Posts by TheElder

Re: I think the residents of Finglas may disagree

Upon checking mean IQ of various countries we have these scores:

UK = 100

Ireland = 92

35 countries lower than UK in this list:

https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country

Shakes head...

I can't believe they made such a mistake. We have known for a very very long time that it is not a good idea to try and stick something into a hole that is too long to fit in the hole.

"an attacker could take control of the Segway while it was being ridden and bring it to a sudden stop, catapulting the rider"

Throwing somebody off a bridge or in front of a trolley comes to mind.

When you had a couple...

Haven't been there for quite a long time so I did a quick check to see if the quick cure still exists. Well, maybe not so quick and not really a cure...

IT DOES!! I am so very surprised but hey, it is obviously something so many people need.

It is the Brain Laundromat. Still have the T Shirt.

http://www.brainwash.com/

Might work with some US Americans...

I very much doubt it can work with me (Kanuck). I happen to speak Danish since I was born as well as some German, Swedish, Norsk, French, and a bit of Ruski as well as a small amount of Tagalog and some others. Not bad with tonal languages since I have true perfect pitch. When I go into the European languages I immediately go into a pan European dialect, depending on which language(s) I dream in. I can also drop my voice to Basso Profondo when I like to do some sing along.

Also, Danish has 52 phonemes such as the swallow your tongue Glottal Stops. I can also roll my "R's" much the same as Rammstein industrial metal, one of my favorite groups.

I wonder what the speech detector would would make of a sentence like this:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Re: Power crazed psychos.

Precisely. It was all something that was directly enabled by the incredibly successful 9/11 events. Then the corruption index went into full and continuous overtime asymptotic to infinity.

I remember when I visited Europe before all that happened. I am a Pilot and was flying first class. The door was open to the cockpit (always like that terminology) so I asked if I could sit up front in the empty engineer's seat for a while. "Sure, come up front if you wish" was the answer. It was so cool to watch the aurora as we flew over the pole.

Try that now and see just how far you get...

How fast can computers go? Not well know is that there are computational architectures using other materials that can operate in the several hundred gigahertz range. They exist as functional and available parts used in very special technologies such as signal processing. There is no technical reason these cannot be used for ordinary computing systems, only cost. We are a very long way from the physical limits when looking at the hardware sitting on your desk, even if it is the very latest you can buy. Even the CPU I have has been clocked to over 8 ghz with extreme liquid cooling. With more attention paid to heat generation and intra chip scale cooling the potential exists for next generation chips to run at speeds far higher than they do now.

Buy a Surface?

Buy a Microsoft Surface? Not bloody likely. This is direct from the warranty statement from the MS Store web site in Canada:

"... use in countries not listed in the warranty may void the warranty and your product may not be eligible for in warranty or paid warranty service."

So I void my warranty if I so much as turn it on in an unapproved country and they won't even let me pay them to fix it? They must be joking but unfortunately it doesn't seem so. Perhaps they have been smoking something...

It also says the included Office Home and Student software is " not for use in commercial, nonprofit, or revenue generating activities." So what does that leave? Staring at the nonexistent start button?

re: Pretty Good at Geometry (Non-Euclidean, Also!) #

I fail to see your point. What I said is the star sensors provide a fix on **attitude** as you now seem to agree. Attitude is not position and position is not attitude. However, knowing absolute attitude relative to a "fixed" reference such as the "fixed stars" (astronomy term) is necessary in order to calculate the transformation matrix that describes the pointing of the optical system. That is why star sensors exist.

So what is your point?

"Why is it so difficult to talk to?"

Russia does not have the required comms satellites to relay comms everywhere in orbit. They also no longer have the fleet of comms ships that they used to have for the purpose. The spacecraft has a high gain antenna to transmit data from the vicinity of Mars at high rate and an omnidirectional low gain antenna that doesn't depend on accurate pointing. They cannot talk to it for most of the parking orbit because the craft is over the horizon and the Earth is in the way. Once at Mars the geometry improves tremendously and the craft would be visible at least half of every 24 hours using the high gain antenna.

The most likely problem is total electrical failure immediately after the single communication that was received. Perhaps someone forgot to charge the battery before launch....

Incidentally, the mirror isn't anything similar to an ordinary telescope mirror. It is entirely metal and is made of concentric very slightly tapered cones nested together, It is called a "grazing incidence mirror" which reflects X-rays when they strike at a very low angle of incidence.

Objects in Earth orbit are not at 3 Kelvin since they are illuminated by direct sunlight at least half the time. That is why they are usually covered by IR reflecting gold coated mylar mirror material. Without the IR reflecting insulation they would overheat. In a vacuum there is only one way to reject excess heat and that is by radiation. Convection and conductance do not work. The problem this close to a star is keeping the object (satellite) cool enough.

I will point out that the CERN results may require modification of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity whereas the results of the study of gravitational "drag" on photons is a matter of General Relativity.

There are a number of distant possibilities other than experimental error that might explain the CERN results. Quantum effects could conceivably play a role if some sort of mechanism similar to "tunneling" is taking place. The problem with that is the possibility of a neutrino interacting twice or more times with matter over such a short distance is vanishingly small. A neutrino can travel through light years of lead before it has an even chance of interaction. Also, since any sort of quantum interaction will be ruled by probability it should show a characteristic curve superposed on the emission curve of the burst.

The CERN experiment depends on matching the emission burst curve to the detector burst curve so anything that alters that curve along the path will upset the correlation. The curves appear similar so it is unlikely that any interactions took place.

Re the distance to the galaxy clusters, they are too distant to use the cephid variable star "standard candle" method. They are also too distant to make use of stellar orbital velocity methods of mass determination. As well, the orbital velocity method is confounded by the issue of dark matter. The Hubble constant (red shift) is most easily applied in this case to give approximate distance to the clusters. That, combined with the the apparent luminosity for particular types of galaxies, serves to give galactic cluster mass well enough for the purposes of this experimental determination.