noneeeed

It's a big issue there but it's very localised to that specific area (which is itself in the bottom 25% of areas in the UK). They are like having a whole load of idling lorries sat near your house all at the same time, normally for several days at a time. And all of that is on top of the general level of pollution from being in the centre of London. I'm going from a documentary and a couple of article from a few years ago, which I should try and find.

Hopefully with all the work on both improving the fuel used, and providing grid hookups so they can turn their engines off, that will have made a big difference. Hopefully the effects of the congestion charges have made a big difference too. A lot of the kids featured in the documentary had a really crap life because of it all.

Cruise ships certainly used to moore up in the Greenwich stretch of the river at the and a few years ago there was quite a lot of coverage of the issue around it. Cruise ships require a lot of power while docked, and unless they connect to the grid they used to create a lot of air quality issues.

If there are a lot less docking then that's great, but there do still seem to be a number that dock there https://blackheathandbeyond.wordpress.com/2024/03/27/fairly-...

I know there was a push to develop a big new cruise port in the Greenwich stretch which was strongly opposed by locals for that reason.

There are still cruise ships that dock, and they have been a big issue for local kids. They use a lot of power while docked. I believe the solution is to hook them up to the grid, but that requires that they and the dock both have the facilities.

There is a dock in the Greenwich area, and another one further down the Thames estuary.

The other striking aspect for me is how, as has often been the case, those most affected are the poorest.

Levels of asthma in London are highest among kids in the vacinity of the docks where cruise and container ships and moor. They sit there running their engines for power, churning out SO2 and other pollutants. These areas are some of the poorest in London.

The same was the case in industrial cities during the industrial revolution. The poor factory workers lived close to the factories, and their kids grew up breathing the smoke. The wealthy owners moved to the outer suburbs (often upwind) where the air was clear.

There was a bit of an uproar a few years back about how many premiership football players were using asthma medication, a higher rate than the general population. The implication being that they were using them as performance enhacning drugs. But if you take into account that they disproportionately come from poor inner-city areas (not all, but many more), the proportion with asthma looks much more in line with the background rate.

Urban air pollution is insidious. Unlike the dreadful smogs of previous generations that lead to things like the Clean Air Act and the banning of open fires in urban areas, today's is invisible, and so doesn't create the same political problems. In fact if you try to do anything about inner city pollution you can pretty much guarentee an angry pushback.

Ah, sorry, I missed that.

In this case it's not communication, it's using the school buses as power supply

From the article: > V2X technology, which lets vehicles feed power back into the grid, is currently concentrated among a small number of US companies. Some are focused exclusively on commercial or residential applications, while others cover multiple segments.

Aha, I did wonder. The language was just so spot on.

Keep up the excellent work.

I love how closely this matches how GDS built flows work, not just the visuals. The careful step by step pacing, the direct wording, it's all absolutely spot on.

Perfect.

a) That is a fantastic way to put it. It does feel like the whole world seems focused on just moving money around

b) I really must make the time to watch The Wire.

I feel like a portion of it is the way that many/most companies have been captured by their finance departments. Everything is accounting. The CFO in many organisations has become the most powerful exec, and many CEOs seem to come up through the CFO role.

Outside of places like Meta, who are printing money at a ridiculous rate, finance acts as a break on any long-term or big bets. There can be no risk taking.

I feel like this is one of Google's problems now. Once upon a time they were willing to take big swings with their piles of cash, now it's all about revenue maximisation at the low level. I forget which change it was, but they started charging for something, or limiting quotas on something, and the email contained the phrase "in line with industry norms", and I just thought that was very tellings. Back in the early 2000s Google was constantly defying and upturning "industry norms", now they are just like everyone else, squeezing every last drop from the smallest stones. Getting rid of the previously grandfathered in free Google Workspaces was a good example. I find it hard to imagine that the cost of those even registers in their accounts compared with everything else.

I've always appreciated Ada's approach to arrays. You can create array types and specify both the type of the values and of the index. If zero based makes sense for your use, use that, if something else makes sense use that.

e.g.

  type Index is range 1 .. 5;
  type My_Int_Array is
     array (Index) of My_Int;

That reads like the script from a sitcom. Amazing.

I moved across country and left all my friends behind at the age of 9, The Sign was a hard watch. I was those kids. I can still remember my reaction to being told we were moving (I would have been about 8).

Bluey is a certified work of perfection. My kids have stopped watching it now. I'm tempted to watch them all from the start by myself.

In the UK Craigslist was never really a thing. eBay is too complex for many of the things people sell.

My wife sells a lot of our old stuff on marketplace. It's quick and simple to do, and there is a huge market. It's all small stuff that no one will pay shipping for, but if you are local and can pop round it's absolutely fine. Things like kids toys, books, mostly low value stuff. We've got rid of knackered old furniture for free on there because it meant someone else would take it away.

It has the advantage of market size. A lot of people are still on FB for things other than marketplace, so it's an obvious place to look when you want to buy something second hand. It's also easy to share your listings on FB.

It's frustrating. They have completely stomped every other marketplace in the UK. Things like Gumtree are ghost-towns in comparison.

I don't use it but my wife has sold loads of stuff that we no longer need. In that sense it's fantastic, it's made local selling very easy, but I really wish it was almost anyone but FB.

Great, thanks I will have to check them out.

A UK firm would be perfect as a brit, but just not-US is great.

Who do you host with btw? I'd love to avoid the big US SaaS providers if I can but would like something a level above a VPS, especially for database.

Perfect timing. I've been working on a little side project which is getting close to actually being done. Being able to use at least one non-US company for it will be great.

Just to add one more wrinkle to the link between DNA and the presentation of sex, there is also androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which the person has a Y chromosome, but the developing body does not react to the testosterone produced by the testes.

The result is someone who may appear to be female, have female genitals, but has testes where ovaries would be expected. It's often not discovered until puberty doesn't happen as expected, and they discover they can't have children.

Like all these conditions, this is on something of a spectrum depending on how total it is.

As you say, genes are complicated. So much more so than is often implied in reporting of discoveries of "a gene for X".

Thanks, I hadn't known about the connection. It's a great film.

I am convinced Just Stop Oil are. Everything they do simply makes people angry at the environmental movement.

XR seem to be trying to distance themselves, but it's too late, I don't think most people distinguish between them.

Aha, thank you.

As I mentioned in another comment, one of the most amazing examples of this was the British Army/MI5 mole inside the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Steaknife. He was a leading member of the IRA's internal security team.

It really feels counterintuitive that someone who has got to the top would be the one to turn, but it also makes sense that they would be the one's targetted.

I've been struck by how often it is really quite senior people within criminal/terrorist organisations are the ones that get turned by the various agencies.

In the UK, there was an informant for MI5 in the IRA for years codenamed Steaknife. It turned out he was the head of IRA internal security, it was his job to hunt moles. He was the perfect agent. I seem to remember a story of a mafia don who turned out to be an informant, which seems wild to me.

Well that is delightful! Especially as I've always really like that song.

The world needs more of that.

I absolutely adore mechanical systems like this. If I had the time, space and money I would spend my time collecting examples of clever mechanical systems.

My mother in law used to be a comptometer operator and I've always wanted to get hold of one and get her to show me how it was used.

That was a lovely short read. I didn't play muds much, I didn't get an internet connection until they were starting to look old hat, but I did play a Discworld one for a while at uni.

It's stuck me recently how much I miss that kind of programming. Everything I do now is hidden behind so many layers of abstractions, toolkits, libraries and environments that it all feels a bit divorced from what's actually going on. I need to come up with an excuse to do a bit of low-level coding again.

I feel like it would be more useful if it recorded what people clicked through to and then just showed you those. No need to weight this too much, just exclude the things that people never click on.

Nice!

My first job was mostly SPARK Ada, subtypes were so useful, both in terms of making contracts clearer for the human and for the various analysis tools.

Rust is high on my list of languages to learn when I can make some time, having something like this available will be great.

That really is an excellent (and rather long) piece.

I've often wondered how much of the original HHGTTG radio series was really John Lloyd his producer, who often had no choice but to take what Douglas had produced and bash it into shape to make a workable script.

I often wonder what could have been produced if Douglas had just had a little more focus, and whether that might have just taken the edge off his work.