Reminds me of the old joke about a student walking around the streets of Oxford late in the evening and seeing two academics who appear to be having a drunken argument. As they come into earshot one says to the other “and NINTHLY…”

Also reminds me of an old @garius.bsky.social thread about how important a perfectly flat concrete floor is for military logistics, as it allows very rapid cargo handling with forklifts.

Oh gosh... we had multiple meetings about reorganising our internal structure, ostensibly so that we could make our website make more sense, and then we did the restructure and it took months to get the website updated to reflect it...

See also: leaded petrol…

And here's the piece Ian and I wrote (the actual Shugar Kane paper) wrote in @nature.com explaining our little 🧪 experiment www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Very much so - the generation who grew up on media that had WWII as a direct or allegorical theme definitely have a misplaced romanticism for it. I wrote about this back in 2014… proved sadly prescient. www.randominformation.co.uk/writings/?p=...

Yeah - I wouldn’t condone it as an approach to chairing, but fair warning was given! I don’t think he’d ever actually done it…

Amazing! I once went to an event (it was a KTN event, iirc) where the chair, a middle-aged rotund hairy guy, told all the speakers (mostly men) that if they didn't stop speaking by the deadline he'd walk onto the stage, and if they still didn't stop speaking he'd kiss them.

Congratulations, excellent work!

Certainly if I'd been the session chair I'd have been telling the sound engineer to cut off his microphone and then telling him to sit down.

And he then *asked himself a question* which he then answered for a further 3-4 minutes before finally getting off the stage. I can't even remember what the talk was about.

What an ass.

He went wilfully and gleefully over time, despite being prompted several times by the session chair, until finally he reached his last slide. At that point he leaned over the lectern, cupping his hand to his ear theatrically and said "What's that, a question?"

The most egregious one, and I am going to name names here, was Roger Braithwaite of University of Manchester, who gave a talk at a conference in Reykjavik that I attended in 2022. By this point he was in an emeritus role.