Interesting Links for 08-09-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Elon Musk reveals that he took over Twitter because he believes it incubated the woke mind virus that turned his daughter trans.

(tags:ElonMusk bigotry Twitter LGBT OhForFucksSake transgender )

2. I wonder if any other places share Arkansas's geographical feat

(tags:Arkansas geography USA )

3. The Radical Design of PizzaExpress - How one chain changed the way we eat.

(tags:food uk history )

4. The average age of UK Christians went up by 6 years in the last 10 years.

(tags:religion age uk demographics )

5. This is pretty much how I feel about relationships and friendships

(tags:relationships attraction friendship )

6. The Princess Bride, recreated by celebrities, in their own homes, during lockdown

(tags:PrincessBride movies Pandemic )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

1. I dont know which is most revolting and just deranged a) Elon Musk's views or b) The Telegraph's cloyingly fawning tone.

[dewline]

His Sinkness can keep on whining. Somewhere other than Twitter.

[andrewducker]

Both are pretty awful.

[hilarita]

I decided that I couldn't face reading the article because I'm not even slightly in the headspace to cope with the Torygraph's attitude here :-(

[simont]

#2 reminds me of the oddity on the London Underground that each of King's Cross St Pancras and Euston is notionally south of the other, in the sense that you can get from KCSP to Euston by going southbound on the Victoria line, and from Euston to KCSP by going southbound on the Northern.

[andrewducker]

That's because they're basically East/West of each other and the lines are only nominally going North and South at that point?

[simont]

That's certainly what it looks like on the standard Tube map. But of course that in turn is an extremely approximate representation of real geography, or even real directions. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the true geographical situation was something else again!

[andrewducker]

https://imgur.com/a/rwTw3OJ - kinda NE/SW of each other.

[ckd]

IIRC, there's a section of road south of Boston (MA) that is I-95 northbound, MA-128 northbound, I-93 southbound, and US-1 southbound all at the same time. When on it, you're driving west.

[marymac]

Oh my god is that what was happening there? We were on that road to go to my friends wedding and my poor GPS had serious difficulty!

[redbird]

I am amused by the color-coding on the average age graph (item 4). It's coded as blue for increased, red for decreased--and it then turns out that the only group whose age decreased between the two surveys was "declined to answer." Every other group's average age either increased, or stayed the same.

[calimac]

1) “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Mr Musk said.
Well, if her knowledge of rich people is based on him, no wonder she thinks so.

2) Michigan. It's often remarked that you can travel south from the US to Canada, and this is where you do it.

3) "How one chain changed the way we eat" - I was about to say "What you mean 'we', white man?' but I see it's about a situation specifically British and I'm not. I will say that on my first visit to the UK in 1979 I was amazed, as an American, at the dearth of actual restaurants in the smaller cities and towns. Typically a hotel, pubs, and one Chinese takeaway was about it. (And while you could have an evening meal in a pub, nobody else did, which made it feel creepy.) By the time I returned in 1992 there were more options. But that was the first time I had pizza in Britain, which was utterly inadequate on that and every subsequent occasion. I hope it's better now.

[naath]

there is a lot of pizza choice

[calimac]

There were a lot of pizza choices in Britain in the 1990s. I tried several, because I couldn't believe they would all be that horrible. They were.

Eventually I stopped trying, so it might be better now, or maybe not.

[bens_dad]

2. Tennessee looks like it fits the bill too, though if you insist on land to land but don't allow islands,then getting to Kentucky would take an accurate compass on your trip "across" Kentucky Lake.

musk

[snippy]

I mean, he says that now. But he has many times shown he'll blatantly lie about his motives.

Re: musk

[andrewducker]

Entirely true. https://www.tumblr.com/andrewducker/727923437983694848?source=share

[anna_wing]

On my monthly Saturday exeats from my boarding-school in the early 1980s, my preferred lunch option was a nice ham salad wholemeal roll from a bakery in the small town nearby into which we were decanted by the bus (I tried Coronation Chicken once for curiosity's sake; never again), followed by an apple turnover if I was feeling peckish, eaten either in a little churchyard garden if it wasn't raining, or window-shopping in the cobbled-street part of town, which had plenty of awnings under which to shelter.

[andrewducker]

Nice food from local bakers is the best.

[autopope]

The ageing trend among Christians in the UK if extrapolated suggests that by 2050 or thereabouts the average self-identified Christian will be 70.

Coupled with declining life expectancy due to the ongoing COVID pandemic (it's a vascular disease, it fucks all your organ systems, the cardiovascular death rate goes up after you've had it and overall life expectancy is falling) and climate change, this suggests that Christianity in the UK is heading for a near-extinction event by mid-century.

(My guess is that most likely they'll reduce to a hardline core of fundamentalist sects that emphasize fecundity and raise barriers to defection out of the group: they may even start to increase in time. But we'll see a decline in moderate Christians as they age or switch to "no religion". As indeed has happened in Judaism since the 1970s.)

[andrewducker]

Yes. People who were Christians "because that was the cultural norm" are going away. I'm curious to see where the equilibrium is.