Quote of the week!

[Cody]

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact, it's all dark!

In honour of the album's 50th anniversary!

[Commander_X]

There is no dark side of the moon really. [...]

[...]

It's _not_ Paul McCartney saying this at the end, am I right?

[Cody]

You're not wrong!

[Cody]

According to a survey carried out by the paper, 80% of Brits agree with the monarch's bid to "trim down the monarchy"

Why do I have an image of a guillotine in my head?

[Cody]

AI has divided the sci-fi community. Editors of the Clarkesworld Magazine, for example, consider short stories written by machines to be spam.

[Disembodied]

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

[RockDoctor]

Maybe not quite a normal quote of the week, but I just asked my terminal the question " get_iplayer --pid-recursive --pid b008ncn6" and got the answer (which I'll trim) :

Episodes:
Red Dwarf: I - The End, BBC Two, b008nddx
Red Dwarf: I - Future Echoes, BBC Two, b0077lqz
Red Dwarf: I - Balance of Power, BBC Two, b0077lw4
Red Dwarf: I - Waiting for God, BBC Two, b0077m17
...
Red Dwarf: XII - Siliconia, BBC Two, p090v2zd
Red Dwarf: XII - Cured, BBC Two, p090v2wj
Red Dwarf: Special - The Promised Land, BBC Two, p0fq3s31
INFO: 71 total programmes

Which translates into English as "All 71 episodes of Red Dwarf are available to download from the BBC at good resolution." Which is going to explain why my link is going to be saturated for most of the next day.
Alternatively, those who don't have a set of DVDs (are all the episodes on DVD? might want to settle down with their toaster for a binge-watching session.

The shows were put up a few weeks ago, I think, but were initially only available for watching on iPlayer. No longer - download away!

[Cody]

Alan McKenna, from volunteer research group Loch Ness Exploration, was on a boat using a hydrophone system to capture the underwater sounds of the Highlands loch. He said when they were testing the system on Friday, they heard four distinctive "gloops". "We all got a bit excited, ran to go make sure the recorder was on and it wasn't plugged in," he sheepishly admitted.

<sniggers>

[spud42]

sure gloops lol... evidence or it never happened...lol

[hiran]

Looking at spud42's signature, it comes to my mind that someone I know was just recently stuck both at London Heathrow and at the destination airport. Once because the flight was delayed, the other time because it took ages to claim the baggage. Which reminds me of...

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport". Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

[Cody]

Concorde - breakfast in London, lunch in New York, luggage in Barbados!

[Cody]

It is as if the whole of reality is now just a finely balanced ponzi scheme ready to collapse at a moments notice.

[Cody]

"potential unknown alien technology operating in Earth's atmosphere" is not a possibility that Nasa is ready to deny.

[Cody]

Mayor Sadiq Khan says everything is being done to ensure the bedbug infestation seen in France will not spread to London's transport system.

Yeah right! Bring back cockroaches, they love munching on bedbugs!

[Cody]

The Guinness World Records has crowned Pepper X as the hottest chili pepper in the world, dethroning the Carolina Reaper chili pepper after 10 years. For comparison, a habanero pepper typically hits 100,000 Scoville heat units, but Pepper X registers at 2.69 million units.

Much as I like hot chili peppers, that's insane!