You’d think that would’ve caused it to give-up all the sooner! 
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Recharge of the shite brigade
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And for more nope and some “how did you get funding for that?”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-use-dead-spiders-to-grip-objects-180980498/
It doesn’t sound like it would have cost a lot compared, say, with CERN or the ISS.
If they were Brits I’d have guessed it was a ‘Friday afternoon experiment’ i.e. what you get up to when you’ve come back from a pub lunch and your boss won’t let you touch anything expensive or dangerous.
But these people were at Rice Uni (where I worked for a year) and a) they don’t go to the pub on Friday lunchtimes there and b) they’re genuinely interested in spiders because the SE corner of the US is where violin spiders live and keeping an eye out for them matters.
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I’m sure there’s some absolutely useless stuff being funded and worked on, but the number of useful discoveries that came from research that at face value seems pointless is actually quite impressive.
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One more go at 2022?
I can’t help but wonder if some- not all- see WFH as a right rather than a privilege.
WFH has certainly improved life for a lot of people- including many of my friends of course, but on balance many businesses that relied on commuters have suffered- and in many cases- closed.
Personally, I would like the media to focus more on occupations with shitty working conditions where bullying; harassment and fatigue are a problem.
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Conversely, when covid hit, the one place around here that did coffee (a bakery) suddenly saw a massive upswing in business as all the people who would go to Starbucks etc. in the city centre still wanted their fix.
As WFH culture has settled in more places have opened to service the coffee, snack etc. market - I feel that in part the business has moved rather than disappeared.
Personally, there was never any point in my being present in the office five days a week. The nerds all sit at their computers with headphones on and communicate via chat systems - Slack or whatever. Face-to-face happens, but not all that much. Admittedly hundreds of nerds in huge open plan offices is a bit of a niche workplace 
Oh yes, it’s MS Teams now, isn’t it. They rather cornered the market during and after covid.
The other side of the fence
Because of underutilisation my firm have just closed and sold an office (With change of use planning permission to residential).
65 people are getting new hybrid working contracts with a new office base. Nearly all those people work from home and the firm are also taking the opportunity to enforce policy about office attendance.
It has been quite painful with a lot of very experienced people with 15 to 25 years service taking redundancy and a lot (like me ) agreeing a new contract with a six month option to take redundancy if it doesn’t work out.
I think HR underestimated how people had settled in to WFH over the last 4 years. Some even moved to Scotland on the basis that where WFH.
Well, that’s just plain selfish 
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Ahem… Did I mention me? 
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@Jim you been visiting old friends in Ilford?
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BiL is getting all competitive about the GCHQ annual quiz thing and I’m reminded of the time that I applied for a job there and they explicitly wrote back and said that I was too much of a mutt 
Not their exact words I hasten to add, but you had to have at least one British-born parent and despite my protestations, well, yeah.
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Did that at work today.
It’s not as bad as usual.
My morse is very rusty but I managed to decode the front of the Christmas card while it was being shown on the telly news this morning.
Presumably there’s more to it than the front cover?
Apparently it was aimed at 11 year olds so my feat is not that impressive.
Some recipe inspiration for @coco, the pizza sounds particularly suited.
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