I believe the s-boxes were provided by the NSA without much comment about them.

You're probably thinking of DES rather than AES with regards NSA provided s-boxes. IIRC said s-boxes in DES were changed by the NSA with no real explanation. Some years later when differential cryptanalysis was discovered in the non-secret world it turned out that the change actually hardened DES against such an attack - so in this case the NSA created a stronger algorithm. See wikipedia.

There's a fair amount that's been removed from this datasheet from the full BCM2835 one - all the parts that aren't accessible from the ARM have been taken out. It wasn't that these bits were secret per se, but that it took effort to produce the edited version.

I think the word you're looking for is "symbol" rather than "bit". A bit by definition is either 0 or 1.

> Pity King & Barnes exist in name only now.

WJ King are run by the same family as the King from King & Barnes. The newish brewer there was at Harvey's until a few months ago.

Spirits haven't been sold in fractions of a gill for some time now. They're sold in multiples of some number of ml, although that number varies between bars - 25ml, 35ml and 40ml all seem to get used.

Largely right, in that the hops provide hardly any sugars for fermentation. I'd like to correct one point though. The hop flowers are removed after the boil, before the yeast is even added. Spent hops are generally sent to agriculture, so the carbon cycle is continued that way.