The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) is a road construction executive force in India that provides support to Indian Armed Forces. BRO develops and maintains road networks in India’s border areas and friendly neighboring countries.
But not only are they known for building tens of thousands of kilometres of roads around the border areas of India, they also put up some of the weirdest road safety signs in the business.
Some of which seem to be aimed at the lady in the passenger seat…
There’s almost certainly a poetic term for this sort of first word/last word almost rhyming stuff. I don’t know what it is though.
And I’m left wondering if I’d be more distracted by trying to work out that sort of thing rather than the chatty passenger.
I’m not an economist. But I know some people who are. And they don’t seem very impressed with Trump’s tariff plans:
Oof. But I am a scientist, so I know how a graph should look, and perhaps more importantly, how it shouldn’t look. That there isn’t a good look. If this was a patient, they’d be on their way to ICU.
$2 trillion gone in less than half an hour. Poof!
You can say many things about Trump (and people do), but you can’t knock his power. Even 80s magician David Copperfield is impressed, and he made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Trump is just making money vanish. Well, that and actual Liberty.
Still, you can’t argue that these things haven’t been well thought out. There’s clearly been a lot of planning that’s gone on here. The penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands are finally paying the price for their frankly heinous 20% import tariffs on American goods. Famed for exporting Elephant Seal Oil as recently as… er… 1877, it seems like the infamous H&McDI Stock Exchange would be in all sort of bother if it actually existed.
No-one has lived there for decades, but these tariffs mean that if anyone ever does live there again, they won’t be exporting much to the US.
Elsewhere, the EU (including France) gets a tariff of 20%, but Réunion (part of France and therefore also part of the EU) gets hit with 37%. But of course, French Guiana, Mayotte and Martinique (each part of France and therefore also part of the EU) get a 10% tariff on their exports to the US.
Réunion has had it too easy for too long.
The big losers in this whole thing is everyone. But if I were to be more specific, it would be St Pierre & Miquelon. This isn’t a French overseas territory: it’s a French Overseas Collective – Collectivité d’Outre-Mer. But because of… er… reasons, their exports to the US will be charged an additional 50%. That’ll teach them for being to close (geographically, not necessarily politically) to Greenland.
Only local boys Lesotho (as far as I can see) manages to match the heady height of a 50% tariff, so Southern African
diamonds, garments, wool, power equipment and bedding
markets will be hit. And it looks like the mokorotlo won’t be part of the New York Spring 2026 Collections anymore.
It’s the clear attention to detail that makes me think that maybe these tariffs might well have been devised by a troop of circus monkeys who have been blindfolded and then instructed to throw various coloured darts at a world map.
I’m just impressed that there was anyone in America who was able to work out which countries the darts hit.
There can’t be many more clear and obvious ways in which one species defiantly tells another: “GFY”, than what crows are doing to humans in parts of Europe.
And it’s even more amusing because it comes down to humans trying to tell crows exactly the same thing – and failing.
…designed for the sole purpose of keeping birds off places where humans don’t want them, now repurposed (by those very same birds) as building material for their homes.
Incredible.
Untidy, but incredible.
When I’ve been over on Robben Island, doing beach cleanups, one of the saddest sights is the Kelp Gull nests made almost entirely out of waste plastic and fishing gear. So the idea of birds using manmade stuff isn’t new to me. But them using stuff that man made to keep birds off things is pretty special.
Many birds are known to use human-made elements in their nests. In fact, 176 different species have been documented nest building with synthetic materials, according to another study published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Yet the birds in the Dutch study are exceptional for having taken something so purposefully built to minimize their presence and using it to rear the next generation.
In South Africa a few years back, these thing suddenly became very popular:
And they are irritating – even to humans. But I knew that their days were numbered when I saw a Red Winged Starling (Onychognathus morio) sitting on one and enjoying the spinning effect.
At the time, I thought that was amazing – and quite amusing – but it’s got nothing on the European crows.
99% of the time, when I do a job, I do it properly. If I’m doing it for someone else, I’ll always give it my best effort. If I’m doing if myself, I’ll usually give it my best effort.
But there is that other 1% of the time when circumstances (tiredness, trivial job, working conditions, amount of football on the tele etc etc) come together and conspire to make me put it on the back burner or even, in some cases, give up completely.
I know I’m not the only one. And I don’t just say that with no evidence, because look at this town in Porters Lake, Nova Scotia:
What has prompted such laziness? A poor night’s sleep? A perceived lack of respect at work? Sheffield United being on at 4pm instead of 5?
Laurie Lane – Alliterative street name or gentle Celtic poet? Keizer Drive – it almost rhymes.
Post Office Road – perfect – very descriptive. (Until you find out that the local Post Office is actually on Keizer Drive.)
And when you’re pointing that out:
No, it’s not on Post Office Road, it’s on That Street. Well, no. Not That Street. The Other Street. Which is called Keizer Drive.
And then those abominations south of the main road. Appalling. Lazy. Disappointing.
As an aside, Nova Scotia Trunk Highway 7 (crazy name, crazy road) looks like a very cool drive. And some of the place names along that bit of coastline are superb:
Grand Desert. Head of Chezzetcook. Ship Harbour. Lower Ship Harbour. East Ship Harbour. Watt Section. Pleasant Harbour. Mushaboom. Musquodoboit Harbour. Moosehead.
And the inevitable: Wine Harbour, and Sober Island.
There’s a whole blog post to be done about the bizarre North American place names I have found while searching on Geoguessr. But NSTH7 really packs them in along just a couple of hundred clicks.
Especially if you watch this guy – his name is Shane Griffin – running up the side of buildings like Isaac Newton never did the thing with the apple back in the 17th Century.
I’m not advocating the trespass, endorsing the invasion of privacy or the overlooking of basic health and safety here, but there is something rather impressive about the way he does this.
It’s not just his ability, but his faith in that ability (and some aging drainpipes) that is remarkable. He really does make going vertically upwards look rather effortless, and yet we all know about the 9.81ms-2 constantly trying to pull him vertically the other way.
One false move and he would be fine – if that false move was before he started going up the sheer side of a four-storey building – the rest of the time, he’d be in a lot of trouble, very quickly.
And he’d likely have the ghost of Sir Isaac doing that smug “I told you so” face at him. Understandably, too.
Thankfully though, that appears not to have happened. So let’s just marvel at just how easy he makes this all look.
