Interesting Links for 21-03-2016

[andrewducker]

As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops (tags: money pay society sexism work ) Budget 2016: George Osborne cuts £1.1bn from NHS repairs fund (tags: nhs money austerity ) How a simple SIM card is making Indian farmers more efficient-and possibly saving lives (tags: india farming phones Technology ) The Comma That Costs 1 Million

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Yeah the thing is people have been fucking before their weddings for forever.

There's an old saying that can be traced back to the 1700s that "a first baby is always premature, but the rest take nine months."

You get the implication.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. The biggest thing that's changed is that you can actually talk about it now.

[danieldwilliam]

The sim cards for Indian farmers sound like the Archers.

[andrewducker]

*is unfamilliar with the show*

[danieldwilliam]

It's a long running radio soap about an agricultural community. Started in 1951. Historically it was used as a way to communicate and normalise technological and commercial innovation in agriculture through an entertainment.

My grandmother used to date one of the founding scriptwriters. In no way are any of the characters based on my family.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah, I'd forgotten it was used as an education tool for farmers.

That makes sense - and yes, a great way of normalising things for Indian farmers who need a push towards a more sustainable livelihood.

[gonzo21]

Wow, so what would the motivation have been behind an LD/Tory pact? Ultimately to merge the two parties into one? I mean, the Neoliberal agenda does seem to favour two-party systems.

Or were the Tories just somehow genuinely afraid they couldn't win?

[andrewducker]

They were. It was looking like a Lab/Lib/SNP group would take more than 50% right up until polling day.

[gonzo21]

All from the influence of these three men who run the three big polling companies eh.

[momentsmusicaux]

Contracts should be written in some sort of pseudocode.

[andrewducker]

Legal language pretty much is pseudocode by this point.

The problem is that they wrote the wrong pseudocode, and then tried to argue that it should be interpreted as if it was plain English instead!

[momentsmusicaux]

Not really, as there's a constant arms race between the writers and the interpreters. When it has an EBNF, *then* it's pseudocode.

[andrewducker]

You're never going to get around the arms race, because at some point the symbols reference real life things, and are applied in general circumstances where the references are unclear (because real life is unclear).

Most court cases don't happen because of laws stated in an unclear way, but because someone notices that law A about thing B could also apply to thing C, if you squint at it just right, and that it intersects with law Q in a way that could be interpreted in the way they'd like it to.

As the laws are not mathematically formalised in a way that prevents contradiction, you're never going to get around that.

(And as that would require formalisation far beyond pseudocode, contradict Godel's points on incompleteness, and result in a system that you wouldn't actually want running your country. Judges are there to make sure that common sense isn't completely overridden, with good reason.)

[kalimac]

I'm a little suspicious of the white wedding gown article, insofar as it talks about Victoria flouting tradition of whether a queen should wear a crown to her wedding. I won't swear I've not missed something, but I think the only previous time an actual queen had had a wedding in England was in 1554.

[andrewducker]

I did take a quick look at the Wikipedia page, which indicated the same Victorian origin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_wedding#History_of_the_white_dress

But I suspect things are more complex.

Good piece here too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_dress_of_Queen_Victoria

[kalimac]

I'm not saying the white wedding dress story is actually wrong. But I'm not taking Wikipedia, of all things, as any sort of confirmation of something told by some random person on the Internet, beneath 6 (!) layers of quotes, who is so loose and unreliable with checkable facts.

[a_pawson]

There have been only 6 actual Queens of England/Britain (unless you count Jane of Matilda, both of whom had dubious claims to rule and got their heads cut off before they were even crowned), so it would be hard to have a tradition based on so few examples. I think that by Queen, the author meant a woman marrying the King.