Tim J

@timtfj
247 Followers
199 Following
3.4K Posts

I used to play in too many orchestras, and currently play in none. I'm interested in many things, often science, language or music related.

I like words (especially ones that don't exist yet), and cheese. I hate underthinking, football, parsnips, and rigid rules about commas.

Jeg bruker av og til et omtrent norsklignende språk, but am not in fact Norwegian. 🎻

Bloghttps://timtfj.com
Birdsitehttps://twitter.com/timtfj
Locationjust outside Manchester, UK
Show threadTim J3d ago
Comparison with 2022. The peak with the blob on top is the 103°F forecast for July 11th this year. The fainter, slightly lower one just to its right is the insanely hot (102°F) day we had in 2022. (Just Fahrenheit this time. I'm running out of energy for doing the screenshots twice.)
Tim J3d ago

Just when it's starting to "cool" down a bit, I look at the 15-day forecast . . . 😬

(Though there's time for it to change to something a bit more benign if we're lucky.)

Tim JDec 13, 2025
English spelling has definitely gone downhill since 1400. #MiddleEnglish #OED #language
Tim JNov 7, 2025

Um. Spending less than £10 for a "128 GB" "Sandisk" MicroSD card wasn't a good idea, was it? (Worse, I got two and they're both the same.)

And since the cards are presumably either fake or rejects, I don't think I should treat them as safely usable 96 GB ones either.

Tim JMay 4, 2025

Well. I never thought I'd need to add the third of these, but it's just happened. Somehow the "u" takes it over the line from painfully annoying to excruciating.

(I hate these phrases so much. Using any of them kills the funniest of jokes stone dead in a millisecond.¹)
_____
¹ OK, probably about 50 milliseconds really.

Show threadTim JApr 29, 2025
If you listen carefully you'll also notice that a burglar alarm or fire alarm starts sounding before the thunder arrives. That's visible as a faint wavy line in the left (i.e. upper!) channel in this spectrogram view.
Show threadTim JApr 29, 2025
In contrast, the thunder shows a time delay, since it was only travelling at the speed of sound and reached one microphone before the other:
Show threadTim JApr 29, 2025

There's a very faint electrical-sounding click about 8 seconds in, 2.3 seconds before the thunder. At the time, I started counting seconds when I saw the flash, and estimated that the thunder took about 2⅓ seconds to arrive. I'm pretty sure the click is the lightning strike, since it's identically timed in both channels and looks like this:

(It's smaller in the left channel than the right because I adjusted the L–R balance to compensate for recording through a tapered window opening.)

Tim JApr 29, 2025

I don't know if you'll remember, but a couple of summers ago in the UK we were getting a #thunderstorm every week for several weeks. So I thought I'd see if I could get some decent #thunder recordings. On one of those days, it had stopped raining and I was about to stop the recorder when a brilliant flash lit up the room and this happened . . .

I'm intrigued by the apparently repeated rhythm, combined with the inexactness of the repeats. Are they illusory and if not, what's happening?

Tim JJan 18, 2023

If you're going to write about careful #editing, don't do this . . .

(Article: https://gizmodo.com/cnet-ai-chatgpt-news-robot-1849996151)

CNET Is Reviewing the Accuracy of All Its AI-Written Articles After Multiple Major Corrections

Big surprise: CNET's writing robot doesn't know what it's talking about.

Gizmodo