18 Oct
2025
18 Oct
'25
3:30 p.m.
On Sat, 2025-10-18 at 13:53 -0600, ben via cctalk wrote:
On 2025-10-18 1:34 p.m., Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
When I was preparing for my first meeting in Oxford, a colleague who
had worked at the UK Met Office in Redding told me "Eat in pubs; the
food is much better than in hotels or restaurants." He was right. I
enjoy Fish 'n Chips with mooshy peas and vinegar, and Shepherd's Pie …
and of course good English Ale served at the proper cellar temperature
of 54°F.
…. Ferdinand de Lesseps's failure to build a Panama canal, and the
Citroen (and Peugeot), and the Maginot line. On the other side of the
ledger are Louis Pasteur, dozens of outstanding 18th and 19th century
French mathematicians (Laplace, Legendre, Lagrange — who was born
Italian, Poisson, Fermat, Poincaré…), the Millau Viaduct, French
nuclear power reactors, and spent fuel processing.
In European hell the French are the engineers,
the English are the
cooks, the Germans are the police, the Italians are the bankers,
and
the Swiss are the liovers.
The Eiffel tower and Fish n Chips and Statue of Liberty disprove
that
theory.
Ben.