“The Code Book” and “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets” are also great books by the same author.

It’s barm, with an m, from barm cakes. Barm is the frothy scummy stuff you get on top of fermented beer, and it contains yeast. Back in the day bakers would take the barm from local brewers to make weakly fermented bread rolls… barm cakes.

(So obviously those calling them cobs or rolls or whatever else are just wrong!)

I think that was just autocorrect to be fair. Barm isn't in the standard dictionary

I suspected that might be the case, but I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to share one of my fun facts!

Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/barm_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#2...

I managed to break my F100 at the weekend, fantastic timing!

Booths makes Waitrose look like Aldi.

I did this a few years ago with a few companies. The most “interesting” was eBay, the data itself was predictably boring but they sent it to me on a USB flash drive!

Hmm, this dataset is pretty poor. There are at least 3 pubs near me that are missing.

Worth noting that after playing an incredibly irritatingly slow game of chess, Noctie will ask for 14 Euros a month to carry on playing!

Corvids have been known to investigate deaths, truly fascinating creatures!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...

Thanks for the link. I observed a flock of "mourning" crows around a dead one in the field behind my yard. I was flabbergasted at what I was seeing. So they are mourning and investigating the cause of death for the sake of the flock. Wow!

Thanks for linking this, I had been wondering what the heck I had observed. It was really interesting. I love watching them. I almost always see something new (for me)

There’s been a bug when ordering an Uber in my (quite small, circa 20k pop) town recently in that they think our annual festival (which is in July) is on now and try to force a stupid pickup point which in my case is about the same distance from my local pub as my house is but in the opposite direction. I guess things like this need some sort of maintenance (which apparently they’re not getting!).

I would love refurbished one of these in my back garden, unfortunately they weigh far far too much to lift into my limited-access back garden and I’m not sure it’d have the same impact in the front garden.

You can get a refurbished K6 for about £3000, absolute bargain if you ask me!

https://www.x2connect.com/