Nick Taylor

Bonus points if you manage both an electrical fuse and a Bickford safety fuse.

British English properly uses -ize for most of those words; the rise of -ise seems to be some kind of post-WW2 "the Americans are wrong about everything" effort.

Second time this week that that episode of Morse has been relevant.

Nope, "fuze" is also used in the UK to mean something like a detonator; I'm not sure on the precise distinction.

Does it have an opinion on whether we're at war with Eastasia?

Thank you, I really appreciate not having to study the details of its hazard profile and how that interacts with CLP/GHS.

(or, more realistically, accepting the constant mild annoyance of seeing that label)

I'm sore vexed that Wikipedia has slapped H330 "fatal by inhalation" on CS, presumably because the author of one of the safety data sheets only read half of CLP before getting bored.

I think @glynnstewart.com has numbers showing that (thanks to Amazon's anti-competitive practices) he's pretty much locked into Amazon as his only outlet. I doubt he's an outlier on this.

If you can't buy Stinger and NLAW off the shelf at Target then what was the revolution even for?

The Spaghetti Junction approaches its complexity for cars, while also incorporating canals (with towpaths suitable for horses), railways, and at least one river. Truly a multi-modal nightmare.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is *also* a mix of sucrose, glucose and fructose, if that helps.

I know people do that but it’s dimensionally inconsistent and I wish they wouldn’t.

(strictly so is v/v if you don’t specify a temperature, but it‘s less painful to me than quoting mass per cubic length as a percentage)

Weight over weight (slightly imprecisely): the mass of salicylic acid is 3% of the mass of the final mixture. Used to distinguish it from a volumetric approach (v/v), where the volume of salicylic acid would be 3% of the volume of the final mixture.

Ah, and your position was one of the live-in ones, which I’d missed. I guess there’s a reason they don’t call it the Extremely Public Operations Manuals Service.

Would Biden count as having equalled your time, or do VPs not actually spend much time in the White House?

I bought some tea towels once which were branded "flour sack" and I'd always wondered why they thought that was a good name. So thank you for clearing up an extremely minor mystery!

Literally yesterday, though given the showers at this hotel also tried to cook one of my colleagues I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plumbing fault to blame.

The problem seems to be that the throat diameter is too small or the curvature is too tight, presumably to reduce volume.

Ooh, thank you, both of those sound like fun. We'll see how my feet feel in the morning.

Allotments ("Victory gardens", to use the local name) looking unreasonably beautiful. A clutter of ornamental plants in a couple of small fenced plots in the foreground. A tall tree, more distant, is centred in the frame and gloriously yellow with autumn. The sky is blue with a scatter of puffy clouds, and the light is undecided between "late afternoon" and "evening".

A building in the angle between two merging roads. It's in the classic Boston colour scheme of deep red stone walls, slate roof, and green (possibly tarnished copper) accents. Notably the designer has built it with conical "fairy-tale castle" roofs on cylindrical towers. It looks good enough to slightly redeem the profession of architects in my estimation.

I'm in Boston (MA, not Lincolnshire) and it's both walkable and very pretty. Now I have walked too much.

Anything in particular I should do on Sunday? I've already ambled along the Freedom Trail.

My work issued decent insulating mugs so now my ADHtea is incredibly stewed but still reasonably warm.

"Schedule no online meetings this week"

Was that a drill problem (emphasising speed over precision), a technology problem, or an inability to identify target areas (as I presume they don't flash in the real world?)

@sarahtaber.bsky.social has a bunch of videos and podcasts about how the farm owners are doing a really good job at PR (and for the most part a terrible job at agriculture).

The farm-owner lobby in the US is extremely keen to maintain confusion between farm owners and farm labourers where the term "farmer" is used.

My guess is it's a meaningless brand name, but that's just a guess.

I am annoyed at how often TERF-branded screws are the best choice on Amazon. But not annoyed enough to brave the Screwfix website.

They're bad, and people who drive at approaching traffic with their full beams on are dangerous dickheads. But your retained vision is much better and the damage is much less than with a laser. Also (thanks outdated US specifications!), ridiculously bright LED headlights are legal.

The immediate blindness from a high-powered laser is because blood vessels in your eye burst, and blood is not transparent. We're not talking "dazzled" or "can't look in that direction", we're talking "this eye is no longer an eye".

Often victims recover some vision after a few days.

Is that the one which is basically on a corner of Kirtland AFB? That doesn't seem like a particularly realistic goal.

Beats mass lead poisoning because lead acetate makes wine taste better.

(there were several factors in the fall of Rome)

A quick google found me suppliers of battery-powered laser pointers that are firmly in the "instant blinding at range" category with prices in the low three figures. They are upsettingly easy to get hold of.