James

I'm guessing most of us UK thumbs won't have had a reason to transfer between the two, but I'm pretty sure nine hours would easily leave you space for a few hours in London. Arriving at the airport more than two hours before your flight is excessive. That said, you'll need to bear in mind when the last trains are, since your latter flight is in the middle of the night. Also, London can be pretty expensive. If you were to transfer directly, you could take a coach (e.g. National Express), which looks like it'll cost you about £20. Alternatively, you could take a taxi, which looks like it'd cost £50+. If you wanted to stop off in London, I imagine you'd be better off taking the train. There's an express service from Gatwick to Victoria that takes 30 minutes and costs about £18, and another from Paddington to Heathrow that takes 15 minutes and costs £22 (there are also slower services for cheaper, if you prefer). You can catch the Tube from one to the other, and since they're both in Zone 1 it looks like it'd cost £12.10 for a travelcard, or £6.50 if you pay with an Oyster card, which is the contactless pay-as-you-go travel card in London. All this said, I almost always get a cab or a lift to the airport, since I'm coming from home and the fares from here to Heathrow aren't too bad. So perhaps someone else can weigh in with some firmer advice, and maybe suggestions of things to do or good pubs? I don't actually go into town that often.

Really great stuff as always, everyone. Erkki, your blocking woes reminds me of the time I lost my mind over some weird colour effect I was getting on one browser on one computer. I still don't know what caused it, but it basically introduced nasty mottled banding into skin tones, with the shadows being an unpleasant green shade. Anyway, the shadows in your picture look fine to me, though that is something that always worries me when playing around with black levels. I went to Sweden in the summer. I took loads of photos, some of which I quite like, but I still haven't found the motivation to go through and process them all, particularly since I'm still often frustrated by my limited skills in that department. But in the interest of making a start, here are a couple that stood out to me: I'm really pleased with the second one, though it's a shame I clipped off the edge of the roof on the left. Still, it's a different style than what I usually do. I think it's rather fun.

I made a stupid thing that automatically spoils pictures from the Internet and posts them to Twitter for nobody's enjoyment but my own (a fact that is numerically measurable). It's very dumb and of no interest to anyone but me, but I'm pleased with it anyway. Here it is! Very nice. "im c00ler_than_u" is depressingly close to the username I chose for my family's first ever ISP account. It didn't matter because nobody uses ISP email anyway, but it's still pretty embarrassing.

The zero-input babbling and the music was fascinating! It makes me think (fittingly) of Google DeepDream, in that it's a relatable insight (of sorts) into the workings of neural networks. They're trained to do something transparent (be it render text as natural-sounding speech, or identify objects in pictures), but it's very exciting to see those things turned on their heads and the process made visible (by removing the input text, replacing the source speech with music, or emphasising the patterns and sub-patterns identified in a picture until it's full of target objects).

I've been learning Swedish on Duolingo since early 2015. I'd been using Memrise before that, and had tried to use a book before that, but with less success. I reached the end of the course quite a while ago, but I still try to get my daily 30xp to keep it fresh, and the fact that I routinely get a fair amount of stuff wrong suggests that the practice is very necessary. I know that I'd have to ramp things up with maybe some proper lessons or at least some more time and other tools if I want to attain real proficiency, but I'm pretty lazy and a bit concerned about pushing too hard and losing motivation, which happened with the book. Perhaps it's a back-handed compliment, but one of the most valuable things about Duolingo is that it makes daily practice relatively painless for lazy slackers such as myself. I'm much more concerned with keeping up modest daily efforts than really pushing for faster results, but being unwilling to sustain that momentum. At least, that's how I justify it to myself.

If they were to ignore the referendum, do you think that would lead to a surge in support for UKIP or other fringe parties? Much has been said of Leave voters' remorse, but that's presumably a very visible minority; a lot of people would feel very betrayed if we backtracked. Would that be significant enough to be something to be concerned about?

Yeah, that's the main reason I'm suspicious of claims that we might not even leave. If we were to renege on this, we'd have to do so with our tail between our legs. The EU can't show any more favouritism, for its own sake. We'd have nothing to bargain with whatsoever; the situation the Leave politicians find themselves in may be dreadful, but returning to the EU in a worse position than at the moment of the referendum seems like political suicide. I think it'd be better for the country if they did that, but it seems astronomically unlikely.

To be fair, it's not a decision they make often. Only three referenda have ever been held that cover the whole UK. But that one of them should have been held as a cynical ploy by a PM desperate to cling on to power despite deep divisions in his party and supporters – a ploy that has now forced him to relinquish that power and potentially thrown his party into even greater turmoil – seems achingly unjust. David Cameron wanted so badly to win re-election that he gambled the whole country's future for generations to come on it, and lost. And to compound the bitter irony, the left's showing at the last election was so poor that he probably needn't have even bothered. I really hope we find a way for this to work out OK. That the pound bounces back and we make trade agreements and we allow for similar movement of people and labour and we don't descend into racist mayhem and so on. But I don't know if that's even remotely likely, and even if it is, the ugliness is already starting to show. Perhaps it's being overrepresented because everyone is on the lookout for signs of trouble, or perhaps the emboldening of racism is only a short-term effect that will subside once things start to seem normal again, but I don't know. It's a thought you see all over the place, but it's an irresistible one: you can totally imagine this appearing twenty years from now as a key contributing factor in the "prelude" paragraph in a Wikipedia article on something really dreadful. Melodramatic, sure, but it fits the bill. I guess it's hard to pin down why people voted leave. A friend told me he did so because he believes the UK economy is incompatible with the EU. Hopefully it's a lot of that, or people drawn in by all the nonsense about EU regulations and unaccountability and vague notions of sovereignty. I think the latter swayed my dad. My mum, on the other hand, is Swedish, and has found this result frightening and upsetting. What a mess.

I initially misheard "serving size: just enough" as "circumcised: just enough", which was an alarming notion. Are pictures of the J Allard book available anywhere? It sounds amazing.

I do find it delightful that AlphaGo developer DeepMind was co-founded by Demis Hassabis, who at 17 was the lead programmer on Theme Park. (Presumably this AI is better than that in Theme Park, which seemed to cause all my lawn-mowing handymen to end up stuck in the bottom-right corner of the map.)

Another voice against Clyde's "but what if they spend their last dollar on frivolous indulgences" concern is that of the charity GiveDirectly, as attested in this episode of Planet Money. It's by no means conclusive, but I find it quite convincing.

I can't wait for the next episode. When's the next episode?!

I've thought about getting a 35mm lens quite a bit, but I'm definitely at the stage where I'd need to be taking more pictures before I could justify spending any more money on equipment. I don't feel very inspired by my immediate surroundings, and I'm bad about taking my camera with me further afield (not driving doesn't help). Of course, the new baby in the family presents ample opportunities, which is nice. Anyway, great stuff, all. I really like that pair of architecture ones, uh, Architecture. (The portraits are very good, also.)

A new nephew arrived a few weeks ago: Flickr Flickr Flickr Flickr Flickr Flickr

It's obviously Jeff Gerstmann.

Does a "wrong thread" thread exist? EDIT: Sorry wrong thread.

Both those animals are adorable.

Boring non-fun response: I thought the idea was that cats miaows are a weird extension of the sounds that kittens make to their mothers, because of the somewhat parental relationship pet-owners have with their pets. Cats don't tend to miaow at one another because they're adults and don't expect food or other help from each other. So cats miaowing at you are basically crying like babies.

I did relish his insistence that his bad joke wasn't bad.

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Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone (Alex?) made some sort of hint at preservation of momentum, but not confidently enough to put those ideas to bed. Once doubts did begin to set in, someone did suggest the jetpack, but obviously the thrust on that thing wouldn't be able to make a dent on an orbital speed of that magnitude. I was pretty frustrated at the lack of basic understanding of physics, but when it came together, it made for some pretty hilarious and tense viewing, even if it was pretty obvious well ahead of time there was no way they were actually going to make the transfer. I hope they do work it out eventually, though. That would be incredible. Much more impressive than landing on the moon, in my book.

Listening to the latest Ryckert family odyssey podcast, it's funny as ever, but I'm really starting to feel quite sad for Paul. A bunch of individual things he says are incredibly frustrating, but overall they all reflect what seems to me to be a pretty tragic life, and a mindset that serves only to compound that. He also exhibits a lot of the worst traits of nerd fandom. He doesn't carry the overt prejudices that can entail, but he's far too concerned with how other people interact with the objects of his passion, and how that measures up to his own ideas of authenticity, which is based largely on obsessiveness. I get where that kind of impulse comes from, and I'm sure there is a certain amount of self-kidding and bandwagon-hopping when stuff like the World Cup comes around, but if that stuff seriously bothers you there's probably something up with your relationship with your interests. Maybe that's too harsh. It's good to be passionate about things. I just think this obsession with others' engagement probably comes from a bad place. I suppose he's on his way to becoming an archetypal bitter old man. Dan, on the other hand, seems to be getting better about having some perspective about other people, which is encouraging.

Yeah. Other than being pretty pleased when he bullied everyone into accepting Skyrim for game of the year back when that happened, GotY is pretty much "get irritated by Brad" season for me. I can't place my finger on what exactly it is about his particular belligerence versus everyone else's (is he just the most stubborn?), but it winds me up.

Very nice colours.

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