Viewing profile — KineticLensman

You'd also have things like bus doors now being on the wrong side (traffic-side), road curvature being wrong (e.g. motorway junctions and entry/exit ramps), let alone car mirrors a…

Thiss is a very good example. Consider the difference between "he's hard working" and "he's hard work". My wife ran into this when some German co-workers were describing a colleagu…

It's on the same site but there is some institutional nonsense that means getting onto the Bletchley site doesn't guarantee access to the NMoC, which is only open on Tuesday, Thurs…

Used in WW2 to refer to radar engineers, bouncing bomb designers etc

Yes. Especially for owls like the Great Grey, it shows how small the bird is inside all of those feathers.

What isn't mentioned is that owl feathers are generally less oily than many other birds. This makes them softer and thus quieter, but the penalty is that that they get water-logged…

No, that was "Foot heads arms body", when Michael Foot became the chair of CND.

Birds have all sorts of optimizations that improve efficiency, some of which make them very different from mammals. Their lungs are different from ours in two respects. Firstly, th…

> If someone calls you a "bird brain", perhaps that could be taken as a complement! Trying to do more with less! (source - worked at a raptor conservancy). It depends on which bird…

> Vision fails first, not memory, or thinking I've had two complete blackouts due to Ventricular Fibrillation, and one near blackout where the VF stopped after nine seconds (as rep…

> That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction. Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. Ho…

> the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise) (Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unst…

I followed the links and got www.thejispot.com’s server IP address could not be found.

Here's a link with contact details: https://www.durhamvintage.co.uk/ Most of their advertising / info is probably on Facebook. Their physical store is in Bishop Auckland, a small t…

At Uni we had a stable of Vaxen.

> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with. My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothe…

Yes. Kryten had definitely been at the pies

In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to c…

In Vivaldi, point insertion seems to be x-offset to the left or right of the mouse click.

When I discovered that you can daisy chain cable ties, I felt that I’d found a new law of DIY physics

See 'genetic programming' for techniques that are sort of based on this idea. Typical approach is to have a problem representation (gene analogues) that can be used to create a pop…

> despite air being the same everywhere. The air may be the same everywhere, but roads and safety laws aren't.

So he was a Robber Ducky?

E.g. with phrases such as "Let us go and respire the air" (which I am now keen to use in an actual conversation)

For another work inspired by The Tempest, Forbidden Planet! Caliban == Monster From the Id, if you squint hard enough