All of the IT/tech press focuses solely on the Oracle overspend as being the reason for the council's bankruptcy. But the council also recently agreed a £760m settlement in a long-running pay discrimination case.

Yes the Oracle project has been a screw-up but it is a small part of the much wider problems in Birmingham.

I don't know where Wikipedia got their supposed information from, but the git commit making this change was time-stamped 2025-08-28 15:16:16

Or maybe they meant "London Bridge tube station" (which is what the summary said) which is a tube station that very much still exists.

"aptitude why needrestart"

The story is about a recent review article by Poon et al. It's a literature review covering studies about spreadsheet problems over the last 35 years. The "94% of spreadsheets contain critical errors" claim from the phys.org report looks to just be a sentence in the review's introduction: "it was found that about 94% of the spreadsheets in use contained faults ". (N.B.just "faults", not *critical*) The paper cited for that claim is: McDaid K, Rust A. Test-driven development for spreadsheet risk management. IEEE Software, 2009, 26(5): 31–36

The 94% claim is in the abstract for McDaid and Rust., and is repeated in the introductory paragraph: "Early research indicated that between 2 and 5 percent of cell formulas can be incorrect, but a more recent study found that of 50 real-world operational spreadsheets audited, 94 percent contained errors with almost 1 percent of formula cells found to be incorrect. " No citaton is given for what the "early research" or the "more recent study" used for these claims is.

It is well-known that (at least) 94% of reposted slashdot stories trying to summarise academic literature contain critical errors [citation needed].

I'm pretty confident that Ee Durbin had not attempted to memorize the string 0d6a9bb5af126f73350a2afc058492765446aaad , which is the personal access token that leaked.

Access tokens != "memorized secrets"

Quoting the actual Redhat announcement rather than the badly edited summary: "Yesterday, Red Hat Information Risk and Security and Red Hat Product Security *learned* that..." (my emphasis)

Physics is all about building useful models, where the meaning of "useful" depends very much on the context.

Is it fair to treat the air around us as lots of little hard spheres that bounce off each other? Yes, if the ideal gas model is a suitable description of what I'm trying to understand or explain.

But.. air "really" consists of molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and so on. So maybe it would be "fair" to say I've got O2 and N2 and we should think about the way they interact using some slightly more realistic description than "hard spheres that bounce off each other"

(Or does air consist of oxygen atoms, their associated electrons, nitrogen atoms, their associated electrons.... or maybe its a load of protons and neutrons and electrons. Or should I say quarks and gluons instead of protons and neutrons. Or maybe .. who knows?)

TL;DR : it is fair to describe this system as behaving like a single 10kg reduced mass if that's a useful description/characterisation of the behaviour the authors were studying. I am not an expert in optomechanical oscillators, but the authors are - and the idea of a reduced mass is a common one in physics because it often facilitates a simpler analysis.

When you have a coupled system of multiple masses oscillating, you can sometimes describe the collective motion using something called the "reduced mass" https://chem.libretexts.org/Co... . Basically, in some cases, you end up being able to describe the motion of multiple masses using the same equations you would for a single mass, if you redefine the "mass" that you use in the equations. This "reduced mass" is a property of the overall system, and is dependent on the "actual" masses of all the constituent parts and how they interact.

In this experiment, they had a system of 4*40kg masses that were coupled together in such a way that the system had a reduced mass of 10kg. It is thus perhaps a journalistic simplifcation to say "this is one 10kg object"

The local greengrocer's called and as'ked if you could give your apos'trophes' back