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There are 13 issues a year so they come out every four weeks and we receive each issue two or three days earlier than in the preceding calendar month. By the November issue we should be fully four weeks 'early'. In fact, last year we actually got the November issue on 30 September, and...

The excellent B1M youtube channel released a report on the Faroese tunnels just last week.

Is it excessively nerdy to point out that EE Doc Smith's Panther paperbacks featured classic Chris Foss covers whereas the above is by Colin Hay? I confess I wasn't familiar with Hay so was pleased to find the Grimm's World art in a more colourful version on tumblr

Space Perspective's website is still quoting $125,000 for their 'budget' option. That doesn't includes a meal. It doesn't say if you can bring your own snacks, bottle of water etc.

And the beeb showed their '10 years on' programme tonight, on iplayer here: Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370 Some 'new evidence' they offer is the WSPR radio signals tracking announced by Richard Godfrey over two years ago. They do say that his method is being investigated by team at...

now I feel very old... I'm pretty sure my phone doesn't have battery, UPS nor AA. Pretty sure if the mains power goes, phone doesn't work whether or not there's leccy in the phone line. I've still got my GPO phone somewhere, but - inevitably - it hasn't got a BT connector.

Don't think logarithms were thus described when I was at school! As the video concedes at the end, while Bürgi may have computed his tables as early as 1600, he didn't publish them until 1620. This was six years after Napier's version and three years after Briggs' more convenient 'common'...

Wot no 442? Akron Poltergeist German Wild Men the Haunting of William Stevens ..and lots of other stuff including Princess Di-Morrissey Conspiracy Skibidi toilet and two pages of Hunt Emerson

Just misread that as

following that second link says Allwyn bought Camelot off the Ontario Teachers in early 2023, after winning the franchise (in 2022). They are already running the old lottery but now, as you say, they get to rebrand and reinvent it.

This is the right week - it was last month's that was a week late, presumably so the FT elves could get a xmas break. Same thing happened last year. No Outcasts review I'm afraid.

Standard GWR rules for duration events allow competitors to take 5mins rest for each completed hour of activity. So cook for 12 hours then take one hour snooze, awake refreshed and ready to cook some more. Or keep going for 24 hours then sleep for two, or shorter breaks more frequently. Or do...

Thanks. I don't think that documentary contradicts what I said, but perhaps industry-sponsored records are more than pervasive than I realised. Ross and Norris would be turning in their graves...

My reading of the GWR website (I'm unregistered so based on only the 'public' info) suggests that's true of corporate activity only. There are two routes to getting a record. The 'business' route described as "An account-managed solution that will help you find the perfect record title to suit...

Yes there is. It used to be in The Book but I've not checked for a few years. We had a brief discussion on the topic in 2021. I expect Ashrita Furman is still the person to beat, his website claims he's set 700 records. oxo

Compare with: Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen. (We must know. We will know.) David Hilbert

Yes... but my thinking was that that would apply more strongly to ethnic identity than religious. So that non-observant persons of Sikh heritage might identify as ethnic Sikhs but not religious Sikhs. Evidence doesn't support my prior thinking.

If anyone is interested, a 2021 Census report on persons in England and Wales identifying as Sikh was published last Friday. It got little or no press coverage that I could see. Sikh was defined as those who stated their religion, ethnic group, or both as Sikh: 426,230 Sikh by religion only...

I used to suffer from Raynaud's syndrome, with the top third of two or three fingers losing colour and then going numb in response to cold weather. Then after fifteen minutes or so the blood would come back all tingly pins and needles. It didn't need my hands to get cold to trigger it, in fact I...

By a minor coincidence, I came across this ten-ish year old xkcd comic this morning: Birds and Dinosaurs oxo

Well remembered Swifty. Mrs McNaught was in the GBR from the early 70s through to the late 90s. The 1997 edition has a photo of her with all twenty surviving children.

Not just people, there's a lot of marketing in record setting nowadays. (To be fair, there were always firms producing eg a large pie/cheese/miscellaneous foodstuff to get in the local press, but it's a GWR strategy now if you look on the website) I've followed the 'tallest lego brick tower'...

Christmas has arrived: Hythe Mothman Cursed video games Santa's saucers Strange Stories, Amazing Facts - Stu Neville on the Reader's Digest classic Penis snatching panics plus more 50th anniversary weirdness and 80s satanic abuse panic revisited

Um, this doesn't really affect your argument - that we all experience many events and so there are lots of opportunities for possible coincidences, and we notice the remarkable coincidences while ignoring the much more common non-coincidences. I agree with that. But, as a paid up statto, can I...

Nice piece in The Atlantic about personal privacy vs commercial publicity as spaceflight becomes routine.

Wikipedia says it's to do with atmosphere but it's not well-defined. The intro to the article includes The Kármán line has no particular physical meaning, in that there is no noticeable change in the characteristics of the atmosphere across it, but is important for legal and regulatory...

Yes quite so. But the more broadly-accepted though largely arbitrary altitude is 100km There's obviously a big difference between suborbital and orbital spaceflight. As we learnt at school, near earth orbit requires a velocity of 17,000 mph; Virgin Galactic's Space Ship two reaches about 2,000...

No, it's essentially an arbitrary figure. 100 km is the FAI-sanctioned boundary for 'space'; NASA use 50 miles.

Nope. Yesterday's flight reached 'only' 87.4km (54.3 miles) at apogee. Virgin Galactic haven't said they are planning to fly to 100km any time soon.

That's plausible. The Etymology given in the OED is that originally toe-rags were literally strips of cloth wrapped around toes and feet by tramps in place of socks, and hence the term was used to describe tramps and vagrants. Other sources suggest some link to "Tuareg". oxo

And another flight yesterday though we only got to hear who flew after the event: spacenews.com perhaps three white men not quite going into space is already not newsworthy.

Post came early, just before 10am. Envelope dry and intact. from the FT's spine: UFOs over America Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose Richard Freeman's Gef Pilgrimage New Lands at 100 Peru vs Aliens oxo

Absolutely: the picture shows an ordinarily proportioned horse twice as tall and hence perhaps eight times the weight of the tallest recorded examples - which are around 2,000 to 2,500 lbs. It would weight as much as a (large) African elephant. While googling for Zeus I came across multiple...

So is Big Jake: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2021/7/big-jake-the-worlds-tallest-horse-dies-666548 Guinness don't list a new tallest living horse. A quick google brings up Zeus as a contender 13 years ago, but no evidence that Zeus is still alive. oxo

I found it hard to see the face - almost had to shut my eyes before it appeared. And unlike some pareidolia it is easily 'unseen'. I think that's because the girl's hair and face don't form part of the alternative face

My experience today too, unfortunately. I don't have a dog, but the postie did a fair imitation, scrunching the FT up and shoving it through the letterbox so that the damp envelope ripped. Not spotted any toothmarks yet.

Guinness World Records don't authenticate records where there is an existing recognised world body and as the report says, in this case the record was set at the 2004 World Championship so there must be an international governing structure with national affiliates. I just couldn't find any...

Quite so. Here's the project summary from the NCAR website. "The primary goals of our project are to produce ensemble convection-permitting regional climate simulations of convective storms in South America driven by large climate model ensembles in order to: (1) assess the influence of...

I'm surprised that no-one's pointed out there's one mayo, but it goes by two names.

My very hazy memory is that the picture is of post-decimalisation black jacks and fruit salads - didn't they get bigger at that point? I can't find any other images online to confirm this.

Mine arrived an hour ago while i was moving furniture. I thought there was a five-week gap between 431 and 432. But it Gordon R posting early last month. I'll actually start reading it now. oxo edited: to realign the cosmos

Bit of a stretch to call 80,000 feet the 'edge of space' The American space balloon shown upthread last year, plans to go up to 100,000 feet. I'm sure the French will do better food though.

Red Right Hand and its parent album Let Love In came out in 1994. You have a lot of back catalogue to catch up on.

Pleased they included the golden ratio as a good approximation between miles and km, though not the consequence that you can use successive terms of the fibonacci sequence to convert.

I couldn't see the child in the original until I got the cues from Gordon's pic: I can now see the child in the original if I concentrate on the man's eye until it becomes her face. If I look at the man's hair, nose, moustache or chin - pretty much all of it - it remains the man's face.

Indeed. To return to slagging off lazy journos: That's actually quite a good analogy: 28 cyclists' power output = one electric kettle! Unfortunately it's not true: Guy showed his kettle drawing 2800 watts so that rates the cyclists at 100 watts each. 100 watts is the rule of thumb output...

Great post! Real world reckoning based on actual experience and comparison is very sensible and it's what we all do all the time. But this thread started with scriptwriters -not people actually doing stuff- reaching for comparisons that were further from everyday experience than the original...

An Enviro400 bus without passengers weighs 11 tonnes according to wikipedia so the glaciers lost about 250 million London buses-weight. Easier of course to imagine the buses carrying passengers. If the buses were all fully loaded you'd only need around 150 million of them... Plus about 10...

According to wikipedia, SpaceshipOne flew above the Karman line three times though one of those was marginal. The X-15 exceeded 80km 13 times but only two of those went over 100km. SpaceshipTwo, the one-day-maybe passenger carrying plane has flown four times so far, each time to between 80 and 90km.

Yes it is a Red Kite. They are very smart birds that only swoop down low when they are sure I don't have my camera on me. This shot isn't quite in focus but at least kitey was hovering. Probably not a factor in Catseye's transaction, but I wonder how often shoppers pick up the Waitrose mag...