Pete Birkinshaw

My mother would have called the police if I’d done that

Companies race to find cure for having a fork embedded in sinuses after government encourages everyone to ram a fork up their nose

Oh of course, the actual problem is just processed meat and fizzy drinks again for the millionth time with a headline blaming “half the average diet”

This is the person who argued for days that there were no political themes in the original Star Wars, even ignoring numerous things written at the time by people involved.

I was surprised by it a few months ago

Vikings: Short hair or shaved hair marks someone as a slave, loser or criminal
"Vikings": I will shave the sides of my head like those vikings on TV and Assassins Creed who look like a nazi death metal band

Do Scandinavian countries get a lot of visits from deluded "heritage" types?

MF tried to say ”skål” but said ”school” instead.

"But AGI seems very likely" No matter how detailed the stitching is, a teddybear will never become a real bear.

I think this one might be unwise, sadly

Mac and cheese is not Italian though. The pasta shape originates in Switzerland, and the recipe/meal in north-west England.

One day I hope to achieve enough self confidence and calm mind to only press ctrl-c / ⌘-c once

BEARS

Is there a Loch Ness monster? No. They've scanned all the DNA traces in the loch and analysed the entire ecosystem.

Sky Sprites and Ball Lightening: weather. Cool weather.

Big Foot: Bears

Yeti: Cold Bears

Aliens in UFOs: *snoring sounds*

"I was lying in bed and saw-" Hypnagogic hallucinations

MAMS: Lots of the topics that excited my generation as kids in the 70s and 80s are now dead to all but a few more eccentric enthusiasts because science has literally answered the question: things either exist and become less interesting or are proven to not exist and become less interesting.

I think they do but there's a final part 3 of the series next month so I'll probably find out then.

I'm not saying I'd become a royalist if the king morphed into a T-Rex, but I would become more interested.

I'm not so sure: two nights ago I had a dream that Charles was now some sort of T-rex (same fact though) and was fighting a lot of small bouncy acrobatic hobbit-like people who were armed with swords, while crowds watched. I was cheering the bouncy hobbits. Fingers crossed.

(It does mostly seem to happen in the USA, which is very curious in itself)

This means that maybe it's a clue to some new source of power, or super-dense energy storage. Could we power the spacecraft and energy grids of tomorrow with the white-hot energy of American pensioners?

What makes it particularly interesting is that there's both lots of strong evidence from many incidents, recorded by professionals, and also no way to explain the evidence, it defies physics. It's not about catching fire, there simply isn't enough fuel to produce the results, it can't be replicated

I've been afflicted by Middle Aged Mulder Syndrome and lost all interesting in some Fortean topics but The Fortean Times' recent articles on Spontaneous Human Combustion have been *very* interesting (written by a decades-long researcher and expert) and, have rekindled an interested in this topic -

A lot of British people don't really grasp that we'd have a ceremonial and symbolic non executive president.

The whole "look at America and see what can happen" thing simply doesn't apply.

It's more a case of "look at Ireland or Germany".

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DOG!!!
The Giant Database of Dogs is a data collection project for classroom use. 6 quick questions to help students learn statistics! ALL good puppers are welcome!

buff.ly/f6weaUE
(please share widely!)

Oh thank goodness it probably isn’t real yet

That looks like it somehow came out of both ends of a cat, surely it can’t be real

Someone with a PhD in physics insisted to me that if you have managed to roll a 6 on a die 10 times in a row, the chance of you rolling a 6 again was miniscule. I am fully confident that “AI” can indeed answer questions like someone with a PhD, in another subject.

I Used Stealth To Hide From The Elf On A Shelf

A Chrome browser error page displays the familiar “Aw, Snap!” message, indicating that something went wrong while loading a webpage. A pixelated frowning file icon with Xs for eyes appears at the top left. Below, the error code reads “Out of Memory,” suggesting the browser ran out of system resources. The page includes a “Reload” button in blue on the bottom right

behold the "HTML bomb"

It's a counterattack for AI companies that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

when a scraper grabs it, it becomes a 10-gig HTML page and 💣 goes the scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

Brands won't play no more. Too much fighting on the dance floor