h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

19 October. Join me and up to one million friends in demanding an end to brexit.

Malaria was common across half the world – since then it has been eliminated in many regions
https://ourworldindata.org/malaria-past-prevalence

The past exonerative tense. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous-grammar

A visitor has arrived from a distant star - a comet this time, which is much easier to spot than Oumuamua was.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/why-the-interstellar-comet-matters.html #space

Alternatives to fossil fuels when making useful chemicals https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/06/switching-out-of-fossil-fuel-feedstocks #chemistry #climatechange

How democratic is each country? Polity4 is a dataset which will give you long-term trends for each country (up to 2013). Many huge countries are sort-of democratic: Indonesia, Brazil, India. China is the big autocracy. https://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4x.htm

Pirate music for #TalkLikeAPirateDay https://www.jamendo.com/track/902951/captain-blood

Avast! Ye landlubbers find treasure in them thar Talk Like a Pirate Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day

NPR buys oil, from an oil well, and sells it to a refinery. Digging oil has a huge impact on the economy, climate and society. This is a great way to show what's happening in a huge and often hidden industry. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet-money-buys-oil #economics #climate

How motorway divisions work
https://www.roads.org.uk/articles/emergency-diversion-routes/

Strange-looking chemical compounds http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/03/25/some-natural-product-weirdness #chemistry

The 2019 IgNobel prize ceremony is TONIGHT at 11pm, and is webcast live. Past winners include "the perceived personalities of rocks from a sales and marketing perspective" and "the effectiveness of human saliva as a cleaning fluid". https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/2019-ceremony/ #science

Digitising a collection of bumblebees
https://naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2018/08/13/digitising-british-bumblebees-digital-collections-programme/ #biology

OpenTrainTimes has lots of block signalling diagrams, showing the location of trains and the signal aspects. It's super amazing. https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps/signalling/fss1 #maps

Most people should enable 2-factor-authentication (Google Authenticator), but GMail has an even stricter setting for those most at risk of hacking attempts. https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

Glad to see http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/ is still going strong. I remember reading it while at uni, and it is still my favourite source of news about biscuits. #websites

Positional-only parameters for Python https://lwn.net/Articles/785245/ #python

Watching the clouds... on another planet
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2019/curiosity-noctilucent-clouds.html #space

What do you do with a cyclotron you no longer need for science? You make music, of course!
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/upcycled-instrument-tied-to-auspicious-accelerator #science

The UK government wants to suspend parliament for 4 weeks. There is only 9 weeks until the brexit deadline. Parliament has been on summer holidays for 5 weeks and a leadership election for 8 weeks. More time off is a bad idea. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/269157 #ukpol