Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1891 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Re: Interesting spectrographic output...
Calcium is a relatively common element in space (as are most even elements before iron).
I am surprised that nobody ...
used the pirate icon for comments yet.
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is just weeks away!
ARRH!!
Re: I'll drink to that!
wah whash that??
Neat!!
Love this kind of science, even if I first misread the "Russian instrument looking for water" as "Russian instrument looking for wodka"
Hmm, seismic stuff
Tremble, ye Martians
Sorry, couldn't resist
Igor! Pull the lever ...
Yeth, Marthter!!!!!
Sad news
I was very sorry to hear this news. She was an inspiration for many women to join in in the fun that is science and technology.
I will raise a glass to her memory this evening
Looks more like a Celtic Triskelon. No wories
Re: Hmmm...
You are right about Northern Siberia: nothing to see except blizzards
Re: "The solution? A more potent igniter"
and if it breaks, it needed replacement anyway
Re: Kids
"Actually yes, but thats besides the point. No reason kids can't eat French cuisine. I'm fairly sure French kids do. I'd take steak tartare over a mc horse scrotum burger. I'm no fan of frogs legs, but escargot is awesome."
Agreed, my kids (8 and 10) love to try exotic stuff like snails, or eyes and brains of fish (they learnt that from a Croatian friend (I passed on those myself)). It gets them huge bragging rights at school.
"The solution? A more potent igniter"
True to the spirit of Real Engineering:
- if it doesn't fit, force it
- If it can't be forced, use a bigger hammer
Posted in Nasa guides Mars Rover with Kinect
But do they add an 8 to 40 minute comms delay
depending on the relative positions of Earth and Mars?
Just to add realism?
They didn't even include Stargazer's Lounge and CloudyNights in the survey
I'm miffed
$49.95?
I beg your pardon? I can get a two new batteries for my old Tungsten T3 for that?
Pity really, I loved the Astromist application for Palm
Posted in iPhone 5 to be skinniest Apple yet SHOCK
Hmm, 7.9 instead of 9.3 mm
And suddenly a whole new target demography fits through the doors of our stores!
Those 1.4 mm really count!
Re: Why - Oh Why waste so much money when Open Office & LibreOffice are free?
I have recently had to edit some docx forms in both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. It almost made me scream! Actually, the almost in that sentence is wrong. Things kept changing position in unpredictable ways, bits of text in tables became invisible. I have had similar hassles with MS-Office for that matter. Exporting stuff to PDF is colourful as well (words stuck together, layout shot to pieces).
Ultimately I just hacked together a LaTeX style file to generate the same forms (as they wanted PDF sent in). End of (my) problem.
Re: "The landing was very intense."
Best ever euphemism for a crash, I would say.
Re: Patent Nationalism?
Not just recently: try looking at the Philips Philishave patent spat with (IFAIK) Remmington.
They should have claimed it was radiation damage
More plausible, but might be considered shooting yourself in the foot
In congratulation I would like to say
JFADF IUKHK JUYKL HLKHH DBXUW NWXPG HJDSG UYQWJ BXXXM
ZOPQW KSXWQ SLWHF AAGHF THEOPS GHFML QWEBN IITHQ
The people who need to know will get it
Re: Hooray! New Textbooks on the Way!
"Clovis? It's just the name of a Town in Southern New Mexico again, where some people passing through dropped some arrow heads and forgot to pick them up."
And they weren't even fined for littering!
Holiest tablet since Moses was gifted by a burning bush
That made my Friday! Need to clean the keyboard now
All ur comms are belong to us!
sorry, couldn't resist
Aurora alerts always coincide with heavy clouds
Sadly.
I would have liked to have seen some of the fireworks on the sun in my little H-alpha scope when the flare went off, but alas, cloudy again.
Ministry of Administrative Affairs, anyone
"Yes, Minister" was so right at so many levels
Sad really
Interesting
Might get a student to try something like that with the 320GB Fusio-IO cards in two of our compute servers.
Hear, hear!
A rare voice of sanity in that judgement: patenting should not be about the bleedin' obvious to a skilled team of designer or engineers.
I am not an Apple user (at the moment, their current hires display MacBook pro is tempting!), but I am quite happy to admit that Apple has done genuinely innovative stuff. However, this "invention" was a case of scraping the barrel. I feel it should. There are plenty of other players in the market scrapping the barrel in the same way. I do hope (vainly, no doubt) that this trends is brought to a halt.
Posted in Is the Higgs boson an imposter?
Re: Observer effect?
Precisely. Whenever we find out what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
Evidently, this has already happened
Mine is the one with cassettes of the original radio plays in the pocket. Douglas Adams, we miss you
Memristive spintronic memory?
Brilliant! The BOFH gets more ammo to apply Management Stack Theory
And of course spell checkers go bananas!
Re: view the real world with a brighter, friendlier glow.
Mo reimportantly, are they peril sensitive? will they black out the moment you might see something that could disturb you?
Re: Another warning sticker
But where will that end? A 190g smartphone weighted down by 1kg worth of stickers?
Re: ""Premium haggis in a tin" seems like the very definition of an oxymoron."
Is there a Feegle in the house?
Darn!!
Now we cannot welcome any arsenic-loving alien overlords
How would you like your smartphone?
Rare
Medium
Well-done
Re: Scotch?
but if he did, which one? Did he sound smoky, like an Islay malt, or smooth, like Speyside?
Re: My line with the boss...
I never had to work in the financial sector, but I did work at the University hospital. Whenever one particular senior staff member (non-computer science) tried to meddle in my work and ask what was going on (with an implication that things weren't going fast enough), I tended to explain in detail what I was doing, with as much mathematical jargon as I could muster (which is a lot when you are doing image analysis), in a friendly, fellow-scientist-to-fellow-scientist tone (i.e., I do not have to explain every concept in detail, do I).
The first mention of "fast Fourier transform" or "optimal convolution kernel" was generally enough to make them run for cover.
This is just a practice run for the RotM
Next time they will do it using ICBMs!!!
We're doomed, DOOMED!!!!
Re: Repeat after me
The programmer OR the user fucked up.
(not XOR, btw)
My bet would be on the user. But, as I write programs, it would be, wouldn't it?
"area of outstanding natural stupidity"
Also known as Darwin Award country
Scientists ar eon the lookout
for one humongous hoover
Just a thought
I suddenly have this image of the touchscreen punching
when annoyed by the user
High leccy bill? Don't look at me!
I never use any powerful hair furtling devices!
Never have, never will.
Good for them!
I'll drink to that (but not Chinese rice wine)
But does it contain Narrativium?
That would be really surprising!
Am I the only one with the urge to say ARRRRH!!!!
Buried treasure, after all.
Fins do not like to be called Swedes
see title
A page out of the PARIS/LOHAN book
Is there an El Reg special nautical bureau?
Well done!
Must visit the centre next time I am over in England with the kids.
Oh, Goody!!
There I was getting worried about storage bottlenecks in terapixel image processing applications.
What wonderful times we live in.
