saaaaaam

The generation above me in my family were largely life-long tenured senior academics. My father and uncle were both well respected academic administrators and my father was a small p politician within the confines of the university at which he was seated.

Lots of people told my father that he should go into big P politics and his response was always Groucho Marx: “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member”.

I think he also found Politics of that sort futile and aggressive and based on all the things that he felt didn’t (or shouldn’t) matter in academia: who can speak loudest, build factions, and influence an agenda with no regard for data or facts. Of course many of those things are in fact present in academia.

But it’s very inspiring to see this parliamentary cohort. I do wonder whether they will find it exhausting and disillusioning to operate in the cut and thrust of modern personality politics.

I sincerely hope not though.

I think you know that this approach is optimal.

Very much hoped that the article itself would be written without the letter e. Disappointed.

Yes I slightly mangled that one. But I’m sure there is a survival technique that involves crawling into the body cavity of a hollowed out cow. You probably wouldn’t want to do that in an igloo though. I’m not even sure you could get a cow into an igloo. If standard issue humans are this flawed it’s hardly surprising that top flight LLMs get things so wrong sometimes.

I have not, sadly. But I’m pretty sure I also had the book you mention. My brother and I made our own motor and many other things that would now be considered entirely unsuitable for 10 year olds to be doing. Copper sulfate crystals seem like a great idea until you have to explain why the playroom carpet has melted.

As I said elsewhere, you can always burn the books! And eating a laptop is considerably crunchier and more fraught than chewing through some good old fashioned leather facings, horse glue and nice heavy 120gsm wove.

When you’re living in an igloo trying to stay warm in the hollowed out belly of a cow having a few books around the place is probably more useful than some files on a laptop that ran out of battery just before it got morbidly damp. Plus you can burn them if you really need to.

Given the whole thing reeks of vibe I don’t think anyone picked anything.

We had a set called something like “How to do anything in an emergency” which had instructions for this and more. Alongside lots of creative uses of potassium permanganate.

I’m pretty sure it also told you how to butcher a sheep.

I used to be obsessed with it as a kid. The spectre of nuclear war and a three volume handbook on how to survive the impending apocalypse with nothing more than a plastic bucket, a packet of potassium permanganate, some charcoal and string. The late 80s and early 90s were a wild time to be a kid.

> Mac or PC with 16–31 GB | IBM Granite 4.2 8B | 14 of 22 right | 6 GB

So on a regular consumer machine this is going to be wrong nearly half the time. Great! Let’s hope it’s only on the simple stuff and not the “how do I perform an emergency appendectomy”.

Honestly, just buy some books.

Settle down CJ Craig.

I don’t know where you live but a talking pumpkin with a phone inside it would be gone in sixty seconds round here. Even a very old phone.

This is absolutely lovely.

A pelican with an empty pouch would have no need for a bicycle to get home.

Fax machine? Genuinely not sure what you mean. Is the answer just "a computer" ?

Because while yes, that's true, this apparently recognises the different users. So presumably if a child is using it, that will be under managed parameters set by a parent - meaning that it's much harder for the child to circumvent.