Network Rail invited me to take a tour of signalling through the decades, starting with the Littlehampton Signal Box - still operating semaphore signals - th...
There's a few semaphore signals left on the Hexham line. There's no significant junctions the whole length of the line, but there used to be, and it's double track, so I imagine under normal operation it doesn't need much attention.
A lot of the infrastructure has been reduced to short sidings and the like for engineering work. There's also crossing points between the tracks which spend 99% of their time normal. I suppose if you're at a possession to work, there's no real need to electronic signals.
Wasn't there something about an accident at a Thetford level crossing because that line was on a special, completely different computer system at Cambridge Power Signal box, which everyone hated using and was confused by? Or am I misremembering?
@Sion [main] NSTR. Basically as you say but the driver needs permission from the signaller to get the token. Level crossings seem to be either user worked, open, or automatic.
@Sarah Brown When I was up along the Cumbrian coast with @Ben Harris we got chatting with a signaller somewhere around Drigg. Apparently moves to upgrade the signalling along that route got nixed because it was felt having people on the ground monitoring train movements was better for the security of flask trains. (Both the low level repository and Sellafield are up there.)
@ajlanes I think all the open crossings are on private farm tracks. Hit a cow on one once. Messy. Missed advance ticket connection and guard took some persuading that I was trying to use a later train because the service I'd been on had hit a cow.
The working signal box I know with token exchange is Pantyffynnon at the southern end. Then it's all single track north from there, apart from a few double-tracked stations for passing (including here). Which I guess means there must be some point operations as well as signals.
@Sion [main] There’s a delay attribution code EXT ANIMAL for attributing a delay to “animals not under the control of Network Rail”. This begs a question, obviously.
Reading the Hugo-Winning "A City on Mars", which refers to a provision in the Colombian constitution declaring Colombian sovereignty over a piece of geostationary orbit. Here's that provision. constituteproject.org/constitu…
Regrettably, there are people out there who seem to find a complaint in every activity. It is not that the glass is half-empty, it is that the glass it the wrong temperature, wrong colour, badly designed, and probably made in a country that they disapprove of. So grit the teeth and don't get wound up when these people come into your life (just hope they move on soon).
OK, here we go: Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.
Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.
As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.
This is the first place ballot only, the second place is calculated by treating the winner as eliminated and rerunning the election. I have not included the final round runoff against "No Award" as this year that's all uninteresting.
Saw someone elsewhere assert that Britain is “one of the least corrupt countries in the world”, and couldn’t let that go unchallenged, so here’s what I said:
Only because of this one weird loophole, which I will explain below:
For the last decade, the previous government has been awarding public contracts for infrastructure, etc, to what are essentially shell companies run by their mates. These companies then do the bare minimum for as long as possible, which if you drive round the UK, is why you see all those road “improvement” works which do nothing and take forever and never seem to have anyone working. It took two years to replace a roundabout with a set of traffic lights near my apartment, for example. Other examples: large amounts of “PPE equipment” during Covid which turned out to be useless junk.
Obviously they aren’t actually spending anything but a trivial amount going through the motions, so what happens to the rest of the money, which let’s remember, was raised by taxes.
Well, it gets d
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Saw someone elsewhere assert that Britain is “one of the least corrupt countries in the world”, and couldn’t let that go unchallenged, so here’s what I said:
Only because of this one weird loophole, which I will explain below:
For the last decade, the previous government has been awarding public contracts for infrastructure, etc, to what are essentially shell companies run by their mates. These companies then do the bare minimum for as long as possible, which if you drive round the UK, is why you see all those road “improvement” works which do nothing and take forever and never seem to have anyone working. It took two years to replace a roundabout with a set of traffic lights near my apartment, for example. Other examples: large amounts of “PPE equipment” during Covid which turned out to be useless junk.
Obviously they aren’t actually spending anything but a trivial amount going through the motions, so what happens to the rest of the money, which let’s remember, was raised by taxes.
Well, it gets donated back to the ruling party as “political donations”, and then if the pretend contractor does a good enough job of this, they get an knighthood, or even a seat in the House of Lords for “services rendered”.
Now you might think that this sounds corrupt, and you would be right. It sounds deeply corrupt, but apparently it’s not because a lot of the global agencies which work out corruption indices are based in, checks notes, London, and are probably in on the scam, and get to define what “corruption” means, and define it to mean, “not this”.
Et voila! You have a country with one of the biggest wealth gaps in Europe funnelling vast amounts of public money to populist spaffers in government, all legal, laundered and sanitised.
The whole of UK society is like this. It’s how it works, and once you see it you either join in, or walk away in disgust.
@Captain_Jack_Sparrow @partnumber2 If you can't see that the fanboy comment was a joke based on your own statement then you're either not paying or not being a good faith actor.
@Captain_Jack_Sparrow @partnumber2 Passive aggressive much? Yes I probably should get a life but it's pretty difficult being physically disabled & autistic & traumatized but thanks for highlighting that.
@Captain_Jack_Sparrow @partnumber2 This is what you responded to. Where I'm very clearly not making a generalisation. You replied to this. This is what you've been basing your whole tirade on.
'People don't realise how corrupt the UK is because the British (let's be honest mainly English) know how to spin, minimise, evade & manipulate like no others. Even the British public has zero clue just how corrupt it is."
You engaged with me. You started insulting me. You wouldn't drop it. But please tell everyone how I'm the bully.
Remember when we thought that the internet was going to be a wonderful thing for the advancement of human knowledge instead of the Library of Babel, with Hitler as the librarian?
I do sadly. And, in quiet moments, I interrogate my part, as a Principal Consultant for a very large international IT services company in the mid nineties, cheerleading for the fabulous future we were going to have with the sum of human knowledge freely on tap. I made the gross error of assuming people were good and kind and honest, like me.
@christineburns I see it like anything a tool, which reflects those that use it. Currently we have rich fascists who control parts of it. But they don’t control it all. Basically capitalism ruined a lot of it so I avoid those bits.
@SteveClough I think it depends on how you use it and who you depend on for the archiving of the knowledge / footage / art.
If all The Internet someone sees is Twitter and Instagram, then yeah, I can see why you would call it the Library of Babel with Hitler as the librarian.
But for those who are publishing their own blogs and sharing files so that art made for human entertainment remains preserved it can be a slightly different experience.
The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frank
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The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frankly, fascist sympathies are too heavily embedded within the ruling classes and security services of those countries, and removing them would involve a level of pain and commitment to principle that those in a position to actually do so are not willing to entertain.
What should be, at a bare minimum, in place is a commitment to uncovering and removing fascism from all levels of public life, backed by robust and mandatory civics education.
Western democracies are utterly incapable of doing this, and instead think that they can accommodate their own fascist undercurrents without them becoming overwhelming.
But with the dismantling of their own welfare states, they have nothing to fall back on, and so when economic shocks hit, the shit they have been hiding rapidly bubbles to the surface.
We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
“We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
@Idealistic Pragmatist :mstdn: It's somewhat notable that while the allies DID remove some of the most egregious fascists from what was left of German civil society after the war, I'm not sure how much the Soviet Union did, and the support for AfD is strongest by far in former East Germany.
It really blows my mind when a country explicit forbids fascist organizations in their constitution and then the constitutional court keeps approving the existence of multiple fascist parties, one of them very successful.
@Llwynog It has to be a continuous process, because if there's one thing that these bastards can do, it's play the long game.
But first, they need to root them out of their own parties.
Second, they need to fucking condemn shit which is currently being normalised or presented as "legitimate concerns".
Third, they need to divert significant resources into proper civics education to create a populace that is politically literate and able to spot and critically analyse their rhetoric and dog whistles.
And fourthly, there needs to be an understanding that it is an utterly illegitimate political stance, that is not to be tolerated in a society that values human rights. There need to be laws that proscribe fascist organisations. They need to be enforced, and the courts overseeing them need to kept free of the sort of creeping political influence that has caused institutional capture in the US.
the "western democracies" haven't taken fascism seriously because they were instrumental in its creation. they didn't try to lessen the influence of fascism after the second world war because they created it in the first place. they won't try to reduce it because fascism is essential to "western democracy".
John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of canada, inspired Hitler with his white supremacist screeds about "Aryan race".
the nation states who pretend to be a bolster against fascism did absolutely nothing to stop it when they had the chance. canada and USA gave no official support to the revolutionaries of the Spanish civil war. the Stalinists in Spain worked to prevent revolution, which fed dead antifascist bodies to Franco, who had Hitler's military support. the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade, which came from canada, an anti-fascist volunteer brigade which went to Spain to fight Franco, received no support. most of them didn't come back.
canada turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape Germany. canada had also put thousands of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps. nevermind the "residential schools" and what the reserve system for Indigenous people used to be. (guess who Hitler learned to use concentration camps from
the "welfare state" has always been a fascist idea. it was social democrats, read: reformers of capitalism, not socialists, who created things like welfare and universal healthcare which, while they seem like good ideas on their face, just look at what's happening now when the capitalists decide to dismantle these systems, which was bound to happen.
if you want to learn a quick history of "social democracy", find out who the Bolsheviks really were, and who had no problem with letting the NSDAP march in Germany.
it's not an accident that the ruling class is fascist. they invented this shit. it serves no purpose other than to uphold a white supremacist ruling status quo.
if you hate fascism, ask your doctor if tyrranicide is right for you!!
Another name for hydrochloric acid is muriatic acid. My Latin ears immediately pricked and wondered if this was squished down mice (mus, muris) or something to do with destroying a wall (murus, muri). But no, it's derived from the Latin muriaticus meaning "pickled", from muria "brine". Thus neatly connecting it to another name for hydrochoric acid: spirit of salt.
@wynke I have just looked up "offal" to see if this CW was in fact labelled strictly correctly, and I'm facepalming at not realising hitherto that it's cognate with _afval_ (and _Abfall_).
@pseudomonas That one was pretty obvious to me, but then I'm Dutch so I learned 'afval' first. (And my brain really likes to find these connections between languages, although I miss many too.)
A good word in the lingo of the Olympics is "repechage" which is a sort of second chance to get through to the next stage of a competition. I assume it's from the French and means something like "fishing again"
I think most "communities" are like this, tbh, even the fluffy ones, once you get under their skin. The more I see of society, the more I like plants. It all seems to be fine, until there starts being a *thing* independent of the individual pairs of relationships. Then it falls apart.
TERFs having a normal one, destroying women’s sports because some of the cis competitors maybe remind them a bit of trans woman, none of whom ever qualify for anything anyway, even when allowed to compete.
@KateKarnage I always forget who said "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit", but it seems really applicable here. (I know it from Flavia Dzodan but IIRC she's quoting someone else).
@Cyberspice Mm, I think I first encountered the term when @Sarah Brown was learning to SUP. No weirder than any other weird word in a specific context, like "squelch" when talking about radio.
Its a fudging device with a couple of buttons, a wheel and an optical sensor, why would you need updatable software when current os drivers can take care of the task fine! FFS! Down with capitalism and greedy bastards.
Cass deserves to go down alongside Wakefield in my opinion. This is a wholly biased piece of work, produced to order, and to suit an agenda, and that agenda is profoundly hostile to trans people. erininthemorning.com/p/british…
The British Medical Association, the professional organization representing doctors in the United Kingdom, has called for a public critique of the review and to bar its implementation.
Arrived on time, would have had plenty of time to make our connection of 15 min. But No. This was not bookable, only the one with 75 min layover. And thanks to the mandatory reservations, you can't just hop on the earlier train. Spain, wanna work on this or invest another billion on a new high speed line? Both saves one hour. Choose wisely. #Madrid Puerta de Atocha, #Castilla #España #TrainTravel #connection #Reservation
seriously! There are a lot of parts I'm sure I don't understand, but even just the experience of sexism my trans friends have told me about are so illuminating.
Why researchers aren't begging you all for your insights is beyond me.
and clearly since it is so unknowable, male and female must be complete opposites that could never possibly understand each other, live equitably, etc.
Speaking only for myself (a cis woman), I'd worry that it might seem like an impolite question to ask a trans person. I wouldn't ever ask such a thing, unless I knew the person quite well (and even then I might hesitate). I wouldn't want to make someone feel "othered" just to satisfy my own curiosity.
By its nature most dealings with estate agents tend to be one-offs, with not much repeat business in the short term. They've probably got a new marketing chap who hasn't realised that yet.
American Christians will tell everyone who isn’t them that we’re “special snowflakes” who need to toughen up, and in their next breath go utterly fucking nuclear on Facebook because the French dared to depict Bacchanalia.
TERFs be like, “biology is immutable” as they sit there converting grass seed to skeletal muscle after having replaced >90% of their body mass in the last few years, while being descended from literal fish that breathed water.
Just gonna preempt the “trans woman said ODD, that’s ableist, ha gotcha!” takes, I do in fact have ADHD with ODD so if you’re tempted, maybe just STFU instead?
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games kicked off on Friday night with a glitzy opening ceremony, and after organisers of the show decided to include a segment featuring drag queens, right-wingers are once again branding this type of self-expression and art as…
Literal grown ass adults thinking the devil is real, and complaining that he’s running the olympics or something. Fuck’s actual sake. Get a fucking grip.
hahaha I grew up Catholic in the 1980s and the satanic panic in the U.S. was very real. My mom and stepdad really believed the conspiracy theory that the company Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan and communicated diabolical messages with their old crescent-moon logo. Now, QAnon is basically the same thing—baby boomers giving each other the chilly willies with spooky stories.
I assume all those beautiful queer performers didn't go down well with them, either. I, on the other hand, had a constant grin on my face at how the organisers were rubbing it in their faces.
kæt
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •There's a few semaphore signals left on the Hexham line. There's no significant junctions the whole length of the line, but there used to be, and it's double track, so I imagine under normal operation it doesn't need much attention.
A lot of the infrastructure has been reduced to short sidings and the like for engineering work. There's also crossing points between the tracks which spend 99% of their time normal. I suppose if you're at a possession to work, there's no real need to electronic signals.
Sarah Brown
in reply to kæt • •kæt
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Alexandra Lanes
Unknown parent • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Sion [main]
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •@ajlanes I think all the open crossings are on private farm tracks. Hit a cow on one once. Messy. Missed advance ticket connection and guard took some persuading that I was trying to use a later train because the service I'd been on had hit a cow.
The working signal box I know with token exchange is Pantyffynnon at the southern end. Then it's all single track north from there, apart from a few double-tracked stations for passing (including here). Which I guess means there must be some point operations as well as signals.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sion [main] • •Sion [main]
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sion [main] • •