The three hour line to get through customs at Calais and onto a boat is less of a delight, also the way the road to the port is lined with tall concrete fencing topped with razor wire
Personal automobiles are quite spectacular if you push them hard: Nantes, Zaragoza, Andorra and the Puy de Dôme inside a week #roadtrip
Five sorts of fruit at breakfast and then ham and cheese baguette and a cafe au lait for the other two meals is a reasonable nutrition approach, no? It’s one that the aires de service on French autoroutes seem to suggest
Making a small vow that the next time I drive straight over the Pyrenees will be in a car with more than homeopathic quantities of torque. My darling 998cc Dacia Sandero was really struggling up some of the hills at 15mph in third.
The bar and shooting range also offers axe throwing. I am distinctly surprised to have encountered this in Europe!
I recently watched Iron Man (2008) for the first time in over a decade, and it's a real lightbulb moment to realize that every executive, business bro and tech guy currently obsessed with using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever thinks they're like Tony Stark talking to Jarvis
I had not quite realised quantitatively how much less efficient it was to drive fast in the heat. 47.4 litres (at €2.19 ≈ £1.88 per litre) for 333 miles on 80mph French péages, while Kirsten’s road trip to Cornwall and back at the end of April in the same car used 34 litres for 360 miles.
Marvels of French culinary innovation: ice cream sold with a spoon cast out of waffle-cone material that you can eat afterwards!
More than 10% of the way to Zaragoza (via Calais and Nantes). I wish there were a slightly clearer statement of when we needed to drive onto the ferry …
Fortunately I double-checked what was being requested, because I think fried breaded prunes in a salt, pepper and chilli spice mix with noodles would be unusual if you meant prawns. Though now I am thinking of devils on horseback and Zwetschgenknödel and actually it might work … another time :)
FIVE? What sort of heretical un-Lego-like number is FIVE?
(u^2-2*u-2)^4+(u^2+4*u+1)^4+(2*u^2+2*u-1)^4 = 18* (u^2+u+1)^4 I wish I could construct more of these with less than O(n^9) runtime - there are O(n^3) quadratics with terms less than n in absolute value, and so O(n^9) triples of them to examine (6*u+3)^4+(u^2-2*u-8)^4+(u^2+4*u-5)^4=2*(u^2+u+7)^4
“140 football pitches” may in fact be the stupidest way to say “one square kilometre” (140 x 105 x 68 = 999600)
Watching Great British Sewing Bee en famille. My six year old daughter just came out with ‘that is super duper cottagecore’ !
My, using locally-hosted LLMs gives you a better appreciation of what lengths the Big Companies have to go to reduce hallucinations. LLAVA is sure that my picture of a tern is a seagull; and when I tell it it's not a gull, it informs me it is a heron standing on floating debris!
Emily Wilson's latest translation is a prequel to The Odyssey. But since the original already covered the Trojan Horse, this one is all about a fight between two minor characters that Odysseus encountered in Hades. Embarrassing cash grab, milking that IP for all it's worth.
The HS2 works as you head into and out of Birmingham New Street are really quite impressively monumental. Though I’m a little surprised how rusted the brand new bridge frames look - I guess they’re COR-TEN and it’s deliberate to save the cost of keeping them painted.
Looking at what Dinomania can do today, and at the current Chinese focus on biomechanical-inspired robots, I expect an entirely plausible baby triceratops petting zoo event at Universal Studios Beijing by 2040, with a plausible T Rex roboting around in the background #dinoconuk
The arc of shops with the walkway in front of the artificial lake: #dinoconuk definitely setting itself up for the Jurassic World fans. Lake so far appears mosasaur-free, and a reassuring absence of large pterosaurs.
Would it be possible to make a Prehistoric Planet-like thing set in the actual Jurassic, or would anyone with the money to produce it reckon that they could not risk the audience reaction when so many people have Cretaceous favourite dinosaurs?
Usually convention hotel clashes are hilarious, but here we have fifteen hundred dinosaur enthusiasts at #dinoconuk in green lanyards and a comparable number of people in red lanyards from the Midlands Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, and I don’t think this will be the cause of any whimsy at all.
#dinoconuk haul from @introvertebrates.bsky.social, www.patreon.com/SpeedThief, and Gert van Dijk of planetfuraha.blogspot.com
