Tomrn

I tried this with some cheap "low-fire" clay that bought online and wanted to make into pots. I tried firing them in my metal "stove" style fireplace (these are the iron looking ones that are fairly common at least here in the UK) The first batch simply exploded in the fire as the clay was not dry enough (sounded like I was making popcorn). To thoroughly dry the next batch of pots I let them air dry for a week and then 'cooked' them in the oven for a few hours. I placed them in the fire, and kept it burning for a good few hours feeding in wood fairly consistently, although the temp was nowhere near hot enough for a 'proper' firing.

It 'sort of' works - the pots are very brittle and not at all waterproof. Glazing wont work at those temps so I tried a slip-glaze (basically glazing with liquid clay) which at least gave the pots a slightly shiny appearance.

Thanks for sharing your story, God bless you and your family.

Anyone else getting a bit of a dodgy PR vibe about this post and all the glowing comments, or is it just me?

My 2cents on how I picked up emacs:

Keep using your 'main' editor for coding for now.

Get a shell/terminal that you can open/close with a hotkey (iTerm2 on Mac or something like yakuake on linux)

Run the editor you want to learn (I recommend emacs) in your hotkey terminal (basically you want an 'always there' emacs that you can just pop open at the press of a shortcut key)

Spend 5 minutes learning the basic commands.

+) Move the cursor around.

+) Open a file.

+) Save a file.

+) Switch between buffers/files

Now while coding in your existing editor, use the hotkey window with the new editor as your 'scratchpad' or diary. Note down ideas, todo items, thoughts about the code your are writing etc. Google commands as you need them and you'll pick things up bit by bit.

You don't see the productivity drop because you're not using the editor for your main task of coding, but you'll be using it 'little and often' which is a great way to pick things up.

I made the full switch when after a year or so at work I found myself pseudo-coding and stubbing out methods in my scratch file in emacs and copying them to my IDE.

YMMV but hope that helps :)

This reminds me of something I read a couple of years ago about an earth-orbit satellite collecting O-zone data.. when it encountered the 'hole' it ended up throwing away most of the data since it failed its 'common sense' test. Wish I could find the link.

In the case of an altimeter it makes sense to be aggressive with the 'common-sense' component to throw out bad data. But with other things like temperature, you wouldn't want to throw out data that could look wrong, but could actually be caused by some unknown phenomenon (like say, superheated gas pockets on mars) as that's exactly the type of weird stuff you'd be interested in.

I guess the problem is distinguishing [data that differs greatly from what was expected] and [data from a sensor malfunctions]

Was anyone else half expecting this to be a dwarf fortress story?

hundred percent agree with this. A standard lib bundled with all browsers would solve so much of the framework madness.

favourite line from the article -

"the plural of anecdote is data"

nice.

Thanks for the links man, the crash bandicoot stuff is a great read

I always think this is the closest thing to a 'Bible for atheists' that I've ever found. Seriously awesome stuff

My line is always "salary is something I'd discuss in a face-to-face interview".

If they push just apologise and say you're not comfortable discussing your salary over the phone.

"Results from models with alternative cutpoints at 1980 and 1985 are shown in the online supplement."

Does anyone have a link to the online supliment?

Also would it be normal practice for a study like this to make the raw data aviailable? I'd love to take a look. As it's not totally clear how the 3.3% figure was arrived at.

This sentence struck me as a little odd: "For example, I use employment from 1985, reported in survey year 1986, to predict marital dissolution in 1987"

I would have thought unemployment in the actual year of divorce would be more important when looking for a corellation? Not looking at the husband's unemployemnt two years previously?

The issue is that the data was gathered without a warrant, making it inadmissible.

In cases like this where it sounds like a number was found in a known drug dealer's phone, I can't imagine they would have had much trouble getting a judge to sign a warrant to track the phone?

On Point (A) "weird that they [hmrc] didn't [go after google for more fines]" Google had managed to negotiate some kind of 'tax-deal' with HMRC which came to light in 2016 and was widely critisized. It all seemed a bit shady and I wouldn't be suprised if HMRC were discouraged behind closed doors from going after google too agressively.

People have seen the market responding to uncertainty by dumping GBP and FTSE and are equating that with the UK economy actually being much worse off already. Hence the sudden 'realisation' that brexit was a terrible decision. Large numbers of traders betting on the UK betting on the UK being worse off does not make it so. (Or I guess it kind of does.. but that's markets for you!)

At this point we have absolutely no information about what the Brexit deal will look like, it's impossible to know what the UK economy will be like post EU. For all we know the eurozone could face a crisis in the next few years and by distancing itself from Brussels the UK could end up better off.

In a month or two when things have settled down we'll see a much more reasoned debate. Once article 50 is invoked and we begin to see what the 'leave' deal will actually look like you may see many people adjusting their position.

Yep, the last few movie trailers I've seen on there have been subtitled. I assumed this was the reason. If this sees us getting more and better quality subs for video content then I'm all for it.

I realised this is why I've been enjoying shows with subtitles recently (some anime titles on netflix) because it forces you to watch the show without the constant phone checking.