I'm currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can't be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.

If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then "catch up" by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

Not quite the same thing I think.

My understanding of "no contingency" is more to do with inspections, certifications etc. I.e. an offer has been made that isn't going to be cancelled if the structural survey comes back with a load of issues to fix.

"Chains" in UK real estate lingo are about whether your sale is tied to other sales. For example, if you're buying a house from an owner-occupier who won't move out (and give you your new house) until the new house that they're buying is ready- that's an onward chain. A chain in the other direction would be someone who says that they'll buy a house, but will only have the money to make the purchase once they've got a sale locked in for their current house. Selling a house with "no onward chain" is telling the buyer that they can have it as soon as they've got the money, and that the seller isn't waiting for anything.

Chains can get very messy and complicated, as you can end up with s dozen house sales all tied up with each other waiting for one house in the chain to be ready to go before any of the others can go.

I've just discovered that the vets in my town are owned by Mars Inc.

You know, of "Mars Bars" fame.

Who knew?

I'd be inclined to see them as a European company which trades in America, rather than a company with American ownership. The reality is that if you buy a Stellantis European marque in Europe, it's almost certainly made in European factories, designed by European engineers, and the company's corporate HQ functions are also in Europe. If you buy a Ram truck from them, though, it's probably originated from their US operations.

The family next door used to have furious, thunderous rows all the time, until the couple got divorced and the dad moved out; now it's all very harmonious.

In my old house I once heard the woman having sex with someone who definitely wasn't her partner (as he was very definitely out at work at the time). That relationship ended before I moved house!

I'm deaf as a post, so when I watch TV I have a tendency to watch it too loud; apologies to my neighbours for that. But actually I don't watch a lot of telly these days, so they mostly dodge that bullet.

No, Chrysler and Dodge are Stellantis. Which is Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Opel and others.

I would use both ways depending on context, but ee-ther by default.

I'm in Swindon.

Pretty much. Anyone who is 50 years old today would have been 8 years old when the NES launched. Lots of dads and mums in their 30s will have been hitting their teenage years well into the PSX era.

Not everyone is or was a gamer, but very few parents with young families today will be old enough to predate gaming being widespread and mainstream.

You can't spell "public transport" without "trans"!

Imagine trying to dust that. Just think of the cobwebs.

He's a man with a dream: a dream of building a big windmill.

Unfortunately he doesn't appear to have any land, money, or expertise in building big windmills. But it's quite the vision.

Hey, don't you cast shade on the Magic Roundabout. That is peak traffic engineering.

Maybe I'm just tired at the end of a long day, but I'm also completely unable to parse that headline. Somebody's mum is fingering what now?

maybe turn the three sisters

Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.

Even the US he ce why Vauxhall exists.

Not to detract from your point (because you're completely correct), but just an FYI that Vauxhall/Opel has been European owned for some time now. General Motors sold it to Peugeot back in 2017, and it's now part of Stellantis.

Ford had (and still has) essentially the same arrangement, only in their case they use the same brand. Ford Europe and Ford USA are pretty much entirely separate companies, owned by the same parent; hence why their European car lineup looks mostly nothing like their US lineup.

That's encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don't have any control over what happens to it.

Fundamentally, if you don't trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.

“Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

"If they look like this animal then they are the animal" really doesn't sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.

Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren't the same species.

FFIX is my favourite FF game (yeah, fight me on it), which means this news is either very good or very bad depending on how the remake ends up.