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I thought a significant proportion of the ‘dust’ found around houses was sloughed human skin cells.

I understand the problem, and I sympathize. One of my sons was a junior university lecturer about 10 years ago, where the problem was ‘cut and paste’ from online sources. But there was software to detect that - the AI problem is something else. I’m not sure, though, that going back to written exams under controlled conditions would be fair. Many students found those pretty nerve-wracking and could underperform as a result, especially if the exams were end of term/end of year and counted for the large majority of marks for a course. Are you proposing many small exams throughout the course? Would that not significantly increase staff workloads? And how would things that are currently essay assignments (presumably one of the greatest problems with AI) be handled in a situation like that?

Notetaking in university lectures was what finally destroyed my handwriting. It hadn’t been great up till then - I had moved primary schools from one where we were still printing to one where the class had been using cursive writing for a year. I had never really caught up.

NOT FUNNY!!!!

I should have put a smiley on my post.

Most (all?) of Western SMTs LDs had a fifth gear - drivers called it ‘booster’ gear. Very few of their original-bought FLFs had it. I knew of only two, though there may well have been more. And one of those was the regular bus on a route about 2 miles long which had maybe a quarter mile which wasn’t steeply up or down or on busy town streets.

From the Wikipedia entry for Burns: Through his five surviving children (of 12 born), Burns has over 900 living descendants as of 2019. Quite possibly the owner is related!

I have posted this before, but it seems appropriate to your situation, so please excuse the re-post: https://youtu.be/xHYGYCyWK0o?feature=shared

One scientific department at university used to have a monthly one-hour guest lecture and following Q and A session. These could be very interesting, and the Q and A could become very detailed and occasionally rather heated. In one month each year, the lecture would be on a subject not in any way related to the research interests of the department. One year, the lecturer invited was from the local branch of the Flat Earth Society. The Q and A consisted of two or three softball questions, asked by members of the committee organizing the lecture, and that was it. Nobody was interested in ‘learning’ any more.

The Hughes mogul (“Crab”) was based on a Caledonian design by Pickersgill, drawn up just before the Grouping. The Caledonian design had large horizontal cylinders, which were out of gauge on some of the English railways included in the LMS. Inclining the cylinders dealt with that problem. The original Caledonian design also specified 180psi boiler pressure, which fitted with Hughes’s ideas. (Sources: Locomotives Illustrated vol 22 “The LMS Moguls” and Steam Days #172, December 2003 “The Horwich ‘Crab’”.)

Is there an app for that?

Sounds like it could be worth selling tickets for (and popcorn!).

When my parents moved into their first house after they were married in 1946, they bought a second-hand writing desk and it went through several house moves in the West of Scotland. It was a fixture in the sitting room and was used to keep writing materials, but also storing photographs and documents. I would use it if I needed a quiet place to do school homework. When my parents moved to a retirement home, the desk was the only large piece of furniture they took from the house. After both had died, we took the desk from the home, and it spent some time in my mother-in-law’s basement. My sister, living in Ontario, wanted the desk, so I arranged for it to be sent there. She died a year ago. When in Ontario dealing with the formalities after her death, I asked various members of the family if they wanted anything from her house. One son asked if he could have the desk. After probate etc. had been settled, a cousin living in the same town as my sister arranged for the desk to be shipped out here to BC. We had it stripped and refinished by a local husband and wife outfit, who did a superb job. Our son and daughter-in-law took the grandkids (9 and 6) to see some of the work being done. The refinishers told us they thought the desk was about 100 years old, which fits with it being secondhand in 1946. The desk now sits in the living room of my son and daughter-in-law’s house here on the west coast of Canada, at the end of a long journey from Glasgow.

Make sure you point out the possible problems here to Important People in the client organization, keep a record of that warning, and you can walk away humming “Not My Problem”.

I’m obviously missing something (and there are 3 “agrees” on that post). Why ‘The Night Mail’? What’s wrong with ‘Early Risers’? Or even “Handsome-Hippo-in-Charge”?

The New York Times has a daily game on its website called ‘Connections’. You’re presented with 16 words, and have to arrange them into 4 groups of 4, with the words in each group connected by some common theme. Here’s the starting position of today’s game. Has a resident of this parish had some influence on the makeup of the first line? 🤔

CRINGE!!! And look at the bottom of the leg of the ladder!

CPKC ES44AC #9369 as pusher on eastbound potash empties in Coquitlam this morning:

Tell that to a friend who had got to the stage of doctors having a discussion with his wife about switching the machines off! Fortunately, one doctor came up with the correct diagnosis - a rare bacterial infection caught from rodent faeces and/or urine.

There’s a pub in a small town in the interior of BC where the doors are labelled “fir” and “mna”. Clue - it’s an “Irish” pub.

90% of white males are born in the USA?

Ah, the ‘other’ Hunterian Museum! It is based on the collections of John Hunter. William Hunter’s collections were bequeathed to the University of Glasgow, where he had studied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterian_Museum_and_Art_Gallery

Agreed. My last 4 pairs of soccer boots have been bought in charity stores or in clearance sales. None of them cost more than $20. I haven’t noticed any great decrease in my abilities (though that may be because there wasn’t much room for any further decrease.)

A bit OT, but that beats the thrice-withdrawn 8Fs (48773-5).

In the 1968 Glasgow hurricane, a house near my (now) wife’s family lost their one-car garage - scattered over the neighbourhood. They didn’t use it - it had been put up by a previous owner. My brother-in-law, then a teenager, made a deal with the neighbour - he could keep any bits he could find. By diligent searching, over quite a few blocks, he found 90% plus of the garage and re-assembled it in their yard.