Interesting Links for 14-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. U.K. Museum Says Roman Emperor Was a Trans Woman

(tags:transgender Rome history )

2. The Surprising Things That Helped Make 2023 the Hottest Year Ever

(tags:globalwarming doom )

3. How the legal system made it so easy for the Post Office to destroy the lives of the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses - and how the legal system then made it so hard for them to obtain justice

(tags:law UK postoffices OhForFucksSake )

4. A Mountain of Used Clothes Was Dumped in Chile's Desert. Then It Went Up in Flames

(tags:Chile waste clothing environment OhForFucksSake )

5. Panama Canal drought moves Maersk to start using land bridge for cargo

(tags:shipping drought canal )

Comments

[armiphlage]

The water recovery system they mentioned is interesting.

When you have two locks side-by-side, and one lock is emptying at the same time as the other is filling, you discharge water from the emptying lock into the filling lock, instead of discharging it to the canal. This will save 50% of your water at most.

To get to the 60% (or more) mentioned in the article, and remove the need to synchronize your lock usage, you can create many small storage basins next to the locks. When the top 10% of a full lock is emptying, you discharge it into a high storage basin; when the next 10% is emptying, you discharge it into a somewhat lower storage basin, and so on. When you are filling a lock, you fill from the lowest storage basin first, moving to the next higher basin in sequence. It saves water, at the expense of greater capital costs.

[cmcmck]

1. There's no certainty as to whether Elagabalus was trans but it's a possibility.

[andrewducker]

I agree that we can't be certain. But it does seem reasonable as an assumption.

[calimac]

3. Dipping into the judge's rulings, but not reading the whole thing, I'm gathering that "the computer made mistakes" means not that it couldn't perform arithmetical operations accurately, but that in complicated transactions it was putting monetary data in the wrong bins. Would that be an accurate summation?

[andrewducker]

That sounds about right from my understanding.

[reverancepavane]

The High Court judgement on the Post Office case is quite entertaining reading, being full of Mr Justice Frasier's acerbic commentary on the quality of the witnesses provided by the Post Office, whilst still maintaining an outward neutrality. There were definite reasons why he referred some of the evidence provided to the DPP for review as to the possibility for very public perjury prosecutions.

It also points of that the Post Office actually profited from these missing funds, since unattributable monies were held in special "suspense funds" that became Post Office property after three years (if unclaimed). And rule one of any accounting system is that if you have anything unattributed in your system, let alone sums this size, something has definitely gone seriously wrong with your accounting system.

Really worth a read if you don't have serious problems with your blood pressure.

The last time I saw so much arse-covering was the Robodebt Royal Commission down here in Australia, which was really quite pathetic. Although they did have someone die before the commission, so it all tended to be her fault according to the recollection of the other senior bureaucrats when they could be finally pinned down by the barrister assisting. [Whilst this was caused by the misuse of a computer system, it has the problem that the people involved had been given legal advice to this end by inside and outside counsel, repeatedly told by the Administrative Affairs Tribunal that they were in error and in violation of the appropriate laws.] And the politicians who actually had responsibility for the actions of their department and government escaped scot free.