Interesting Links for 07-03-2018

[andrewducker]

The experiment which proved the theory of relativity wrong

(tags: physics errors history )

Could US-Canada border solve Irish dilemma? (Spoilers: No)

(tags: ireland NorthernIreland uk europe usa canada borders )

France to fix legal age of sexual consent as 15

(tags: Consent law france sex )

What If Online Movie Ratings Weren’t Based Almost Entirely On What Men Think?

(tags: gender movies ratings )

Eight reasons UK ended up in this Brexit mess

(tags: uk europe history media EpicStupidity )

Secret NYPD Files: Officers Who Lie And Brutally Beat People Can Keep Their Jobs

(tags: newyork police OhForFucksSake )

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted" - How British media restarted after WWII

(tags: wwii history media bbc viaSwampers )

Conway's Game Of Life in APL - a short video which uses programming paradigms I've not encountered before. Math fans will appreciate

(tags: mathematics programming life video impressive )

When it's so cold that water freezes as it hits the beach

(tags: water ice cold video )

Who's a good boy? Why 'dog-speak' is important for bonding with your pet

(tags: dogs communication language )

So, Theresa May, renters are human beings too? It doesn’t feel like it

(tags: rental housing uk )

The dirty industry of fast fashion is causing an environmental emergency

(tags: fashion clothes OhForFucksSake pollution environment )

‘Silver bullet’ to suck CO2 from air and halt climate change ruled out

(tags: technology globalwarming co2 thefuture )

"I’m a Sinn Féin MP. This is why I won’t go to Westminster, even over Brexit"

(tags: NorthernIreland Ireland politics uk )

Ten statistics people keep quoting even though they're nonsense

(tags: statistics fraud myths beliefs )

Nick Offerman Joins Amazon’s Neil Gaiman Series ‘Good Omens'

(tags: neilgaiman terrypratchett tv )

Brexit: EU Parliament sets out stance on future UK relations

(tags: uk europe )

Great discussion of "secret family recipes" - including the first meta-secret recipe I've encountered!

(tags: recipe secrecy )

Was St Gildas the first Brexiteer? Or was he a Romeoaner?

(tags: history uk rome europe )

Disagreements beteeen Kosovo and Serbia cause electronic clocks across Europe to run 6 minutes behind

(tags: time electricity europe fail )

Lessons from Spotify

(tags: spotify music business )

Your co-workers probably know you better than you know yourself

(tags: psychology Intelligence personality )

Where we currently are on Brexit

(tags: doom thefuture europe uk )

Comments

Carbon Capture

[danieldwilliam]

Sucking carbon out the atmosphere is going to be energy intensive.

Re: Carbon Capture

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I strongly suspect that not producing it in the first place is going to be a lot easier in the long run.

[momentsmusicaux]

> Only 37 per cent of the electorate voted to leave the EU. Thanks to A Perfect Fifth. It is true but irrelevant. If you don’t vote, your vote doesn’t count.

Uh... huh?
It's true AND relevant. It means only 37% were of the opinion we should leave and held that opinion strongly enough to get to a polling station.

[hilarita]

That irked me as well. It's a correct statistic, *and* it tells us something useful about the percentage of the population who voted.

[andrewducker]

But unless you also quote that only 35% of people thought that we should stay and held that opinion strongly enough to get to a polling station, it's misleading and clearly partial.

[fanf]

I got the impression from the time-nuts mailing list that grid operators do not try to target a long-term frequency average any more, so you can’t expect a mains cycle counting clock to be accurate, even if the grid frequency is nominal.

[calimac]

The US-Canada border has always, during my time, been a hard border - that is, there are customs stations along the highways, and everyone has to stop at them - but during recent years it's become a lot harder.

First they required passports. That's right, US citizens once didn't need a passport to visit Canada. They do now.

Now the US is cracking down on weak spots in the border, ones where local crossing had been allowed freely, on fears that this enables smuggling (both of persons and of terrorist equipment). This has been especially stressful at what is effectively one town that's half in Vermont and half in Quebec. A Trump-style wall would be impossible there without going full Berlin, but Jersey barriers now block off street intersections.

I know offhand of one case where a terrorist did try to sneak from Canada to the US and was caught, but it was at a hard border checkpoint.

[redbird]

If that was an open border, there wouldn't be a US customs "preclearance" area in the Montreal airport, with a separate post-customs concourse in the security area. Nor would I have to get off the bus and talk to immigration/customs people when I cross the Vermont-Quebec border that way.

Even back in the last century, there was usually at least a brief "what's your citizenship?" question at the border, though they might not ask for paperwork if you were in a private car rather than on a train or bus. (That's for roads between towns, rather than the sort of cross-border town calimac mentions.)

[zotz]

"Proved".

Didn't prove.

Statistics. Tricky. We need to work on them. but not as hard as we need to work on not blatantly misstating results to get attention.

Can you please stop linking to AMP versions of web pages?

[skington]

For one, they look terrible. Guardian silver bullet: AMP, normal website; Independent zombie statistics: AMP, normal website. The type is wrong; the content is unnecessarily small.

Secondly, the supposed performance boost you get from AMP pages only happens if you find them from a Google search, because Google then preloads the page. Unless you add the same pre-loading to DreamWidth, LiveJournal and Facebook, you won't get the performance boost.

Re: Can you please stop linking to AMP versions of web pages?

[andrewducker]

I tend to link to whatever opens when I read the article in the first place, and sadly on my phone it's not always at all obvious unless I go and scroll back and forth along the URL (which is not much of a fun experience on mobile).

I'll see if I can find a de-ampifier addon for Firefox that will forward me to the original page automatically.

Re: Can you please stop linking to AMP versions of web pages?

[skington]

Thank you!

(Also, while you're at it, looking for an automatic “show me the desktop version of the page” addon would be worth it also. It's easy enough to get rid of e.g. the m. prefix in youtube links, but some mobile websites aren't as easy to bypass. The problem is that if you're genuinely on a mobile device, the desktop site will redirect to the mobile site automatically; if you're on a desktop device, the mobile site won't redirect back to the full-fat website.)