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CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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I am signed up to academia.edu and happily get a bunch of papers sent to me every day, either because they have M J Harper in them or because they are related to my interests. Then they stopped coming. Only I didn't notice (speaks volumes). Now, after a month (or so), I have noticed.

Getting the problem fixed is not easy because academia.edu are signed up to Zendesk, an algorithmic help service that responds to words in emails without necessarily addressing the problem. Here is their first effort

Hi Michael Harper,
Thanks for getting in touch. We often find people are interested in a mix of papers they've previously read as well as new documents on the site we think might be relevant to their interests. A way you can get more new papers and fewer papers you've already read is turning off the "Academia has papers from your reading history you would like to revisit" setting in your email notifications: https://www.academia.edu/settings#email-notifications Please let me know if we can assist with anything else! Thanks!

Hannah (she/her)
Academia Customer Support
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Mick Harper
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Further to my diatribes about post-Covid supermarkets, I went early to shop with a relative spring in my step. They won't have any excuse this time, thought I. That's what you think, thought Tesco. No sliced white. I'm talking own-brand, stuffed to the gunnels with chemicals, delish, lasts a week, sav? Not a chance. I have to make do with cruddy old no preservatives, no additives, no nothing Warburton at twice the price.

On to soups. For reasons that even the European Court of Justice can't fathom, all supermarket own labels are 75p and all brand names are £1.50. Get out of that one. I'd love to but there's never any available (apart from cream of tomato some weeks though not this week and not any week as far as I'm concerned, I'm sick of it) and I'm not being held hostage by Baxter's Old Traditional Farmhouse Cock-a-leekie. I'll cock a... well, never mind.

The freezer cabinet. Oven chips? Sod off, you can make your own. Magnum mini's? Vegan salted caramel? You can sod off. Mixed veg? Yes, if you like big chunks of broccoli and parboiled cauliflower. Whatever happened to peas and sweet corn with a bit of carrot to keep it honest? Don't they grow them in Spain anymore?

Look, stop me if I'm being exotic. If I'm making impossibilist demands. If I'm ending life on earth with my carbon hoofprints. I just want to get back to the food mum used to cook. You know, c 2019.
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
But anyway there are lessons here for those of you having difficulty bringing your work to a wider audience. Or indeed any audience.


Always planned a YouTube channel once I have the book completed. It's taken longer than I anticipated.
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Mick Harper
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Here's a quite stunning resource, news of which I can find nowhere else to put https://library.oxfordarchaeology.com/search-by-period
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Grant



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Superb. I’ve bookmarked it.
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Mick Harper
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It was all my own fault!

Hi Michael,
Thanks for getting in touch. Our records indicate that you pressed the "Report Spam" button on an email from us around January. When you click that button, we stop sending you all emails. It looks like you've opted back into emails, so we should start sending you a selection of Academia emails, including these. You can make more granular changes to what emails we send you here: https://www.academia.edu/settings#email-notifications. If you don't want anything other than new papers, you could uncheck all the boxes. Thanks!
Hannah (she/her)
Academia Customer Support

Except you would have thought they could have had a quiet with me after all these years, this mistake being so easy to make. But that is not the way of the modern world. It was, I think, Lord Reith who coined the memorable

Algorithm shall speak unto algorithm.
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Mick Harper
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It's a little known fact that non-Latino people who are currently living on tortillas filled with sliced salami and a random mix (from four) of Tesco Tex-Mex Dips often forget how to fold the tortilla so it doesn't all start coming out in a squidgy mess all over their hands and futon.

They look on the internet, they get it right but when, in an excess of hubris, they think they can do it again the next day without going back to the internet, the squidgy mess naturally returns. But get this. The poor mutts think, 'Oh I won't be doing it that way tomorrow.' But of course they have forgotten what the wrong way is by then. It's called fusion.
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Mick Harper
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My latest fan on medium.com
Mike Harper clapped for 'A small but possibly significant point..' about 6 hours ago

I wonder if they'll guess.
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Mick Harper
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Strange Signs A Person Is Highly Intelligent

These are usually lists of things that people who think they are highly intelligent suffer from and this one -- culled from medium.com -- is no exception. But I'll pass it on for what it's worth, with my comments that are always worth it.

Impatience
This is certainly true. It gets to the point where you withdraw from all human contact because they're so damned slow.

They are super cheap
This is true. They just can't be bothered.

They lose shit
Partly true because of the can't be bothered factor but there's not much to lose because of the can't be bothered factor.

They have the handwriting of a kindergarten student
This is probably true -- it's certainly true of me -- but who handwrites anything?

They are terrible at maths
True, and quite important because our chief rivals, the idiot-savants, are always very good at maths.

They never go to the bathroom
This is true because you get obsessed with whatever you're doing. Though not, in my case, to the point of Chuck Jones, creator of Looney Tunes, who used to piss his pants at his desk.

Strangeness
No matter how hard you try, people diagnose this quite rapidly.

Revelations that disappear
Not in my case (I write them down) but there are a lot of revelations to disappear.

Inability to understand the plot of most television shows or films
This is sort of true of me but I think it applies to pretty much everyone.

Buyer of coffee
Ya gotta have drugs. Partly to keep slaving away, mainly because nobody's going to take any notice after you've finished slaving away.
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Mick Harper
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Starting the day staring down at a half-eaten Wagon Wheel is commoner than you think.
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Mick Harper
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More Top Tips

If you are expecting a visit from a rather formidable member of your family and you're worried the cleaning blitz may not be up to scratch, take your name off the front door bells and she'll think you've moved away.
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Mick Harper
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Sister: How's the flat cleaning going?
Brother: You could eat your dinner off it.
Sister: So you have finished?
Brother: Except for the kitchen/diner.
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Mick Harper
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Every time someone refers to 'the king', I wonder who they are talking about.
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Mick Harper
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I was commended by medium.com for getting claps this week for the following posts

Britain sending uranium-depleted shells to Ukraine

Everything you say may well be true but since 'the public' are resolute in their belief that depleted uranium is tantamount to 'going nuclear' the West should not use it. War is politics by other means so it is no use winning the battle but losing the war for hearts and minds.

Identifying Ukraine's spring offensive

I can't see this as serious. Ukraine has achieved its objectives in this sector -- recapture of Kherson and re-establishing control of the Crimea Canal . Why push the Russians back into the relative safety of Crimea where they won't be able to pursue them further? One for morale, I think.

Are sweeteners safe?

My starting point is to ask, "Have there been billions of blind trials involving people taking artificial sweeteners since they were invented in the 1870's and have these reported no direct harm in one single case?" If the answer comes back, "Yes, to be honest, that's about the size of it," I would say, "In a world where they're coming at us from all sides let's not lose too much sleep over this one." The argument, however, fails because of the Judaeo-Christian ethic: "Thou shalt not do anything that's easy."

Seminal songs that failed initially

I'd nominate Jeff Beck's Hi-Ho Silver Lining. From memory this got to about No 15 in the 1967 NME.
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Mick Harper
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I got an email from Virgin boasting they were the fastest internet provider in the known universe at 650 mbps (miles per second) and provided an URL https://samknows.com/realspeed/ where you could check this. (Try it and let me know if Virgin's claim is correct.) As it happened I was experiencing a bit of lag (as we call it) so I did just that. It came back with the figure 0.7. For those of you not good at figures, this is quite a lot less. The email told me what to do about a low mbps so I started moving my router around, shutting down other devices (the fridge needed defrosting) and so forth but nothing seemed to make a difference.

Finally I did what they said to do when all else fails and started communing with a Virgin bot. (No cheap jokes, please.) He (is it?) eventually said he was giving up and passing me over to 'a member of the team'. After an hour of 'we are experiencing an unusual volume etc etc' I gave up and resigned myself to a bit of lag. It didn't matter a fig to me I was only doing all this because they had drawn it to my attention. I checked this morning and it was 665. Apparently Virgin engineers had been out and about in my area, as is their wont.

The moral of the story? WTF difference does it make having the fastest or slowest computer in the known universe. It's the person using it that counts.
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