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Definitely listen to the 1981 radio version if you like them.

Bilbo's Last Song scene here(spoiler warning for those who haven't read it as its at the end of the book).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIsHshR1Ig8


'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Housekeeper_and_the_Profes...

is a beautiful novel about a mathematician with a short term memory condition, that should appeal to HN readers.


I enjoy

https://destevez.net/about/

from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).


My alma mater (University of Nottingham UK) has just stopped all music and modern language teaching, which (for a very popular, respected, large campus institution) seems a bad sign for universities generally.


And that's with all the foreign student bonanza money. My inlaws live in Notts and all they see getting built is student blocks. Imagine what'll happen when the next government drastically limits student visas.


Roald Dahl said it best:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles:_A_Dangerous_Illness

'Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die. LET THAT SINK IN. Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles. So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised? They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation. (Dahl 1986)[4]'


It's weird that it compares the numbers in all Britain to only "a district of around 300,000 people".

Google says there are 70.000.000 persons there:

7E7/3E5/250 = .93 ~ 1 << 20 deaths << 10000 "ear or chest infections"

> That is about a million to one chance

A million to one is much bigger, the number in the example are almost 100 millions to one per year


I think it means 'Given a district of 300,000 people in Britain (in 1986)...'


Thanks. Fix the number, 5.5E7 people there in 1986

5.5E7/3E5/250 = 0.75 << 20 death << 10000 other problems


Yes, it made me think I'd already watched it and had forgotten about it...


I like the recent variant on websites and apps where a random neutral start position (about ten normal ply moves in) is used to reduce the effect of opening books.


The idea of these random openings (called XOT) has been around for at least 10 years. https://berg.earthlingz.de/xot/


It's turtles all the way down.


I always think about this when alien technology gets reverse-engineered in a remarkably short time in SF novels.


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