Blatant nerdsniping bid. Given any two railway stations, you can compute p, the cheapest price of a return ticket between the two, and d, the Levenshtein edit distance between the names of the stations. Find two stations which maximise p/d. And no, "Queen's Park" and "Charing Cross" do not get to omit their "(Glasgow)" and "(London)" disambiguators.

A super off-peak return between Nottingham and Mottingham is ninety quid, but we can surely do better than that?

Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo voting - still working on this, but first pass for the Best Fancast voting.

Coode Street Podcast transfers won it for Octothorpe, after a late surge for Worldbuilding for Maschocists fuelled by Publishing Rodeo transfers #Glasgow2024

Original data at glasgow2024.org/wp-content/upl…

Can we talk about baby Moorhens? 🐥

#BabyBirdGlowUps

You need a tachograph if you are driving under UK/AETR working hours rules UNLESS you are collecting sea coal. You still need to keep to the time rules, but don't need the tachograph.

There are similar exemptions if you're going to repair a lighthouse, or are transporting a circus, or carrying live fish to an entrepreneurial activity within 100km(*), or returning milk containers to a farm...

But strangely, while all those exemptions are given in a schedule to the act, but sea coal is included in the main statute, ie roughly, "if in the schedule (lighthouses, circuses, entrepreneurial fish, etc) OR sea coal".

As far as I can tell (it's complicated; I'm not sure), a lighthouse repair person or their friend taking fish to an AGM doesn't have to *follow* the rules.

The unique thing about sea coal hauliers is that they (and only they) *do* have to follow the rules, but don't have to prove it.

But why? Delving into it further ... 🧵

(*) I assume these are entrepreneurial fisherfolk, not entrepreneurial fish.

If Kamala Harris picks Josh Shapiro to be her VP pick, understand that this is who will be on the ticket with her:

"Palestinians will not coexist peacefully. They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” - Josh Shapiro.

Josh Shapiro volunteered to serve in the IDF.

#USPol #Democrats #Harris2024

I know much of the commentary around the Olympic a boxing thing is well meaning, but please avoid using or boosting the term “biological woman”.

“Cis woman” is more accurate. “Biological woman” is meaningless. Which bit of someone’s biology do you mean? Hormones, primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, chromosomes? (Bear in mind most people don’t know what their chromosomes are)

The term comes from transphobic efforts to other trans women and has no other value.

My submission for Slanted - Experimental Type 3.0:

Unicode Spaces
There are invisible characters in the UTF-8 unicode character encoding standard. This experiment measures the width of each invisible character with p5.js to dynamically manipulate the kerning of single characters. By analysing the brightness of pixels of an image and inserting white spaces at the corresponding lines and characters, image patterns are emerging in the text through white space.

#utf8 #typography #p5js #slanted

British Medical Association calls anti-trans Cass Review “unsubstantiated”. bma.org.uk/bma-media-centre/bm…

This is major: the BMA is the major union for doctors in the UK and not a niche group, most doctors are members.