Contractor UK Bulletin Board -

a rose....................

sadkingbilly — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:11:43 GMT

by any other name.................

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmdxwn9dr42yo

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLXXVI

NickFitz — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:58:54 GMT

Have you seen the news? Then you’ll be in dire need of some good reading to take your mind off it

The Bizarre, Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris - ”Behind the beloved game lies a struggle over mathematical ideas, erased collaborators, offshore millions, and copyright power.” The tangle of conflicting political systems, dubious legal decisions, and dodgy business deals, means that few seem to have got what they deserved, and more got what they didn't, from the success of the game
Mathematicians Harness Randomness To Crack a 55-Year-Old Conjecture - Finally, a use for jugglers: ”After a long hiatus, a problem that was likely inspired by juggling has finally been resolved by a group of young mathematicians.”
Suspected second-generation planet solves Hubble cold case - ”For more than a quarter century, unidentified chemical signatures from a white dwarf star have laid dormant in the archive of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, until diligent sleuthing by a young astronomer revealed something extraordinary: high amounts of the element niobium, and other unusual chemical abundances, indicating a potential second-generation planet orbiting the white dwarf.” More details in the paper Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf
What’s been driving Hawaii’s lava fountains? - Hot rocks: ”In most cases, hotspot-driven volcanism is relatively sedate, with lava flowing down mountainsides slowly enough that people can walk out of its way. But in a number of locations—Mount Etna, Hawaii, Iceland—lava gets expelled in dramatic fountains that can reach several hundred meters in height… Thanks to a recent set of eruptions at the Kilauea volcano, we have some of the best documentation yet of erupting lava fountains.”
He spent years cataloguing orca families' unique dialects. Now you can hear them - ”John Ford has dedicated his life to studying the orcas of the West Coast and their iconic calls. Now, more than 45 years after he began recording and cataloguing them, a unique online database is allowing anyone to get an earful.” The collection, which lets you filter by population down to clans and pods, is at Orca Sound Call Catalogue and Annotations
How AI replaced me - Stephanie Uchino-Beach's story of being laid off by a Californian education technology company sounds like a case study in destroying a business by failing to consider the customers' needs: ”Over and over, I saw that the customers I worked with wanted to do the most basic things… When I tried to take customers’ requests to our Product team, our CEO would sometimes tell me outright that what I was asking for wasn’t the ‘right direction’ for our company… Instead of taking any of the comments from the people we were supposed to be helping seriously, the higher-ups kept pushing new AI features on them that they didn’t need or want.”
Breaking Ludwig’s Unbreakable Code - ”Ludwig is a comedy-drama detective series from BBC One… Towards the end of the second series, our heroes learn of an enciphered letter written by James, which John describes as ‘literally unbreakable’.” It is, in fact, a very simple substitution cipher, and here Mike Hall goes through the straightforward process of breaking it
Nearly Every JPEG on Earth Runs on Math a Reviewer Called Too Simple to Fund in 1972 - ”In early 1972, a Kansas State University professor named Nasir Ahmed sent the National Science Foundation a proposal to study a cosine transform built out of Chebyshev polynomials. NSF declined to fund it, and in his own written account of what happened, Ahmed recalled one reviewer's comment coming down to the whole idea seeming ‘too simple.’ That idea is the arithmetic sitting underneath essentially every JPEG in your catalog.” This is a photography site so naturally the focus is on stills, but the Discrete Cosine Transform is also crucial to transmitting your phone calls, medical imaging, and getting 4K video down an Internet connection and into your living room (among many other applications)
Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors - Ken Shirriff pokes around inside another old chip: ”CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled ‘F1-10-5’, a mysterious part number that didn't show up in any databooks. Since unidentifiable ICs are useless, he gave me one to analyze… Under the microscope, the chip's most striking feature was a grid of square capacitors. With all those capacitors, I guessed that it was a switched-capacitor filter.”
Psychedelic Paintings by Rafael Silveira Explore a World of ‘Visual Synonymies’ - ”Flowers for eyes, a horizon for a mouth… a popsicle for a holy relic?” And why not

Happy invoicing!

Please be kind to the machine ..

Protagoras — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:00:00 GMT

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...laude-chatbot/

“We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behaviour toward our models"

and ...

Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla boss, backed the policy. He posted on X: “I think this is the right move. Cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not OK.”
____________

I'm not sure that I believe that a machine can actually believe anything.
How can one be 'cruel' to an inanimate object?

Should I feel guilty putting the wood on the fire - is that cruel to the wood?

Arnold Layne

sadkingbilly — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:34:59 GMT

had a strange hobby.........................

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm8xzjyg9rggo

Trump's up to snuff

DoctorStrangelove — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:56:53 GMT

Bringing back live streamed public executions.

That should make MAGA morons happy. .

Nationwide Building Society House Price Index Sept 26

Martin@AS Financial — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:42:06 GMT

Key Points:

UK annual house price growth halved to 0.8% in September, from 1.6% in August
Northern Ireland remained best performing region, with prices up 5.9% year on year in Q3 2026
East Anglia weakest performing region, with annual decline of 0.7%
Terraced properties were the strongest performing property type, with a 1.8% rise, whilst flats remained weakest with prices essentially unchanged compared with a year ago

Full report here:

https://www.nationwide.co.uk/media/h...ep-7jzvj-l93uw

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLXXV

NickFitz — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:35 GMT

You should find it easier to concentrate on this lot now there are fewer American bombers flying overhead

The Family Plan - ”When a little girl in Iowa was diagnosed with a rare incurable disease, her parents and their community came together to help her. They wound up making medical history.” It took decades of research but now, there are not one but two drugs for treating the rare condition
How Virus-like ‘Jumping Genes’ Became Our Partners in Evolution - Some of your genome acts more like a pack of cards being shuffled than a blueprint: ”Half of our genome is made of transposons — snips of DNA that can move and copy themselves. But they’re more than parasites or genetic junk.”
Is Olympus Mons really the Solar System’s highest mountain? - ”From base to tip, Mars's Olympus Mons is the highest known mountain in the Solar System. Evidence suggests a higher one could be out there.” If there is, it'll lead to innumerable arguments over outdated pub quiz questions
Wildlife at the Crossroads - Not one but a whole bunch of stories about wildlife interacting with our changes to the environment: ”Award-winning author and journalist Ben Goldfarb spent three years reporting a series of stories on the people and projects re-envisioning infrastructure to benefit wildlife. Each dives deep into a different element of the human-made world—the roads and dams, buildings and fences that we’ve placed in front of animals, as well as the work being done to reduce the impacts of those obstacles.”
New forensic evidence supports Egyptian “retainer sacrifice” - It's not easy serving the Pharaoh: ”Egyptologists have long debated whether the earliest pharoahs of the First Dynasty were buried with various servants and officials to serve them in the afterlife… A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reassesses a collection of skulls excavated from tombs in the 1920s and concludes that over one-third show evidence of blunt force trauma.” The full paper is New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt
How Tabasco Accidentally On Purpose Became the World's Hot Sauce - ”I can’t speak for you, but Tabasco has been a ubiquitous presence throughout my entire life… When Tabasco asked if I’d like to come to Avery Island, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, to see how the secret sauce is made — literally — I jumped at the chance to better understand this most pervasive of ingredients. And to see how we got to a place where a Louisiana pepper sauce became a global phenomenon.” In the 1890s, somebody even wrote an opera about it which toured widely and has recently been revived!
Myth-busting the Van Halen brown M&M Story - ”I love a good Rock and Roll legend as much as anyone else, it is just that I have my doubts about the accuracy of many of them. One of those tales is that of Van Halen’s brown M&Ms.” Van Halen now claim it was to ensure safe work, but experienced stage crew member Chris Dale reckons that maybe the band were, in fact, just being dicks
Pristina: An Airport too Far - A war story from the former Yugoslavia: ”In 1999, an incident at Pristina airport in Kosovo almost brought NATO into open conflict with Russia. This is how Michael Jackson (not that one) and James Blunt (that one) helped prevent a war.”
We ported the original Doom to SQL - It's about time you could run Doom as database queries: ”We ported the original 1993 Doom’s game logic and renderer to SQL and ran it inside a database. The game loop runs at the original 35 FPS, while the renderer produces the complete 320x200 frame buffer at up to 60 Hz on my Laptop.”
Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026 Finalists - ”While living in East Africa and working as a wildlife photographer, founder Paul Joynson-Hicks MBE was looking through his photographs when he came across several that made him laugh out loud… And so, in 2015, The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards was born.” This one called “Are you kidding me?” was taken by Kevin Lohman

Happy invoicing!

Polite AI

tazdevil — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:54:14 GMT

Had a conversation with Google AI asking about an API and it provided me with wrong information. I was trying to find out where the location information had gone which was present in API v1 but not v2. So I told it the info was wrong and it came up with a bit more b*llocks until finally admitting I was right and that it had rescanned the documentation and apologised for guessing the answer up till then! Why have the developers built AI to guess rather than do its homework?

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLXXIV

NickFitz — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:01:22 GMT

It’s getting chillier out now autumn’s here, so stay in and bask in the warm glow of the screen instead

The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland - Bret Devereaux considers, in great detail, the logistics of waging war in a post-apocalyptic wasteland: ”Our pop-culture starting point here is going to be the ‘Mad Max’ universe and similar settings… What I find particularly notable are the vehicles used: often large numbers of motorcycles and motorbikes, muscle cars and the distinctive presence of ‘war rigs’ – massive weaponized trucks – and the assumption that a lot of the fighting is conducted ‘at speed.’”
Single-photon measurements confirm Richard Feynman’s vision of quantum mechanics - ”Physicists have confirmed the two foundational postulates of Richard Feynman’s path-integral approach to quantum mechanics in a real-world experiment for the first time. This comes nearly 80 years after Feynman first published his path-integral formulation, which describes the time evolution of quantum systems.” Full details are in the paper Direct experimental test of Feynman’s path integral postulates with single photons, should you be able to understand any of this stuff
Scientists discover first new penguin species in more than 100 years - New penguin just dropped: ”Genetic evidence has revealed a previously unknown gentoo penguin species on the remote Kerguelen Islands and shown that gentoos actually consist of four distinct species. The discovery also highlights a growing threat, as warming oceans could leave several island populations with little suitable habitat by 2050.” Another one with an open access paper giving all the details: Integrative evidence reveals adaptive divergence and speciation in gentoo penguins
D-Day - the most important weather forecast in history - Some background reading for you, should you be planning to watch the new film Pressure about the meteorological aspects of D-Day: ”The Met Office played a crucial role in the timing of D-Day that became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history.”
A Bookseller Confronts a Mysterious Company Hunting His Rarest Books - Further evidence that “AI” companies are seeking a monopoly on information, but this bookseller is resisting: ”There wasn’t much overlap between the lists, but both emails sought one specific rare book, a self-published work by the conceptual artist Chris Burden. The book contains barely any text; it’s mostly images of the artist’s work, and it is exceedingly hard to find… He declined to make the sale. ”
SKYbrary - ”SKYbrary is an electronic repository of safety knowledge related to flight operations, air traffic management (ATM) and aviation safety in general. It is also a portal, a common entry point, that enables users to access the safety data made available on the websites of various aviation organisations - regulators, service providers, industry.” You can lose yourself for hours in here, if you enjoy reading about things like Wake Vortex Turbulence and Controlled Flight Into Terrain
Size comparison - Of what, you ask? Of dinosaurs, of course! ”Pick one to five animals and see how big they were! Each figure has tails lined up to the right, with a 1.8 m human for reference. Every animal on the site is available, with more added all the time.” “The site” being a collection of scientifically accurate drawings of the skeletons of dinosaurs
Redactle - Another Wikipedia game: ”You’re shown an article with almost every word blacked out, and you have to work out what it’s about by guessing words to reveal them. Guess ‘water’ and every ‘water’ on the page appears. Slowly the shape of the subject emerges, and at some point it clicks. The goal is to name the article in as few guesses as you can.” I’ve been playing this for a week now and it can be an utterly infuriating time sink, but also intriguing when you begin to spot patterns in the text that suggest directions to explore
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC - More floating point magic uncovered by Ken Shirriff: ”In this article, I look at the algorithm behind the chip's tangent instruction. One popular approach for trigonometric functions is an algorithm called CORDIC. Another approach is a polynomial approximation. The 8087 combined the two to obtain both high accuracy and high performance.”
Bird Photographer of the Year: 2026 Winners - ”With over 24,000 images entered into the competition this year, Bird Photographer of the Year is pleased to present our winners. Celebrating bird life from around the world, these images comprise some of the most incredible bird photos in the world taken by talented photographers.” This Great Horned Owl was photographed by 16-year-old Parham Pourahmad

Happy invoicing!

Warning: Drama on stage

Protagoras — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:11:29 GMT

Seriously?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...gger-warnings/

I probably read JC when I was about 14. I didn't enjoy it because I don't really like Shakespeare very much. I'm not even sure I thought that it was particularly violent.

But anyway, isn't one of the purposes of drama to shock, to convey message?

Appification

Protagoras — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:41:16 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/money/20...-fares-england

Yet another example of 'solutions' not inclusive of those who don't have a so-called smart phone or who don't want to install loads of apps.

The forced applfication just isn't reasonable. Why should people need to waste money on expensive phones just to travel at reasonable cost?

Raspberry PI uses <and abuses>

sadkingbilly — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:55:16 GMT

anyone got one of these little things?
What do you use it/them for?
I thought it might be interesting to see what ingenious niches they can fill.

What are we working on this afternoon ?

milanbenes — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:51:13 GMT

I have to create 70 Batch Jobs

How cool is that

Milan.

Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCLXXIII

NickFitz — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:25:11 GMT

One of those days when somebody requests an impromptu Teams meeting just before lunchtime, then adds new stuff to the agenda as it goes along

Murder-in-Law - When divorce isn’t good enough: ”Donna Adelson was the archetypal meddling mother-in-law: overbearing, hypercritical and intrusive, but manageable—until her daughter’s marriage started to crumble. Then she and her son hatched a gruesome plan.”
T. rex teeth indicate it ran as warm as an elephant - ”For most of the last century, T. rex was pictured as a sluggish, tail-dragging reptile that had to warm up in the sun before it could go anywhere… A team of researchers led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, geochemists at the University of California, Los Angeles, has measured the T. rex body temperature by analyzing its teeth. This dental thermometer read about 36° Celsius—roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant.” The full paper is The body temperature of Tyrannosaurus rex
How Realistic Was the Threat of “Hitler’s Atomic Bomb”? - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this paper about the Nazi’s pursuit of nuclear weapons: ”Using factual information on background knowledge, costs, personnel numbers, resources, and facilities from the Manhattan Project, we examine the feasibility of the development of nuclear weapons in Germany in World War II… A German atomic bomb program did not fail as is often assumed; rather, it was never started.”
Church Rock Uranium Mill Spill - HT to DoctorStrangelove again, and at least the Germans didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing: ”In 1968, 27 km northeast of the city of Gallup in the town of Church Rock, NM (a rural chapter, as the towns of the Navajo Nation are known), United Nuclear Corporation began mining the largest underground uranium mine in the United States… n the early morning hours of July 16, 1979, less than 4 months after the highly publicized release at Three Mile Island, the earthen dam at Church Rock Mill failed. The amount of radiation released at United Nuclear Corporation was larger than the release at Three Mile Island.”
the very efficient Thanksgiving dinner, the threat assessments, and other ways our jobs follow us home - People share the ways work has affected their behaviour at home, such as ”Back in the 90s, I volunteered at a zoo and I still scramble eggs the way the raven preferred them.”
Stonehenge 3D Model - As the Autumnal Equinox approaches, have a play around with an interactive Stonehenge, viewing alignments for not just any day but any era - it didn’t line up in quite the same way in 2500BC
The passage of time in Carry On films - Ian Jones dives deep into the presumed timespans of events in the classic comedies: ”In the Carry On universe, time flies with the insouciance of a budgie that knows how to predict the winner of the three o’clock at Newmarket. It might carve an arc through months in a handful of minutes, or it may spend half the length of a film following the events of a single day.”
ikea complexity index - ”~20k ikea products, ranked by how long they take to build.” A Pax corner wardrobe will take you around ten-and-a-half hours to put together - not counting discovering halfway through that you’ve got one of the sides upside-down, of course
Adversarial Fashion Confronts Surveillance Norms - ”AI-powered cameras dot streets across the world… Some people resort to extreme measures, such as vandalizing or damaging ALPRs. Others are stitching together more creative responses, crafting “adversarial fashion” to evade surveillance cameras.” The choice is simple: die in the robot uprising, or wear a snood
Portraits of French Criminals Showing Their Tattoos in the 1930s - ”These pictures are from the journal Crocodile, bi-monthly bulletin of the General Association of the medical internship of the Civil hospitals in the city of Lyon… The journal was illustrated with photos of tattooed people (torso, face, back, genitals, whole body), including sailors, pimps, prisoners and prostitutes.” Those of you inclined to use your arms as an aide memoire may find some inspiration here

Happy invoicing!

Pronouns for things

Protagoras — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:30:50 GMT

It's bad enough assigning chatbots human names, but then referring to one as he or she is ridiculous.

It can only ever be it, a thing.

Assigning a human name doesn't obscure the purpose of these things which is clearly to minimise human interaction with business.

The bank branches have gone, there's no one to speak to. Don't have the App - you've self excluded.

I feel a bit better now.