A large nature reserve created using soil dug up from the Elizabeth line tunnels under London has proven so successful that it is to be substantially enlarged. Wallasea Island at high tide (c) RSPB The 740-hectare nature reserve in Essex, Wallasea Island, was started in 2006 with a small project to…

An (In-) Complete Guide to C++ Object Lifetimes - Jonathan Müller - Meeting C++ 2024 Slides: https://slides.meetingcpp.com Survey: https://survey.meetingcpp.com A C++ program manipulate objects, but it is undefined behavior if you attempt to manipulate them while they are not alive. So let's do a…

Weighted Randomness Before looing at the code, let's do a quick recap of weigthed randomness. Games of all kinds, including board games, depend on randomness. For example, we might have a 6-sided die that is rolled. Each side has an equal chance of coming up, so we call it a fair die. By contrast,…

quantum physics Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case. January 16, 2025 Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof. Read Later Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine Introduction Sunlight melts…

Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you. I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that…

손톱깎이 하면 쓰리세븐이 가장 유명하지 않을까 싶은데요. 손톱깎이에는 생각보다 여러 브랜드가 있습니다. 국내만 해도 벨, 로얄금속공업 등이 있고 해외의 벨로티, 카이 등이 있죠. 손톱깎이 최초의 브랜드는 Gem이지만 현재는 판매되고 있지 않습니다. 그래서 두 번째로 오래된 회사인 Trim을 중점적으로 살펴볼 예정입니다. 아니, 그럴 예정이었습니다… 만 마찬가지로 Trim에 대한 정보가 거의 없더라고요. 그래서 손톱깎이 전반에 대한 역사를 다뤄보았습니다. 그래도 분량이 적은데, 이런 날도 있어야죠ㅎㅎ 1. 시작이 불분명한 손톱깎이…

Tracing memory allocations is critical when debugging performance or memory-related issues in high-performance applications. However, Rust still lacks a good toolset to do so and often some techniques require code changes such as changing default global allocator. In this article we will explore how…

A deep dive into using Rust’s const evaluation features to validate hex strings at compile time, ensuring both correctness and zero runtime overhead. Introduction Compile-time evaluation is a powerful feature in Rust that allows us to perform computations during compilation rather than at runtime.…

2025-01-08 In this post, we take a look at developing a device driver in Rust using Dion Dokter’s device driver crate Dion has very kindly put together a book outlining the use of this crate. We will also reference the documentation for the crate when it come to understanding the data types that are…

This is a modern pocket park just north of Canary Wharf that was only briefly turned from fields into homes before returning to grass as a public park. This part of London was still pretty empty in the early 1800s and was just starting to show some new housing developments in the 1820s As a corner…

This is a former bomb site near Nine Elms that was opened as a public park, then closed, and will soon be redeveloped back into a public park again. This whole area was once rows of Victorian terraced housing, but WWII did extensive damage to it, and it was redeveloped with post-war blocks of flats.…

This is a new public park space in Canary Wharf that’s only recently opened as part of the adjoining skyscraper towers development. It’s built up on a slope, which gives people at the top nice views of the local area, but mainly as it’s also a sloping roof for the skyscraper utility rooms and, of…

This is a very long narrow pocket park in Hackney that seems at first glance to live up to its name — a former burial ground that’s now a public park. But there’s a problem — it’s got the wrong name. Not the long bit, because it’s very long, and as you can see, graves are dotted around — it’s very…

If you’ve ever walked past Parliament or seen the outside lawn where politicians are interviewed, you might have noticed a long stone wall and wondered what lies behind it. To find out, I am departing from my usual rule that a pocket park needs to be open to the public to be written about, as this…

This is a new pocket park that partially floats over one of the docks in Canary Wharf, but in line with modern fashions has more seating and decking than planting. The pocket park can be roughly described as having two zones—one more of a raised series of steps to sit on and the other a long path…

This is a very new and very small pocket park squeezed into an empty triangle of a space left when a block of flats was built here in the late 1990s. The corner plot next to St George’s Circus roundabout was once home to several different buildings, including the Royal Eye Hospital, a couple of…

This is a small curved garden a few minutes walk north of St Pancras station that was once a private space for the houses that formed the Crescent. The main road the park sits next to was laid out in the early 1800s as London started to expand northwards. The housing followed when Goldington…

This is a small pocket park in Twickenham town centre on a plot that was once a row of houses, later cleared to make space for a car park and a superstore. Garfield Road emerged as a street filling up some fields behind the main street. It was mainly lined with small terraced housing and completed…

This is a large public garden square near Islington’s Spa Fields that has never been built on. The whole area around it was still fields in 1800, but just a couple of decades later, the local streets were laid out, with Wilmington Square in the centre. The developer was John Wilson, a property…

This quiet haven of peace can be found just a few minutes’ walk from the crowded Camden town centre and has been here since it was created just over 200 years ago as an overflow burial site for St Martin in the Fields church. The burial ground was effectively created in 1802 when an Act of…

This is a narrow noisome dog-leg of an alley off Croydon’s main shopping street named after a church, but there’s no church around here. It was also once a lot longer than it is and far more wholesome. The name doesn’t come from a church, but something related, a Methodist Chapel. The history is…

This is a brand new alley in central London that sits on a former orchard and was much later the brutalist police headquarters of New Scotland Yard. The area was originally an orchard providing food for the monks in Westminster Abbey, which was also known as Cemetery Orchard because monks were…

This is a bit of a passage, and mostly a footbridge over several railways in West Hampstead that has a remarkable name that’s just too amazing to ignore. It can be found at the far end of West Hampstead tube station, offering a route across six railway tracks used by Chiltern Railways and London…

This is one a classic of the posh mews style prevalent in parts of London as former cheap stables near Hyde Park were turned into expensive homes. The area was still all fields to the north of Hyde Park in 1800, but was earmarked for grand property development. Rather than rows of houses and…

This is a slightly winding passage that has been around for a few centuries and yet left little history in its wake. It first starts to show up in the middle of the 17th-century as an unmarked passage through the built-up area. In 1746, John Roque’s map of London showed the alley as Nags Head Court,…

This is an alley in Covent Garden that seems to have slipped through history barely leaving a mark, but it’s also an alley that’s had many names over its long life. It first shows up on William Morgan’s map of 1682 as Queen’s Head Alley. It’s likely, in line with common tradition at the time, that…

This is a Clerkenwell alley that has survived many attempts to remove it and today snakes between a posh hotel and into a private car park. The alley leads off what was known as Great Warner Street, which shows up initially in the 1740s as the area was slowly developed from fields into houses, but…

This is an alley that’s owned by The Queen and comes with its own unique London Underground tube roundel. The land that the alley passes through and all the buildings around it are owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, which manages the estates of the Duke of Lancaster, who happens to be The Queen.…

Part of the busy Wandsworth Road sits at the bottom of a steep slope, and to get to the top, in one place is a steeply sloping alley, with the charming name of Matrimony Place that leads up to an old church. The alley is rarely named on maps, but the name seems to have been around for a long time,…

This is one of those notorious Soho alleys for the ladies of the night, although in recent years, as with the rest of the area, it’s more cafes than carnalities these days. It first shows up with a few of the streets in the area starting to be developed in the 1660s, mainly as people moved west…

This is a narrow alley leading off Borough High Street in Southwark with a link to one of England’s most famous stories. The alley was once home to a famous coaching inn, and plays a key part in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Today it’s lost all its history, being more a back alley that gives…