Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
1887 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
So what is the name of this Apache bug?
Geronimo?
Mine is the one with the Karl May books in the pocket
Playmobil?
Or it did not happen
Nah
There are plenty of Parks and Lees too.
Posted in Argentina: home of Bavarian lager
Yeast spores could potentially travel far
even by wind. So maybe this species of yeast is more widely spread than was thought.
That could be seen as an instance of evolution in action
but then they would not believe you
and anyway, by NOT allowing this atheists (often) do have a strong sense of ethics, and thus show that atheism != satanism. This confuses the hell out of the more mindless type believers (which are the ones "self-selected" by this channel).
Note that I have quite a number of Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims as friends, and none are mindless (mindless believers (or atheists) I tolerate, rather than befriend)
But they did get to the pub to finish their "work"
good planning, that
Beer icon, obviously
So we could have sharks
with frikkin' particle beams instead?
sounds cool
Posted in God particle back in hiding
Just like quarks quirks have flavour
disappointment, in this case (also known as "rock bottom")
Posted in Afghan coppers trained with Playmobil
Brilliant
You just cannot make up this kind of stuff!
For added bang
fire the rocket payload straight up through the balloon.
I just like things that go WOOOMP
Re: You need 3 screens
Play DOOM on 3 screens?
Don't be so modest, we have a set-up with a 3D immersive virtual reality system (like a CAVE)
Brilliant episode
Really on form
or a donut-shaped balloon
for a really weird-looking solution. The rocket could fire straight through the centre hole. You might even be able to get sponsored by any well-known maker of donuts..
I know such a balloon will not be available off-the-shelf, but it would look cool.
If I were needlessly nasty
I could suggest that Opera is so difficult to install and use, and thus requires more intelligence to use. As I have on occasion used it I know this is not true. It could be a small-number effect. If the number of Opera users in the survey is comparatively small, random fluctuation are more likely. It would have been nice to have error bars in the graphs, so we could judge whether or not the differences are significant.
taxed too much?
Come over to the Netherlands, or most European countries. We seem to pay rather more.
Re: Wha?
You should go to the parties with the finite improbability machines.
Bloody big rocket?
Of course it's bloody big! Would you prefer a damp squib?
Posted in Apple MacBook Air 13in Core i5 laptop
I am looking for a new lightweight,
For a machine this expensive, I would like more graphics grunt. For people who do not need OpenCL or Visa it may not be a problem.
So
I'll get me raincoat, I suppose
How about using the lesser known virtues as names?
Tubso and Bissonomy spring to mind.
Mine is the one with "Going Postal" in the pocket.
Cannot resist asking
which occurs more often?
PLEASE DO NOT ANSWER THAT!!
I'll get me coat
Totally agree
The opteron machines here have been great. The old Xeons (pre-Quickpath) were not very good on shared memory parallel computing, because the front-side bus throttled the memory bandwidth. The opterons have given 75-80 % efficiency on 24 cores. Really neat.
Luddite that I am
I just read the books. Nothing about Gandalf's staff broken by the Witch-king in there (though only a purist would complain). I only got to see the Fellowship, and liked the more active role given to Arwen, so I will not say all changes are for the worse. I did feel the fighting was a bit much, compared to the more sedate pace of the book. However, if you kept to that pace, the film would have to become a (very long) series.
Regarding the increased length, Tolkien said in the preface to the book that the main criticism he agreed with is that it was too short.
Grilling again?
Roasting over a slow fire is better at his age, to achieve properly tender results.
Flame set to low/medium
Really nice
What will the revenge be?
I am not too surprised you got a response
because doing it allows them to show off their system again. And Big Blue does have a lot of smart people, AND allows them to talk to the outside world.
Interesting news
I am about to start looking a new machine (looking for something like a 48-core 256 GB RAM job), even if the bulldozers arrive too late, prices of older machine might drop.
Actually, some "facts" are routinely manipulated
Like the output of weather stations in the USA to "correct for changes in the station's environment." This is not a good idea, it is better to let the raw data out, and explain any trends later. Anyway, the debate is not so much about climate change per se, but about the underlying causes. As we cannot see the causes, only correlations, it makes perfect sense to argue about that. It might well be argued that the Earth is unusually cold (starting in the Pleistocene), or that we are in an interglacial era.
Whatever the outcome of the debate, we still should not be wasting energy and other resources.
Some very good questions indeed
I have read one report that the ice caps of Mars are receding, but the mechanism is not fully understood. We also don't have temperature readings over anything like the period we have for Earth. Venus is even more difficult, because it really is a runaway greenhouse, and surface probes do not tend to survive for any length of time (the Russians hold the record, I think). I remember reading a letter in Science in about 1989, that some Danish astronomers (IIRC) had found a 98% correlation between sunspot activity and temperature on Earth, over a period of some 150 years. That is quite a coincidence supposing there is no causal link.
Again, it is definitely wise to move towards more sustainable energy sources, but I am certainly not sure the solar cycle is not involved in some way.
Say not: I will believe
say: I will understand
;-)
Posted in Fujitsu installs Windows 7... on a phone
Why does nobody ask
if it will run Crysis?
I'll get me coat
I live in the Netherlands
but still watch Beeb more than most other channels
As if science should be based on consensus?
Science makes progress whenever there is a lack of consensus. When everybody agrees, and we therefore think we are right (for a given value of right), and there is little incentive to refine our knowledge.
By contrast, whenever we disagree we work hard to prove the other guy/girl wrong. In the best cases, we do that indirectly, by trying to prove ourselves wrong. If we fail to prove our theory wrong, it may be right.
As an example, astronomy progressed a great deal simply from being annoyed by Fred Hoyle, who proposed preposterous (they thought) theories which were consistent both internally, and with observations (at the time), and very hard to prove wrong. They often were proved wrong, but the proof taught us a great deal.
If all scientists vote on an issue, say global warming, the outcome has no effect on the truth of the matter. Suggesting global warning has been proven beyond all doubt is not very scientific.
Posted in Hubble detects new Plutonian moon
and of course he is feeling that cold and lonely
so thumbs up to that name
Posted in Hubble detects new Plutonian moon
P4 stands for Pentium 4
Imagine the overclocking you could do at -240 ambient temperature
On the other hand, imagine the overclocking you would NEED to do to stay warm enough
Posted in Hubble detects new Plutonian moon
Plutonian Ice and Molases
New flavour of icecream? At -240 deg centigrade, it may be a bit cold in the mouth.
Still sounds better than the tunafish flavour favoured by Kzinti in one Larry Niven story
Thumbs up to Ousama Abushagur
great work!
Posted in Python orgy menaces Yorkeys Knob canoes
So the pythons showed
the full Monty?
Mine is the one with the Holy Grail DVD in the pocket
Posted in End of an era: Atlantis hits the tarmac
End of an era indeed
I remember I was just painting the my first ever student room when the first shuttle was launched. I will raise a glass to the guys at NASA, who despite many flaws and problems, still gave us a lot to cheer about
Posted in Russia’s space telescope in orbit
They may have meant
the biggest space telescope, not the biggest satellite
Many satellites other than the Mentors can be seen by stargazers (even with the naked eye). With my 15x70 binoculars, I start to resolve structure in the ISS and similar sized satellites, but many others are readily visible.
Quite right
In the words of Niklaus Wirth:
"Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster"
Is it Apple's implementation you have a problem with
or bluetooth in general? I have few problems with my bluetooth kit (under Linux and Windows)
Given Apple's attitude to Java
that is no surprise, at least as far as computer science students or any others that need to use Java code (bioinformatics anyone?).
Posted in Russia’s space telescope in orbit
Not necessarily better, but differnt
In astronomy, things get really exciting when you can line up different instruments on the same target, to see what it is doing at different wavelengths. Another important difference is that by itself, Spektr-R's images will be much poorer than any radio telescope on the surface of the globe. However, by combining its signals with ground-based scopes we synthetically make large dish, much in the way the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, or the Very Large Array, or more recently LOFAR build up an image using multiple antennae to simulate a very large one.
Posted in Russia’s space telescope in orbit
Doesn't being in tune to disease mean
dying horribly of causes we can now not only cure but often prevent?
Science and engineering are the main reason human beings have FAR more heartbeats during their lives than other mammals.
Astronomy actually came into being because we needed to predict when to sow and harvest.
Posted in Russia’s space telescope in orbit
A lot of good science is happening right now, despite cuts
Perhaps you should follow real scientific literature now and then and not rely on newspaper articles (which I know can be seriously disjoint from what the scientist actually said). The very science you deride has brought you all the improvements in computing power, and many real cures as well. The work I do as a scientist (computer vision) has ranged from determining whether a drug attacks a specific cancer before administering it, through detection of malformations in blood vessels, and automatically scanning through terapixels of astronomical images for peculiar objects, to supporting post-disaster rescue efforts by automatically analyzing remote-sensing images for collapsed buildings. In the latest case we brought down the compute time from 104 days (=useless) to 8 hours (=useful). I also know cancer deaths have been reduced for certain types, in particular in the case of certain early cancers (no work of mine).
There is a lot of excellent science being done, though I agree more could and should be done. Funding cuts are not just undermining scientific progress, but also the status it has in society (or more particularly bureaucrats). I also agree school science can and should be improved.
I would invite every capable worker in science/technology to get involved in doing just that, by spending time at schools getting children involved in science. I taught some basic science/engineering lessons at my boy's school (they are 7 and 9) and it is great fun. We also organize outreach programs to secondary schools close to our uni, and that too is really nice. Too bad that that funding cuts are threatening even that.
I will do it
if they give me enough to drink.
I'll dirnk to having a scientific symposium on this topic
After all, "symposium" means get together for the purpose of drinking (literally).
"One aspect absent from the call for submissions is the close relationship between the academic community and policy makers."
I am all for closer links between scientists and pubs
Well, at least he is old enough
to make the Ronald Reagan defense ( (I do not recall)^N ) plausible.
However, if he really does not recall, through whatever dementia, he should retire. If he does not retire, he cannot rely on dementia as an excuse.
