Posts by Muscleguy
255 posts • joined Friday 15th August 2008 15:03 GMT
Re: Hot Mac Pro?
If the heat moving capacity is as good as they claim then I can foresee a market for a clip on wire frame that allows you to cook on top of it. Just watch the pot noodles don't boil over . . .
Re: What they don't seem to realise is
Except as here in the UK the government simply puts you in gaol until such time as you cough the decrypt key, it being illegal and contempt of court to withhold such things. So not even encryption gets you out of this. It just blows back at you. At the very least they impound your devices and just get the keys from there and again your login please or you go into chokey until you do.
Re: Welp
My wife has found an emulator for old style text adventures and installed it on her newish Windoze 8 laptop. Not what Microsoft had in mind for such machines and systems, not at all.
Posted in On the hunt for a new ampere
First define your pinhead
All you need to do is define your pinhead, then the number of angels that can dance on it can better be thought about.
Though in fairness this new method has done that, with their quantum dot. A unitary pinhead.
Paris because she is an angelic pinhead.
Posted in On the hunt for a new ampere
Re: Just define the number of electrons in a coulomb, stupids!
Presumably you missed the bit where the value differs depending on how you measure it? Since that is a problem there therefore must be no good or valid way to determine which value to choose. Not to mention if it is wrong then other calculations using much more tightly defined units will have the accuracy of the result degraded by the Coulomb.
Which is why they are trying to do it properly instead.
The Stupid Does Burn
To all those bleating about the flights only being for rich stupid people, well this is Bert Rutan's income stream from building the things for Branson (and getting a pile of testing done along the way). So since this is, partial, rocketry an Americanism is appropriate: The Stupid, it really does burn!
If I won the lottery I wouldn't sign up, no biology to speak of and I'm not too fussed about thrill rides. But that doesn't mean I need to deride those who do want to, or fail to see the benefits of fleecing them.
Re: The brighter side of life ..
Don't worry, we have The Boys to protect us from human eating aliens.
Re: Einstein's Limit and Time Travel
"You cant measure anything faster than your measuring stick."
So I can't measure any distance longer than my longest measuring stick? Except with Pythagoras's theorem I can measure any distance I like starting from wherever I like.
Seeing something move across the horizon is a matter of the number of degrees or arc seconds it transects per unit time. So, if you have a measuring stick of the size of a say a galaxy you have got to with triangulation you can sit and watch for things crossing that horizon at any given speed. Even light takes long enough to cross at galaxy scales that anything travelling that fast would be easily viewable and measurable, if of course it were reflecting or generating light. There are some stars orbiting the monster black hole at the centre of the galaxy and also on strange trajectories out of and around the galaxy that have been measured travelling at appreciable fractions of the speed of light.
At the other scale if you magnify your view slugs and snails become speedy as they transect the horizon quickly. Things moving under Brownian motion are quite speedy looking once you magnify them enough but their absolute speed is very slow. It's all relative you see. To observe fast moving things move back a long way, to observe slow moving things move much closer.
@HolyFreakinGhost
" We *can* write down loop quantum gravity, which is a first-quantised vacuum theory, but mapping from LQG up to GR is to my knowledge still an unsolved problem"
Which just goes to show that mathematics is a language, albeit a highly formalised and logical one. Languages can be used to write fiction as well as non fiction. When writing fiction, as the best show, you can describe perfectly internally consistent fictional universes, but they are not this universe. It has always seemed to me that many theoretical Physicists and String Theorists in particular forget this aspect of the language they write their theories in, and from this we get assumptions such as that the Mulitverse must be true because we can write consistent stories that require it to be true.
As an experimental biologist I just sit back and say: 'prove it'. Because such descriptions don't look like this universe. I'm all for throwing up testable hypotheses for the atom smashers and the cosmologists to go see if they are true, but they have to testable. If you are building castles in the air with untestable buttresses supporting untestable towers and resting on untested assumptions then you are not doing science any more.
It's obviously designed to determine if the jobseekers are Wolverine so able to cut your way out of the waterboarding restraints and disembowel the guards.
If so then they have a job for you in a meat processing plant making horse look just like beef. Saves on the knife costs for your employers.
"gorilla arm"
That is Nature's way to tell you to man up and get thee to a gym. That your arm is less strong than your girlfriend's might also give you pause.
Re: Zero velocity?
You want to read Alastair Reynolds' latest book Blue Remembered Earth. He has a maglev launcher launched from under the plains that ascends through the middle of Kilimanjaro before being boosted to orbit with lasers.
Lots of other interesting ideas in it as well as you might expect from an ex astrophysicist.
Re: Niven & Pournelle
Not to mention the heffalump invasion force parachuting in from orbit. Footfall was fun. It needs the special effects film treatment.
Re: Live in purgatory.......
Ben Elton wrote a book about what life must be like for those people, except it was made compulsory for everybody. Be afraid, be very afraid.
From the Wikipedia page on HIV testing:
"The CD4 T-cell count is not an HIV test, but rather a procedure where the number of CD4 T-cells in the blood is determined.
A CD4 count does not check for the presence of HIV. It is used to monitor immune system function in HIV-positive people. Declining CD4 T-cell counts are considered to be a marker of progression of HIV infection."
So your hottie could be in the early stages of infection which has not yet lowered her CD4 cell count and still be infectious.
And besides, wouldn't the deployment of a latex/silicone tube not be a much cheaper solution to the doubt? or are you inclined to sexual activities that involve the exchange of blood?
Re: I have not paid for software for years ...
What's the betting that the headline 1 in 3 was arrived at by deciding all open source software, being unlicensed after all, should be included.
Re: "...digital copies of books should "deteriorate"..."
Not just E-Books have crap proofreading. I borrowed a dead tree Feist from the library that was almost unreadable with huge continuity errors. 'The wrong version' being uploaded was blamed. 'They fired all the proofreaders' is more like it.
Re: Back into medieval times
The library here in Dundee lends E-Books and the dead tree versions and have not moved lots of books aside to make way for computers either. The computers are in the lobby. I use both. The E-Books were great when we went back to NZ before xmas, I took three from the library for no extra weight.
Which reminds me, I have a dead tree library book I need to return.
Re: bitcoin hosting: good idea? alternatives?
If you incorporate your company in Delaware then it is against the law there to reveal the owner of that company. You will then need a chain of offshore accounts in secrecy jurisdictions to launder the proceeds through. The tricky bit is to get the money out in some form you can benefit from that the taxman can't get you for.
Re: Becoming Hobbit
It's because in education and in their jobs the ability to use their judgement or initiative and experiment is ground out of them. In their jobs they're the people who can't help you and keep parroting the company policy because they would be fired if they did anything else.
Re: One of life's little puzzles...
increasingly they ask the geeky female friend of a friend who won't hit on them or make them feel creeped out.
I know this because they ask my youngest (double major CompSci & Biochem), who is pants with a screwdriver. I'm the one who does machine surgery.
Re: I'm waiting for...
Who goes in there? people whose appliance has died and need another one, now. Not next week.
Also our experience of shopping for appliances online on price has resulted in the non delivery of goods which included time spent off work waiting for the delivery that never arrived. Excuses galore but a very strong suspicion that they were unable to supply the goods at the price offered.
Re: Other shops doing it
Do a whisky distillery tour here in Scotland and the cost of the tour will be refundable if you buy a bottle of the product. It's still worth it though, you get an interesting tour, fascinating tours and a dram (many offer miniatures to drivers). So this is hardly unknown here in the UK.
Re: Touch Call
Whereas having found shoes that work for me and feet that don't radically change from week to week I go online and find the cheapest deal I can. I use the local running shop for small stuff I need now that is not worth the postage like double layered socks and tubes of drink tablets. They don't reliably stock the gel sachets I like so I get those by the boxfull online. Their clothing range and prices are ridiculous. I point blank refuse to pay £60 for a pair of split shorts.
Re: How Microsoftian
I can't speak for Oz but it was noticeable in NZ before xmas that gluten free stuff and options were much more common than they are here in Blighty. A teashop in a flybitten town in Central Otago had GF quiches and a nice fruit slice. Try that in the Highlands.
Hell's Pizza there have been doing GF pizza for years and do a side in GF brownies to boot. Here in Dundee we have only this last month got the option of GF deliverable pizza. The youngest worked at a poshish burger joint that does GF burger buns. The supermarkets were full of a variety of GF breads that make Genius bread (very good btw) here look in need of inspiration.
Re: Oh bollocks !
Since all imps are over 21 this made them ideal for a broadcasting standard over all US states. We got all the teenage imps. They migrate over the Atlantic when they mature. When your set has a colour hickup it's because as you no doubt know it's not hard to get a drink underage in the UK, or it's a long shot of the England Cricket team which has caused the white balance to go snow blind.
No HDMI?
The sub £300 Windows laptop I bought my wife to replace the one that died has an HDMI port on it, despite a fairly decent 13" screen. We used it to watch The Men Who Stare At Goats together via iPlayer on the 40" HD TV I bought her so she could play her new game properly. We could not have done that as easily on this (we unplugged her XBox and used that cable, have you seen the price of HDMI cables?).
I don't care how good the screen is, it is not 40" and shareable to the whole room.
Re: @John Smith 19
What your analysis does not include is the fact that the alcoholic strength of both beer and wine have increased in the last couple of decades. I remember when wine was 10-11% ABV (most are now 12-13%) and when Old Speckled Hen (5% ABV) really was a strong ale. What a minimum price per unit will do is reduce the strength of wine and beer in order to keep the price reasonable.
People do not generally drink according to strength they drink according to volume. Which is why the increases in strength are a problem. If you have not changed the amount you drink your consumption of alcohol will still have increased.
Eraser?
In this case surely a nice sharp craft knife acts as an eraser?
Re: The last I heard
"The last I heard of any updates to our normal technology was the idea of 3D circuit board design that even our CPU's of the future would look like a borg cube in design. Good luck in fitting a heatsink with that!"
Biology does heat removal (and supply) to 3D blocks of matter all the time. By of course running fluid carrying channels right through it on a need based model (other than the major bits of plumbing) and pumping a fluid through those channels.
A heatsink as usually bolted on top is always going to lose in efficiency compared to proper cooling. We sort of do it in petrol and diesel engines where coolant is pumped through the block and into a radiator (acting much like the skin does in humans or the ears of an elephant).
Re: But
I wouldn't rule the clever dolphins out until we have drilled through the ice on Europa and had shufti and sniff about underneath it. As a biologist I get goosebumps just thinking about the ocean under the ice on Europa. Mars? pah. Sign me up for a one way mission to Europa.
Re: Space is big but time is big too
Wrong, a lot of it is dead copies of retroviruses and transposons. The rest is vast stretches of tandem repeats. Occasionally you have islands of regulatory dna and some of it is essentially genetic insulation. When one of the fringe genes was knocked out in mice with the antibiotic resistance cassette still in place the expression of that interfered with the related fringe gene just downstream and the resulting phenotype was a melange of the two genes being knocked out and dialled down. It was one of the big stimuli to do 'hit and run' gene targeting so the antibiotic selection gene is used then removed. But biologically it tells you that turning on one gene might also turn on or inhibit a nearby gene and if that is deleterious then there would selection for variants with more and more distance between them driven by things like copying errors, tandem repeats and those retroviruses.
BTW there is evidence that some of the not dead retroviruses wake up after the fertilised egg splits and again when the egg implants in the uterus. So not junk then, sequences that may just have enabled us to be mammals.
Re: Space is big but time is big too
@Mikel " Recent modelling proves this."
Making fairly heroic assumptions about the biology and it's ability to survive using ultra hardy bacteria from the modern earth, that are utterly unlike the very primitive life that might have arisen before the heavy bombardment.
But here's a thought, since we now know a significant proportion of the water on earth came in wet asteroids is it not perhaps more likely that it was only on the wetter earth 'fertilised' with all the carboniferous, amino acid and nucleotide containing goodness the asteroids delivered that life could get going? So there was nothing to be boosted into space at the start. It is all such a huge assumption and yet you build castles in the air from it as though they must be solid.
Evidence, by which I mean tested data, not assumption heavy calculations.
Re: @Joseph Lord
"You deal with risk in a project by identifying areas of concern and work on them early on."
Except when the number of innovations is above a certain level, then the number of possibilities and combinations thereof becomes unmanageable and you respond by identifying 'areas you think might be a concern' and you just don't think about everything else.
If Boeing had done all the design work in house I would be more sanguine but that they outsourced the design work as well seems to have already bitten them in terms of the delays. Who is to say that this is the only way it will bite them post production? Having recently flown long haul on a Dreamliner I feel lucky, I'm not sure I want to feel lucky again.
Agreed, just look at what happened to text post Guttenberg once it did not have to be laboriously hand written by monks. It also got democritised as text production moved out of the rather closed monasteries.
If every book cost as much as illuminated manuscripts did in their day, they would have about the same sized market, in proportion.
If you consider the vast explosion of good, useful, tested knowledge post Guttenberg then the flattening of the value of text is even more stark. Trashy pulp fiction notwithstanding ;-)
Re: Beef
When making a beef burger all I do is finely chop an onion, add herbs/seasoning and the mince then mix well (by hand). Then you take a pattie sized lump and sort of slap it back and forth between your hands a couple of dozen times or so. Do not add egg or breadcrumbs. Then fry/grill.
Re: To be honest...
It depends on where you are. When we lived in NW London there was an Aussie butchers in Finchley Central that did roo and croc and stuff. Up here in Scotland there are local places that stock will ducks, pheasant, partridge, quail, rabbit etc. I got a partridge on short date from the local Sainsbury's last week, seasoned it, browned it lightly in butter, the stuck it and the butter in the oven for 15min before pouring the butter and juices over the top as a sauce. It was delicious.
Re: Pic 1, page 1
One advantage of working in a science lab is that industrial quantities of pure alcohol for the cleaning of mouse rollers and balls was no problem. I still have a small vial of the stuff for loosening the ball my current mouse, the one on top.
Meths will do just fine as well of course, though smellier.
Re: The point is not always to kill
And the carbine was originally issued to dragoons in their original role as mounted infantry. I have photos of my Great Uncle on his horse (Yeomanry Cavalry, so mounted infantry) in WWI (he was an Old Contemptible and served right through). He appears, small photo, to have a carbine. The point being weight and not wanting to tyre out your horse. The advantage was speed and mobility which made up for the lighter calibre. Just like horse artillery that kept up with the cavalry had lighter field pieces than the foot artillery.
Modern warfare is much more about speed and mobility with other weapons that can be deployed or called up in support when absolute firepower is required. So the average foot soldier has a semi automatic carbine which is more for keeping the head down of the farmer with the hunting rifle while he is dealt with otherwise.
Re: @Zmodem
" Or is that magic kevlar and ceramics you have on, which is paper-thin"
I expect zmodem is imagining the level where he has done the side quest and got the mythril plate armour with added anti grav/speed boots [+30.+15](+25,+40) while also playing in 'so piss easy your 8yo could do it' mode.
Re: Desert Eagles ....
I thought from Afghanistan that the favoured method of house clearance was a 1,000ib 'smart' bomb dropped by the jet you called in so none of your guys need put themselves in harm's way and sod the kiddies and other civilians and your crappy 'intelligence'.
You are aware that the Yanks have developed a range of 'programmable' and explosive rounds for a shotgun, aren't you? They for eg enable you to shoot around corners and lob a round such that it will explode inside the room and not at the window or when it hits the back wall. These rounds are in theatre in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marines.
So perhaps you need to get up do date before you mouth of.
You are assuming they have to fly it all the way down at a thrust necessary to achieve escape velocity, which clearly is not the case. Firstly gravity will bring the rocket back down meaning you just have to use thrust/chutes/etc to steer it and keep attitude then initiate a burn close to the ground to slow it sufficient to prevent damage on contact with the pad. All this means the amount of fuel needed is vastly reduced from your calculation, which assumes escape velocity thrust all the way which would result in the rocket either zooming away or hovering at apogee.
Posted in Fish grow ‘hands’ in genetic experiment
More Evo needed
Shark fins are much further away from tetrapod limbs than teleost (bony fish) fins. Fish fins are movable, they have discrete blocks of muscle and bones that are the precursors of humerus and femur. Shark fins have no cartilage equivalent and the muscles are segmental strips that just allow the shark to trim the fin. The main functional difference is that sharks can only swim with their tails whereas bony fish can hover, or even go backwards using their pectoral fins which are very mobile.
So doing this experiment in a cartilaginous fish would make no sense.
As for the research, I would need to see how the extra growth is generated before reaching a firm conclusion that these are 'autopods'. as claimed. But as a proof of principle it is intriguing.
Separate Locations Essential
I have written a PhD Thesis, back in the days of 1.4Mb 'floppies'. One set was in my office and was used day to day. Once a day they were backed up onto the set that was in my backpack. Once a week that was left at home and the set at home came in to be backed up (no home computer back then). To wipe out my thesis two locations (one with sprinklers) would have to burn down and I would have to be crushed or incinerated travelling between them, in which case it would have been moot.
A colleague at the time told of a PhD candidate he had known in a previous, non computerised era. He had given his, handwritten, thesis to a typist to take away and type up, as was common practice. She put it on the back of her moped and set off across town. By the time she got there it was no longer there. He had to recreate it from scattered notes. That was NOT going to happen to me.
I have lost count of the number of colleagues and family members who have lost stuff because it was not backed up. This machine is backed up to an easily grabable FW drive by Time Machine.
Re: I can't believe I'm commenting on this....
"Ah the platypus. So many features like so many other animals, yet not related to any of them."
Other than the other monotremes, both extant and extinct of course and that ALL life on earth can be demonstrated to have a single common ancestor, dubbed LUCA. That includes monotremes in general and platypus in particular.
Re: Never a good sign
You could add RBS's headquarters just outside Edinburgh to the list of hubris edifices.
Posted in Why do Smart TV UIs suck?
Re: Bought a Samsung "Smart" Blu-ray
"Just put some engineering resources into the "let me easily watch a streaming service on my telly, regardless of what that streaming service is" requirement and watch units fly off the shelves."
But that is what they think they have done, which is the problem. Another one is 'streaming services' makes sense to you and me but some old dear will say 'I don't want water in my tv so I never choose that, where is iPlayer?'. Adding in that Aunty, Netflix etc all want their branding used and there will be ructions and copyright etc all tied up in how they appear, or else.
It's like some guy on another discussion site made a comment about the advert at the bottom of the page. I expressed surprise that people still browsed the web without ad blocking apps. He replied that it was too complex to set that stuff up. I'm the sort of person who always learnt how to use software by pulling down menus and wondering 'what does that do?' but most other people are not like that. My wife, who has a BSc in CompSci included. Her defence is she was interested in how computers worked and how the program them. My response is her part of the 3rd year project was the interface. This does not get me brownie points and I still have to navigate the crappy devices she buys so they see the home network.
Posted in 'Mount Doom' rumbling ominously
'Wrong' Volcano Burps
Meanwhile Tongariro, the volcano at the north end of the group has burped overnight UK time causing tourists and schoolchildren to scarper sharpish and the Tongariro crossing to be closed. It's only a burp though.
Re: *chunder*
That's because acres only have mass in Flatland.
