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āBabe, youāre looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, youāre an M-438.ā
Standard nerd.
āBabe, youāre looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, youāre an M-438.ā
Rather embarrassingly, Austria Post doesnāt do that but does have ācrypto stampsā which are regular stamps only with a QR code linking to an NFT or something. To be fair to Austria Post, though, they are really good at extracting cash from the pockets of overexcitable stamp collectors with gimmickry like this. https://onlineshop.post.at/en-AT/page/crypto-stamp
āFood truck cultureā is pretty much a hipsterism as far as I can tell. Itās a posh way of describing regular food of a sort that often gets sold from the back of a van everywhere except itās made by and for white people and costs twice as much. Their original purpose of selling affordable food reasonably quickly to workers who want some hot food instead of bringing their own lunch to work but donāt have a long enough break to go anywhere to eat was gentrified away a while back.
One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.
An āOops, racism!ā incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.
Frickinā laser beams or GTFO. A gunbot with a metal-projectile weapon taped to its arm is like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie where theyāve lost all the knowledge needed to build new tech.
Well, āMan who wrote some code mostly based on other peopleās code a very long time ago and parlayed that into media darling status and a lucrative incomeā is a bit long-winded.
worst prog rock band ever
Claim to fame! Aleister Crowley was born a short walk from the house where I grew up, although then he was plain old Edward Crowley. My home town isnāt that keen to be associated with him, largely because of the above - at a superficial level he was a harmless crank, a rich kid who decided to start his own religion and dress up in robes, but once you dig down into the history he was a pretty unpleasant, exploitative man - a classic cult leader.
āsponsored content, but only very smol bean sponsored content, pls not be mad thxā
There was a new government elected last week on a platform which can be broadly summarised as āno more insane politics shitā. So far theyāre showing dangerous signs of competence and rational thought. What a load of weirdos.
If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. Iām not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.
I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like
(without reading article) The answer presumably boils down to āthe Toriesā.
Well, theyāre arguing that your claim is nonsense. Hereās the reason why different countries ended up with different standards for various railway things: interoperability simply wasnāt that big a deal at the time. These werenāt continent-spanning high speed train services, they chuffed along at a speed of 30-40mph and had frequent stops because the locomotives needed regular watering and coaling and the passengers needed regular watering and emptying as well (no on-board toilets or restaurant cars yet). Border crossings usually involved a lengthy stop while formalities were completed, and if a train was crossing the border theyād simply do what happens right up to the present day in many cases: change the locomotive for one belonging to the company that operated the railways in the country they were entering, staffed by drivers who knew the local rules, signalling and practices.
I know this doesnāt cover for breaks of gauge, but they were handled in a similar way ā border stations were simply connected to both systems, so when crossing from (say) France into Spain passengers would alight, clear immigration, and board a new train on the opposite platform to take them onward into Spain. The French train would then usually (all going well) return into France taking the passengers whoād left the train from Spain (which falls mainly on the plain) when it arrived there. Freight was obviously harder to transship, which is why at least initially the railways were more interested in enabling through-running of goods wagons without having to offload and reload the whole shipment than they were in through-running of passenger carriages.
Definitely this. There are few more persistent myths out there than the origin of various track gauges ā starting with the myth that standard gauge (1435mm) derives from the width of a horseās arse. Military planners werenāt stupid enough to think that a break of gauge would present an insurmountable obstacle to an invading army (not least because they could just commandeer or seize rolling stock and march all their soldiers off one train and onto another), but instead relied on the obvious, reliable stuff like having plans to blow up bridges and tunnels to deny the enemy the use of the infrastructure. If a gauge is unusual like in Russia or Ireland the most likely cause is that it was a compromise between people who wanted broad gauge and people who wanted Stephenson gauge which resulted in the choice of some number inbetween the two. Russian gauge is a round 5ā, Irish gauge is 5ā3", both round numbers in archaic units.
There are loads of weird things which essentially boil down to āsomeone made an arbitrary decisionā - for instance, a lot of railways in Western European countries have left-hand running for no reason other than it was what George Stephenson used when he built the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and British practice was highly influential on the early development of railways on the continent.
The CPH metro also has short trains - evacuation of a three-car train is substantially less difficult than the safe evacuation of, say, a Victoria Line train - 133m long, with a crush load of 1,200 people and no side walkways. Youāre right that the benefit here isnāt so much in cost savings (most trains still have at least one staff member on board) as it is in being able to run short trains at low headways.
If what you took away from that is āEU trains are FUBAR because something something conflictsā then you werenāt paying attention. Automating trains isnāt that hard to do (Londonās Victoria Line has been more or less self-driving since 1967) with some kind of transponders-and-in-cab-control arrangement, but they still to this day have to have a train operator (i.e., a driver) in the cab. This is not because the automation canāt make the train go and make it stop again at the right place, itās because actually pushing a lever back and forth is only a tiny part of the job of driving a train. The rest is about knowing rules many of which are extremely safety-critical, evaluating rules, and applying knowledge and experience to make sure those rules are correctly applied. For instance, you can put a passenger train on a fenced-off track with no intermittent route changes and it can drive itself from A to B using existing technology. The problem, however, is what happens if something goes wrong? A wire connecting a trackside transponder fails ā the train will stop because it doesnāt know what to do. A foreign body is detected on the track in front? The train will have to stop until someone moves it. And not only that train will be stopped, but all the trains behind it will be stopped until someone can get there in personā¦ and letās hope they donāt have to use the strech of track thatās blocked to get there.
So you still need a human on the train to resolve these problems - a signal failure means a two-way conversation with the signalbox to confirm whatās going on and get given manual permission to proceed, usually at a reduced speed. A foreign object can be examined on the spot, moved if the driver is able to do so, and the track checked over to make sure it hasnāt been damaged by the impact. And this is a very simple example. Driving a train is one of those jobs (a lot like being a pilot, and few people seem to be talking about getting rid of airline pilots) which is 99% routine but 1% exceptions, and the possible number of exceptions is nearly infinite. Automation in the cab is certainly a useful thing just as automation in your car is a useful thing and for the same reason - it frees up expensive human eyeballs and brains to worry less about the repetitive mechanics of the 99% routine so they can pay more attention to any potential 1% exceptions coming down the line. Automation simply canāt meet the safety requirements ā thereās no āacceptable numberā of accidents or fatalities in railway operations unless that number is zero.
There are, to be fair, some extremely niche operations where full automation can and does work ā mostly on isolated metro systems where the infrastructure is expansive enough, there are no level crossings, and the line operates effectively in a vacuum. Even in that case, the Victoria Line canāt meet the safety requirements as the tunnels have no side walkways and passenger evacuation means walking people off through the middle of the cab onto what have to be assumed to be live electrical rails without going through complex safety procedures to be sure theyāre safe.
Railway safety in Europe is nothing like what a lot of people think it is (i.e., akin to highway safety). Itās taken very, very seriously and no compromises are ever acceptable. Even many rules which seem hard to explain today exist because a massively improbable series of failures at some point in the past caused disaster or near-disaster and could still repeat themselves today if not for this rule. Itās complex, sure, but for a system thatās undergone 200 years of continuous evolution and development and still remains extremely safe itās anything but FUBAR.
Im also annoyed at how much words are written about the Collins. Stop promoting these doofuses. (They have come up in sneerclub before)
Apologies. First time poster, all that stuff.
The corporal punishment thing is a weirdly Anglophone obsession ā assaulting (sorry, āsmackingā) your kids has been a crime here since 1977 and the kids seem to be alright as well as having the bonus of being less likely to have grown up surrounded by violence and the threat of violence. In 7 years here Iāve seen exactly one person hit a child in public (looked a lot like a visiting grandma from elsewhere) and it came as a real shock. The more the Collins types (and, of course, fundie types) try to justify this as ānormalā the less normal it appears to everyone else.
Plenty of propaganda, but Smoky was a real cat ā was rescued from a bombed-out building after an air raid by the woman in the picture - Miss Ann Twynam of Paddington (a district of London). While Iām sure his saluting trick didnāt involve taxidermy, Iām sure it involved bribery. Cats basically owned the black market in tuna during the war when pretty much everything was strictly rationed.