h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

The Earth's Core contains a large iron crystal spinning differently to the rest of the Earth. But how could scientists ever work that out? In Our Time http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05s3gyv #earth

Writing in an engaging way, about science or anything else. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/18/scientific-prose

Democracy Club is crowdsourcing information on the candidates for the general election, election leaflets, and everything else.
https://democracyclub.org.uk/blog/2019/10/29/its-on/

Life on Earth: lots of plants and bacteria https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth #earth

How do you make a motorway into a lorry park?
https://www.roads.org.uk/blog/operation-brock

Are the people on government infographics representative?
http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2019/10/six-diverse-characters.html

I run a site showing everyone else's tactical voting recommendations: https://dontsplittheremainvote.com/

Where do people give conflicting suggestions? https://dontsplittheremainvote.com/other_sites.csv is a spreadsheet which shows the differences. #ukpol

Mars Used to Have Water, But We Can't Explain How
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2019/mars-water-stable-paradox.html #space

How quickly does the future start?
https://www.improbable.com/2019/10/21/when-does-the-present-end-and-the-future-begin-study/

The UK government bought £9bn of company debt. But which companies?
http://missingnumbers.org/a-truly-massive-number-9-billion-quantitative-easing/ #ukpol

Podcast recommendation: 13 Minutes to the Moon. Tells the story of Apollo, with interviews and geeky details. Presenter Kevin Fong expands a 13 minute landing into about several hours of drama and excitement. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads

Git 2.23 was released: "git checkout" becomes "git switch" (change branch) and "git restore" (set contents of file to a previous revision). "git checkout" still works (and probably will work forever). https://lwn.net/Articles/796563/

Large pro-europe march through London TOMORROW. Starts midday at Park Lane. Last time it was HUGE. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/47680979/brexit-people-s-vote-march-to-parliament-square-sped-up

Brushing your teeth:
- brush the gums, especially boundary between teeth and gums, angled down/up to get in good
- brush in a circular motion
- no rinsing or mouthwash (dilutes fluoride toothpaste)
- brush between teeth using interdental brushes

The Overwhelming Historical Evidence that Galileo was a Hack
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2019/03/20/the-historical-evidence-that-galileo-was-a-hack/

The nice vs nasty of copyright enforcement: The End of Hellwig vs. VMware from Free as in Freedom podcast http://faif.us/cast/2019/apr/22/0x66/ #podcast #gpl

For tactical voting nerds, a list of remain parties which can win in each constituency. If only one remain party could win (even under others' best polling assumptions), then it's easy to know who to vote for. Hopefully PeoplesVote will come up with an answer for more difficult cases. https://dontsplittheremainvote.com/

e-m-er-g-en-c-y
in-for-m-'-n
#braille

A very strange-looking paper airplane. https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A656859 #maker