Posts by Marvin the Martian

Option `other'?

I'm seriously missing the option `other' [or `otter', of course].

My money would be on some of the Gracie brothers, given their experience in Vale Tudo [`anything goes'] matches. But they get beaten by Masahiko Kimura.

Confused bunnies

As a continental, I cannot get my head around the confusion a lot of posters exhibit. Namely, how can you work happily with centimeters to build stuff, but have to judge height [of a person] in feet? Or be comfortable with meters, but large distances have to be miles? Or measure volume metrically but weight imperially?

It's like knowing the route between any neighbourhoods in london but having no idea whether a trip from norwich to leeds will take minutes, hours or days. As long as you cannot treat all sizes [from cupboard to holiday trip] etc in one unit system, then you are failing to grasp how stuff works.

@ What about the ones that didn't die yet?

That's what Survival Analysis is for. This issue has been studied long enough, you note there's more missing data points --> your subjects die earlier.

@ Luther Blissett: get a clue. Just go.

Less cumbersome?

Surely it's equally cumbersome to fire up stinkin' Safari as Burp?

How does this simplify? And for those poor saps with Windoze, or those blessed with *nix?

Loving the suggestion "if you haven't received mail"

So lets think: who failed to mail me yesterday that might have mailed? Hm...

You definitely don't want to come across as whiny and insecure, but then if that company mailed you a job offer or promised estimate: shall we just wait a couple days and let them hanging? Shall we nag them now? Choices, choices. Nah, just dump PlusNet, get a Gmail account and mail the companies this change -- voila.

After passing airline security,

I don't want to sit next to one of these guys. The ventilation panel accidentally half-covered, a 200*C jet of steam on your arm.

They should come with a good milk-frothing attachment, though, for all your selfmade frappuccinos.

"Crazy frog version of <the lord is my shepherd>"

Scary monsters! You really do have the scariest bunch of insane commentators foreseeing distopian futures, just for kicks. This is just too upsetting.

Now I'm to frightened to read the comments ever again.

[Posted this without reading the comments-article's comments, so sorry if it's a doublepost. I'm not going to risk my sanity.]

ID and security

TheRegister's position on ID cards ("no!") continues to amaze me. This country has a ridiculous system without any shared official document; even the disorganized US succeeds in giving a picture-driving licence (above 16, and only qualified drivers, natch).

The `toolkit' lays the responsibility with the person, the first commentator with the banks. I think it's just a lack of structure, the banks can't get around the fact they're dealing with a mickey mouse identification protocol. Membership to the Blue Peter fanclub goes further to establish your citizenship than a phone bill, I think.

Recent incident:

I go to a library, accidentally have a gas or phone bill in my pocket. Pronto, library card, up to 12 books/cd's/dvd's I can take, and if I desire so: never return. Did I say at any point it was *my* bill?

I want to register with an NHS GP (i.e., a publicly funded medical doctor), I need two bills: what kind of do-it-yourself ID-building exercise is that?

Just give me an ID card, I register with the community and then the GP (or more logically, the central NHS register) can crosscheck with the gov database (they anyways have for tax purposes). If I don't have any bills except bank statements (as when I was a foreign exchange student), I cannot register (burdening the emergency medical services by consequence).

Bill Bailey: "Midnight, Turkish border. Border police goes `passaport, passaport', Briton goes `no passport: gas bill', guard says `ah, ok'..."

Mechanisms

Only ignorance gives one the right and opportunity to make "Everyone knows.."-statements. It gives a right to believe anything convenient to oneself.

The commentators clearly state that the results are "suggestive", not that there is an immediate causal link. One causal chain, not requiring unknown effects, would be: disaster -> prolonged fear and worries in pregnant mother -> affected baby -> affected teenager.

A friend of mine then was aresearcher in Kiev, and called up to decontaminate trucks. While the state repeated how everything was contained, his wife and child he immediately sent as far as he could (St. Petersburg): it was a very real and very prolonged fear. There is enough evidence of lasting influence on fetuses living through such things.

Proactively adding value?

*whalesong alert*

Losing the plot

He already was already epically unfunny on Have I got news for you, which he joined via satellite. His teammate Paul Merton turned off the TV he was appearing on --- and there was much rejoicing!

[2002: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3vTn7C2kkE ]

Use any mapping service to be sent to the ditch

Little to do with the gps [=the positioning] and everything with the mapping. About every route planning service I've used, has come up with road that run through water, whether online or offline, and independent of gps or not.

And see the hilarity on the register of a route suggesting to swim the atlantic.

E.g. ViaMichelin still sends you on the roads [e.g. Carpenters Road, Stratford] that have been closed down with metal gates [for the olympic developments, so stays closed for another year or four].

Or buy a hub

If you're just "fed up plugging stuff in your laptop", then buy a hub. The end.

I have 7 permanently connected things plus a few variable ones like memory sticks, and lo, with a single usb plug it all connect to my laptop.

Picture of robber?

A picture of his number plate would have been mildly more helpful... Or did he take the bus?

A small town?

How large is a small town? 5houses? 500? I don't know.

This is a ridiculous unit, just like the `football pitch' (a variable sized thing even looking at FIFA football, plus NFL and other rulesets have different ones. And hating teamsports, I have no real feel for its size).

Just gimme energy consumption in kilo- or megawatt, in dollars (at domestic rates), or in kilos of potatoes fried with a family fryer [I'm Belgian, it's an intuitive unit].

@Alan Gregson: artists' incomes

Hang on --- painters do get some 10% each time their painting is resold. Thus it's another example of `work once -- earn many'.

I feel it's a correct rule, since they tend to have to sell their paintings cheapo in the beginning to dealers/collectors who know the price will explode, but those have the money to hang on to the pic where the painter doesn't.

Celebrity dog names

In a surprise move, celebrities stop calling their dogs `tinkerbell' and unanimously switch to `tiaamii' with various accents and diacritics.

I'm personally waiting for a wave of southamerican style catholic names (Concepcion, Immaculata and similar) for celebrity sprogs: Incestina, Anticonception, Fellatia, ...

@missing the point

If you randomly shoot, what is the chance of hitting something? Pretty near zero.

Try for yourself: go to the roof, throw a pebble into your garden, and see if you hit an ant. It's possibly, but unlikely.

Now the essence of the sky is that it's pretty much empty space. Put your camera on a tripod and pointing randomly skyward, choose self-timer, and then count how many of the 4--10million pixels are made up of birds or plane or whatever living: that's an approximation of the chance you have. A very rough one, as your beam is a straight line but your pixel represents an arc (one pixel nearly is a square mm or so, one far away is many square meters). And no points for waiting until there's a flock of birds, to then push the button!

Air marshalls: how to sneak them on?

I don't know how do the armed airmarshalls get on board? If it's the last-minute passenger who doesn't come from the terminal but walking across the tarmac then it's pretty obvious. If he has his pistol and he can suppress the scanner's alarm going of then you have a problem with these devices getting in public hands. If the gun gets smuggled on by the personnel to his prearranged seat then you also have a security hole big as a bombcrater.

So how?

Gecko=stick, bug=repell

It seems self-defeating, at first sight, as geckos want to stick to stuff but the robobugs want to repell water?

That said, the setae hairs at gecko feet are special, because they don't attract crap that would inhibit their stickiness. As opposed to other experiments with sticky-note type glues to make robots walk on glass or concrete ceilings.

London streetview

@Angus Wood:

I saw a similar rig months ago in Gray's Inn Road but the car had its company stickers on. My bet was a streetview-service for real estate companies.

That was before the (american) Google streetview was rumoured.

Useful for the weirdly levered.

I tried to help a guy use his computer (you know, for mailing and browsing on the wild side, collecting worms), a few years back, and he never mastered the mouse.

The strange thing was that due to some eye/hand coordination thing, he could look at his hand and things would be fine, but when looking at the screen his arm inexorably lifted so that the mouseball pointlessly hung there. In the end there's tricks for everything, but this device would probably be the better solution.

Not sure his type form a large part of the population, his genes weren't spreading really anyhow.

Oh that Moore guy

At the risk of wandering offtopic (if such a thing can be done on the internetz),

Of course everybody knows M. Moore is a very rich philantropist who makes documentaries purely as a hobby. You can see this by the zippy armani suits he keeps wearing.

It's really really selfish of him not to then give them away on the net and in offer free cinema seats as well.

Toodeledookie!

Laptop Gnomes

Michael, you can combine phase (1) and (2).

Then phase (1) is format HD with XP disc. Phase (2) is ... eh. Phase (3), PROFIT!

Painting laptops eeees BIG BUSINESS.

But hey, if they are anyway playing with metal particles during the drying: why this borin' diamond pattern? You can get all kinds of weird figures, no sweat.

Yes google, Anonmouse

You miss the point that the burglars already had been given the codes (inside job, yes). It's just that this didn't suffice those hardened problem solvers.

So they probably went to the homepage of the safe's company and dug up a pdf manual: think "e.g. if the code is 3-7-2, first rotate dial clockwise to 3, then anticlockwise to 7, and finally clockwise until 2. The safe should now open."

A colleague of mine felt unsafe when his GP fired up a search engine during a consultation [medline obviously], while to me that's more a sign of staying up-to-date. So I have no problem with professionals, be they safecrackers, to consult the latest.

Anti-roman catholicism?

Didn't he mean anti-semitism or islamophobia? Much more popular, both in Europe, far as I can tell. The first is additionally very popular as a bogeyman, the second not. So I'm guessing he'd have wanted to say the first.

Germany.

I understand this is all gesture politics, as nobody believes for a second this will pass German opposition. They have the roads where you can legally drive in excess of that limits, and (by jove!) they have the well-marked, well-laid out and well-maintained roads where you can drive at such speeds, as opposed to, e.g., Britain.

So many jobs depend on automobile construction and sales, especially of powerful luxury cars, that Germany will not in the foreseeable future lower or introduce speed limits. Not. Forget it.

It escapes me where the `Liberal' is in this proposal. It echos a Dutch proposal when the first 300kmph-capable production motorbike (Suzuki GSX-r1300 Hayabusa) went on sale, they planned a limit of 160HP or something arbitrary like that (the suz had some 167, just in excess; arbitrary given that aerodynamics are so important --- it needs about 15HP to drive at 140kmph, exceeding speed limits).

Government lab worker?

You might mention Sandia is the national high-energy physics lab, so thermonuclear devices, nuclear fusion and suchlike is their thing!

It's like the NASA case all over again, but luckily not someone with a broken mind still working in very sensitive position.

I liked the warning they had, `Do not look directly into laser beam with remaining eye'.

No.

Most PS fanboys have lost their reason and will to live. You can see these broken spirits hang in dark alleys at night, not online by day.

Australian shark jamming

Sharks stay away from the electric lines because they indicate danger/headaches to them, which are neither here nor there for the shark-in-a-box --- it is controlled by humans or programmed to ignore such strong and recognizable signals.

The presence of chaff-like stuff would indicate something's up, or indeed make the sharks go on a wild-goose chase and waste time. Here again, roboticists can develop chaff-recognition tech or soft where sharks are just stumped.

I'd be pretty optimistic something useful comes out of it, if only a sole-vacuum to precision-fish large but not pregnant flat fish. I'm in favour of research with edible by-products; memory research should be done preferentially on lobsters etc (given the continual need for `naive', unused, individuals).

Life is like a sewer

... what you get out of it, depends on what you put into it in the first place. So too with this.

Nice graphs, but this is coming from the people who are mildly surprised that if you destroy a sizeable country's entire administration and do not replace it immediately, the country descends into anarchic hell. Does it matter that the whole, fractional and divided country was kept together by a feared and hated dictatorship? Possibly, possibly not that much if you see how quickly looting starts anywhere where the electricity goes down.

Anyways, so far for scepticism. Call a Systems Biologist, or better even, a statistician in Evidence Based Medicine for a ludicrously optimistic quote, and he [for it strangely seem mostly males] will explain how omniscience emerges.

"have been shown"?

You mean, they sent an envoy to the City of Interweb, who googled for "bomb making instructions" (but not for "fire safety") and then the entire collected army stood round, kinda Corny version of the water/wine trick?

And Lo! They were Flabbergasted! And their hair and brewery was on Fire...

The one true way

Vision, and will power, of course!

That, plus Voodoo (v2.1) --- the only way to keep your tubes clean.

Lowlife?

It's always fun to generalize, and easy if it's about them Am'ricans yonder.

The only american cops I know are NYPD, one is visiting at the moments and recently switched from a psychology job (having a phd) to policework. Her brother is a cop since many years, recently moved to the motorbike unit. Oh, the two other brothers have a phd and an md between them. So much for being stupid lowlife.

That said, if the facts of the story are true, fire them all including the (probably elected ---> which means the people likes it like this) sheriff.

White and nerdy

Hm... will they go the whole hog, and task off-duty cops with wiki-fiddling?

And at we know the song they'll be humming while patrolling!

<...They see me roll on my Segway I know in my heart they think I'm White and nerdy..>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw&mode=related&search=

[see around minute 1:30]

Verbal dexterity

"That's when you take 3 minutes and a couple of hundred words to communicate what could be said in 30 seconds if you kept to the subject of the discussion."

No, that's not it. Verbal dexterity is where all the blame mysteriously ends up with the other after about that timespan.

What has EMP to do with it?

Oh, because this one has an electric motor it will be more sensitive to electrical problems?

Have you ever driven a car in the last 50years? Any car is equally sensitive, being chock-full of microprocessors and sensors.

Viva electric cars and their acceleration --- an electric sports car is almost as good as a run-of-the-mill motorbike in that department! Maximum torque at 0mph. Good acceleration indeed.

The Walloon version??

Yes, that well-known language, Walloon. Hmn.

Why bother with a Dutch version if you want a Flemish? Not that there's a difference (they make a habit of subtitling each other's tv programmes, for no clear reason --- but written is always seen as universal).

You didn't mention a German version (the third national language, for the benefit of about, eh, 25k `acquired' in WW2), but anyway she's running from Antwerp so only a Flemish version would be missing.

Keele? With its superior vice-chancellor? Surely you're joking!

Of course Keele is beyond reproach --- you only need to look at the vice-chancellor's paycheck, highest in the academic country, to realise what a superior institution it is.

Given that they're not that big on education and research, they might as well spend their efforts at image building [I propose a new logo and corporate identity] and policing the irregulars.

For the people suggesting giving more home/coursework to the students: numbers just in from Holland show that students are spending more time on their curricula now than a few years ago.

In my experience this is true --- you give them half the excercises of 5years ago and it takes them 50% more time. Not that they're dumber per se, just that within minutes they drift off into chat and IM, some mail, oh a java game, wikifiddling... As we sold them the laptops at reduced prices and force them to use the 'net to solve their tasks, I guess we had it coming.

My point being, giving them extra tasks means them loitering longer on the 'web instead of the bar, and leaving said indelible comments digitally instead of verbally.

Re: Re: Facetious Comment

<offtopic>

"Of course, if all y'all Brits could learn to cook a decent steak, among other things, you'd weigh more too... ;-)"

Sadly not very true this, it's mostly sugar and fat that explodes people to indecent sizes --- check the contents, a good steak is lean and not that high in calories.

Or you mean steak "drowned in some nasty gravy and obliterated by a mayonnaise-based glop"? Starting from an extra-fat miscut piece of meat? Then I misunderstood the word "decent"; tsk english/american false friends.

</offtopic>

Apocryphal quotes

By now most people know the 640K quote is made up. However many reasons there are to dislike Mr. Gates, surely there's no reason to lie and make up some?

So it's a bit pointless to see it mentioned twice in the comments. Don't tell me they didn't foresee this, in their happy comments about a prediction they expect to fail.

20 plus 20 isnot 40

Nick writes "at 20mph from each vehicle equates to a 40mph impact speed" which is not true.

Kinetic energy (m*V^2) scales quadratically with speed, so a head-on 20mph-vs-20mph crash is half the energy of a 40mph-vs-0mph crash.

Boyhood dreams

All fine to make people dream and hence support NASA with tax dollars, but it's an infinite waste: human space exploration is ridiculously inefficient and kills people as an extra. The underlying supposition is that humanity needs a dream and that dream has to be moving to other planet --- the Bush space pitch --- and NASA calculates that this is the only way they can justify/keep their *astronomical* budget.

Robots are far cheaper and easier to design --- they sleep until needed, so no air supply, no food except electricity, no waste production, no entertainment needs. And if one fails, or crashes, its a few million wasted as opposed to human lives and many more millions (compare crashes of mars landers and columbia and challenger etc etc). Hence you can calculate on this, and to things `on the edge'. Also they do useful things for small budgets, as opposed to the ISS albatross which is scientifically useless --- unfinished, it already falls apart, and there's a lack of things to do as their science budget was cut. Oh yes, and most interesting and cheapo space exploration plans have been scrapped to pay for... human space flight and ISS maintenance. See also Hubble which they refused to repair for a long time.

Tragedy in point: the `science' experiments the Columbia was carrying were literally proposed by school children ("how do spider's webs differ when grown in microgravity?" I recall), and people died for it. To send a robot in space with the same experiment would have cost 1/100th of the price, and you could have planned to let it burn up on reentry for all I care.

Asians AND Italians

Italy is full of people wearing a thingy on their phone! It's mostly Winny-the-Poohs-wearing-different-costumes, where Asia has all from MarioBros figurines to golden poo's.

Poor farmers

Those poor farmers wouldn't by any chance be the same that kill all the wolves and bears that conservationists try to maintain there? Those same misunderstood country people whose way of life is threatened by forbidding (in britain) badger baiting and fox hunting, and who claim killing unarmed creatures is central to their culture?

[The same who claim 70.000 sheep are killed by wolves in France per year, seeing the compensation claims.]

My heart bleeds.

Specialists say: 40% of school murderers wrote/talked beforehand

Really, Time (and others) wrote just that after the VTech massacre, that "telling signs" are: writing about it in essays or plays or talking to classmates about it, because it has been documented for 40% of the perpetrators.

Right, and some 95% of perpetrators have been documented as male (exception: the girl from the "I hate mondays" song). Soo... ban all males from school --- it's an even better indicator!

Obviously what you need is the opposite information, *given* that someone talks/writes about it, what is the chance that he does commit such an atrocity? Its obvious that most people will not be able to put their finger on the problem/difference, but if a reporter cannot/doesn't want to point this out this is tragic.

So if the chance of pandemonium is significantly higher *given* that he has made a map, fine, they need to take steps. If not, shut up. There's hundreds of these maps made up to now, none are known to be from murderers (AFAIK), so definitely not enough ground to take steps. That the police has helped with stealing his stuff --- well, given that sheriffs are elected in american towns, this kind of macho bullying is what the population votes for.

All spiders are venomous...

...obviously, that's how they eat: their saliva turns the insides of the prey into an oxo-type broth held together by its owner's skin or carapace.

So the question is: which of these poisonous creeps can bite through your skin and inject its venom? All the larger ones, plus a few (mostly Australian) small ones...

Hotmail is NOT a free service

There's enough paying hotmail customers, even though the basic plan is free. Thus the argument a few comments up `you get what you pay for' does not hold.

Nobody in their right mind would start now paying for a hotmail account, I agree, but enough are locked in. If your address is printed e.g. on (scientific) papers, it will stay there forever --- and enough important (mostly older) people will not succeed in contacting you if you change the email.

Fingerprint-protected USB is worthless

The Dutch site tweakers.net recently let a hacker look into several models of fingerprint-protected USB memory sticks. None held up very well, and some collapsed before serious testing.

It took some clever tricks to get there, but once understood they're mostly blood simple. So with the protected ipod you will not fare better, as these can be copied anywhere.

Interestingly, in the best protected sticks the vulnerability is the fingerprint: since two fingerprint readings will never be 100% the same, it cannot serve as a real password to the encryption of the data. Thus the `reader' must necessarily give a green light signal to the decrypter, and this signal can be faked or circumvented.

Segways vs mobiles

As the mobile/cell phone took some 20 years before becoming ubiquituous, maybe we have to give the segway a bit more time before solving global warming and bringing Pyongyang to its knees.

However, ubiquity seems to be the only reason to mention cell phones (hey, sliced bread?). It cuts some time of some things and wastes some more --- I do not see how this invention has a big impact. The benefit/impact of shoes/cars is more obvious for now, and it's used by more, so why not that?

Lastly the mobile is just a patching together of Bell's phone and Marconi's radio. So even in originality and stand-alone impact it does not score well.