A Little More Web Kipple
Quanta Magazine has a nice article on a question I’d not even thought about – can all shapes pass through themselves? And, apparently, the answer is ‘no’, but only for a very limited number of shapes.
The article is pretty good and breaks down the problem and its history quite nicely. Go read!
The BBC archive has just thrown up this lovely little clip. Shot in 1962, this short Ken Russel piece can only be described as a post apocalyptic archeological report. It has good fun misidentifying various pieces of 60s paraphernalia and contains a couple of sly digs at archaeology’s propensity to call anything it doesn’t understand ’religious’.
It also has a few subtle hints as to the nature of this post apocalyptic world; there’s still no mass production, no knowledge of radiation, nor (given the ignorance of the electric fire) apparently, electricity. Indeed, destruction must have been almost total – no books, no photos, no pictures. Even no real oral history.
The BFI also has a nice article on The Lonely Shore here.
Another short timelapse, this time from Saltburn and their lovely funicular tramway.
Gallery: 2025 Misc
This blog’s slow descent into postbox topper fandom continues – this time with a nice ‘Harvest’ themed topper in Malton.
It looks like ChatGPT’s new browser is identifying itself as a bog standard Chrome instance. That should make it both hard to block and hard to track.
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"And now for something really rather fab to start your day off with – ICT 1301 resurrection project! Their goal is to restore the UK’s oldest 2nd Generation Electronic Stored Program Computer to functioning order.
They also have a lovely set of digitised technical manuals up to view!
Fab!
The Moorland Association has an interesting breakdown of the events around the Langdale Moor fire in the North York Moors National Park. If you have any interest in what happened then it’s really worth a read.
This is a lovely little video of RNLI boat launches. I especially like the Lizard Point launch – having walked the coastal path above that lifeboat station I can tell you it’s quite a drop down to both the cliff to the station and from the station to the sea!
Raymond Chen at ‘The Old New Thing’ has a lovely tale about what could be Microsoft’s worst selling product ever – OS/2 for the Mach 20.
Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing.
According to that person’s memory (which given the amount time that has elapsed, means that we should basically be saying “according to legend” at this point), a total of eleven copies of “OS/2 for Mach 20” were ever sold, and eight of them were returned.
I’ve seen a few expansion cards as part of choosing images for ‘Retro Computer Adverts‘, but the Mach 10| 20 is not one I’ve yet stumbled across. And as for ads for ‘OS/2 for Mach 20’? Not a sausage!
