Some, however, might prefer "half a gross and twenty" which, in the right circumstances, would be a perfectly acceptable alternative.
So 80+12 or (144/2)+20, depending on your idea of fun.
I was running low on coffee, so #TodaysWalk was to fetch some more from across the river.
Pelican Rock had no pelicans,, but Waterloo Place had a new statue which, like everything else in London, was getting more bystanders than attention.
Replying to
@dwillanski I turned mine off. It takes a little longer to write stuff now because I have to think about it first, but at least all the typos are human typos.
It's made no obvious difference, admittedly, except that I'm marginally less annoyed. But as nobody knows I don't use autocorrect I find I'm still able to blame it and so blithely make the arguable best of both depressing worlds.
#TodaysWalk was to nowhere at all, but somehow involved two hills, two woods and two parks.
Replying to
@robchapman @benroyce @Wen I'm reminded that Private Eye's Pedantry Corner itself has a relatively recent title. Before that, it was called Pedant's Corner, Pedants' Corner or Pedants Corner and, as a result, became a neatly self-sustaining feature, if a somewhat dull one.
@keefeglise@mastodonapp.uk The point of bothering was so they could say it had been done.
When a "no" is provided by a different organisation or department, there'll always be a way to bury it under someone else's desk, without necessarily telling them. It's a tactic we've seen in a string of inquiries, transforming e.g. failed tests into certificates of compliance, risky punts into safe investments, and dodgy accounts into evidence of dodginess in others. Astonishing, perhaps, but not so surprising.
@Lizette603_23@mastodon.social I guessed Don Quixote - a lot of people speak Spanish, and I guess that most of them had to read it at school.
Fewer people speak Greek, I think, and even fewer Latin, so curricular impositions will count for less there. As for the others, I'd guess Anna Karenina is less read than War and Peace and, for reasons, not many government departments would think Orwell's cautionary tale as suitable for children as the futile adventures of a deluded, nostalgic ideologist.
Replying to
@baoigheallain@mastodon.ie @CiaraNi@mastodon.green My dad was one source and, when I was little, told many forgettable tales about his days in the huts and the 'hands' he communicated with.
I think we've still got his morse key somewhere. According to its markings, it remains the property of the War Department, but operators got very attached to them and seem to have smuggled them about, which might have helped in the hand detection, depending on the state of the springs.