d6y @d6y@mastodon.social

Operating system feature request: never default to "Label Writer" for the default printer, even if the A4 printer is offline.

I was at Fully Charged Live yesterday. Saw lots of electric cars, and all sorts of eco thing, as you’d expect. But the thing I was most thrilled about was toothpaste tablets. Ie toothpaste not in a plastic tube. Makes total sense. Hope it works. From: https://nonplasticbeach.com/

TIL: “The Garibaldi biscuit was named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and leader of the struggle to unify Italy. Garibaldi made a popular visit to South Shields in England in 1854.” (Wikipedia)

“...this pursuit of happiness can be stressful – and research suggests that it actually makes many people unhappy” 🤦‍♂️

http://theconversation.com/striving-for-happiness-could-be-making-you-unhappy-heres-how-to-find-your-own-path-115104

Museum of the moon, Queens Park, Brighton.

Re-writing aliases, across 4 million based, into a canonical form. 18k edits later and it still works. Interesting because...successful “tinkering” always is interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/15/cambridge-scientists-create-worlds-first-living-organism-with-fully-redesigned-dna?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

It’s not a desert, but looking at the aerial photos of Dungeness I can see why it might be described as one.

From 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/10/britains-only-desert-goes-on-sale-for-15m-dungeness-estate

I think my neighbours have had enough of seagulls on their roof. Some kind of bird-of-prey kite installed:

New old word for me: “gigglemud”, constantly smiling.

I’ve not been to the Francis Crick Institute before. Funky!

London, March: “ScalaBridge London is a community for people who are underrepresented in technology to learn Scala or improve their skill in the language. “

https://www.scalabridgelondon.org/

Specifically, Mercury is closest to Earth 46% of the time. Venus 36%. Mars is closest 18% of the time.

TIL: the closest planet to the Earth, on average, is Mercury.

Catching up on More or Less podcasts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001y9p

Before they vanish from iplayer, do yourself a favour and catch Prof Alice Roberts / Prof Aoife McLysaght Royal Institute xmas lectures. Even if it’s just the first 3.5 minutes. It’s fab.

http://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/2018-who-am-i

Underground radioactive decay produces heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima bomb. Every 3 seconds. This is normal.

From "A day in the life of Earth" which you should catch on iPlayer if you can: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0001vjc/a-day-in-the-life-of-earth

Does the iterative fit? at the Turner Contemporary (which is closed boxing day)

Weird: laundry symbols/pictograms are not included in the current Unicode standard. Not that I can find, anyway.

TIL: "copyright law does not protect the taste of cheese"

Source: https://theconversation.com/copyright-law-does-not-protect-the-taste-of-cheese-108356

At The Skiff for a merry Skiffmas Party.

Looks like a big breakthrough on an important problem:

"AlphaFold topped a table of 98 entrants, predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins, compared with three out of 43 for the second placed team in the same category."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/02/google-deepminds-ai-program-alphafold-predicts-3d-shapes-of-proteins