I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

Far from the only one, I think there’s plenty which could plausibly be a duck. It’s just that most people seem to be going for one of these ducks:

Or one of these ducks:

instead of one of these ducks:

Reading the news while having breakfast, though it’s now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it’s closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I’ve found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I’ve never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don’t know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don’t seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.

It’d be interesting to see how much this changes if you were to restrict the training dataset to books written in the last twenty years, I suspect the model would be a lot less negative. Older books tend to include stuff which does not fit with modern ideals and it’d be a real struggle to avoid this if such texts are used for training.

For example I was recently reading a couple of the sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps (written during WW1) and they include multiple instances that really date them to an earlier era with the main character casually throwing out jarringly racist stuff about black South Africans, Germans, the Irish, and basically anyone else who wasn’t properly English. Train an AI on that and you’re introducing the chance for problematic output - and chances are most LLMs have been trained on this series since they’re now public domain and easily available.

It appears to be a 1970s bike (I would take a stab at a Yamaha LT3) and by that period shutter speeds of 1/500 or 1/1000 were readily available amongst better quality cameras. That would be plenty to get a clear shot of the spokes on what would be a relatively slow moving bike (I would assume <40km/h, likely noticeably less). I’ve got several 50s era cameras that have 1/500 top speeds, so even if the bike was new at the time of the photo it didn’t require a new camera to take the shot.

I would not say having the inside foot off the peg and held forward in this situation is an indicator of the photo being fake, seeing as it’s a common behaviour when riding dirt bikes.

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we’ll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years…

Indeed, I just realised that point - the force of propelling the anchor is tiny compared to what you can exert on the ship once the anchor is hooked.

A trebuchet primarily transforms downward motion (of the counterweight) into forward motion, so it would actually work - the trebuchet doesn’t push the ship back as much as it pushes its load forward. This is particularly so if your trebuchet has wheels and you have room on your ship to accommodate it rocking back and forth when firing.

Edit: Thinking about it this technique would work even with something that does impart equal backwards force on the ship when firing a projectile, because there is considerably more force involved in winching the ship towards the anchor than what is involved in actually moving the anchor. You aren’t pulling against the inertia of a free floating anchor after all, you’re pulling against the ground the anchor has hooked into.

Weirds me out that she’s got the watch in right hand though

If you’re left handed the right hand is the normal hand for a watch, it’s not that unusual.

Admittedly it’s less common to see anyone wearing a watch now, and there’s less of a reason to put it on your right hand now that most people don’t handwrite regularly.

I never had a problem with walking around cows as a kid and I did it pretty often. Visitors would get spooked occasionally because cows love to follow you and see what you’re up to, but I never got chased or anything. That was beef cattle country though so these cows were mainly cows (female) and steers (castrated males). I’ve heard that some bulls could be territorial however so your mileage may vary if one is around - the couple I’ve walked around were fine but your chances of issues are higher with them.