Pizza news not at the speed of light

Years ago, there was a BBC science series, probably featuring James Burke, that had one episode that talked about the speed of information.

Something happens somewhere in the universe, say a star explodes, and you don't know - cannot know - anything about it before light can get from there to you.

In your universe, things continue as they are, until starlight reaches you with the information that many of your Earth years ago, that star exploded.

On Earth, for most of human history, news has travelled much slower. Before the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, it'd take over a week to get news of anything between Europe and North America. The first one in 1858 took about ten minutes per word. That lasted less than a year before failing. The second cable in 1866 could do an astonishing eight words a minute! In between, Lincoln was shot and, in one sense, lived over a week longer as far as Europe was concerned than he did in America.

Anyway, what prompted those thoughts was that, over lockdown and gallstones, I've been looking forward to eating at Mod Pizza in Nottingham again. Mod was somewhere I discovered at the most recent Leeds BiCon, going off site to have something to eat at somewhere Google reckoned was good.

And it was! There weren't many of them, but you could make your own pizza with as much as you wanted from over thirty ingredients. For £7.99. Even the lemonades were great. A good loyalty scheme meant you could eat free every so often, and more frequently if you scanned other people's discarded receipts with the Mod app, cough.

I was in Nottingham again last Monday. Turns out that all of Mod Pizza's UK branches closed permanently in October 2020...

Oddly, they didn't bother to update the app to say so or push a notification or.. and just left me thinking that it was still there to be visited.