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* Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007

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Stiff upper lips and sun glasses: the Chancellor bets on Brexit feeling

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: What is the purpose of this article?

It is hard to overestimate the importance of EU funding. The UK are not the only country where national funding has been squeezed, and researchers (like myself, here in the Netherlands) increasingly have to turn to EU funding. The UK has been exceptionally successful at obtaining EU grants (like the highly prestigious ERC grants), and rightly so, I should add. The UK still has a lot of first class research going on. I have colleagues in the UK who are understandably worried about what will happen after brexit. Unless some way is found to compensate UK researchers (like e.g. the Swiss model), many scientists may consider moving elsewhere. Really sad.

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What should the Red Arrows' new aircraft be?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Hawker Harrier

would be a top choice for me. It can pull stunts few others can. Dearly love that plane

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Hypersonic cruise missile scores US$175m DARPA cash

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Come again?

"affordable air-launched hypersonic cruise missile"

This is clearly some strange new usage of the word "affordable" I was not previously aware of

Doffs hat (black fedora again) to the late, great Douglas Adams

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America has one month to stop the FBI getting its global license to hack

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: FBI / KGB

One major difference: One of them changed its name; it's FSB nowadays. KGB sounds so last century

But then a spook bureau by any other name would smell as fishy

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Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Joke

Re: Extradition Treaties

At least if you sentence someone to 12x life you can deduct a life or two for good behaviour and still not let him out

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NASA's asteroid orbit calculator spots a hot rock zipping past

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Not sure blowing an asteroid into smithereens is going to be a solution. Nudging them to a safer orbit takes rather a lot of time, and five days is almost certainly not enough. Assuming bigger, planet-killer asteroids will be spotted long before these much smaller, 25m objects, we might still be able to calculate where the latter are going to land, and see if we can evacuate people. A 25m object is going to cause huge damage (especially if it lands in the see, causing a tsunami), but I do not think it is a planet killer.

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AMD will sell server CPUs at Happy Meal prices so you can supersize servers

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Sounds interesting

I might have to replace our ageing 64-core Opteron compute server (still running smoothly though) at some point in the near future. Will certainly give these Zen chips a look. Regarding the 1024-core chips, these are certainly interesting too, but my impression is they might be less suitable for the kind of workloads I have. One worry would be getting enough data from memory to each of the cores. Still worth a look see. We do indeed live in interesting times.

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Spoiler alert: We'll bet boffins still haven't spotted aliens

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Alien

Re: why are they all pointing their lasers at us?

They are pointing laser at us because of cricket. Bad form, that game, very bad form. Brings back some very bad memories for most alien races out there

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Possible reprieve for the venerable A-10 Warthog

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I have always had a soft spot for the A-10. I managed to make some pretty decent snaps of one doing mock runs on a castle ruin I was visiting in England when I was a student (must have been early '80s). Really impressive aircraft. Bit like the Il-2 Sturmovik, not pretty, but terribly tough, and lethal to tanks.

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Do AI chat bots need a personality bypass – or will we only trust gabber 'droids with character?

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Anybody remember Sirius Cybernetics?

"Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. I can tell it is about to open by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates."

Doffs hat (black fedora again) to the late, great Douglas Adams

Of course he also gave insights into how to deal with annoying GPP features, as Ford Prefect said to Eddy's emergency back-up personality: "If you don't open that hatch this minute I am going to your main memory banks with a big axe and give you a reprogramming you will never forget"

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Drone exercise will transform future naval warfare, says Navy

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Inconvenience them into surrendering

I thought inflicting Polka music on your enemy was banned by the Geneva Convention? Or was that the infinite loop of Eurovision Song Contest Winners?

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ExoMars arrives at the Red Planet on Sunday

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Looking forward to the results. Nice to see these collaboration between scientists originally (i.e. when I was a teenager) in rival programmes.

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My Nest smoke alarm was great … right up to the point it went nuts

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Coat

Re: What is 'Smart'?

I fear that if I am ever forced to live in a smart house I will end up with a load of self-satisfied and chatty doors, an elevator sulking in the basement, and a nutrimatic machine insisting I want a cup filled with a liquid, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Doffs hat (black fedora today) to the late, great Douglas Adams

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Stripped of its galaxy, this black hole is wandering naked in the cosmos

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

A gravitaional slingshot perhaps?

The smaller black hole may have been catapulted out of its galaxy by a gravitational slingshot effect, perhaps. There are hints of double super-massive black holes in certain blazars (OJ-287 being one, the most distant object I have been able to see in my humble 8" scope, at 3.5 billion ly). The heavier one might catapult the lighter right out of the galaxy, possibly during a merger of galaxies

Cool stuff, anyway (actually, rather hot)

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UK will build new nuclear bomb subs, says Defence Secretary

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Happy

Re: Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant and Vengeance

"Jackie Fisher's weirder intellectual offspring met with a similar reception from the Fleet when they were commissioned during WW1. HMS Courageous and HMS Glorious were immediately and universally known as "HMS Outrageous" and "HMS Uproarious"."

And the similar "light battle cruiser" HMS Furious became HMS Spurious in the same way

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Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Mushroom

Re: Shouldn't the new names all start with a "W"?

To take a page out of Douglas Adams' book:

HMS Suicidal Insanity

sound like a suitable name for an "S" class boat

after all, there's a "Daring", and an "Audacious"

Another "S" class boat might be named HMS Suppository (for obvious reasons)

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SpaceX searches for its 'grassy knoll' of possible Falcon rocket sabotage

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Que?

"... conspiracy theorists going nuts on this one for a while" ???

Conspiracy theorists are nuts, and they never, ever stop, in my experience

Just look at all "the moon-landing hoax" theorists. I mean, it was nearly 5 decades ago, and still these idiots go on. Love Buzz Aldrin's response seen here

</rant>

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Simulation shows how space junk spreads after a satellite breaks up

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Interesting, but adding perturbations from other orbiting stuff might make it more realistic. I might set this (extended) problem as a project in the course Modelling and Simulation next year

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Curiosity sniffs Mars' odd atmosphere wafting out of its soil

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Alternative title

Curiosity Catches Curious Noble Gas Curios

Sorry, couldn't resist, it's definitely Friday

Perhaps I should get me coat already

More seriously: awesome stuff from the rover

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Oracle loses (again) in battle to get Google Java case retried (again)

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Some lawsuits are like vampires

You think they have finally crumbled into dust, and then some idiot spills a drop of blood (or spends some cash in this case), and

LOOK WHO'S BACK!!

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'Geek gene' denied: If you find computer science hard, it's your fault (or your teacher's)

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: They're claiming a lot less than you guys seem to think...

Odd belief indeed. I have inspected the grades of several courses I teach (as part of the evaluation), and I rarely see any bimodality. In my computer vision course I sometimes do see bimodality, but this often relates to the students background (those with a BSc in CS vs others)

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Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Interest

Interest (even enthusiasm), aptitude, and a lot of hard work all go into making a good student at anything, I would say (is there an Ig Nobel prize for stating the bleeding obvious?). Which of these factors is most important is almost impossible to determine because they are interlinked. Did I become good at maths because I worked hard? Perhaps, but it didn't feel like work at the time, I just enjoyed playing around with mathematics. On the other hand, maybe I enjoyed playing around with mathematics because I was getting good results. Being good at something can really stimulate you to do more of it, and doing more really makes you better.

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Redback sinks fangs into Aussie's todger AGAIN... second time in five months

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Not all creatures down there are dangerous

some of the sheep are safe

OK, time to go. Mine is the one with "The Last Continent" in the pocket

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Unlucky Luckey: Oculus developers invoke anti-douchebag clause, halt games for VR goggles

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: "Palmer acted independently in a personal capacity"

Or then again, maybe someone seriously ripped you off for your Scotch.

I like the odd classy single malt (simply love Talisker Port Ruighe, or some of the Ardbeg offerings), and I have seen some eyewateringly high prices on bottles (always wonder if they could possibly be worth it), but if you pay more per tot than the cost of flying a jet for a minute, I feel you may well have been ripped off, and bought the bottle for some false prestige, rather than having superior taste buds. Might be wrong of course, but I suspect not

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Pretending to be a badger wins Oxford Don 10 TRILLION DOLLARS

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

You have got to love the Igs!

That prize for chemistry is well deserved

I actually gave a lecture on the topic of improbable research for PhD students last week (entitled "And Now For Something Completely Different, or, On The Importance of Not (Always) Being Earnest"), including my own work on a quantum-mechanical interpretation of homeopathy (it might work if you don't look), zero-tolerance maths, and the Craske-Trumpe theorem. I also discussed various Ig winner, including the team from our university who investigated what goes on during sex with an MRI scanner. Iwould have loved to have been able to include some of the latest crop of Igs!

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Moron is late for flight, calls in bomb threat

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Facepalm

ID10T error, most definitely

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Zuckerberg to spend $3bn+ to rid world of all disease by 2100 (Starting with Facebook, right?)

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Boffin

Just to put 3 billion in perspective:

It can give the top 200 universities another 60 PhD students each, or thereabouts, without equipment, consumables, travel expenses (conferences are not cheap), or compute power. This is rather less than the total of PhD students in these universities at this point in time, even if we only count those in medical sciences and AI research (our university medical centre has a few hundred PhD students, alone). If he expects the 3 billion investment to solve the problem of all disease, he must apparently think we are already halfway there. I (and my colleagues in the medical centre) beg to differ. This isn't to say the extra money isn't welcome. It is just that the money provided can hardly be expected to attain the stated goals

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Rosetta probe's final death dive planned for just after last call next Friday night

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Looking forward to the final results

and will raise a glass to the engineers and scientists involved. We do live in interesting times (and not always in a bad way)

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Margaret Hodge's book outlines 'mind boggling' UK public sector waste

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Parkinson's Law

was written some 60 years ago, but the problems he described persist

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2,000 year old man found dead near 2,000 year old computer

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Happy

Re: Finding DNA could tell archeologists more about the ship and where it came from.

Alternatively, we find out he was the ship's engineer, who repeatedly told the captain "Ye cannae change the laws of physics!"

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Map to the stars: Gaia's first data dump a piece of 3D Milky Way puzzle

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Great stuff. We might well let our students practice data mining on this set. Much nicer than giving them toy sets to play with

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Using a thing made by Microsoft, Apple or Adobe? It probably needs a patch today

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

I would expect ...

that whether any statement containing the phrase

"so updating your <insert device of choice here> will work as expected."

provides any comfort depends on you expectations.

If your device has just been bricked by a faulty update, your expectations may be lower than expected

I expect I should now get my coat. The one with "Great Expectations" in the pocket please

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Phones exploding in kids' hands, shares tanking – but it's not all good news at Samsung

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Mushroom

Re: Indeed

So I take it you do not drive a 1972 Pinto

Very wise

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NASA's OSIRIS-REx is off to nick some rocks from asteroid Bennu

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Whatever the final outcome, I'll raise a glass to its success (Affligem Tripel, today)

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IBM lifts lid, unleashes Linux-based x86 killer on unsuspecting world

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Very, very interesting

Memory bandwidth and latency often kill performance in many applications, particularly the bottleneck between GPU memory and main memory. This kind of boost would really help

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Lenovo's tablet with a real pen, Acer's monster laptop, Samsung Galaxy S3 watch

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Coat

Re: 8 kg laptop … five fans to keep it from melting.

But 8kg says it stays put. I do wonder if with some added rubber skirts, it would float across your desk like a hovercraft.

A mandatory question remains: will it play Cr...

never mind, I'll get met coat

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FBI Director wants 'adult conversation' about backdooring encryption

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Facepalm

Re: Disregard for consequences

The Farce is strong in this one.

If the FBI wants a back door, so will every other national bureau of spooks. I cannot imagine the FSB wanting to share a back door with the FBI or NSA. As the number of available back doors rises, the chances of blackhats getting in would asymptotically approach 100% rapidly. Even then criminals could roll their own encryption quite readily (one time pad anyone? I have said it before, will keep on saying it).

Of course if he is really honest (yeah right) about having an adult conversation, he should then also actually listen to what experts have to say. I am not holding my breath

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Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Happy

Re: Distance fropm the sun

Yes, absolutely

but then what are three zeroes between friends ;-)

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Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Facebook announcement?

I trust they informed the IAU's CBAT or MPC NEO pages as well. That is the standard procedure.

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SETI Institute damps down 'wow!' signal report from Russia

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Vogon constructor fleet?

Sorry, I'll get me coat. The one with the HHGTTG radio play on cassette tapes in the pocket, please

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Phoney bling ring pinged by Tolkien's kin

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Coat

Shouldn't these rings come with a health warning?

Warning: Do not use ring in traffic, invisibility increases the risk of collisions with cars

Warning: Prolonged use may cause user to fade

Warning: May attract Nazgul

Warning: Casting ring into Crack of Doom may cause volcanic eruptions, and damage to property

Sorry, couldn't resist. Mine is the one with the trilogy in the pocket

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New booze guidelines: We'd rather you didn't enjoy yourselves

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Pint

Re: No such thing as zero alcohol

Bread actually also contains alcohol. Not much, but more than various "zero-alcohol lagers" (the Bavaria breweries (in the Netherlands) actually make a pretty decent one).

I do not mind the government giving out this kind of advice. I will take it in, consider it, and decide for myself what to do with the guideline.

In thins case, I think I will have a wee dram this evening. I think it will be a Talisker Port Ruighe, just to treat myself, and celebrate life.

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Sysadmin sticks finger in pipe, saves data centre from flood

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Re: Speaking of boarding up things.

We are now well into the fourth day of a heatwave (30+ Celsius), with girls sitting in the sweltering sunshine outside of an air-conditioned cafetaria, wearing thick black jeans and woollen jumpers complaining it is too hot. It seems some people decide what to wear by looking at their wardrobe (and various fashion magazines), and then expect the weather to accommodation their whims. Worse, some think I am weird coming to work in t-shirt, shorts and sandals (and, yes, I am weird in wearing just a t-shirt and jeans in midwinter, but you will never hear me complain about the cold) .

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'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses – just four light years away

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
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Happy

That's impossible

Or rather, very, very improbable

My bet is on the robot being depressed

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Voyager 2's closest Saturn swoop was 35 years ago today

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Pint

Wonderful achievement

I remember the excitement well. I followed all the Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager programmes avidly, mainly in the National Geographic magazine. Really inspiring. The images sent back by these probes were so stunningly detailed.

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False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

I thought the alert was odd, as I have been watching the sun closely, and had seen little activity to suggest a coronal mass ejection of any size. In fact, many solar observers had been bemoaning the lack of activity (although a few spots have bubbled up in the last few days). I am surprised, however, that a single station reporting weird values isn't trapped automatically. It would seem easy to detect this as an outlier and ignore it (or flag it to let somebody inspect it before issuing an alert.

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NASA tried turning lost spacecraft STEREO-B off and on again... but it didn't work. True story

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Thumb Up

You have to admire the tenacity with which the NASA engineers continue to create work arounds for problems with spacecraft.

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Radio astronomy pioneer dies at 92

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

Sorry to hear of his death, but he has had a very good innings. I will raise a glass this evening

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Beauty site lets anyone read customers' personal information

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Facepalm

Mind-bogglingly stupid

Not only do they have this "feature", they then tweet about it so everyone knows they have this security leak you could drive a herd of overweight mastodons through. If their users really prefer this feature over security, they apparently have room-temperature IQ (centigrade scale, that is)

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My headset is reading my mind and talking behind my back

Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
Happy

Besides, wearables are harmless, right?

I think the term "mostly harmless" should be used

Doffs hat (Panama today, it is sunny!!) to the late, great Douglas Adams

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