This ticket is odd by UK standards, and the arrangement you describe isn’t the norm. These seat reservation tickets normally specify a particular seat

If you read the paper, they’re building on existing work that shows night-time light affects the metabolism

Thanks!

Thank you - that’s a really useful answer. I’ll check them out

Thank you - I’ll have a look at that

It feels like Twitter did 12 years ago - in my experience it’s a really engaged place with high-quality conversations. It really highlights how far Twitter has fallen, and after the last couple of years on Twitter I had to re-learn how to have civil conversations with people who are acting in good faith, because I’d grown so unused to that

Any vaguely recent car is constantly reporting its location back to its manufacturer.

I’m guessing that’s Venus

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

Now imagine that, but onions

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Interestingly, my family subscription more or less halved a few months ago, which I was NOT expecting, but which was very welcome

This is greenwashing. Global aviation uses almost 100 billion gallons of fuel per year. If we even began to address a fraction of that with magic new fuels (which won’t happen) it would require incredible amounts of growing, and if we had that sort of amount of agricultural capacity available on this planet, capable of producing crops at a price the aviation industry is prepared to pay, we wouldn’t have any hunger on the world.

Don’t fall for this. There isn’t such a thing as green aviation. I’m not saying there should be no flying, but we can’t carry on as we are and magic away the consequences. In particular, don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen trying to distract you with appealing non-solutions

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

At this stage it’s a trope that people imitate, perhaps without really thinking about it. Originally it was almost certainly an ironic joke about the value of the medals, playing on the old-fashioned bite tests that would be used for for items of dubious worth

I know. But I was satirising GPT’s bland writing style, not providing facts

“Shits are frequently classified into three basic types…” and then gives 5 paragraphs of bland guff

I suspect the serious answer is that we produce mucus and sneezing as a natural response to microbes, and that’s the environment within which microbes have evolved to take advantage of the mucus and sneezing

Makes total sense: who’s working for whom? Is wheat making an effort to till the soil and find fertiliser to help us grow, or is it the other way round?

“can be” is doing some heavy lifting here. I confidently predict the amount actually recycled is a fraction of one percent