Sofia Hauck

Five years after the first lockdowns, how do Britons think the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic? | YouGov While the public say the Conservatives handled the pandemic badly, they tend to think the major policies were right

I’m not sure the evidence really bears out that people hated lockdowns. In the UK, many more people say the government wasn’t strict enough (35%) vs too strict (22%), and those that disapprove of the government are even more likely to say not strict enough (45%).

yougov.co.uk/health/artic...

Portion sizes and caloric inequity: a hidden driver of obesity disparities Multiple factors contribute to rising obesity rates. However, excess caloric intake remains the primary driver. This conclusion is supported by multiple lines of evidence, including observational stud...

To be fair to him, that was his suggestion, and the Daily Mail tried to make a scandal out of it. “We propose that food outlets offer at least two portion sizes for common single portion ready-to-eat products, differing by around 25% […] and priced fairly.” www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Directors have brought this upon themselves by calling the all-bits-in versions of their movies the “director’s cut”.

Email from the Feeding Hong Kong team saying a receipt may take 14 days to arrive

Online banking screenshot showing £48 = HK$500

Hello Natalia! Thank you for the lovely idea, and I hope I can take you up on it! I donated HK$500 to Feeding HK and I’d love to have a Smilodon and an Ankylosaurus (together or separate, whatever suits you!) when you can.

The real misery in that video is how little space there is on the pavement compared to the road! Two people can barely pass each other but that looks like room for three lanes of traffic.

I get extra annoyed with the surprises and hurdles that have to do with the software trying to guess what I really want rather than doing what I actually asked. Search engines are the worst for this!

The one exception I know to this is Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, but it seems most of the “method” to that was camping, fishing and mending his own clothes!

My parents dropped a bottle of port on a parking lot literally decades ago and the pain has never fully healed. I wish you a swift recovery.

It’s always a good day when my interests overlap! @contamclub.bsky.social would love this.

Nudibranchs as pictured by a Japanese illustrator named Kumataro Ito, artist for the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition, 1907–10. More of his stunning images here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/k...

You could at least change the “tell the user to restart session” message you already have to something that uses utils::menu to ask the user if it’s okay to restart then do it for them. Wrap it in a “if(interactive())” and you can still use the same script in other places too.

Maybe a .rs.restartR() to the top of the script if analysts are working in R Studio only? Everything else I can think of is potentially trickier to work with, though this is a bit slow to run and won’t solve any package installation issues.

Maybe over the top for the problem you’re facing, but using something like the “knitr” package to run your script in a clean environment instead of trying to clean your current environment might be a good option?

A photo of a sunny dock where a small sailing boat is passing by a line of yellow buoys, each of which has exactly one gull perched on it, bar one empty one.

A beautiful morning for some gullible buoys.

The Focus Tree app does a better job of being pretty while you’re using (not using?) it, though the items you earn are less interesting. Hopefully with Bean Friend’s success, there will be some cool new ones in this space!

‎Focus Friend, by Hank Green ‎If you interrupt your Bean by turning off the timer, they'll be really really sad. Complete your focus session, and this cute Bean will give you prizes to buy decorations to help furnish their room....

Not cats, but a bean that knits socks: apps.apple.com/gb/app/focus...

Carnation Revolution - Wikipedia

I can’t make any statements about how replicable it is, but Portugal did pretty much that and it deserves to be better known! 🇵🇹
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnati...

Bar chart showing 38% of British farmers are 65+, with another 30% 55-64 years old.

Pretty similar in the UK, actually!

www.gov.uk/government/s...

YouTube video by ClarkeAndDawe Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off

A classic case of “the front is not supposed to fall off”: youtube.com/watch?v=3m5q...

A policy that benefited the richest and cost the UK £100bn: it's long past time to end the fuel duty freeze | Larry Elliott Successive chancellors have steered clear of increasing taxes for motorists for 15 years, but this should be a no-brainer for cash-strapped Rachel Reeves, says Guardian columnist Larry Elliott

"Fuel duty is 1/3 lower, in real terms than when Alistair Darling was at the Treasury.

Richest 1/5th of households..who drive more, own more vehicles & buy gas-guzzling SUVs...have benefited 2x as much as the poorest 1/5th."

-Larry Elliott for @theguardian.com

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

We had this back in 2021! I searched for *six months* for a shelter that would let me have one or two adult cats to live in an apartment and it was just not possible. We ended up adopting two street cats from Abu Dhabi and honestly, best decision ever.

I have been thinking we’re creating a generation of BMX cyclists with that!

I just cycled through deep Brittany for a holiday recently and it was a gorgeous place! We mostly stayed at chambre d’hotes (bed & breakfast?) sort of places, and quite a few were run by retired former city-dwellers who wanted to occasionally have some new people to talk to.

It’s an under-appreciated downside of Brexit actually, the availability of European language teachers is way down!

Yes I do! The “HRF 40 Heat Rejection Window Film” from Purlfrost. www.purlfrost.com/mirror-and-t...

Interesting! We didn’t have that problem, but maybe that’s the flip side of having one that was very fiddly to apply and seemed to love sticking to everything, including itself! We also used the trick of getting the window thoroughly wet first and squeegee-ing out the water.

If you have large windows, solar window film can really help! It’s very easy to install if you don’t care how neat it looks, and fiddly but possible with patience if you do. It’s the only thing that made a real difference when we lived in an all south-facing windows flat!

That looks like AC has higher power consumption than open windows until the car exceeds 80mph, which is above the national speed limit in the UK, and that’s only for one of the two cars tested.

I will put up with people who want ACs in residential properties banned when they ban AC in cars too.

Open a window! Get a nice breeze going. What’s the problem?

I think it’s literally just that air con is discussed in the summer, when global “warming” sounds bad because it’s already hot, and heating is discussed in winter and it sounds like it’d be nice to be cozy.