Interesting Links for 01-02-2017

[andrewducker]

Virtually painless: How VR is making surgery simpler (tags: VirtualReality surgery healthcare ) David Davis confirms UK will leave Euratom, putting UK's nuclear strategy at risk (tags: uk nuclearpower OhForFucksSake ) Thousands of British gay men pardoned for past convictions (tags: uk lgbt law history ) "Men Explain Lolita to Me" (tags:

Comments

[gonzo21]

So if we're leaving Eurotom, then... presumably our nuclear energy plan is to go all-in with the Chinese instead?

[nojay]

Yes no maybe. China has the cash and some of the tech to build new reactors here, France has some more of the tech and we'll get that regardless. Leaving Euratom will cause some administrative mess and costs but it won't affect our existing position in the nuclear world that much. It does have knock-on effects further down the line though, affecting our work in ITER and the associated EU-funded JET campaigns

[danieldwilliam]

I like the Chinese high temperature pebble bed reactor. I wish we were buying two or three of them instead of Hinckley C.

And I like the Chinese plan to re-plant their existing coal power stations with HTR-PM's. I wonder if their existing requirements for new build nuclear, re-planting and the potential export market means there they can avoid that three generation problem and keep some sort of production line going more or less indefinately.

[nojay]

We'd need to buy thirty of the Chinese modular 100MW pebble-bed reactors, not just two or three to match the generating capacity of Hinckley C (two EPR1600s each producing about 1.5GW of electricity annually

Edinburgh's banana flats

[mair_aw]

I used to have those flats out of my back window. I got quite fond of them.

[danieldwilliam]

My old university had a very, very unlovely Brutalist high-rise building right in the middle of it which was listed. Difficult to maintain, not good to be in or to be out of and not able to be knocked down.

I'm glad I was doing law and got to hang out in the older buildings.

[nojay]

There's a saying that the best view of central Edinburgh is from the top of the Appleton Tower because it's about the only place in central Edinburgh you can't see the Appleton Tower. The new St. James Centre might run it a close second once it's completed though.

[danieldwilliam]

The Appleton Tower has been improved a bit by the new cladding.

I've always been fond of the story of Guy de Maupasant : that he would lunch each day at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place he couldn't see it from.

[momentsmusicaux]

The case of things like the banana flats is a tough one. On one hand, they're a part of the architectural history, and if they were all demolished, that would be something lost.
On the other, if they're not very nice to live in, that's crap. The article doesn't seem to say (skimread!) about how people living in them feel about them. They don't look terribly nice, but that's mostly because concrete ages badly and looks all uneven and bland. Or maybe that's just how we see it; the stonework of the New Town ages badly and stains and if unmaintained fritters away, but we see old buildings and think they're gorgeous (and don't see that they're cold to live in).

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I can see that as a part of history they're interesting. I'm just not convinced that they're nice to live in. That may just be my prejudices showing, of course.

[momentsmusicaux]

They certainly have that grim look from the outside. Then again, provided the actual structure is sound and they don't let in damp and they're warm, people probably do lovely things with the interiors.

(My dad told me about a place he lived in when he was little, where their flat was in the part of the block that made a bridge over an outdoor bit, if you see what I mean, and because it was basically just a layer of concrete between the outdoors and their floor, in the winter you'd get icy cold water building up in the carpet because of the dew point. That's the sort of grimness that shouldn't be preserved.)

[momentsmusicaux]

I once worked on a new build of a website. It was put on the live server, so the client could check it, in a user account called CLIENT-dev. Bad idea putting it on the production server in the first place, of course.
Then, in due course, the new build went live. The server guy did this by changing the domain data to point to the server's CLIENT-dev account. I pointed out this was a REALLY BAD IDEA. Nobody listened. Something like a year or two later, when this was long forgotten, I accidentally deleted the site, because it was in an account called -dev.