In Canberra they’re black overlaid with iridescent colours. They fly noisily when it’s dark

Some people have a very strong opinion that wanking is bad, probably a sin too. They’ll make up whatever they need to, especially now as they need to fight the advice that regular ejaculations protect against prostate cancer

The post appears to be about “perfect flowers” which are flowers that have both male and female parts, joking on that and human sexuality

Shame he never tested the switch’s continuity between the connected pin and the case in the two switch positions

For clean power it’s now actually practical to power the amp by batteries

I don’t believe you could save the emissions from animal agriculture. Most animal ag is on land that isn’t suitable for growing crops, if it was ended, the land would become useless and left to go wild where it would support just as many just as polluting animals, but with no possibility of treating the pollution problem as no one would be managing the wild animals

He’s saying bug lite is a low calorie drink for dieting spiders

Electrical engineering is designing stuff an electrician might work on, something that’s part of the grid, electronic engineers work on stuff with chips in them. Most of the stuff Big Clive shows was designed by an electronic engineer

My favourite subjects in school and university were the humanities, but I landed in IT systems analysis which turned out to be fun for me, especially now I’m good at it, but I’m pretty trapped there by ok pay and a very generous retirement plan (we called it golden handcuffs back when there were many of us with access to it — since the early 2000s it got less generous.

I feel like I could run a brewpub in my retirement, I wouldn’t need it to survive as I’d be on a good pension indexed to the CPI*, and it would work as a one man operation

(Consumer price index, the cost of living)

What he’s saying is there is always a bulge of water pointing at the moon (and another pointing away from it) the earth spins so the land sees the bulge coming and retreating as our bit of coast passes under the moon

It’s a bad description because the water also spins with the rest of the world, so though there always is a bulge that is stationary relative to the moon, there is always different water being part of it.

Also part of the tide is solar, if you see a highest high tide or lowest low tide, it is very likely it will be at a full or new moon as that is when the moon and sun are aligned, with the moon on one side or the other of Earth (or lagging that by days due to land getting in the way)

You know it’s too expensive to fix for the people and companies with more wealth than 99.99999% of us, and with the decision maker(s) not valuing any future beyond their expected lifespan, and I don’t think any of them think the previous generation will be the last generation to die

There is a calendar that uses 28, 35, 28 day months each quarter for 364 days, with the last quarter having an extra week (or having an intercalary week so they can pretend quarters will be all equal) in leap years

Every 7 or 6 years for a leap week 12 month calendar, it would be four times longer for a leap month, and the formula is a bit too complex for people to do in their heads, but we all refer to computer calendars anyway

A 364 day calendar with 13 even months, or 12 months alternating between 35 and 28 days or whatever would also let you use the same calendar every year (as opposed to my tea towel that has a calendar that is only useful in leap years that start on a Tuesday — the last was 2008 when it was bought, next is 2036)

Though it would be too expensive to change the calendar, and a 364 + leap weeks calendar doesn’t track the seasons as well as 365 + leap day calendar, I really like the symmetry 454 calendar

One of the good things about IT in giant organisations is teams often get big enough to let programmers specialise into the job they enjoy. In my team one programmer does all the auto unit testing, the other two do more of the programming

In my job, I haven’t found other analysts who want to do all the admin

My favourite thing has always been English language, so I was disappointed you didn’t think of an “apposite opposite anecdote” (though your experience was both apposite and opposite)

My phone thinks apposite isn’t a real word. Silly phone.

Funny that the most correct answer was also the worst spelled

One of the carnivore doctors (Dr Anthony Chaffey, I think) does a presentation named plants are trying to kill us. The central idea is to eat only meat because you can’t overeat it, you can’t poison yourself with meat. But plants don’t have teeth, claws, hooves or horns, they use poison

A neutron bomb but different

But if you asked for milk and they gave you anything made from a plant, you’d be right to reject it

Milk with no qualifiers is cow juice