Posts by Muscleguy

Re: Hello diabetes

I drink my tea black, with lemon juice. No sugar (yes lemon juice has some, but). I drink my coffee black no sugar too, but no lemon juice. Freshly ground, aeropress ATM.

Re: Fully Automatic my arse!

And of course in many rural roads here in Scotland. I would love to know how it will manage getting from say Glasgow to some lochside high rank hotels I know about relying on the systems when the last 15 or so miles are along single track roads to with passing places.

Does the Tesla system know about passing place etiquette in Scotland? Can it measure the distance of itself from the nearest place vs that of the vehicle approaching?

Can it recognise an endangered Scottish Wildcat vs a crossover with a moggy? Will it’s sensors get clogged by clouds of midgies in August?

As a Kilted Kiwi I must add NZ roads too, wider with more shoulder width than in Scotland but running through a geologically younger landscape. There is a genuine railway spiral for eg. Some roads even now are gravelled. All the major routes are not, sadly, any more. I’m still not sure how road motorbike with top heavy pack on the back I negotiated the corner on the Haast Pass road with thick gravel on the left but not on the right which was heavily cambered. There were and still are large tourist buses on that road.

Re: hint: the same place it was yesterday,

I was on LinkedIn until recently. I got a new job, I tried to update my profile to reflect the fact, as you do. It utterly failed to accept either the silly modern job title I have or the sensible old style on everyone thinks of my role as.

The suggestions were not even close, not even in ballpark.

So I thought if you cannot let me be myself on your platform what is the fucking point? So I no longer have a LI profile and told them so and why on twitter. They don’t care.

Day after I was told I had this job guy via LI tried to recruit me. I’m perfect for that job too, utterly different, but it was in Wales and I don’t want to move and I cannot do it remotely though I’m not sure why not

I’ll be in this job until I retire now, that kind of role. Unless I go do the same thing back in NZ after a few years experience.

Re: So he waited

So they can cover their asses if you fail or turn out to be mad or bad. In the interview for the job I have now they were not assessing me, they were working hard to persuade me to please, please take the job.

Nevertheless HR insisted on my references. One of my referees was sweating it, I told her not to, that I had it and they just wanted to know I wasn’t mad or bad.

Took an unconscionable time to actually start work, council HR depts in the pandemic there. Then I do two weeks work before the month ends to be told no money, they’ll pay it end of this month. I wish they’d told me that when I started. When you’re expecting money you spend more than when you are not. Bastards.

Re: Hmm ...

Nope, ideal coffee brewing temperatures are around 85C. When making my morning cuppa (fresh ground beans, Aeropress) the jug is first boiled then a modicum is poured into the coffee mug to warm it.

Only at that point are the beans ground (the Aeropress is set up whilst the water boils). It must then be tipped into the device with straggler grounds encouraged out with the brush then the funnel brushed down.

Only now can the only quite hot water be added to the grounds (sitting on the metal filter for maximum oil content, the metal futrther cooling the water).

2000C is rather more than that making for a harsh, astringent cup of coffee.

Re: Well...

Y-Chromosome Adam may not have lived anywhere near the time of X-Chromosome Eve but he absolutely was not lonely since he quite obviously managed to procreate successfully. Both likely lived in tribal groups where loneliness is a luxury not always achievable.

Re: Very cool.

I’m quite sure the ice sharks of Neptune will be very interested as they plot their takeover of our world. Just as soon as they work out how to survive the ridiculously hot temperatures here. At their metabolic rates they might finish thinking about it in about a million years.

Re: Why is that name not familiar ?

He’s a Kiwi engineer not a Saffer techno geek. He designed a 3D printed rocket engine and got it to fly reliably. Musk just paid a lot of engineers to make stuff go uppity up, up.

Engineers don’t tend t make good PR either. I know who out of the two I would like more though. Especially since I grew up in NZ.

It’s one up those Okkers as well. Us Kiwis got ourselves a goddam space industry.

It’s compensation for losing the ridiculous fighter wing of the NZ Air Force. Threaten us, we’ll send the rockets at you.

Re: The last straw

Amen, back in NZ agri scientists working on things like sheep genetics get emails from interested farmers who have read all the papers and want to know when they can get their herds and rams tested so they can apply all that stuff.

Back in the ‘80s NZ had 70million sheep, now it has merely 50million. What happened? Getting 99% of the ewes to give birth to twins happened. Means for the same productivity you need fewer breeding animals. Rolled out nationwide. Add in lots of stuff, ultrafine merino wool, leaner less fatty lamb. Science to the farm gate is possible.

It helps that NZ sends it’s cockies to university. There’s three semi or really specialised in Agritech and Farming education so the cockies these days are graduates, many with Masters.

All that NZ lamb on the supermarket shelves is there for reasons, competitive reasons.

Re: “ how it managed to develop an entire update without realizing it would be blocked”

That should be English, as the article says up here in Scotland we avoided that trap with a completely separate app which I have just installed, thanks El Reg!

The NHS Protect app is separate as well. We plugged into the API’s from the start. So all the expensive false starts in Englandshire did not happen up here.

Re: The Polluter Should Pay!!!

So Mars colonists, do they put all the human made stuff on the surface in a museum or do they reuse and mine it for resources?

I'm sure you could get lots of knickers out of one of those parachutes.

Re: Biometric password

And periodically my phone makes me input the pin when I hit the fingerprint sensor. So I still need a pin.

And just like periodically when you go to swipe your card the system makes you insert it in the reader and input your pin.

So Biometrics will need another factor, what could that be, oh! a password.

I use initial phrases with unique suffixes for each site not easily guessable.

Except for El Reg, my Reg password is deeply ancient. The only one left, that feels right.

Our local sub post office was involved in a fire. The newsagent is back up and running sans the PO business.

Meanwhile a newsagent approx 400m East is now a sub post office as is the one 800m (by road) away to the NW.

So two established local newsagents have apparently jumped at the chance. The guy in the Eastern one is great. Very friendly and efficient. I seriously hope that Horizon doesn’t get him.

I do science tutoring for an online co. They were in dispute with my client over what tutorials I did or did not do in December (when I probably wasn’t tutoring since I had viral meningitis). The co contacted me to resolve the issue. I relied on their systems to keep track . . . Meanwhile the meningitis screws with your memory . . .

There’s a lesson there, keep your own records. I shall be doing that in the future.

Re: school meals

I resided at university in Halls which doubled as the NZ Presbyterian seminary. Seminarians lived out, farmed into local parishes. So there was largely just us prole students in residence.

Fridays we always had fish for dinner, despite being Protestants. Go figure. Big square, WET, slabs of fish. In first year we had to do dogfish dissections. We had Biology labs on Fridays.

We had the same dogfish for three weeks, dissecting various bits, they were fixed, kind of but they still began to smell.

I like fish, I have eaten dogfish i have caught. But on the third week I could not eat the fish.

My speciality is muscle, hence the monniker, the previous PhD student in the lab could not eat steak, she had cut and examined too many muscle cross sections. I became expert on the anatomy of the lower hindlimb, which made eating chicken drumsticks problematic. My mind kept trying to identify the muscles.

Re: Never trusted slack, Never will.

It allows you to post documents for group discussion. I’m in a Scottish political party and we use it for policy discussions. Our manifesto due out soon would have been much, much harder to do using email.

It’s free and secure enough. Entry to our space and folders is by invitation only.

Re: moving DC with no bribe

I know a scientist who shall remain anonymous who wanted to take some mice to Paris. Flying from Geneva to Paris would have required lots of paperwork. He put the mice in his pocket, drove to the French side of Geneva airport and flew domestic to Paris. Problem solved.

I once got mice from Paris to here in Dundee. Bringing live adult mice required rabies quarantine, I kid you not. I solved the problem by getting them to send the mice as day old embryos (balls of cells) in culture media in a 7ml vial delivered quickly by courier. We had recipient female mice ready to put the embryos back into ready and waiting.

It worked.

Re: The 80s were generally a happy time...

We arrived in London from NZ in ’93. NZ had passed smoke free legislation some years previously. Coming to the UK was an unpleasant reversion to the past we thought we had left behind.

It took almost 20 years to catch up to where NZ was in ’93. NZ is aiming for zero smoking. Not sure how we’ll handle tourists when that happens if they can’t buy them and there’s nowhere to smoke them.

ATM machines here still haven’t caught up to NZ ones in ’93 and you can punch in how many dollars worth of petrol you want, click pull the nozzle handle and then flip the catch so you can let go. It will stop automatically when the amount punched has been dispensed. As well of course if you chose to fill.

The technology clearly exists here to that but it still hasn’t happened. I suspect b/c They make money out of all those £20.02p petrol bills. The NZ system doesn’t have those.

Re: And this is where it goes ... pear shaped?

Way back on usenet we had a guy with a huge case of pareidolia. He saw numbers and letters in rocks claiming they were all messages from aliens. He would post these pictures trying to convince us and we simply could not see it.

Then he started posting pictures of standing stones etc here in Scotland. He was going on about a number by the yellow and I thought ‘yellow? on Scottish Granite?’ and I realised, no stone, not even concrete which has been in the weather fails to host algae, lichens and mosses. He was reading the biology.

Most rocks exposed to daylight have algae on them, often a black variety and often under the quartz grains where the light gets concentrated. I realised this as a child in NZ, there’s this long high hill behind Dunedin and at the top is a rounded outcrop of weathered rocks. You can go underneath them on the downhill side and I noticed the rock in the shade was a different colour from the rock which saw direct sunlight.

It’s why geologists carry hammers, to crack the rocks to see an unaltered aspect. Even rocks in dry deserts have weathered, biology covered surfaces.

Re: The power of coincidence

This mill wouldn’t have been in Guardbridge Fife by any chance would it?

Statistically the best thing you can do for your health is to stop smoking. Second will be to take up exercise. Sustained deep breathing cleans the lungs out very well. I’m mildly asthmatic and after a layoff I will cough for a few hours after the first run as the fluid in my lungs disturbed by the heavy breathing is brought up and disposed off.

Regular running keeps my lungs clear. So don’t worry too much, especially since you gave your body time off while at work.

But the point is the animal has to be capable of being thus trained.

Re: Well....

It’s exactly the same with the home sharing systems. Fine if it’s just your spare room, but people are renting whole flats 365days a year, often in multiple. Operating as hoteliers without having to comply with hotel regulations.

Gods, Covid would kill someone like him with CF in pretty quick fashion.

Re: Club 50+

Indeed, and it’s only every two years. My second one disappeared in the post. Imagine that. Now instead of a small sample you just have to dip the test strip. A big improvement.

I’ll be up for it later this year. Just getting used to being 55 and 56 looms up at me. At least I shall be employed, as what is the question. If the HR bods get their act together finally I should be a science tech at a local secondary (well across Dundee) thought that MIGHT get interrupted in May.

Re: Phone for the living room

In Bioscience you need to go into the animal house and deal with your animals the management of which is via a database. I have built a number of FilemakerPro apps to do this. Take a laptop into the animal house? behind the infection barrier? with a keyboard? Nope. You can wipe down an iPad and back in the noughties at least it ran Filemaker.

Solution. Goodbye paper and having to update the desktop afterwards. No connectivity is required either. Which was good. The whole place, especially the animal house was buried in the hillside. There were skylights. We had to go to the end of the corridor of the main lab space to find a mobile signal.

I doubt they have wifi in there now.

Re: Expensive!

It’s a Home Loan not a mortgage. Need a rewiring? an new roof? And extention? new carpets perhaps? lack the readies? No worries mate, pop down the bank get a home loan to fund it.

Benign prostatic hypertrophy is not however cancer. Telling the difference is the problem. The prostate enlarges naturally with advancing age but not everyone gets prostate cancer.

The more linked biomarkers one tests the higher the chances of correct detection, if they are linked in the way we understand. Using AI is a good idea, provided clinicians don’t rely on it absolutely. I’m a bit dubious about the indirect measurement method. The body uses several but that means it can be fooled.

CO2 levels in the blood for eg are monitored via pH by the body, but both metabolic acidosis and alkalosis are possible. The former can make you unwontedly breathless the latter tired and prone to blue lips.

Re: How is this possible?

From a patched Sierra install on Mac sudoedit is an unrecognised command.

The SE30 had a maths co-processor. I was using a bespoke 3D reconstruction program to reconstruct mutant mouse legs. It was coded to take advantage of the co-processor when present.

Rendering the reconstruction, you had to specify x, y, and z coordinates the hit go, went from hit go, go get a cup of coffee to hit go, drink some coffee, go damn, rejig the coordinates.

It was a nice wee beast.

Re: A lot of thought...

Agreed, at that temperature any biochemistry is going to be glacially slow. As for using methane in place of water that doesn’t really work, it’s too reactive.

The water ocean on Europa is a much better bet for lifeforms. Deep down around the hydrothermal vents. No much more than bacteria though I wouldn’t think.