Posts by Thecowking
221 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd June 2009 07:50 GMT
Re: Pink wafer biscuits = Soylent Pink
Dead fly biscuits count as one of your five a day.
Jaffa cakes are 2 because they contain both orangy bits AND chocolate, which is made from a bean.
Re: errrm .....
My dear boy, Steve Bong! is one of Britain's leading digital lights! To suggest otherwise is simply offensive.
Re: Useless Move
They only get striped if they've been spotted.
The whole business has a chequered past.
It's still findable
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3315/PC-Business-World-16-April-1991/
Correct publication?
Re: Life or Death?
Not safe, decidedly unsafe.
Remember, an image of an angel becomes an angel. For a given episode.
Re: Re:That Warning about peanuts in peanuts in peanut packets
In all fairness, peanuts aren't nuts.
So they don't contain nuts.
Re: What did you fry the eggs in?
Conversely, the more basic the pan, the longer it seems to last.
I've got a wok my father brought with him to the UK the best part of 4 decades ago which is still perfect. I need to oil it after I use it, but that's par for the course for caring for metal for me.
Got a cleaver of even more ancient provenance which I don't know how old it is, but the handle is worn nearly smooth and it's bamboo. Oil that after using it too and it's going strong too.
I actively avoid non-stick coatings and the like, I find they wear out in short order and tend to flake. Plain old steel's good enough for me.
I did of course mean the closest star that wasn't the sun.
Reaching the Sun in less than a year is definitely possible.
Nearest star is 4 Ly away, travelling at accelerations humans can stand, years is definitely the minimum. Leaving aside the energy costs, it'd take nearly a year to hit C, so you'd have travelled about .5 LY in the first year.
Lorentz dilation doesn't take it down much in the velocity changing phase given that for a long chunk of speeding up and slowing down you'd be experiencing only minor dilation.
Of course at lightspeed (if such a thing were possible) you wouldn't experience time, but the two subjective years of speeding up and slowing down would be longer than a year my back of the envelope maths tells me.
Of course the bonus about accelerating to lightspeed and then travelling at it is that all journeys would,subjectively, take exactly the same time.
In reality of course the energy requirements get sufficiently onerous as you get faster that constant acceleration is a non-starter.
Re: That's a real site?
So you've not actually read the story then?
Ali Baba is not the thief nor even affiliated with them. Opposed would be a more accurate description.
That's like saying that since you associate cops with robbers, calling a site "cops.com" would imply it's run by criminals.
Re: Seems like...
60 kuai for a meal is definitely achievable, but it's not going to be that nice.
I'll be honest, the food in China wasn't as good as I was expected, I've been spoilt by Malaysia I suppose. I wouldn't even differentiate it bewteen Chinese and western restaurants. Most expensive meal I eve had in China was at the top of the LG twins and it was exclusively Chinese eating there, and proper Beijing foods (still not awesome though).
That was a few hundred quid for four people and it wasn't value for money.
Re: Seems like...
An engineer in a city would not be earning <£25 a year.
Living in a city in China is not the cheap proposition you might imagine it to be. I spent quite a lot of time in Beijing (admittedly right next to the LG twins, so not the cheapest part of town), and it's more expensive to live there than Manchester I'd say.
If it were farmers out in the sticks, you might have half a point, but the wages for people in the cities are not massively different from people in the west.
Of course if they pushed out 300+ phones at £100ish profit a time, that's £30k, which is walking around money no matter where you live.
Re: Why don't you...
It was a kid's tv show http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Don%27t_You%3F
So not sanctimonious, just a mildly obscure reference designed to amuse those who got it.
I was amused.
In all fairness though, if you want to do _anything_ you should really know Latin.
I did Astrophysics at uni, but damned if I don't use Latin more in my day to day life*.
*Largely using it as an etymological base for doing the Times 2 Crossword at lunch.
Re: @Gwaptiva
moutuus est? But he was in the garden only a moment ago!
Damn it, poor guy.
Also it shouldn't be terram I don't think, now I look at it, as nothing is happening to terra.
Re: @Gwaptiva
I am not certain that you can actually, since ad means to.
If it were ab (from) you could use the ablative absolute, but hazy memory tells me that that was a two parter too.
I'm not certain that there is a counter part for ad. (Ablative absolute was drummed into me as " by from with in", happy days. Caecillus is in the garden you say? Sitting?)
Re: Really?
ctrl+shift+y on Linux.
Yes, it's annoying as hell.
Re: Can they tailor this to other wave lengths?
Beta and protons are stopped by hulls on spacecraft, that's not a (pressingly major) issue. Gamma and X-ray are the ones I'm thinking of and I was wondering if they could apply the same principle to say, oh I don't know, a layer of material of the right shape grown on the surface of the hull providing a small, light, effective means of shielding.
Can they tailor this to other wave lengths?
For example, oh I don't know, damaging solar radation such as might be experienced by space craft?
Because that would be really quite useful.
Re: Philanthropy?
It's about diseases, including HIV.
Hope that clears it up for you.
Re: God I'm getting sick of Fry
Brian Cox is a lecturer in Astrophysics.
I can't stand the guy, but he does know what he's talking about when it comes to space and the universe. He explains things well for those who have not spent most of their adult life studying astrophysics (I'm told).
And Stephen Fry was Jeeves, who as we know, knew everything.
Love JB
Spent many a hapy day there as a child and later as an astrophysics student.
The Lovell is awesome, if you can see it being repositioned, it's worth the trip alone. I did hear from people who did actual research there that you can walk under the "new" surface and along the old one under it.
Never done it, but if you guys can pull some press weight and get pictures...
Re: Oh right, it's an RSS reader
Because it syncs across your devices, is minimal as can be and actually works really well.
I've spent some time trying out the alternatives yesterday but so far everything seems to think that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to a mobile phone screen, I'd rather have a scrolling list of headlines.
Feedly, I'm looking at you, that widget is awful.
Anything that means cheaper venison
Is good news in my eyes. I love venison.
More Bambi burgers for me ta!
Re: Once again
In the Co-op by Cambridge train station, there is an Amazon locker.
I get everything Primed to the office, but it's nice to know it's there if I needed it.
Re: grateful for small mercies
Beijing, 2007, the metro there had a series of screens on the walls of the tunnel which displayed animated advertisments through the windows of the trains.
I quite liked them, from a technical viewpoint, because they matched the image changing to the speed of the train, it was very clever stuff.
Re: Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your PC and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?
Why don't you!
Ahh, that was a great show.
Love Swiftkey
It was the very first app I ever bought on Android and I use it every day.
It's extremely good, though mildly prudish and after two years or so of using it, I can't go back.
Just installed the upgrade and it's uncanny.
I'll stop gushing now.
Re: Accent
Yup, it's not a pretty sound, especially not when married to an accent from living in Beijing.
I dream of one day taking some elocution lessons so I can sound like I'm from Taiwan or something.
Re: Accent
I hate my accent in Mandarin.
I sound like a cross between Mao and a Beijingren.
My missus thinks the fact I _cannot_ say a little without the rrrr at the end of dian is hilarious.
Completely apropos of nothing and not related to the article, but it got my rant out. Cathartic.
Posted in Any storm in a port
Spin 1/2 particles
I noted this earlier this year, USB plugs are clearly macro-quantum mechanical exhibitors of spin.
As spin half particles, they require 2 whole revolutions to be in the correct orientation.
This is why you can be wrong 75% of the time and it make perfect sense. It's also how you can rotate them through 180 degrees two or three times before getting it right.
Stand back! It's nearly real science!
Re: Installed ...
As a software tester, can I say that yes, yes there is. You can even get paid for it! I love my job.
I also can't get to comments on a nexus 4, JB 4.2.1
Took me a while to read that right
Kept reading Estonian as "Etonian".
Politics in the news must be warping my fragile little mind :p
Re: Some people wonder
David Attenborough is popular with everyone I know.
I'd vote for him, for pretty much anything he stood for, if I could.
Even the population limiting thing sounds like a good idea when he says it. Especially if there's a meerkat on his head.
Re: where it's going
Google was a verb there, the imperative.
Mirrorlink is from the ccc.
Re: where it's going
Google Mirrorlink, it's already there.
Well it's a standard to let you do that anyway, more mirroring display and piping sound. It's a VNC connection between a car and a phone.
Posted in The Oric-1 is 30
Fond memories
Well very early memories at any rate.
My father used to write games to teach me to read and do maths on the Oric, It even survived being put in action man's dinghy once.
Cinnamon is all very good
But as we know in Britain, if you want to add anything to a cow, it's horse that you should be looking for.
Re: Doomsday eh?
Would you accept a snow crash epidemic as a modern substitute?
Which is probably why they need the fibre.
Re: Doomsday eh?
Wasn't that the Domesday book?
I'm pretty sure that this is the town where the end of the world will begin.
Doomsday eh?
Mayan or Biblical?
How did they even hear of small Yorkshire settlements?
Or watch the video
On that obscure website, the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20087221
Looks like the same phone to me.
Re: @Thecowking
Horizon!
That was it.
Honestly, I rarely watch TV so my memories of what programmes are called is... patchy to say the least.
Yes Horizon, I liked that episode. My girlfriend put it on iPlayer and for once I didn't spend the evening reading a book in front of the TV :)
http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/
This, with the accompanying videos was how I learnt Python, and now I use it every day for my job. OK so it doesn't give you everything you'll ever need to know, but it definitely goes a long way beyond "hello world!"
Re: Penrose's explanation of the end...
Maximum entropy is indistinguishable from zero entropy, if my extremely rusty memory is correct.
So yeah, odd things happen at extremes.
Penrose's explanation of the end...
.. of the universe and the whole solution to heat death and the start of the universe* was on a... panorama I think? recently and as an astrophyicist by training I was just utterly gobsmacked.
It was so... elegant.
It's as close as I get to a religious experience and I am still getting tingles when I think about it. It's quite humbling when you realise the gap between intellects who can come up with these solutions and yourself.
Oh well, I just hope that the human race keeps churning out minds like his.
*as I understood it, and I could well be out of practice, the universe will eventually cool to absolute zero (or close enough that quantum fluctuations are the only accelerating things) at which point space and time will have no real meaning since there won't be anything to distinguish anything from anything else. At which point everywhere is basically nowhere and so could be treated as a singularity which could then explode.
I probably mangled that thoroughly after 10 years away from university and not doing physics, but I think that was the gist of it.
Quietly hopeful
The expanded universe has a plethora of great stories that would make good movies.
The NJA series alone would probably furnish us with a new trilogy of trilogies, and the later Yuuzhan Vong books would easily do the same.
The black hole as shield idea annoyed the helll out of me though.
on Linux too
I'm currently synching my music on my Ubuntu box, so it's not just Windows and Mac.
I say that being able to spell privilege should be the first criterion of this privilege.
Also I love the idea that in a society of pure geniuses, we'd have all the factories and production lines stocked with people who would rapidly become incredibly bored and frustrated. And of course, it's all genetics that lead to crime, not social factors or education. Why is the government not funding phrenology research in this most vital of times?
I have to admit when I was at university I was young and I thought that breeding should be limited to the intelligent. I made two assumptions, 1) That this would be good for the world, 2) that it'd mean I got more sex.
I now disbelieve the first one and I know the second is false.
Oh to be young and dumb again.
You can always make me an offal I can't refuse
And I will say it up front, the Souse has me drooling. I bet it's fair tasty.
Then again, I'm Chinese and as everyone knows, we'll eat _anything_.
I think the missus might have a few words to say to me if I started reducing offal in the kitchen though, she doesn't even let me have tripe steamed with ginger, honey and soy.
Bah! now I'm hungry!
(Also lamb's hearts are very easy to get in most super markets and roast up a treat)
