The Gilwell Park Weather Rock always has the up to the minute weather conditions and has been placed here for your convenience.
The Official Weather Rock is located on Gilwell field and may be used in the following manner:
First -- Observe the rock for motion
The Rock is not moving- 0-3 MPH ligh breeze
The Rock is moving slightly - 4-10 MPH Mild wind
The Rock is moving in a small arc - 11 to 20 MPH Wind
The Rock is moving in a medium arc - 21 to 40 MPH Wind-Gusts to 50 MPH
The Rock is standing off to one side by 15' - Gale Force Winds
The Rock is standing off to one side by 30-45' - Big Blow Coming
The Rock is standing off to one side by 60'-Hurricane!!
The Rock is standing at 90'-Tornado!! Get to a root cellar! Take Toto!
The Rock is bouncing up and down-Earthquake !!
Second - Touch and Look at the Rock
The Rock is cold, dry and easy to see- Clear, Fair Weather, it's Cold
The Rock is cool, dry and easy to see- Overcast Weather
The Rock is warm, dry and easy to see- Clear, Fair Weather
The Rock has a shadow - It's sunny
The Rock is hot & dry and easy to see - Clear Weather, It's Hot
The Rock is warm and white - Chase the birds away
The Rock is cold, wet and easy to see-It's a cold, wet, day-Dress warm
The Rock is wet on top and dry on the bottom- It's Sprinkling
The Rock is cool,wet, and easy to see-It's rainging. Get your poncho.
The Rock is dripping on all sides-Its a downpour-Too late for poncho
A case of oops rather than UPS
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better be going
That was a powerful joke
The sort of thing that could spark a pun-off: a current trend at El Reg.
We Volted at the chance to have some pun
4 days
jakeSilver badge
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Locking MollyGuards.
Available at a sparky supply shop near you; usually under $CURRENCY20 each. //
Sorry for Molly? Nah.
She has a story to tell that nobody else does.
Many moons ago I took my daughter to SLAC on take your kid to work day. At the ripe old age of 9, she had been there many times before and knew the ropes, but I figured she deserved a day out of school.
She told me as we were walking in that it'd cost me ten bucks for her to not push any buttons. I gave her the money.
On the way back out, I told her that it'd cost her ten bucks for me not to tell her mother she was running a protection racket. She made a face and paid up ... and promptly told her mother as soon as we got home. They both still laugh about it :-)
Lost Legend
These legends aren’t really lost — we’ve known where they were the whole time! We created The Repository of Lost Legends (TRoLL for short) for those of you who don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. If you have a taste for the unusual and arcane (and can suspend your disbelief just a little), sample some of these precious gems.
ben_s
Any half decent IT department would get an alert if they couldn't ping an AP, and they would have a look at the switch to see that an interface was disconnected, then go and take a look.
They'd then notice a pattern, take a look at the records to see who was connected to any nearby APs at the time, and because you'd have to do it when the office was quiet, fairly soon work out who it was disconnecting them.
Anonymous Coward
You think we don't have a vm on that network that will easily accept additional network interfaces, created with the access point's mac address and ip addresses to fool the monitoring system? Some of us weren't born yesterday.
rIf you really want to confuse people, you can use a $250 spool of fiber and make their computer, which is 50m from the network closet, appear to be 25km farther away. If you can't get your hands on a spool of fiber, but have a box of patch cables and a spare 48 port switch, you can connect the user to port 1 and the upstream switch to port 48, and then put ports 1-2 in vlan 1, 3-4 in vlan 2. 5-6 in vlan 3, etc, and cable ports 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, etc, making his computer 25 hops away from the actual network.
anon for legal reasons.
The IOCCC, as it's familiarly known, is back after a four-year gap, giving the entrants more time to come up with some remarkably devious code.
This week, the results for the IOCCC 2024 were announced, with a record 23 winners. It's the first IOCCC in four years, but you shouldn't take that to imply it's as regular as the Olympics. In fact, almost nothing about the IOCCC is regular: this was the 28th edition of the event, and celebrated its 40th anniversary.
We confess that we have not yet studied the source of all the winners closely, but we have already got some personal favorites. Adrian Cable won the "Prize in murky waters" for this magnificent effort:
Dr Cable offered this 23 second Youtube clip by way of explanation. The chances are that you may already be familiar with it, but if not, it won't take you long. We also confidently predict that it will not help in any way.
Whatever you think the code does when run, you're wrong, but you're not going to believe what it actually does generate. Don't try to copy and paste it from the above, because as well as flagrant abuse of the C programming language, it also contains flagrant abuse of Unicode encoding. The IOCCC organizers have their own explanation, which will show you what this infernal masterpiece does in fact do.
Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
July 27, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social· 10d
I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer's music, and I knew he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.
The NSA's research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let's see if we can find anything he published internally!
And I found a few articles I can't comment on. But there was one unclassified article-- "Gambler's Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary".
The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957.
The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that's not what stuck out to me when I read it.
See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources.
What's the leftover?
Well, you can look through the entirety of the body of the paper. It'll take you a while, but you can pretty quickly pick up that sources 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are all cited.
But if you know anything about Lehrer's musical career, you can probably figure it out by looking at the bibliography.
See, entry 3 in the bibliography is "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" by one N. Lobachevsky.
And if you've ever heard Leher's song "Lobachevsky", you may have just finished that title with "Bozhe moi!"
Now, it's important to note: this paper was published internally in 1957. Tom Lehrer had recorded and released "Songs by Tom Lehrer" in 1953, with "Lobachevsky" included. The song had already achieved some success.
...but nobody at the NSA noticed when he and Fagan dropped it in as a reference.b
It struck me as a very Lehrer-ish sort of prank. It's harmless, it's light-hearted, and it thumbs its nose a bit at stuffy respectability through its unfailing pretense of seriousness.
How had other people reacted to the joke, I wondered?
So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort of stuff.
The answer came back: "We've never heard of this before. It's news to us."
In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke.
A few years later, I filed to have the paper declassified, and the NSA eventually agreed, and even put it up on their webpage:
media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/...
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF
Rich Fagen @richfagen.bsky.social
· 9d
Thank you for posting this amazing story. My father (R.E. Fagen) was the co-author of this article with Tom. They worked together at "No Such Agency" and co-authored a few papers that were published in scholarly journals. (Scroll to the bottom on Tom's Wikipedia page under Publications).
//
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer
Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius
Tom Lehrer is considered one of the most influential figures in comedy — despite a body of work consisting of just 37 pitch-black songs and a career that stopped abruptly when the counterculture he he...
fsandow.bsky.social @fsandow.bsky.social
· 10d
And for those who haven’t seen his contributions to The Electric Company, an educational kids’ show from the 70s:
https://youtu.be/dB2Ff8H7oVo?si=WGXhQjGnqbBqFDqs
Tom Lehrer - "L-Y"
YouTube video by Edgar Aldrett
youtu.be
U.S. — President Trump has reportedly finalized a new trade deal with the United Kingdom, securing a 15% tariff on the extra "U" in British words.
"I guess you could say this is my favourite trade deal," Trump said, explicitly using the British form of favorite. "And England's shown a lot of honour, a lot of honour. Colour me impressed."
According to sources, the U.S. will now collect a fee every time someone uses a word with an unnecessary "U" in it. This is expected to have vast repercussions across the globe, taking the focus from British English and placing it on American English where it belongs.
On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.
The man in question was Oliver Smoot, then a freshman at the institution who was pledging to join the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. As part of his initiation, he was tasked with measuring the Harvard Bridge using his own height. The resulting unit, the "smoot," remains visible on the bridge today, with its markings repainted annually.
Local police even use these markings to pinpoint locations of traffic incidents. Google Earth also includes it as a unit, measuring five feet seven inches (170.18 cm) - you can find it as the last item under "Settings," then "Distance units."
Smoot went on to a career in standards and policy within the technology sector. After holding various roles, he served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and later as president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2005.
"Anguish Languish" by Howard L. Chace is a playful and experimental publication written in the mid-20th century. This unique text presents an inventive language game that transforms English phrases into a humorous form called Anguish, where the meanings of words are altered through phonetic substitutions. The book serves as both an entertainment and a linguistic exploration of how words can be manipulated for comedic effect. The content of "Anguish Languish" consists of a collection of whimsical stories and poems that showcase the transformations of familiar sayings and tales into their Anguish counterparts.
The Knuth diamond sign collection, from http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/dia
During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides. (Well, not every sign; only the distinct ones.) For provenance, I also stood at the base of each sign and measured its GPS coordinates.
This turned out to be even more fun than a scavenger hunt, so we filled in some gaps when we returned to California. And we intend to keep adding to this collection as we drive further, although we realize that we may have to venture to New England in order to see `FROST HEAVES'.
All photos on these pages were taken by Jill C. Knuth, unless noted otherwise.
ANGUISH
LANGUISH
by
Howard L. Chace
English words are astonishingly versatile and could readily be made to serve a new and extraordinary purpose, but nobody seems to care about this except SPAL[8] (Society for the Promotion of the Anguish Languish).[1] In keeping with its lofty ideals and its slogan, ANGUISH FOR EVERYBODY, the Society is sponsoring this little text, which has three aims:
-
To improve the public’s understanding of the Anguish Languish.
-
To improve the academic standing of the Anguish Languish.
-
To improve the social and financial standing of the Society.
WITNESSES
(45-80 MINUTES)
Eight men, who rubbed shoulders with Jesus, tell stories of their encounters with him. Ranging from wildly funny to dramatically intense, these stories show a “fleshed out” Jesus, who made a curious call on these mens’ lives. Performed in contemporary dress, with very contemporary language, this show introduces the audience, in a fresh way, to Jesus, without “church language or pews”. In the blink of an eye, with very simple costume changes, Curt becomes eight different men, with eight different perspectives on Jesus. //
God-Views
(40-60 minutes)
What is God really like? This show asks that question. And … it’s funny. Very funny. In it, Curt presents, in caricature form, six different comic misconceptions of the nature of God. God as a Sheriff, a Butler, an old Geezer, a Mechanic, a Cosmic Party Animal, and … God-in-a-box. He concludes with one of two stories (or sometimes both!) … a tender re-telling of the Prodigal Son story, showing the Father heart of God, or a very funny “redneck parable,” showing, in no uncertain terms, the picture of a gracious God.
PICNIC
Problem In Chair Not In Computer
Re: PICNIC
Hm, sounds nicer than PEBCAK !
Re: PICNIC
Problem with knob controlling monitor.
So please, when sending your protest message in the form of flames, please be sure to choose fuel consisting of a minimum of at least 30 percent bio-ethanol, and select only cars with standard power plants. This will also ensure that more EVs will remain on California roadways. Protest responsibly and govern yourselves accordingly. //
Granny Heartful
an hour ago
I might be a dumb blonde, but I gotta ask:
How do you burn cars in an environmentally responsible fashion?
I wish it weren't so, but there's gotta be a punch line in there somewhere.
bk Granny Heartful
3 minutes ago
You give up smoking dope for a week and call it a carbon offset. /s
Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
·
Follow
🚨 LMAO...!!
DOOCY: There was a video of the First Lady of France slapping her husband, Emmanuel Macron. Do you have any world leader-to-world leader marital advice?
TRUMP: "Make sure the door remains CLOSED. That was not good."
🤣
"I spoke to him. He's fine. They're fine...I Show more
2:26 PM · May 30, 2025
Two dogs arguing
Rich people problems
”Watery tart” is still my favourite expletive.