In the UK if you sell or rent out a house it has to have an energy certificate with a rating (specified by a letter). I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to rent out properties with less than a certain rating and that rating which is higher than you might expect.

This is true. The rating is actually pretty low though - they only need to be a band E on the EPC. It’s soon to be C though.

One of the… problems with that is that a lot of our housing stock is very old, and honestly not ever going to reach that. The grading don’t take partial improvements into account so if you do internal wall insulation on half your house it means absolutely nothing on the EPC. The means to get to C for older properties basically require insulation (not practical in pre cavity wall buildings without an ungodly amount of work) and renewable installs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try but it’s a tall order to ask anyone to rip everything back to brick and build cavity walls in th pre 1930 stock (which there’s absolutely craploads of)

But surely a higher rating would generally commend higher rents meaning either way it's the landlord pocketing the savings and the tenant is no better?

Currently “E” without an exemption.

It’s changing to C in a few years. But the ratings are odd - only fully completed items count so if you insulate the rooms as you go, you won’t get the EPC benefit until everything has been completed. There’s no partial credit

Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?

I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!

I have been researching local history and Google's AI is a godsend at reading old handwriting so I can quickly get an idea if a document will be relevant or not.

There are actually quite a lot of these in the UK - I remember many years ago meeting a lady who had visited them all and written a book about them!

I'm curious as to how social media gets defined for these bans.

I presume text messaging doesn't count whereas Discord/WhatsApp do? What about Minecraft and other games? What about school platforms which they can post comments/messages on? Is watching YouTube included? When I've filled in surveys about our children's social media use, they have included YouTube, which makes it look like every child is on social media.

It does not really require a lot of nuance. Any platforms serving short-form content using algorithmic recommendations, giving any random account infinite reach, a la Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube/Shorts/Reels/Redbook/etc are part of the problem.

WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.

I'm in my 50s and British and I've only had it done once: by the police when the house I was living in got burgled and they wanted to rule out our finger prints. It was 30 years ago and I imagine I could have refused. I didn't really think about it at the time.

Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.

For a while I worked on a project related to mapping the ancient world (so you could e.g. click on a ancient city and then see items from museums from that city, references in ancient texts etc) and one of the interesting problems was not just that cities changed over time but that things like coastlines also did.

Sounds super compelling, did it end up launching?

It did, but I'm not sure it exists any longer. This was 15 years ago and I've just done a quick google and can't find it. It was called the Pelagios project and it used the Pleiades gazetteer.

The first ever night train I went, about 25 years ago, on was from Berlin to Malmo. Early morning, I woke up to the feeling of my bed swaying and looking out of the window realised 'hang on, they've put the train on a ferry'.

I had no idea that trains got put on ferries, although I had been puzzled by the way the route on the route map crossed the sea but had assumed it was just to make the diagram simpler. It was quite a surreal thing finding myself unexpectedly on a train on a ferry. It was nice though as you could go and wander round the ferry and it was quite fun seeing it go off the ferry which had special train tracks on it onto the normal train tracks on the land.

I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?