Has anyone who likes this not already binged the full box set on iPlayer?

Anyway we enjoyed it. It was bonkers, and definitely don’t poke too hard at the many, many plot holes, but there were enough games of “who really is the baddie” to keep us entertained.

If the thread had been titled “how do I make a bahn mi” then I’d have upvoted you to the moon. But it wasn’t. It was asking how to make that most English (not British, but English) of foods, a cucumber sandwich. And in case that wasn’t a clue enough, the community is Ask UK. Not Ask Vietnam or Ask America.

If you went into an English tea room for afternoon tea and they served you that monstrosity and claimed it was a cucumber sandwich, you’d be perfectly within your rights to burn the entire place to the ground and not a single judge in the country would convict you.

If it has cheese or ham then it’s not a cucumber sandwich. It’s a cheese sandwich, or a ham sandwich.

That “assuming nothing else changes” is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people’s rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.

Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.

Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That’s the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you’d gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they’d have laughed in your face. But it happened.

Looking at that screenshot, even though I’ve been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

Well like it says in the sidebar, we’re the Meh Generation so, I suppose, meh!

Seriously though, I’m not bothered. If anything it’s to our credit that we’ve never done anything bad enough to make us despised by the young’uns.

I’ve not seen any of the previous series (I think I’m right that this isn’t the first series) but I accidentally caught the first episode this time round and now I’m avidly watching each week. I’m really enjoying it.

Also, I want to go travelling again (although on maybe more than 20 quid a day!)

Nothing changed. I’m not sure what you were expecting would change - the only difference was that instead of driving to Dover, putting your car on a ferry and then getting off in France, you’d drive to Dover, put your car on a train and then get off in France.

The Eurostar passenger services started a year or so later iirc, but again although it was fun to be able to take the train to Paris rather than taking the plane or boat, it didn’t really affect anyone who wasn’t travelling to Paris anyway.

Maybe do a simple Google search next time?

Rather than resorting to that age-old cry of the cult member “do your own research!” can I respectfully suggest that if you’re aiming to change somebody’s mind, the onus is on you to provide the evidence, not on them. By all means take hours out of your day to search google and compile a list of things that you think will convince me. Me, personally, I have better things to do with my life.

That’s kind of my point. Blockchain evangelists have been banging the drum for many years saying “This is a perfect fit for the financial industry. Why won’t fintech wake up and recognise that?”

When in fact fintech took a long, hard look at blockchain a long time ago and decided “nope, there’s nothing here that would tempt us” outside of a few very niche applications.

Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.

It’s not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.

We’ve seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.

The one example I can think of that’s survived for many years is Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.

The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?

Maybe a controversial one but I much prefer the US version of Shameless to the British one.

Ooh thank you for this. Hannah Fry is an excellent presenter and brings enthusiasm and clear explanations even to complex subjects. I’m looking forward to this new series.

Edit: for those who can’t be bothered clicking through to the Grauniad article, the programme’s called “The Secret Genius of Modern Life” and it’s on BBC2 at 8pm.