Interesting Links for 08-07-2025

[andrewducker]

1. 7 Engineers Suspended After $2.3 Million Bridge Includes Bizarre 90-Degree Turn

(tags:architecture design epicfail India )

2. Edinburgh Airport liquid limit increased from 100ml to two litres

(tags:airport security Technology )

3. The Time Someone Plagiarized Calvin & Hobbes and Nobody Noticed or Cared

(tags:comics plagiarism history art ai )

4. Turns out a great way to get children to want to learn their times tables is to set them to pop songs

(tags:numbers video music )

5. Employers to be banned from silencing harassed or abused staff

(tags:regulation abuse work UK law )

6. Some English children are living in 'Dickensian' poverty, says commissioner

(tags:england poverty children OhForFucksSake )

7. Electricity from large solar arrays with batteries now cheaper than from fossil plants in Germany

(tags:electricity solarpower batteries germany GoodNews )

8. O Fortuna Misheard Lyrics

(tags:music hearing words illusion funny video )

Comments

[armiphlage]

3. That's astoundingly blatant.

[dewline]

Yeah!

[simont]

#1: in the context of bridges in particular, "suspended" gave me entirely the wrong idea!

[andrewducker]

It's how you test the bridge suspension, innit?

[juan_gandhi]

Regarding this rectangular bridge, it has become as popular as that bridge in Ketchikan that leads nowhere. The difference is, the Ketchikan bridge wasn't actually built, after all.

[nancylebov]

8. There should be a cookbook.

[threemeninaboat]

Ho ho. I never re-learned my times tables after brain surgery. I might try again here, it is sometimes embarrassing.

[andrewducker]

And you never know when it might come in useful!

Definitely an instance where "just repeat it many many times" is the only way, sadly.

3

[anna_wing]

Was there much overlap in the readership of both comics?

Re: 3

[melchar]

Back in the 1980's and 1990's, when I subscribed to a print newspaper - the Mercury News, San Jose, Calif - the paper carried both as daily comics. So there was a shared audience.

3

[poshmerchant]

Sally Forth is written by Francesco Marciuliano who also writes the much edgier Medium Large. Since Sally Forth is a legacy strip and is required to be staid, buttoned up, and soulless by its story guidelines, he works within that framework there

Doing a word for word homage to a Calvin and Hobbes story would be entirely in Francesco's sense of humour as a prank or gag, much in the way that the movie Airplane! is a word for word imitation of Airport 1975. The lack of human emotion in Sally Forth would be the joke

I was following webcomic blogs fifteen years ago, so my context isn't very current, but neither is that Calvin and Hobbes homage