Interesting Links for 01-02-2022

[andrewducker]

Sue Gray says she's not able to present 'meaningful report' due to Metropolitan Police investigation

(tags:UK police conservatives BorisJohnson party )

What do you when the new hire who showed up is not the same person you interviewed?

(tags:work fraud identity wtf interviews )

The New York Times Buys Wordle

(tags:games newspapers newyork wtf )

People have the weirdest ideas: astronomy edition

(tags:astronomy ignorance )

The longer you watch this the more kittens appear

(tags:kittens cute video )

Police given 500 pieces of paper and 300 photographs of evidence on partygate

(tags:police party Pandemic )

Peter Dinklage Called Out By Actors With Dwarfism For His Accusations Against Disney

(tags:acting Disney size )

Scotland's new smoke alarms law comes into force

(tags:Scotland safety fire housing )

This Osprey Looks Right At His Rescuer As He Frees Him

(tags:birds video )

Sophia's nursery is the first childcare business in Scotland to transition to being owned by its staff!

(tags:children business ownership Scotland )

Comments

[gingicat]

I love the New York Times games, and being good at Spelling Bee probably helps me complete Wordle, but I like it being just a thing that someone made for fun. But I'm glad the creator was paid well.

Astronomy

[danieldwilliam]

If we are living on the inside, does that mean that the Earth is not flat?

Re: Astronomy

[andrewducker]

Of course the earth is flat!

Re: Astronomy

[danieldwilliam]

Thank goodness, I was worried I was about to fall off.

On a more serious note, IIRC, Sherlock Holmes claimed to know nothing about astronomy because it had no direct bearing on detecting. He knew tide times but not how they happened.

Re: Astronomy

[andrewducker]

I remember that - it always seemed silly to me - because of the Law of Leaky Abstractions.

Re: Astronomy

[jack]

I remember that - it always seemed silly to me - because of the Law of Leaky Abstractions.

That's an excellent way of putting it. I assume things like, knowing when the moon was up, are easier to tally if you understand them a certain amount.

For contrast, of course, Moriarty apparently wrote an advanced mathematical treatise about orbital mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dynamics_of_an_Asteroid (which of course I only know because of showing up in other works like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Crime)

When I was googling for that, I did find that (according to a random website) Holmes ignorance of orbital mechanics was only present in one of the first stories, when he was also described as ignorant of literature, but later stories showed him widely read, so perhaps Conan Doyle refined that idea himself, while he was working out what made for a good detective character.

[calimac]

Unfortunately the story of the new hire doesn't have an explanation as to how this happened. The writer tends to imply that John just faked his way through the interview, but that seems unlikely: a person who could do that wouldn't be quite so lost when he shows up for work. The writer seems to think that the only other possibility is that the company accidentally offered the job to the wrong person. But I'd think more likely is a case of "test-taker fraud," where the person who wants the job hires a better-qualified friend to take the interview for him. Other possibilities?

[andrewducker]

I assumed the person taking the interview wasn't the same person who turned up. Based, for example, on the headline.

[calimac]

Yes: though the piece is written with an implicit assumption they're the same person, I agree that they certainly seem like different ones. But what I'm looking for is the relationship between the two people. I offered two different possible scenarios for this. Others?

[danieldwilliam]

I think the implicit assumption that the Johns are the same person is coming from a place of disbelief that the Johns could be different people - that the Interview John has been substituted for the Working John. That it could not possibly be true that one person has done an interview process for another person. But the Dramatic Irony is pretty strong.

[simont]

We've had a mention of Sherlock Holmes in the comments on this post already, so let me recommend to you The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk as a third scenario: the person taking the interview sincerely intended to take the job, but in the interim was the victim of fraud and identity theft enabling someone else to show up for the first day of work with malicious intentions.

The comment at the bottom of the John thread wondering what he might have downloaded before quitting makes me think that someone had deliberate malice in mind as a possibility.

[movingfinger]

Staff-owned for childcare businesses seems like it should be the norm! I hope there will soon be more.

Staff-owned should be the norm for almost everything, really...

Six

[agoodwinsmith]

The slurping!

Peter Dinklage Called Out By Actors With Dwarfism For His Accusations Against Disney

[jack]

It also reminds me of someone's observation that in any group's struggle for acceptance, it's often ultimately helpful to have some loud people who point out the injustices and kick up a stink, and some people who act respectable and navigate the system as it. I can see how "he got his" can turn out badly and even harm pepole. But probably the idea of NOT conflating real-life short people with fantasy dwarves would never catch on if at SOME point, some famous person didn't make a show of denouncing it.

Astronomy Exams

[reverancepavane]

At my alma mater the Astronomy 1H course was really for the students doing degrees other than Science, although it was a good fit as a companion to other 1H courses in timetables. The result of this was a sheet circulating through the department of the most "interesting" answers from the people taking the exam each year. At least until Uni admin heard that this was happening (it had been going on for well over a decade), and said to stop doing it on liability grounds (even though no names were mentioned).

[anna_wing]

I was baffled at the new hire story, until I remembered that it presumably happened in the US, which is one of those few, strange places in the middle-income-and-above world that has no actual national identification system (with photo and biometric information), so that people can prove that they are who they are (and, for instance, that they are citizens)...

Once, I visited a friend whose two cats had had simultaneous litters. When I walked into her sitting-room there were no visible kittens. I got a piece of string, stood in the centre of the room, and began swinging it gently, until after about five minutes, emerging from under and behind assorted pieces of furniture, I had ten kittens....

[andrewducker]

No ID cards in the UK either!

Kitten attractors are great.