@dgoldsmith @mcnees I did this last time I complained about Spotlight, I think at your urging then!

The great thing about the early decades of each century is the ability to suffer confusion between two-digit versions of the year, and days of the month.

[This plot is actually for end-of-Australian-financial-year (June 30) in successive years.]

TIL about Rjukan, a Norwegian town in a valley that receives no sunlight in winter, but built mirrors to bring some in.

Some peaks on the moon get sunlight for 90% of the year [https://skyandtelescope.org/sky-and-telescope-magazine/peaks-of-eternal-light/], but year-round light on Earth would need a 540km-high mountain at the south pole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/rjukan-sun-norway-town-mirrors

Breaking: Trump legal team calls for stay in proceedings until quantum computers are available to help solve trial scheduling conflicts.

When TV producers release a finished series to the public, and name every episode except the first, which they just call “Pilot” … seriously? Novelists don’t call the first chapter of a novel “A sample that I wrote to show to the publisher in the hope they’d give me a contract.”

@waldi The people who built it will be surprised to learn that you know better than them, and that their photovoltaic modules are figments of their imagination.

Concentrated solar photovoltaic, but the water that cools the PV modules is retained as a heat store, and some of the electricity drives a chiller to cool a second mass of water. The temperature difference drives a turbine, for ~17hrs of stored power.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-31/raygen-resources-opens-new-solar-and-thermal-power-plant-carwarp/102798366

@anthracite I prefer to have a heap of pillows and blankets behind me.

Scientists publish studies on how too much sitting will kill you, and how standing desks aren’t much better … but how about a study of people who plant their feet against the nearest surface and tip back and forth on their chair, the way their teachers always told them not to?

Depressing to discover that under the latest MacOS, even after forcing the re-indexing of the contents of my entire hard drive, I can find dozens of examples of plain text files containing particular words that don’t show up in Spotlight searches for files containing those words.

Amazon will increase charges for POD books in June (details at https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GPGVYM9KWTYLD2GD#newcosts; typically US$4/pbk, US$10/hbk).

Like many authors, I’ll have no choice but to pass these increases on to readers. So if you were thinking of buying any of my POD editions, sooner is cheaper.

When electronics importer Cara Leon goes missing, private investigator Sam Mujrif is hired by her sister to investigate. Cara is 8 times taller than Sam, but evidence soon points to players much smaller than either of them.

As Sam and his cross-scale colleagues pursue the case, it becomes apparent that Cara’s disappearance is linked to technology with the potential to reshape their whole society, and radically alter the balance of power between the scales.

https://www.gregegan.net/SCALE/SCALE.html