ranko

Children under 16 already get free travel on buses and trams in London, though they have to pay discounted fares on the tube and they'll need a photocard if they are 11 or over.

W B Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, put it like this:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

Ironically, it was ignored by the authors in much of their writing, both in "Elements" and other works.

"28 times smaller than" (and the like) is one of my bugbears. I think it means "1/28th of the size", but then you get constructions like "three times smaller than" instead of the clearer and more obvious "one third the size of". Trying to think too hard about what it means to be "N times smaller than" becomes pretty confusing, I think.

In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.

Tomatoes are vegetables and fruit. "Fruit" is a botanical category, including plenty of things that are inedible for various reasons. "Vegetable" is a culinary category, including many things that are fruit (aubergine/eggplant, cucumber, and many more).

Only if the child in question is male.

Calling an election is now back in the hands of the government (not parliament) since the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act; a PM can ask the monarch to call an election without having to get the agreement of parliament. Neither the current nor next PM (whoever they end up being) is likely to do this if the polling numbers are anything to go by, of course. I think the only other way an election can be called is if the government loses a vote of no confidence.

a party that wins 35% of the vote gets 35% of the seats

At the last general election to the UK parliament (2019), the Tories won 44% of the votes, and ended up with 56% of the seats - first past the post strikes again!

It keeps happening because there are no consequences for it happening

Worse than that - the consequences are positive for Experian: "For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity".

I'm struggling to believe this - without informed consent this has to be medical malpractice (enough to end someone's career) and/or a crime.

I think OP was suggesting that if you hint (or state explicitly) that men's restrooms are unsuitable for nappy changing, you'll be able to avoid an unpleasant chore (by pushing it onto your partner).

Honestly, changing nappies isn't that bad, particularly for your own child, and even if it was, this is a pretty selfish attitude to take.

Take your paternity leave (as much as you can). Drop down to a four day work week, even if you feel like it's a risky question to ask, as soon as you can.

Everyone will tell you that you can't get the time with your kids back - and they're right, so spend the time with them now.

Blame Chorleywood; sounds like the setting for a children's TV programme, actually the name of the process whereby we get a bread-adjacent product that's suitable for mass production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

Miners have a pretty high chance death while on the job - according to https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm, the US death rate in 2007 (because that's the first figure I found) was 24.8 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 4.3 in all private industry. Sounds like a much higher "chance of failure" than most other jobs.

Scottish notes are not even legal tender in Scotland. This isn't as bad as it sounds, in fact, as many things (credit cards, for example) are not legal tender but are widely accepted in shops etc.

More at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/what-is-legal-...

"Seizing the Means of Production" is a reference to Marx, who had many things to say about class tension, such as "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

I think that's in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman". As I recall, he gave up on it because no-one else could understand him - notation is both a tool of thought and of communication with others. A similar idea is Abelson's (I think) remark about writing code for people and only incidentally for machines.

Some data; traffic-related deaths per 100,000 population:

US (2018 figures): 12.4

France: (2019): 5

Of course this neglects many confounding variables, but a factor of nearly 2.5 is quite large.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Unless they were hospital staff, emergency responders, etc, etc...

More species of tree, not more trees.

A good idea, but unfortunately the author has thought of that - every page starts and ends with a complete sentence!

I'm pretty sure that they can't do it without your consent (and cooperation) - they at least have to verify your identity documents (name, address, DOB, etc), get a list of your addresses for the last five years, enter your driving license number, and probably other information too.

There's a nice RFC on machine naming - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1178 - but sadly the practice of giving machines memorable and distinctive names has largely died out at workplaces.

The sculptures were created approx 440 BCE, and Elgin wasn't involved with them till around 1800 CE, so it's not obvious that "Elgin Marbles" is an old name in this context. It's also not obvious that Elgin removed them legitimately (the alleged source of his authority is either lost or never existed in the first place).

It's not, in the UK at least, as Orwell died over 70 years ago (1950). It appears in the US (where this work is apparently still under copyright) the rule is 95 years from date of publication for works published before 1978.

Who is "they" in your speculation?

See also a case where the hardware worked differently due to the moon https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/27/us/moon-is-blamed-for-bli...

See also the discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603398

Book titles in British English tend to be title case (capitalise most words, apart from "a", "the", etc), but newspaper headlines are usually sentence case apart from tabloid front pages, which are all caps and have their own language ("It's the Sun wot won it", for example).

Which is presumably taken from Yeats' "Second Coming" (Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...