Interesting Links for 20-02-2018

[andrewducker]

Simply cutting tuition fees would not help poorer graduates - but would help richer ones

(tags: inequality tuition fees uk Education )

Tuition fees: Five myths busted

(tags: tuition fees uk myths )

Plans drawn up for world's tallest wooden skyscraper

(tags: wood materials construction japan )

Man now has two beating hearts after successful 'piggy-back' transplant operation

(tags: heart organs )

The best smartwatches you can buy in 2018 (mostly for when my Pebble stops working)

(tags: watches Technology )

Sony Very Nearly Had the Movie Rights to Almost Every Marvel Character Decades Ago

To be fair, unless they invested a bunch of money in them, and made the quality of movies Marvel produced, they wouldn't have been nearly as successful
(tags: movies sony marvel viaSwampers oops )

Eating all the food in the Lord of the Rings movies

(tags: movies food lotr )

Basque-speaking footballers told they could be sent off

(tags: language football spain )

Britain is using less and less cash as it goes digital

I pay for almost everything with my phone nowadays. Which has caused problems when I want to leave a tip and don't have change. I've had to make change just for that reason a couple of times.
(tags: money UK cash )

UK millennials second worst-hit financially in developed world

(tags: inequality uk )

Skins: How the TV series produced so much British talent

(tags: tv UK actors )

Iceland's mooted circumcision ban sparks religious outrage

(tags: circumcision iceland religion )

‘People think the deer are lovely. Then they learn more about it’: the deer cull dilemma

(tags: Scotland deer wildlife environment conservation )

Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

(tags: unemployment Technology thefuture economics )

Norris Numbers - the brick walls that programmers face as their programs scale up

(tags: programming scalability design )

Comments

[maia]

Man now has two beating hearts after successful 'piggy-back' transplant operation

Time Lord!!

[mair_in_grenderich]

Or pregnant woman

[alithea]

That deer cull piece was a really good read. I have a twitter friend who lives in Assynt and we often chat about this idea that the Highlands is a wilderness. Wilderness to most people implies untouched by human influence so it is of course nonsense to say that the area is one because it would still be covered in forest and blanket bog were it not for deforestation and grazing.

One of the things that I don't think got enough attention during the indy ref debates was to do with land ownership. I am very convinced that a large part of the opposition to it is because the land owners (who include many members of the Lords) are terrified that community buy-outs will be the norm if we split from England and they'll no longer be able to treat the Highlands like their own private playground.

[naath]

The thing about veison is that it is delicious. How is it so hard to put it on my plate (last venison I bought was iwported FROM NEW ZEALAND it's a pest animal HERE)

[alithea]

I can only assume the lack of proper processing facilities and the staff to do it - there was a bit in the article where it mentioned one person processing 500 animals after one shoot.

[andrewducker]

I wonder if venison isn't popular enough in this country to make an industry out of it

[alithea]

It's popular enough that we can't meet demand and are importing it...

[danieldwilliam]

There are very peculiar licencing laws relating to venison which are partly food safety related but seem to be influenced by a Norman attitude to venison. There was some move a few year ago to increase then number of venison licences so that the relatively abundent meat could more readily be sold. I'm not sure what became of them.

(I'm afraid that about exhausts my knowledge on this subject.)

[errolwi]

It was a pest animal here too (especially in a couple of National Parks). Then we started shooting them from helicopters, and processing the meat. Very green, as the environment isn't evolved to deal with grazers. Then we allowed them to be farmed, and a bunch of mad fellas started darting them and jumping on them from helicopters (to hog-tie them before they fell down a cliff - this is in Fiordland National Park, so the terrain is a bit vertical). Ended up using sophisticated net guns and stuff.
Seeing a farm fenced for deer is now not worthy of a mention, while 30 years ago it was a bit of a boom industry.

[danieldwilliam]

I think that's probably true.

It's a bit frustrating as a economist because one would expect that a viable community buy out would be founded on a business plan that makes better use of the land resources in order to pay for the buy out. One would therefore expect that that the current owners would have an interest in developing a similar business plan. Either there's no current better economic use for the land than as sporting estates or the current owners are thinking of large parts of Scotland as essentially their garden.

Gets a bit more interesting in a few decades when climate change warms up the British Isles and that land is perhaps more useful. Or certainly has different uses.

[alithea]

I'm pretty sure that in many cases it is the garden option. Certainly the Boy is endlessly frustrated by land owners shutting down plans for mountain biking trails and various other sporting activities and infrastructure which would encourage more plebs to visit areas which they want to remain 'unspoilt' for them and their rich retiree friends to enjoy.

Unfortunately, as well as warmer, it is likely to get much wetter, which means the uses may be limited - although I suspect tea plantations may well happen within our life times.

[danieldwilliam]

We seem to already have a few small tea plantations in Scotland

https://weeteacompany.com/

Which is cool.

IIRC (and you will know more about this than me) rhodedendrons are related to tea and grow so readily in Scotland that they are considered invasive. Harris has lots. I went to an RSPB event once where they had a charcol burning workshop from a charitable trust that was clearing rhodendendrons and using the wood to make charcol, which they sold, to fund the clearing.

[alithea]

Yeah, I knew about that actually, I should have said I meant on a decent scale to produce everyday tea rather than very expensive niche tea ;)

Ahh, rhody bashing, a favourite activity of conservation groups all over the UK in fact. The problem with rhodies is that not only do they grow very readily, they also make the soil around them inhospitable to other plant life. I do enjoy them in a garden though I admit.

[danieldwilliam]

There's a group that goes out from the East Lothian coast to the islands in the Forth bashing mallow. Mallow seems to be not good for puffins.

[alithea]

That's a new one on me. But then I did my ecology degree in Lancaster and puffins did not figure heavily in it!

[danieldwilliam]

I'm not sure this epxlains what the mallow does to the puffins but there are lots of people sailing off to hit it with sticks.

https://northneuk.com/2015/01/14/operation-puffin-update/

[alithea]

Ah, I think it's just that the dense foliage blocks access to existing burrows and puts the birds off digging new ones, thus driving them away from nesting in the area.

[nojay]

The "land" in question is mostly boggy moss over solid rock, often on a steep slope. Even when it was heavily forested with conifers it was still quite depauperate of nutrients and any sort of biological soil assistants like worms, mycelae etc. When the conifers went away (to provide charcoal for the nascent Industrial Revolution before coke was invented) what was left would support sheep and other indiscriminate grazers like deer and very little else.

Climate change won't increase the amount of sunlight falling on the Highlands each year, it will only raise the temperature and maybe extend the growing season of whatever can already grow there a little. The extra rainfall from a warming Atlantic won't help.

[danieldwilliam]

I had a friend in rural Australia whose Dad's job was to cull feral pigs. Which he did from a helicopter.

[calimac]

I've never made an electronic credit-card payment for a meal out where there wasn't an option to add a tip, usually presented in terms of percentage choice options. Is it different with a phone? (I don't have a smartphone.)

[andrewducker]

The phone is basically being a Contactless credit/debit card, so it's exactly the same.

But sadly half the places I go to don't have an "add tip" option of the card reader. I might start mentioning it.

[fub]

I almost always pay meals with debit card. I always ask the staff to make the payment out for amount X (amount of meal + tip) and it never gave problems. In the beginning, I used to ask to make sure the tip would end up with the staff, but nowadays it's not an issue anymore here. In some cases, I've seen the staff take out the amount of the tip out of the cash register and transfer it to their tip jar.

[lilysea]

One of the issues is that when you pay a tip by credit card, rather than cash, the restaurant is more likely to pocket the tip and not give it to the servers...

[birguslatro]

I take it you know the Fitbit Ionic is where Pebble tech has ended up? I like they've made programing for it easy (apparently), though it's a pity it looks so crap.

[andrewducker]

I could be tempted by that one. Or the Garmin.