Re: I beg to differ @ Sebastian BBrosig
Tacitus, and most classical Latinists, would not have needed the ¨est.¨
615 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2008
" I'll be buggered if I know how to use a slide rule either." Poor chap! I got my first one at age 11 - celluloid glued to paper glued to wood. Necessary for School Certificate Physics and Chemistry.
Plastic eventually took over, and I've still got a Faber Castell I used much later.: folded dual scale (so 10" was effectvely 20") with reciprocal scale in the centre of the slide, sin, cos, tan scales on the back (not to mention the bibulous shin, cosh, and tanh), and a little KW to HP coversion offset on he cursor..
Who needs a calclator?
Yes, I know, some Japanese whizz-kid with a soroban (abacus) can do it faster!
"Urine from farm animals ..." My first job after leaving school in 1950 was as a technician in a pharmaceutical company development research lab.After settling i, I was given the task of synthesising a number of androgens. Considerable literature research was necessary to find suitable methods. I was amazed at the fact that in those days a major source of steroids and hormones entering aademic and industrial laboratories for investigation was pregnant mares' urine.
The enforced dismissals is the clincher; responsibility doesn't stop at the clerk/office worker actually making the mistake, they have supervisors and setters of security policy.
A local authority justt laughs at a fine: therre are plenty of taxpayers! Start sacking officers and managers, and you could 'concentrate their minds.'
An ant, or a stream of ants, crawling up a table leg to get to some spilled sugar, is unaware of the table, or even the concept of a table, or indeed of the concept of a universe in which tables, makers of tables and spillers of sugar do or could exist.
Physicists being somewhat more sophisticated than ants can measure and speculate about the universe as so far revealed to their understanding, but are still very much in the 'dark.'
Postulating a 'missing' 90 odd percent of the mass of our universe for which they are unable to account they come up with the 'dark matter' idea.
Could not this matter actually be the hardware on which the current simulacrum of a physical universe is running?
Dum bibo spero.
"Of course, per the Cartesian Evil Genius argument, even with mathematics we can never be sure that our thought processes haven't been deranged by some outside influence, and so what we believe follows from a series of formal propositions may in fact be illogical."
Nice Line.
Rember Russel's quote: "Mathmatics is the subject in which we neither know what we are talking about no whether what e say is true."
This after completion of Pribcipia Mathematica with Whitehead.
I'm glad you raised this point - as a confirmed pedant of 80 years, I can really go to town on it.
The word 'infant' is strictly a legal term from the Latin 'infans' = 'not speaking', meaning one who was unable to 'speak' in a court, or unable to make a contract. Until fairly recently, the term 'infant' applied up to the age of 21, later reduced to 18 - when I was a National Serviceman, liable to be sent to fight in the Korean War, I was unable to vote.
Kindergarten, primary, secondary and in some cases even in university (I had uni entrance at 16) we were all infants.
"One word, 'Proops'" Now you're talking. Remember Smiths of Edgeware Road - cases and cases of EF50's; and all the 'surplus' shops in Newport Street cheek by jowl with St John's Hospital. We actually used a fair amount of 'surplus' gear at work, adapting some of those aerial cameras as recorders for oscilloscopes. Gernsback's Radio Electronics, Wireless World were my staple reading on the train home from work long before ETI came out; they were only 2/6 each at W H Smith's in Victoria station.
Mind you, the department I worked in did still have a couple of gold-plated quartz fibre electrocardiographs wirg rgeir massive magbets - sadly no longer in use their place having been taken by the Almqvist and subsequent 'tronic models.
"Then those external sources download their own Javascript, etc. and have their own pointers to further external sources."
As Pope wrote:
So naturalists observe the flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey.
Or in the vernacular:
Little fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite 'em.
Smaller fleas have smaller fleas abd so ad infinitum.
I recall that when I was in the army, each sheet had "WD Property" printed next to the perforations. That was fairly nclose to the Izal standard, as well.
There was also a requirement that one had to have two sheets in one's fully packed 'small pack' at all times.
Ah! Spoonerisms! The Thais mentally carry on spoonerising everything you say to them, so you have to be quite careful when speaking to avoid certain combinations of words and there are actually rules laid down for writing poetry which stipulate sets of words which cannot be used in combination.
You cannot say "The teacher is ill." you have to phrase it as "The teacher is not well." The first form will automatically be spoonerised into "crab's penis."
There are some nice ones in English, however. "After our hymn: 'The shoving leopard' a meeting will be halled in the hell below the Church."
Electrically conductive condoms - wow!
I thought that graphene, being a monoatomic sheet of carbon was a net made up largely of hexagonal holes; is this what one wants in a condom?
(OK, I know - spermatozoa are rather large compared to the inter atomic distances of atoms in graphite/ene, but it was just a thought. If you're trying to persuade people to use graphene condoms, you have to counter the idea those people might have that you're just selling them net curtains.)
Raincoat, obviously (Thai slang for a condom!)
Graham's Law: The lower the vapour density, the faster a gas will diffuse.
This is not really new. I recall working at ICL when they were producing "New Range". One of their tech triumphs was a 100Meg Disc drive with the actual platter/head chamber filled with pressurised Helium.
They were the size of a fridge-freezer.
Made a change from the old ED30's 30Meg drives the size of a washing machine, with replaceable "Cake-cover" 14-plate disk packs, and the heads driven by hydraulics!