Re: ::yawns::

Hold on. You say that wasting an institution's bandwidth is a firing offence, well that's as maybe but what has that got to do with the article? Do you think the researcher used university bandwidth without permission?

Also, you think that no one is interested in the physical details of people they fantasize about? Try telling that to the foot fetishists, BBW lovers, artificial/natural/big/small breast afficionados, the researchers and funders of this study, or indeed yours truly. Smutty jokes aside, this is quite reasonable research into what people (or at least Americans) find sexually attractive especially as a fantasy. It would be fascinating to see what differences there are between grumble-flick girls and "real world" girls that people find attractive, or to see how tastes change over time vs fashions, or across cultures.

And seriously, who calls themselves a dude? (With the exception of The Dude of course).

Re: Stupid little boy

He's a bit like Hitler really.

Re: I just like to offer....

Sausage!?

"I'd still be much happier if we were just sending a thousand tiny robots there, and just driving them all away from a central spot. We'd get a lot more area covered, a lot more pretty pictures, find a lot more odd things that deserve closer attention and a failure won't mean failure of the mission."

So once your Martian microbot army has wandered all over the place taking pictures, how exactly are they meant to pay attention to all the odd things they find? They'd need to take samples. Oh wait, your microbots aren't equipped with sampling devices. Fit them with sampling devices you say? What form would they take, I wonder? Drills and chemical analysis units, of course! Wait, hold on a sec...

So I'm very interested in hearing what you think you might find by just photographing the planet (which has already been done from orbit of course). The presence of water increases the probability that life has or may exist, which will open up all sorts of philosophical and theological debates, yet alone our understanding of how life works. It also will tell us lots about the early solar system, which in turn will help predict what to find in other solar systems.

Have you ever seen Robot Wars (or similar)? You know the robots that have spikey-hammer-arms? Yes, they're always shit aren't they, barely scratching some ali plate while throwing the attacking robot around and about thanks to Newton. This is (one reason) why they're using drills and not hammers on Curiosity. Merely cracking it open will give you what appears to be homogenous material for the most part, so you could learn very little from it. The drilling isn't used to see what's on the other side, it's to get right down and taste the composition of the rock which will tell you a shit-load about that rock all all it's nearby friends.

Essentially Lee, you need to get your head out of your arse and discover what _is_ being found, not what you think ought to be.

Re: *dons pendant hat*

Nope. An astronomical magnitude of 0 is (well, was) based on the star Vega, anything fainter than that is positive, anything brighter is negative on a logarithmic scale.

Re: Miss Congeniality ?

Beer.

Re: Time Legacy.

The problem is, you wouldn't then need the wall of clocks showing the time in different cities, which would leave my underground lair bereft. I'd still have the huge map of the world I suppose, but the wall would look naked.

Re: Both products are a big fail.

I think they should perhaps throw away their devices and do something together rather than watching TV separately.

Genius. That is all.

Re: Not knowing about AirPlay fail

Calm down dear.

Re: If you're going to put pictures like that into a phone review...

Perhaps you ought to get a job where your boss isn't a Puritan.

Take off your tie, wear a t-shirt, grow your hair; be the person that loves life rather than one of the people who are afraid of authority. Celebrate the female and male forms in all their naketude, especially those with dragon tattoos.

Re: It's a matter of taste but...

Funnily enough, technically it's not a henge - the ditch and bank are the wrong way round.

Re: I call Bollocks

*sigh*

Yes, finding any amount of stone-age remains is hard, especially before the neolithic, and so yes technically there is quite a lot of extrapolation. But do you think that's because archaeologists can't be arsed finding sites? Or that they like to tell a good story, evidence be damned? That they just dick about in wet muddy holes all day for shits and giggles? No. A site is identified - Stonehenge is a fairly obvious one - and a shit-ton of work is done to gather as much data as possible, a tricky proposition when the site is protected to the hilt. And then years of expert opinion and experience is brought to bare, as well as diverse scientific processes and data analysis, and the data is sorted, sifted, and interpreted for the benefit of you Robert E A Harvey, who clearly has not an iota of an idea of what's involved, but still feel interested enough to pen some vacuous rubbish.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of flights of fancy (Alison Sheridan is guilty of this IMO), and (perhaps deliberately) you happen to choose one of the biggest culprits alive today - and he is certainly not level-headed nor practical. But the likes of Prof Parker Pearson are the leading examples in their field of study. So perhaps you ought to go and read some of his stuff, or any of the myriad sound authors (Scarre, Thomas, Richards are some that spring to mind), and then shut the fuck up.

Re: What's [sic] with the sick sic?

But it's political rhetoric: start from the general and work to the specific in three steps. It introduces the reader or listener to the problem, then it's turned towards the individual to make them feel threatened by some non-threat.

That said, it sort of sounds like he's saying he wants privacy in your home. I didn't say it was _good_ rhetoric.

Re: What's [sic] with the sick sic?

The editorial team must have gone to the pub _really_ early. Either that or they're still out from the night before. What's worse is that I look at the "your home" bit and I'm starting to convince myself it's wrong even though I know it to be right.

[sic] comes from "thus was it written", implying not just typos and grammar errors, but meaning and content too.

Re: Worst use of inuendo ever?

And of course, because it's a Brid-Aine article, there is the ubiquitous "canned statement". If Apple were somehow involved, there would be a "fruity firm" reference in there somewhere too. It makes me wonder if she has macros set up to avoid typing those canned phrases.

Re: "in the crispy-fried zone for humanity or similar-bodied aliens"

*sigh* The clue's in the title, Tony.

Genius

That is all.

Re: What an idiot

While you were writing that, I nicked your wallet.

Woot! Let's go, I can't wait for the colonists to report back with blogs of humanity's first extra-solar colony. What, it'll take 600 years to upload to Wordpress? Meh, no wonder my Facebook friend request hasn't been picked up.

Actaully... anyone up for building the 'B' ark...?

The problem is that sites like Wolfram Alpha and TrueKnowledge can answer these questions quite easily. I tried "Is ice hot or cold?" (http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/is_ice_hot_or_cold) and got a sentence that contains the word "cold". It wouldn't take much work to extract the answer you need, especially if you allow some leeway with spelling and so on.