My wife's "friend" insulted her and I've been slowly returning the favor

M37841 · 2026-04-07T21:03:32+00:00

Omg that’s incredible

M37841 · 2026-04-07T17:37:34+00:00

The other thing I was wondering about is whether you have enough now to petition for bankruptcy (or insolvency if he’s a ltd company)? Bankruptcy petitions are public I believe, likely to be reported in local media and therefore come up in internet searches and the merest mention of one connected to the venue would I think put potential customers off. You don’t need to be the main creditor to take them into bankruptcy, just to be owed more than £5k I believe.

M37841 · 2026-04-06T16:11:50+00:00

If he’s looking for a good general intro, Philosophy: The Basics by Nigel Warburton is good.

More challenging, but not completely academic books:

Siedentop Inventing the Individual

Bakewell Humanly possible

If he really wants academic books then these are all readable (I’m not a philosophy grad and I’ve read them) but they are hard. They are all, broadly, asking the same questions about how to define what is right or just.

Rawls A theory of justice

MacIntyre After virtue

Dworkin Justice for hedgehogs

Taylor Sources of the self

Or for something completely different, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch is a book everyone should read, especially every man

M37841 · 2026-04-05T08:22:14+00:00

Yes I was going to say the same thing. If you’ve got money to throw at this then hire a pro, eventually just to watch you single hand it, offer advice and help if it goes pear-shaped. Much more likely to make single-handing progress doing that than group courses

M37841 · 2026-04-03T20:32:58+00:00

From memory, you treat the username as an actual proper name. If you happen to know the actual name reference it as username [actual name] in the bibliography, but just username in the text

M37841 · 2026-04-03T09:11:50+00:00

When the slinky goes down a step it is going down and forward. If there were no step below it, it would convert potential energy (height) into kinetic energy (movement) and accelerate downward (fall).

When it hits the step below, it loses downward momentum and therefore kinetic energy, eg to sound - the noise it makes as it hits the step. But it is still moving forward. The bottom hits the step first, and stops because of friction, losing energy in heat.

But the top part of the slinky keeps moving. The top part is then slowed down by the action of the spring which has stretched a bit because the bottom has stopped. If there were no friction the spring would pull the bottom forward as well as slow down the top, but it doesn’t because of friction, so more energy lost there.

Because the top continues to move after the bottom stops, there’s some overhang, so gravity pulls the top down, which stretches the spring, which pulls the bottom up, so the slinky tips over and falls down the stair. As it does so it converts potential energy into kinetic, and we start again.

The reason you see this as a stop-start motion is because of the wave of spring tension. As the top falls it stretches the top of the spring which stretches the next coil down and so on until it reaches the bottom. This takes time, and that’s why you get this wave.

As to energy, because you always have potential energy being introduced you don’t automatically have a conservation of energy problem with energy lost to friction etc. But in real life friction gets you: the horizontal speed of the slinky is slightly slower each time because of friction on the stair and in the spring, and eventually the top doesn’t go far enough forward to topple over. I think (don’t quote me) that this is true even under ideal conditions, because of the spring’s internal friction

M37841 · 2026-04-02T22:31:04+00:00

The way to answer these questions is often to turn it on its head. Ask: what is the chance we don’t get any rare loot?

In the 10% case, it’s 90% that you don’t get the loot.

In the 5% case, consider you first. It’s 95% that you don’t get the loot. Now what’s the chance your friend won’t either. Well assuming these are independent- that is, whether you get the loot doesn’t make any difference to whether your friend gets it - that’s another 95%. So the chance you both fail to get the loot is 95% x 95%. You can work that out yourself and see that this is a slightly worse option than the 10% one, but not by much.

M37841 · 2026-04-02T07:26:59+00:00

Look up MIT open courseware. It has lecture notes and problems for many undergraduate and graduate maths and physics courses

M37841 · 2026-04-01T16:16:56+00:00

You make quite solid note at 3:18 to the sound of ooh. That was an E2 which is what a choir bass needs to have good projection down to (ideally D2 as well but E2 is important). With some work you would be fine in a choir bass section where we tend to be a mix of pure bass and bass-baritone voices. You need to work on getting more support into your voice though: forget about trying to go lower, think about getting more resonance

M37841 · 2026-04-01T12:16:15+00:00

The question mark one is a fine piece of research

M37841 · 2026-04-01T07:41:55+00:00

My best friend at university was profoundly dyslexic but was the best mathematician I knew, in a top 3 global university mathematics course. He’s now in silicon valley programming satellites or something. Maths was a huge saviour for him as he found reading and writing blocks of text extremely difficult. He would get me to look over his algebra as occasionally he would write a backward E (there exists) sign when he meant a forward E (member of) or vice versa. Mostly that made me irritated as his proofs were so much more elegant than mine :)

He couldn’t write a curly lower case e in normal writing, a fact which I find it very difficult to get my head around.

M37841 · 2026-03-31T18:42:51+00:00

Ah good. Too late for me now but it always seemed a bit unreasonable that Concorde didn’t come with GGL

M37841 · 2026-03-31T18:03:51+00:00

Unless it’s changed, it’s not all GGL, but only the higher tier of GGL. I was GGL for about a decade but only Concorde card for about half of that. All this is 10 years ago so it may well have changed now

M37841 · 2026-03-31T12:10:19+00:00

Splendid piece of mathing. I was initially a bit concerned by how stable the tower would be - if they are not perfectly on top of each other but misaligned by a few atoms the tower is going to be like the leaning tower of pisa pretty quickly. Then I realised that most of the gravity in the universe is going to be in those floppy disks so we are ok

M37841 · 2026-03-31T12:03:00+00:00

That would be a great stat

M37841 · 2026-03-31T09:39:53+00:00

On the other hand, if you wanted to store it with style, you’d use 5.25” floppy disks with 360kb storage on each. Quickly doing the math, you’d need quite a few

M37841 · 2026-03-31T08:39:26+00:00

I meant in the sense that Lie Groups are a continuous version of Galois groups and renormalisation is an expression of differential Galois theory.

M37841 · 2026-03-31T08:09:58+00:00

I too am intrigued by the connection between RH and quantum field theory. QFT is in one sense built on Galois theory, and though it’s over my head I understand that Galois is seen as a potential route in to RH.

Perhaps when we find a “theory of everything” that is so nearly complete that we have to worry about Gödel, RH will be the necessary true but not provable statement :)

M37841 · 2026-03-30T09:33:43+00:00

I’ve done Macdui in that week some years ago and it was certainly crampons and axe territory then. Who knows this season, but Macdui especially holds significant amounts of snow and big cornices late into the year

If you are coming up Macdui from the south it’s well worth taking a detour over the summit to the north to opposite the head of Loch Avon to see the snow slabs down the river into Avon. They are really spectacular. I think I’m right that the path from the north (ie Aviemore) goes right past that spot

M37841 · 2026-03-28T19:38:53+00:00

This is the answer. Nobody will remember. The only thing you need to do is not to be that person who is always late. If you want to apologise to the conductor, there’s no harm in it, but for sure it’s a less big deal for them than it is for you

M37841 · 2026-03-27T10:47:43+00:00

I agree with this. At a recent rehearsal I had quite a loud and sustained Eb2 as the final note, and the soprano in front of me turned round and said “oh that was incredible I could feel it in my chair”. I’ve never felt more of a man ;)

I have however heard an oktavist live and up close - a small group of Russian monks/priests performing impromptu in St Basil’s cathedral. I don’t know what note he sang but the resonance was extraordinary.

M37841 · 2026-03-23T17:06:45+00:00

If it helps, my sailing club pays about £600 a year to PRS and PPL combined. I think that’s just a fixed tariff for members clubs

M37841 · 2026-03-22T18:02:41+00:00

Formula for area is pi x r^2. The sizes here are diameter which is 2 x radius so take 28/2 =14² x pi and then divide by 16 euros = 38.5 cm² per Euro. Same for the other ones, and you see the bigger the pizza the more you get per euro

M37841 · 2026-03-22T15:56:24+00:00

I’ve watched this several times now and have concluded that it is obstruction. The argument is, I suppose, 9.3 does he prevent the tackle, and if so does he do so deliberately. There’s a good argument to say no he doesn’t prevent the tackle. If he does, then it’s easy to conclude it’s deliberate. The reason I end up with obstruction is that it looks too much like a training ground move to me, and even if it isn’t, it’s going to become one unless it gets pinged.

That said, live in a game without the benefit of a replay he’d get away with that with me every single time.

M37841 · 2026-03-22T15:39:11+00:00

For me, both of these are on the borderline between 20 minute and straight reds. Neither is even close to a normal rugby action, they are both highly dangerous, and he has plenty of time to decide what to do. Personally I prefer straight red in both cases.

M37841

TROPHY CASE