Further off-topic: You're not wrong, but maybe you should be. It's one of the most pointless irregular grammar rules in English. Nobody is ever confused by the wrong usage of the apostrophe here (when spoken there's no voicing of it). Native writers of English often get it wrong. If we had an Academy Anglaise we'd just regularise this usage. I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
> I give it 50 years max before possessive "who's" is considered correct (along with "it's").
"It's" is one I've struggled with a lot. I understand "It's" -> "It is" but my brain wants to add an "'s" for possessive-ness. It just feels more right. I'm been able to mostly break that bad habit but I still don't like it.
The one that people get wrong all the time is "its" vs "it's" for exactly this reason. By the usual use of posessive apostrophe you would expect "it's" and yet that's only ever correct if you're eliding something (i.e. you mean "it is", "it has" etc.)
Honestly if we (in England) really had an institute of that kind we'd probably just end up formalising the weird spellings and grammar as being "right" instead of what we have now where our grammar rules are descriptive instead of prescriptive. Who knows how the differences with American, Indian, Australian, etc. dialects of English would be handled, but I'm sure we'd make a big mess of it somehow.
Edit: incidentally I now live in Sweden where there is such an institute, and they do seem (to my ignorant understanding) to make sensible updates to the dictionaries etc. to reflect actual modern pronounciation - but I'm still sure my homeland would figure out a way to mess it all up ;)
This is a class of errors I never made when I first learned English (mostly by reading/writing). My pronunciation was so bad that I pronounced these words differently.
It was a major milestone for me when I made my first its/it's mistake in writing :)
That said, it would depend on several other factors, not least catching the tumour early enough - and it looks like a pretty tough thing to go through even if successful.
> This is major life-changing surgery with a long and difficult "recovery". I have elected not to do this, due to existing co-morbidities from my sorted past and the expectation that the recovery would exceed my lifespan, which I'd rather keep as normal as possible.
I wish I'd known about that post before he died; I'd have sent him my best regards personally rather than just saying nice things about him online now :(
Ah, I missed that bit, thanks. My dad had (and died) of pancreatic cancer and it was too far gone for Whipple to be on the table. However I think he too might not have chosen to go ahead with it even if it had been an option.
My dad lived for two or thee years after diagnosis, mostly with fairly good QoL. He did have "NanoKnife" which seems to have helped extend things without much negative impact so that's worth looking into for those in a similar plight.
Thanks for JSON-LD (and YAML-LD) and your contributions to so many W3C specifications over mailing lists and ReSpec specification documents!
Now I'll have to finish a PR to pydantic_schemaorg to build data validators for Linked Data that - by conforming to W3C Standards - enables industry and research to describe all of the things in a giant LODcloud.
yml2vocab also processes RDFS vocabularies.
JSON-LD, for example, makes it possible for all of us to find the website URL and phone number and business hours and accessibility info for an Organization > LocalBusiness Place on the map with :latitude and :longitude fields, find and annotate CreativeWorks, ScholarlyArticles, PDF DigitalDocuments, SoftwareApplications, FHIR JSON-LD,.
JSON-LD foregoes XML parser complexity (and vulns), but because JSON-LD maps to RDF with an @context, you can use vocab URIs for XML XSD types like xsd:boolean and xsd:float64 and so on. But there's yet no standard way to express a complex number like 0.8+0.8j with XSD or RDF or JSON-LD.
I do recall a "late" at the London Science Museum where you could collect wristbands with the names of STDs to win prizes. Ok, still not very educational, but it was quite amusing to hear people trading gonorrhea for genital lice etc.
On a more serious note they do or did offer free lectures that were much more in-depth; one of the things I rather miss now that I live abroad.
In depth science lectures would definitely be a step in the right direction. I think those are gone though:
"Our evening events cover everything from cult film screenings and live performances to gripping panel discussions and exclusive premieres—we’ve got something for everyone."
It drives me absolutely bananas that the "interpretation" (fancy museum word for "signs") at science museums is so parsimonious. Some fascinating device vital to the history of an important branch of science will have a brief paragraph about the person who invented it, nothing about what it's for, and then just a date and the device name.
Often there's little or nothing further even in the museum shop. It's a crying shame.
Art museums are even worse.
"Portrait of Duke von Duke (London, 1841). Oils."
Who is this guy in the painting?! How did he merit a painting? What's unique about the style/composition/whatever?
Conversely, I went to an exhibit of Napoleonic Art and they had a whole breakdown of the symbolism. For example, Napolean liked bees as a symbol of hard work and order, apparently, and they were snuck into most depictions of him as little Easter Eggs.
Most likely, there is no special backstory and the painting was simply commissioned. And most likely, there no super special composition in that portrait and the style is exactly the same as the style of surrounding paintings.
Most paintings dont have a cool backstories. They are just paintings. Art student can see technical details of how they were done, but those are not really interesting if you are not trying to learn to paint.
"Rich people can afford a luxury" is obvious enough, but how rich did you need to be to hire that specific artist? Was Sargent knocking out two portrait a day for every local dentist or was this a one-off where the offer was simply too good to turn down? It'd be cool to know....
And of course, "commissioned by her father, a local merchant" is kind of interesting and it's even more interesting when it's not the case.
Unfortunately portraits are what used to put dinner on the table for an artist, which is why you see so many portraits of random rich person. The camera changed all that though.
Then there are the “artist statement” ladies on some exhibits where artist get to describe their work on self-aggrandizing terms that only make sense to people with a graduate degree in the field
Part of the reason for this is that the world has become deeply multi-cultural and self-aware and, as such, people in the art field—the people who educated the people who are now in power—realized it has become incredibly difficult to write about artwork without smuggling in an agenda that contradicts other perspectives in problematic ways. In the 60s and 70s, artists realized this and initiated a new program for art that privileged the viewer's direct experience in the moment, and totally de-emphasized any outside interpretation. We're still, more or less, living in the wake of those events, since that's basically the last thing that happened in the art historical narrative, and art museums are run by art historians.
To illustrate: when I studied art in the 2010s, the absolute worst thing you could say about an artwork or exhibition was that it was "didactic."
My favorite example of this is an exhibit that I saw at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh many years ago. There was a diorama of several forest animals, and an interface that shined lights on animals with different features. The "lays eggs" light shined on an assortment of animals including a Rabbit. Rabbits don't lay eggs, they only deliver them to good boys and girls.
We pointed this out to a worker that day. Several years later, we went back to see that the exhibit had not changed. I'm not sure if it's still there today.
Yup. Tim Hunkin went for a last look around his Secret Life of the Home exhibition¹ at the London Science Museum and quite a few things were out of order; this may be because the exhibit was imminently closing, but my impression is that that's just the deal with mechanical exhibits - they break more often than the digital ones. Very likely it's one reason the screens are at the forefront.
Similar thing at This Museum is (Not) Obsolete, in Ramsgate. Just so many things that can go wrong that you expect not everything will be working on your particular visit.
Ah, it's been "modernized". I like that museum. But you had to know the history of technology to appreciate it. There's Maudslay's lathe! Now it's been dumbed down.
I think the Hunkin exhibit really did look a bit tired - I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to try something else. After all, Secret Life only got its chance because they were willing to change something back then.
If you like Tim's stuff you can always catch his Novelty Automation arcade over by Holborn. Highly recommended by me at least!
I don't know how good the information transfer was at the London Science Museum way back when I was a kid; I remember excitedly spinning all the little brass handles and pushing the brass buttons on various teak cased devices, but I'm not sure I took much science home with me. Sci Fi, a home computer, and (much later) Bill Bryson's book informed me far more.
This is the kind of thing that gets tech people a bad reputation. YOU don't need Excel. I don't need excel - but that guy? You have no idea what he needs and if the people he's supporting need (or just want) Excel to get their jobs done it is incredibly arrogant to tell him what he does or doesn't need.
Now, I've loathed Microsoft since the 90s, but that makes me a weird and special little petal - it doesn't count for squat in business.
Right, and even "that guy" might not need Excel but the second he opens up Libreoffice or Google Sheets and something doesn't work the way he's used to, he will say it's broken. He's not interested in learning how LibreOffice or Google does it, he's just trying to close a $5m deal. And he's not wrong.
Honestly, these alternatives just don't stack up against Excel. Even setting aside the advanced stuff like complex data analysis and macros that some organizations rely on, Excel is simply more robust and user-friendly. Google Sheets feels like a toy in comparison.
Indeed, or in my case where I don't need Excel, but can't tell someone else they don't. Telling me in this discussion I don't need Excel is very much misreading the conversation.
I never said that guy does not need Excel. High probability that all the features in Excel being utilized by most users is available else where. I get told all the time you don't need TOOL_X because that tool is uncommon compared to office software. It is funny how many people think everyone uses spread sheets. I personal don't need them or touch them. There are others tools that are better fit.
Excel is a great definition of _Law of small numbers_ when it comes to praising Microsoft. Major of all Microsoft solutions are not great and there are better alternatives. Even the most popular ones where not created by Microsoft and bought.
Microsoft does not have any user experience standards. This was ingrained with Bill Gates making CTRL+F _Forward Email_ in Outlook versus a constant of _Find Text_. Number one complaint I see from Microsoft employees in their feature tickets is lack of _muscle memory_ designs. Their file listing algorithms still think 109 < 74 where quality file listing should show 109 after 74, not before.
Microsoft produce products _You have to pay me to use_. I have not bought a Microsoft product in years and never will with my personal income. This doesn't not mean I don't know how to use their junk-ware -- that is more tools in the tool box. It is the mentality that once you know one spread sheet software you don't need any other. Once you know how to use Microsoft tool X, you don't need to know how to use tool Y, even when tool Y is a better fit for the solution.
Then again most people like to short their brain and only know the tools they were taught or used in school.
Mostly 'cos I was trying to track whether the surfeit of AI stuff was real or my imagination - when I did it I was consistently getting four to eight AI stories per front page view. Right now there's only one. The categorisation is very loosey goosey, but I think it's reflecting something real there.
I'm currently on a delightful honeymoon with my wife (6 years after the wedding because of covid and procrastination), but when I get back I intend to add some tracking of category stats over time as well as in-the-moment.
Yes. The full explanation's on my blog and the code's public in my GitHub repo btw.
The main nuisance is that it will use inconsistent synonyms, so an article might be "ai" or "artificial intelligence" or "llms" without obvious differences in the topic.
When I get around to the stat-tracking I might do a Show HN or something, although it feels a bit frivolous for that.
> Also some tags include quotes and other don't haha.
Yeah, that kind of thing is a nuisance too. I'll add some more scrubbing rules to clean questionable characters out when I get back.
Printers aside the VT220 terminal from DEC had a 132 column mode. Probably it was aping a standard printer column count. Most of the time we used the 80 column mode as it was far more readable on what was quite a small screen.
Not only a small screen by modern standards, but the hardware lacked the needed resolution. The marketing brochure claims a 10x10 dot matrix. That will be for the 80 column mode. That works out to respectable 800 pixel horizontally, barely sufficient 6x10 pixel in 132 column mode. There was even a double-high, double-width mode for easier reading ;-)
Interesting here perhaps is that even back then it was recognized, that for different situations, different display modes were of advantage.
> There was even a double-high, double-width mode for easier reading
I'd forgotten that; now that waa a fugly font. I don't think anyone ever used it (aside from the "Setup" banner on the settings screen)
I think the low pixel count was rather mitigated by the persistence of phospher though - there's reproductions of the fonts that had to take this into account; see the stuff about font stretching here: https://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs
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