Posts by David Pollard

Re: I can't feel your pulse

The Reuters articles states a 25% fail rate ... with virtual diagnosis.

I wonder what the failure rate is with surgery visits? My GP doesn't seem to do that well to start with.

a swiftly-passed law

Back in 1997 a solicitor explained to me that when DNA profiling was first introduced, parliament had been told and expected that it would be used exclusively to tie suspects to specific crimes; or to eliminate them from the enquiry. The use of the DNA database for 'trawling' was specifically not allowed; and it was expected that samples and records would be destroyed in due course some time after collection.

After a few months a slight modification to the statute passed through parliament, which most MPs probably didn't understand or didn't even notice. This allowed retention of the data "for statistical purposes".

And the authorities hiding behind such weasel wording to allow function creep wonder why there isn't too much public co-operation and why witnesses to crimes often don't willingly come forward.

Re: re. The picture

Maybe someone has been reading 'Meetings with remarkable men' and been impressed with George Gurdjieff's reputed use of yellow dye to avail himself of canaries for resale. It's all too easy to muddle canaries and canards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff#Businessman

Re: Firewall?

The RPi connection to the internet could be a) secure b) tightly locked down c) self monitoring and d) report any apparent malfeasance to the NHS parent. With slight modification to its software the XP could use, for example, a limited vocabulary and a serial link for communication with the RPi, making it well-nigh impossible to hack.

The folks at Pi HQ can do custom limited editions. I'd have thought that a Pi on a PCi card ready to pop inside an XP box would find the 3,000 to 5,000 users in this and similar situations which would make a custom run viable. If I were a few years younger I'd be crowdfunding something on these lines tomorrow.

Re: Reputation

Peer review does indeed cost money. But there's no reason in principle why the process should not be largely automatic. The expensive part, reading, assessing and commenting on papers received, could be required as pseudo-payment for publication. In return for publication of their own paper each author would be required to review maybe four or five papers in the same field.

Re: Why they have done this

Could it be that someone with a pay grade well above what their intelligence might merit has started a paranoid panic that trrrssts might take over swathes of routers and use them in a massed attack to disable the national radar network?

Accounts not signed off

The last time I looked at this appalling state of affairs was when the Court of Auditors had not signed off the EU accounts for the tenth or twelfth consecutive year. Starting to check just now, for I really can't see that there has been any improvement in more recent times, the first thing that appeared was this:

""Based on our findings, we believe policy makers need to develop a wholly new approach to the management of EU spending and investment."

http://www.eca.europa.eu/en/euauditinbrief-2014/Pages/euaditinbriefdefault.aspx

Indeed, it seems to me what's needed is a wholly new approach to the EU as a whole.

Re: The mind boggles

The image this plethora of 'facts' brought to my mind was of Stephen Fry clones bouncing out of the screen like the Duracell bunny, armed with a never-ending series of clips from an army of automatic elves.

Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

Gravitational energy of something at the Earth's surface, 30 MJ/kg, is of the same order of magnitude as the calorific value of carbohydrates. Is this just coincidence or a subtle reflection of the anthropogenic principle? Is the Earth just the right sort of size for organic life?

Both IrfanView and XNView are available as portable apps too, so you can keep them on a USB stick with a set of backup copies. I haven't tried (yet) but the PC versions may well work under Wine.

Re: So . . . . .

It basically consumed 3 x our sun's mass in an instant,

Various reports seem to have muddled this aspect.

I'm not sure that the process 'consumed' mass, certainly not in the form of a nuclear reaction or suchlike as some reports seem to suggest. Wasn't it simply that the kinetic energy which the two black holes had accumulated as they attracted each other to travel at something like half the speed of light went into rotational kinetic energy when they got close. Much of this was then radiated away as gravitational waves as the pair of them did their final twirls in a closer and closer embrace before they coalesced.

The radiated energy was equivalent to three sun's worth, but the mass that was lost was the relativistic increase in the black holes' masses due to their high speeds, which they gave up when they stopped each other, rather than conversion of the matter that comprised them.

Re: Actually, it makes some sense …

keep only the appropriate data

Initially when the DNA database was introduced, parliament had stipulated that records weren't to be stored and that it wasn't to be used for speculative trawls. It was not long before a weasel clause was added, in a Bill which few MPs would have understood and which made only a slight modification to the statute. This allowed records to be maintained indefinitely "for statistical purposes".

Re: On the Bus

I assume that the router install base will suffer some 'shrinkage' over time.

One of the positive aspects of community involvement is that vandalism tends to diminish. When local people, including the young ones, are directly involved in the way that their local environment looks and functions then to an extent it becomes self-policing.

Re: More words - the show must go on?

It is also fascinating to read Simon Gray's book, Fat Chance: 'Stephen Fry Quits' Drama. which is about the time Fry walked out on the cast of the play "Cell Mates".

A reviewer on Amazon rightly commends Gray's "perspicacity and humour, even if the latter was sometimes of the dark, almost gallows type."

In this book Gray explains "[t]he devastating effects on all the rest of the cast, including all those who are employed both front of house and in the production, that one actor can have due to his actions... It is a fascinating inside look at what happens within a play and its performances when one actor reneges on a commitment not just to a contract, but also to the other people in the play."

Re: You're missing the point

Sadly A/C seems not so far wrong. Here's the xkcd money chart:

https://www.xkcd.com/980/

... use up the waste plutonium ...

Unfortunately there seem to be one or two among the powers that be who think it would be a good idea to hang on to it, just in case it's needed at some stage in the future.

Re: fat chance

As an example, there seem to be a bunch of manufacturers who do rather well selling routers which run open source software, such as DD-WRT. I would have thought that in areas such as home and environmental control a similar approach would also pay off.

It takes a certain confidence to be up-front and open. While this is not of itself a guarantee of quality, it goes some way towards it.

eucalyptus oil for emphysema

The commercial product 'Olbas Oil', available at most supermarket pharmacies, contains a mixture of plant oils such as peppermint along with eucalyptus and is efficacious for me with few side effects; though it is quite strong and stings a bit if you get it on a sensitive area of skin.

N-acetyl-cysteine also seems to help me cope with emphysema. I learned about it here:

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band81/b81-2.html

It's sad that Bandolier is no longer in existence, for they did good reviews on somewhat similar lines to Cochrane in the search for evidence based medicine. Their commentaries on a range off alternative medicines, included in the overall index under the heading 'Complementary', seems to me to be as good as you can get. There do seem to have been a few medics who were neither in thrall to Big Pharma nor to quackery.

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/knowledge.html

I wonder how much the NHS would save and how much overall health might benefit if work similar to theirs were to be extended and made easily available.

Re: Just write it down

USB stick? I wouldn't like to trust a single one of these to retain important information for any length of time.