Complying with the Online Safety Act

In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act, a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry. It is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the distinctions the Act draws between large sites such as Facebook and Google and smaller sites such as this one are insufficiently well defined. The upshot is that complying with the Act places a much larger burden on the owners of sites such as Shady Characters than it does on the owners of those larger sites.

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Shady Characters on AMSEcast: a podcast about calculators

I’ve had nuclear energy on the mind recently — a product of watching Oppenheimer, perhaps, and also the UK government’s newfound interest in nuclear power in the interest of combatting climate change. Apropos of all that, then, I was happy to appear on a recent episode of AMSEcast, the podcast of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The episode was hosted by the museum’s director, the genial Alan Lowe, who was kind enough to let me rabbit on at length on the subjects of counting, calculators, and computers. I really enjoyed talking to Alan, and I hope you enjoy listening too!

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Miscellany № 104: new year, new miscellany

Hello, and welcome to 2025. Is it that time already?

The possessive apostrophe (or rather, the abuse of the possessive apostrophe) is a recurrent guest star here at Shady Characters, but usually in the English language. Recently, though, the Guardian reported that unneeded apostrophes are infecting German, too. The so-called Deppenapostroph, or “idiot’s apostrophe”, appears when a German-language expression uses it to indicate a possessive — despite the fact that it is more correct to add an “s” on its own rather than “’s”.

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Miscellany № 103: calculators!

Having dispatched punctuation and book news, we’re on to pocket calculators! Incredibly, half a century or more after their appearance, there is still news to be had on the subject.

In the introduction to Empire of the Sum, I mention that like some other animals, ravens and other corvids are known to be able to count. Not only that, but they understand the concept of zero, which is something that humans struggled with for quite some time.1 Now, though, a study in Science shows that not only can crows count, they can count out loud. In the words of the paper’s authors,

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