This continues my belief that the mission of some (most?) conservatives is to undo everything good and repeat every mistake of the last two centuries.

There’s now another very good vintage film of a punchcutter at work: P. H. Rädisch at Enschedé in 1957. It’s incredible to realize that if you look at a book made before about 1880 in a museum, every letter at every size had to be individually carved out by hand - and they often look so precise! Of course pantographic…

You may find this amusing. Literally made by the same people, in the same factories.

Don’t think that’s entirely fair. I know some people who work there, and several of them are so smart I don’t know how their heads don’t fall off. They also employ a lot of top chemical engineers who really do care about reducing pollution etc. Although it’s certainly fun to realise that all these products, with all…

Yes.

This is so profoundly depressing. We need great leaders who can stand up for stopping global warming, but many greens have quirky, strange beliefs, or can’t stand up to the people in their movement who do.

Exactly. This is why after seeing your tweet I’m so glad you’ve written this.

Crazy people gonna crazy. It’s not ideal but there’ll always be somebody. Twitter can’t escape so easily. The fact that this person is still unbanned on Twitter - now, with this article up and Jason’s original tweet trending- is just absurd.

I suspect that’s true, though this interview was in one of the early seasons I think. I get the feeling it was a very niche proposition at the beginning. My dad said he discovered it completely by chance and then got obsessed with it.

Yeah, I noticed that. Energy and power: they’re actually not the same thing!

I don’t see that. Not that I know much about battery chemistry, but they’re mostly made of the same stuff. The cost is surely mostly the raw materials, not the design and components?

This article is teetering on the edge of a very big question I have always had about online journalism...why exactly does it all have to be in NYC?

I think part of it is that most TV/movie writers are older than the people they write about. I mean, if you came to NYC in your twenties in the 80s you’ll be looking at things through a very different lens. I remember somebody (a writer?) saying about Mozart in the Jungle that they had this problem that none of the…

Fairly simple, if (I agree) particularly cliche for female characters - research and ability to easily dream up storylines. I mean, a 22-episode season gives you a lot of time to fill up. It’s not hard to think up some interesting storylines for a magazine writer, or some crazy fashion people a fashion writer might…

There’s an entire TVTropes article on it, called “Friends Rent Control”. Pretty much says it all.

Kelsey Grammar was actually asked about this very trope in the 1990s. I remember reading his reply - something like “Yes, it’s silly. He lives better than I do, and surely I make more money...I think he bought shares in Microsoft at the right moment.”

Better reason: buy a flat (better yet a house) in New York, put it in the care of a service company, come back in fifty years to collect back rent and the keys.

Yeah, my Android phone used to do this and nothing bad happened. Can’t understand why Google didn’t put in a script forcing it to stay at 1 January 2013 or the date of the last firmware update or something.

Of course it’s a hoax, but it’s related to an old tradition in computing. Unix-based computers (not including Windows, but including most servers and Macs, iPhones and Android phones) have a clock system that defines time from 1 January 1970. My old Android phone several times reset the date to 1970 when it ran out of…

Oh, they wouldn’t accept a black guy being smart enough to make it as an astronaut. But there are some crazily stupid people out there. Take a look at this guy. And, of course, these emails only work on people who have some money to start with.

Just seen this and yeah, it’s an aesthetics thing - Frutiger considered an ‘l’ with a curve but said he vetoed it because he thought it looked ugly. The font used by British road signs does put in a curve. Many professional fonts (this one, say - see the PDF specimen) offer alternate characters which you can swap in…