Interesting Links for 29-09-2021

[andrewducker]

Labour can continue to fuck off (freedom of movement and spying on people edition)

(tags:labour OhForFucksSake europe police )

What do you call someone who stands for office, drops all their pledges, and then tries to change the rules for the next election?

(tags:labour politics OhForFucksSake )

Nuclear Energy - How unsafe is it?

(tags:nuclearpower safety death electricity co2 )

Third of Covid patients have at least one long-term symptom up to six months

(tags:pandemic health )

Half of American Kids Have Lead in Their Blood

(tags:lead blood children )

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election - biggest Christian and Black pages were run out of Eastern Europe

(tags:fraud religion facebook politics russia )

The code worked differently when the moon was full

(tags:programming weird )

The alarm clock that tells Twitter when you hit Snooze

(tags:alarm Twitter funny )

Comments

[cmcmck]

I'm a lifelong socialist but as a trans woman of Jewish ancestry am I really going to vote for a party that encourages anti semitism and transphobia?

[andrewducker]

Starmer at least came out on the right side with the cervix question he got asked a few days ago.

But the really need a definition of transphobia (as the lib Dems and SNP both have) and rules about it.

[simont]

On silly alarm clock snooze buttons: I remember reading a blog post once about someone who had built a networked alarm clock (I think actually a bedside peripheral to an ordinary computer in the next room) that tied into the online train schedules.

It had some idea of how long it took its owner from "waking up" to "being on the platform ready to get on the train". And it knew when the owner was supposed to be at work. So it would check for the latest train that would get them to work on time, and then automatically wake them up the right number of minutes before that train – so when the train schedules varied, no valuable sleep time would be lost, and no nasty surprises would make them late for work.

But the best bit was that the snooze button didn't have to be based on 9 minutes or 7 minutes or some other fixed interval. Hitting Snooze would mean "wake me up in time for the next train"!

(I think I remember that the blogger mentioned the possibility of having the Snooze button also auto-send an email to work saying "sorry, I missed the train, I'll be in on the next one", but had not actually done it...)

[swampers]

Reminds me of this: https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/249-now-thats-what-i-call-a-hacker/

[andrewducker]

Genius!

[calimac]

For an earlier form of technology, though this was in a novel so I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it is clever: in the 1940s, a scientifically ingenious girl builds an alarm clock by wiring her regular clock so that when it reaches the desired time it will trip the power switch on a radio.

[original_aj]

Also a fairly standard way of improvising a bomb timer.

Silly alarm clocks

[channelpenguin]

Brilliant!