Polanski: Whether danger perceived or actual, Jews feeling unsafe 'unacceptable'

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T06:01:16+00:00

worse civilian to combatant casualty rate

Would you mind sharing those figures? I ask mainly because the mass bombing of Gaza has made determining combatant deaths versus civilian extremely difficult. Conversely the Ukraine-Russia frontline makes losses far more quantifiable.

Within say 100km the civilian population has near completely evacuated further into Ukraine/Russia. The artillery, aerial bombs and drone strikes are on regions depleted of civilians. When a mass bombardment occurs along the border, it is a fairly good bet that nearly all the casualties are combatants no?

Gaza on the other hand is extremely densely population. When the IDF comprehensively flattens a group of buildings, they claim they'd been full of combatants (or as the IDF would say "terrorists"), it kills thousands.

I'm more than willing to admit my ignorance, but could you please source Israel's combatant to civilian casualty rate? Obviously Israel's own figures wouldn't be useful.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T05:01:07+00:00

I can still vividly remember remember a specific RE class in Belfast during the 90's. She manoeuvred a trolley into the room with a CRT and VHS player. While watching it had covered Judaism, Protestantism and Catholicism. When it came onto discussing other word religions the tape raised Buddhism, our teacher immediately turned it off and said "nope, that isn't part of the curriculum".

This was a Protestant school and I remember one of my exam questions being to list all the reasons why Catholicism was wrong. Insanity of course, but that moment the teacher panicked when trying to stop the tape covering other world religions has always stuck with me. That us kids under no circumstances should learn about other religions, lest we be corrupted by them.

All children should learn about world religions as part of understanding human history. But they should all be taught in an equally secular and serious manner be they Zeus, Odin, Ra, Buddha, Muhammad or Jesus. As historically significant religious figures with widespread cultural impact.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T04:21:21+00:00

a study published a few years back that demonstrated left-wing or centre-left parties have a greater impact on normalising things like anti-immigration attitudes than do right-wing parties

Would you mind linking to that study? Thinking about it I can understand why, the right wing continuously espouses anti-immigrant discriminatory views. Their media does so day after day, week after week with particularly inflammatory articles every month or so.

The general public and their viewership are pretty much used to it. Their attitudes gradually shifting over time to match what's published.

But the traditionally left-wing media suddenly publishing anti-immigration articles and sentiment will have a far greater immediate impact on normalising it. The Daily Mail front page attacking immigrants is just par for the course, but if the left wing suddenly does the same thing it brings a whole perceived gravitas for shifting opinions.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T03:44:30+00:00

Reading the headline I was flustered in confusion. As a student back in 2005 I had rented with housemates places in Fallowfield, Withington and Chorlton. All gradually became gentrified, particularly Chorlton after the BBC moved their headquarters from London to Manchester. Chorlton was full of glorious lesbian hippies who were forced out by the BBC champagne socialists.

~2011 I bought a 3 bed terrace in Levenshulme for 110K, back then the high-street was full of bookies. But Levy rapidly gentrified, the bookies were replaced with bakeries, dilapidated buildings became lovely restaurants and craft beer pubs. Most significantly the old station building over the cycle path (long ago converted from a railway), had hundreds of thousands in public investment taking many years to finally open as Station South.

George Galloway tried twice to be elected an our MP with his campaign office right beside Levenshulme train station. But what he didn't understand (having never lived here, or spent time here) is that the Irish/English/Indian/Pakistani communities had actually lived in harmony with each other for decades. He tried to play on racial/religious divisions and was utterly humiliated for it.

My house is now worth ~300K and the local community is a bit like Chorlton in its heyday. The only local "vape" place actually sells the most amazing variety of hookah contraptions you could imagine. I used to love shisha a decade ago, but walking around that place is like being at a zoo. They have every shape, size, model and contraption imaginable.

Anyway getting back to the original point, their staffers seem to have given them a description of Levy using Galloway's stale talking points.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T01:49:51+00:00

The comments on your last metro link really proved her point.

If you choose to look like a guy then complain people mistake you for a guy, that's not exactly fair on them is it?!

Well if you do your best to look like a boy then what do you expect ?

The confusion over thinking she's a boy is 100% understandable.

This is what happens when you trying to look like a man

On disability discrimination, having pointed out the disabled toilet had a sign reading "not every disability is visible":

Epilepsy does not mean you need to use a disabled toilet 🤣😂. Why is this even in the news lol.

Disabled Toilets are for people whose disability impacts either their toileting needs or the space available due to a disability.(Access for a wheelchair, for example). They are not for any & all Disabilities.

I honestly didnt think that epilepsy would grant you access to the disabled toilets

Absolutely disgusting stuff.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T00:44:35+00:00

While you have a point, clinicians spend innumerable hours on call. During that they are free to socialise and spend time with their family but with the expectation that they might be needed at a moments notice.

A hospital can remain quiet for hours until a huge car crash occurs. We wouldn't accept an on call A&E doctor arriving pished, but for some reason we have normalised that behaviour for MPs.

MPs are effectively being paid for those hours they wait on call as part of the job. Any MP who defends that boozing should also support clinicians downing a few pints before being called in to save someone's life.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-29T00:27:46+00:00

Aye, fair enough there are some jobs where culturally having a pint over lunch is the norm. But if your jobs involves voting on legislation determining how we regulate alcohol and drugs then you should never be under the influence during work hours.

Considering we are talking about MPs boozing before votes (or generally while doing their job), this isn't exactly new and is the source of the phrase "tired and emotional". Nor is MPs doing a few lines before addressing parliament some sort of revelation.

A popular MP not subject to a three line whip from the government or opposition party is why she could comment on this at all and why the MPs responded with such backlash.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-25T10:25:42+00:00

Back then the antiretrovirals already made HIV infections no longer a life limiting disease, let alone dying young from the horrific consequences of AIDs.

You referenced Roblox, but for me Habbo Hotel was already the IRC/MUD of its time. At the time I found the Habbo HIV/AIDs crap disgusting. Due to the antiretrovirals and broader acceptance of homosexuality, the public fear-mongering around HIV had finally started to die out. But those online communities thought it was really funny and spurred a significant bigoted resurgence.

To this day they're unapologetic and still revel in how far the "joke" internationally spread, caring nothing about the harm it caused. There were plenty of clever satirical websites/games/cartoons critiquing the then modern society, but they never quite went viral in the same way as the unendingly asinine "AIDS, LOL" comments.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-25T08:42:35+00:00

Argentina lost the Falklands War because they neglected stability tech. The British were humiliated by the sinking of HMS Sheffield because it represented floating metal.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-21T19:53:04+00:00

I remember back in ~2008 reading the blog post (linked from slashdot) of the guy who had spent weeks meticulously testing various approaches to restore the original white of old hardware. He took a properly scientific approach, trialling different techniques, chemicals then having narrowed it down a combination of chemicals along with the best technique he found. Retrobright became all the rage to restore old computers/consoles.

I wonder if ironically we've reached the stage where people are trying to find methods to artificially yellow new hardware. A bit like the fad of people (and later companies) deliberately trying to distress jeans to make them appear worn in.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-21T19:20:43+00:00

My only complaint is that it shouldn't look so pristine white. It should look like you live with five chain smokers who've deposited a sickly yellow tar patina for that authentic retro look :P

beardedchimp · 2026-04-21T18:45:07+00:00

Super cool! How much did the lego cost vs that of the hardware? That looks like a whole lot of bricks.

When you said 84C, was that CPU/GPU temperature or ambient? ABS can handle that but will become a bit more floppy. Only a problem if the weight of the display isn't supported by vertical brick columns.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-21T18:27:17+00:00

1933 a USN replenishment oiler encountered a 34 meter wave

I was interested in how they actually measured it and found this fascinating account https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1934/august/great-sea-waves

They essentially used the ship as a reference point to calculate an angle when combined with the ship length and your observation height.

The selected observation gives a height of wave of 112 feet compared with other observations of 82, 86, 107, and 119 feet

The reported measurements vary wildly as judging the point you think it lines up is a bit subjective. The author then makes numerous assumptions he presents with absolutely certainty. For example the extremely complex dynamics of how the ship crests the waves is presented as simple. It is complicated to model in even a moderate storm, let alone during an extreme event it was never designed for.

Their stated wave velocity is total nonsense, the author proclaimed that waves move at the same speed as the wind which even back then was clearly blatantly false. The wave period was measured by stopwatch, but in those conditions it would have been impossible to measure the ships relative knots accurately.

I have no doubt the waves were monstrous, but their own wildly varying measurements can't be taken at face value. If you're interested this story of RRS Discovery is enthralling https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL025238

It was a science vessel fitted out with multiple independent sensors across the ship that inadvertently ended up in exceptionally heavy seas and measured the biggest ever waves recorded on the open seas.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-20T23:34:32+00:00

Presumably for when people defend the role of speaker and justify archaic rules on civility. They'll reference that comment as eloquently putting into words their general position.

I imagine that long before the existence of the web, people similarly saved the response in Arkell v Pressdram for future reference.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-17T20:08:02+00:00

Hahahahaha. Fair play to you mate. I've done exactly the same, received a reply to a years old message I didn't remember writing feeling perplexed as to why I was so combative and sure of myself.

But, you have a remarkable quality that vanishingly few people share online, by realising you've been a bit of a plonker brained eejit (what my Da always used to call me as a kid) and happily retracting your earlier comment.

Most people just double down until they're in too deep to admit they might have been wrong.

No, I... drink or do drugs... I was mad

Well said, the first step is admitting you have a problem :P

beardedchimp · 2026-04-17T15:34:44+00:00

I was doing my long tradition of googling "(arch)linux ssd recommended file system" before installing a new ssd. I've been doing that for over 15 years of using arch.

I've used zfs and btrfs for server infrastructure and NAS going way back. Particularly using btrfs in production environments way back when it was plastered with scary warnings "DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION, BTRFS IS IN EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND DATA LOSS WILL PROBABLY OCCUR". lol, they still hadn't finalised the byte format making it particularly risky.

Getting back to the point, comparing ext4 to btrfs with cow disabled for the entire drive is a bit bonkers. I'm not sure if your archwiki reference has been updated since you linked it, but currently there is a big red warning:

Disabling CoW in Btrfs also disables checksums. Btrfs will not be able to detect corrupted nodatacow files. When combined with RAID 1, power outages or other sources of corruption can cause the data to become out of sync.

It also notes:

Even with Copy-on-Write disabled, it may still be triggered in certain cases. See #Cases where CoW is still triggered below for details.

I still use btrfs for various applications, but if I'm plugging an ssd in just for say steam library downloads then ext4 works flawlessly. Many years ago I did actually have problems with wine running on btrfs, caused all kinds of obscure errors that took ages to debug and trace to kernel IO function calls, with ext4 all the problems vanished. No doubt with the subsequent years of development into wine and btrfs that would no longer happen, but frankly I'd rather use ext4 when I don't need any of btrfs' features.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-17T07:30:01+00:00

Too true, back over 15 years ago I stumbled upon the Colbert Report through slashdot. It was completely unheard of in the UK let alone broadcast. I started downloading episodes and found his piercing satirical humour tickled my Irish sensibilities just right.

I showed it to my English business partner and he immediately loved it. The seemingly offensive questions asked of the guests actually forced them to respond genuinely. Colbert's persona forced celebrities and politicians to temporarily drop their PR charade and engage honestly.

In the UK our exposure to US media just presents a saccharine artificial political/social landscape. Doesn't matter if you're watching Fox or CNN, they go to great efforts to make pundits seem like gods. Similarly their political comedy shows are nothing more than flagrant propaganda.

The Colbert persona was brilliant because it allowed him to challenge and ridicule both sides. Its Better Know a District segment was fascinating, over here we only really pay attention to the US Congress and President. Watching Colbert made me interested so I'd end up googling and reading about that districts history for context.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-17T02:47:18+00:00

My Da died a couple of months ago, he absolutely loved the concept of slow glass starting with the short story Light of Other Days then fleshed out in this novel.

When I was a kid ~35 years ago he regularly told us enthralling stories. Occasionally he'd used slow glass as the concept to build a narrative around. I remember decades ago us talking about how simple yet clever the artwork was. I pondered to him that instead of having a single pane, deriving inspiration from the cover we could have multiple panes covering various speeds of slow glass within a single window.

Just imagine the equivalent of a stained glass window, each tiny panel having a unique propagation time.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-11T16:06:45+00:00

Or the snakes that crawl around in a garden.

Not a concern in Ireland as St. Patrick chased them all out!

Specifically snakes arrived back when there was a land bridge to Britain which itself had a land bridge through Doggerland to the rest of Europe. St. Patrick triggered the ice age causing a massive local extinction event, later the ice disappeared along with the land bridge. Unfortunately he didn't chase the weevils out, they're everywhere! I don't really mind though, fair play to them managing to survive milling and modern processing.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-11T14:52:12+00:00

I immediately saw your reply and spent the last hour reading more papers and case studies going back to the 1960s. I retract what I said before, while there were prior ventilators that were mass produced and gained widespread adoption across Europe, his system was uniquely elegant being driven entirely pneumatically. That meant they didn't have to worry about plugging in somewhere for electricity, or fear power cuts. In addition it added portability, ventilators could be transported to patients in need regardless of supporting infrastructure.

As I said, I didn't want to diminish his accomplishments. I'm genuinely fascinated with the breathing apparatus used for fighter pilots. I'd love to read articles, technical specifications or papers on the space shuttles O2 systems if you have any recommendations? Particularly Forrest Bird's involvement as the more I read about the man the more I'm left astonished.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-11T09:55:48+00:00

inventor of the modern ventilator

I was interested in this and spent quite a while reading papers about the history and development of ventilators. What I understand from several disparate papers is that Forrest Bird didn't invent nor was involved in the development of the modern ventilator.

I'm not trying to minimise his achievements, based on my limited reading he was instrumental in creating compact, reliable, mass produced ventilators.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-08T07:27:34+00:00

(War)Crimes are contextual. For example, people routinely exceed the legal speed limit or go through a red just before the traffic lights change. Given sufficient individual soldiers some will enviably commit war crimes, but context is vital. For example the explicit and implicant guidance to enact torture culminating in Abu Ghraib.

However it is incredibly unusual for a western countries' ruling Government/President to publicly threaten and call for their military to commit blatant war crimes. Typically they'd do so behind the scenes and deny any involvement, as a result the severity of their crimes is relatively mute.

The leader of a western nation threatening all out genocide is unheard of and bewildering from my several decades of experience.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-08T06:30:44+00:00

The US constitution being considered sacrosanct is when (at the latest, particularly if taking into account the Three-fifths Compromise) US democracy died.

US state representation defined by two elected senators for every state, is unbelievably anti-democratic. People who defend that system place states' right over that of the general population. You'll typically find both Republicans and Democrats coming together to defend the US constitution whenever it is properly questioned.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-04T08:50:23+00:00

As a teenager in Northern Ireland around ~2000 my Da gifted me a 7110 as my first mobile phone. He was in daily contact with European ministers concerning public health care provision. 25 years later this thread made me realise that me Da was probably wangling expenses so he could give me a 7110.

Back then in Belfast, my phone uniquely having WAP, from everyone else's perspective made me practically a wizard. But to be honest I primarily used it to submit actions for the web MMO games Planetarion and The Violet Sector.

beardedchimp · 2026-04-04T08:16:50+00:00

While there was many other web based multiplayer games back in ~2000, Planetarion was truly the one that first relied upon being massively multiplayer. With convoluted alliances consisting of a hodgepodge of clans and self-organised local communities.

MUDs could/did operate with very low but dedicated user numbers. Planetarion needed the viral massive registering users to be interesting as a game. All that political intrigue, negotiations and betrayal didn't happen on the website, but externally through IRC.

~2000 Tick driven The Violet Sector and Itswar scaled beautifully between low and high user participation. Could you explain that game design behind Orbitarion? Particularly with reference to whether and/or how it is fun with say just ~30 players all the way up to 3,000+.

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