Posts by Stewart Haywood

Famous 'Silhouette' Flash illusion unravelled

Re help!

Raivn, there are three of them and they all appear to be spinning in different diractions? How many dimensions can you see in?

Voting reform finally on the agenda

Vegetable soup

Electing a government is a bit like making a vegetable soup. How you choose the ingredients doesn't matter too much, it is the quality of the ingredients that matters. Our problem at the moment is having to choose from a large pile of mainly rotten veg.

Airline ejects passenger for being hungry

untitled

There are two posibilities:

A) The cabin staff had been out-sourced from a non-English speaking country.

B) One of the cabin staff needed an extra 30mins on the ground to do some shopping.

Artificial 'black hole' generator fashioned out of circuit boards

Many years ago .........

when I was young and the world was new, we used microwave lenses as parts of antenna systems. Some of these used large chunks of dielectric material (perspex was a good one at the time) shaped like a lens to focus a plane wave onto a point (usually a small horn). Others used a number of anular metal plates of different lengths to focus a plane wave to a point. Antennas like this could also be used as passive repeaters. It is always a good idea with things like this to ensure a good match between the system and free space so as to capture the max amount of energy. Used at 2GHz, these things stood out like a sore thumb at light frequencies but, at 2GHz, would look like a black hole.

There is nothing new about the basic idea here. The main change is that as the frequency increases, things get a bit smaller. Bandwidth of things like this is a bit of a problem, but then, designing anything to work from DC to light is not simple.

2012 Olympic mascots cop a shoeing

One Eyed Penis

Each one looks like a one eyed penis. They must have been modelled on a certain ex prime minister.

F*ck you, thunders disgruntled fanboi Apple user

No app for that.

There's a Linux penguin, a fanboi, and a Windows luser in a plane, and the pilot says, we're carrying too much weight, one of you has got to go, and the fanboi says, well, I can't jump because...

There's no app for that.

Boobquake fails to destroy planet

@A poor grasp?

My understanding has always been that earthquakes are caused by Iranian clerics with a very firm grasp of their todgers.

The iPad will doom humanity to painful bog-roll horror

Evolution

Quite obviously the requirement for bog paper proves that inteligent design is a crock of shit, but, how did we manage to evolve to the point where we can't take a crap without writing a 3 page letter about it first ?

Now, considering that Scotsmen don't use knickers under the kilt, does this mean that they have no knowledge of skid marks and therefore have not evolved sufficiently to need bog paper?

Chinese go beyond binary with ternary molecule

Nothin New

Thomas fowler built a wooden calculating machine using balanced ternary in 1840.

Someone has built a copy recently, see:

http://www.mortati.com/glusker/fowler/index.htm

Strangely, the machine appears in a stained glas window at St. Michael’s Church in Torrington, Devon.

I believe the Russians tried ternary machines in a university sometime in the late 1950's.

Primark pulls 'disgraceful' padded bikini for kiddies

No

They (Primark) are not exploiting children. They are exploiting parents who do not have sufficient strenth of character to say "No Kylee, I don't care what Rupert wears, you are not having one".

I suppose it is now much easier to say "Well, Kylee, you can't have one because the government says you can't.............That's right, the same man that says you can't photograph the nice policeman checking out the magazines on the top shelf to protect us all".

DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!

Latest news

An old friend on the scene tells me that a volley of tinnies of Foster's flew out of the blue glow followed by a note saying "G'day G'day from Antares at Lucas heights Sydney."

'Smart roof' coating made of old takeaway fryer oil

Treatment with alcohol

....is recommended before using cooking oil in a diesel engine "

Treatment with alcohol is also recomended before eating the food cooked in the oil.

'Health and safety killjoys' kill cheese-rolling race

@Andrew Oakley

Isn't that somewhere near Easter Island?

Giant flying pliers menace West Bromwich

Ooops

These pliers will be dropped by a femail astronaut working outside on her way to Mars in 2051. They will then fall into a highly eliptical sun orbit where they will be accelerated to light speed and beyond resulting in them expanding and traveling back in time to menace West Bromwich six months ago.

Top exorcist says Satan at work in Vatican

Mass Production of Holy Water

Holy water is supposed to protect people from infestation by nasty evil demons. Holy water is made by exorcising and blessing some salt, tipping it into water in the shape of a cross and then blessing the salty water. (You can look up all the correct words to say on the web).

My idea is to mass produce holy water by dumping exorcised salt out of aircraft flying over reservoirs. Then, every morning, the whole population could shower in holy water, drink holy coffee and so on. That should keep the demons away.

Now, if this was trialed in the Vatican it would be interesting to see if there was a sudden spate of spontaineous human combustion cases.

BTW, Amorth actually claims to exorcise more than 300 demons a year himself and has about 350 people working for him.

US must redesign killer hot dogs

Idea

Shove a stick up the middle, of the hot dog not the child, cover it in batter made from corn meal and give it to the kid. If the kid chokes, grab stick protruding from bun shute and pull.

I could be called a corn dog and because it is on a stick all kids will like it.

Arab conned into marrying bearded lady

Maybe.....

Maybe as he was rather inexperienced in these matters and she was head to toe in black, he just got her upside down.

Carly Fiorina unleashes 'demon sheep'

Cylon Sheep

Good grief, I had no idea that the cylons had sheep.

West Country pagans tie horses in knots

D@mn those Andromedans.......

.....you send them out to make a few crop circles and they get the wrong sort of crop and end up frightening horses. Last week another lot of them got it wrong and twisted the heads off a bunch of chickens.

Labour MP experiences nasty video shock horror

Meanwhile.....

....the Church of England wants to recruit children as young as 2 by showing them pictures of a half naked man who has been tortured and freshly nailed to a bit of wood by his hands and feet after having a sharp object stuck in his left kidney.

Secret code protecting cellphone calls set loose

Err...No

"The code is designed to prevent the interception of phone calls by forcing mobile phones and base stations to rapidly change radio frequencies over a spectrum of 80 channels. "

No it's not. Frequency hopping is designed to spread interference around. The idea is that interference that may result in one or more calls failing, when spread around, results in a few more calls being degraded but not failing.

The encryption algoritms are designed to provide network security. Note that although you may think that they are there to keep your calls private, they are not. They are there to secure the network against intruders, not to secure your calls.

Ofcom proposes squeezing £4m out of airlines

This doesn't go far enough

OFCOM only allocate frequencies from 9KHz to 275GHz at present. If they started licensing frequencies below (KHz they could hit the power companies for radiating at 50Hz. License frequencies above 275GHz and they could start licensing street lighting, traffic lights shop signs and so on. Not stopping there, they could go on to license, car headlamps, flashlights, camera flash guns, X-ray machines. Licensing optical passive repeaters (mirrors) would be a real money spinner. The problem with government agencies like OFCOM is that they have no vision, they only manage to screw things up and annoy people by accident instead of planning ahead and doing a proper job.

Design firm sues Microsoft over Bing trademark

@David Barrett

I think that you will find that "bong! Boing! BinkyPlinkPlonky! " is already registered to Intel.

And "FLAARP" sounds like prior fart to me.

US warships to get plane-snatching robot arms?

It's been done

with airships. The Akron and Macon were flying aircraft carrier. To retrieve the aircraft they had to fly at a thing hanging down from the airship and catch it with a big hook above the upper wing.

Top cop's 'stop stopping snappers' memo: Too little too late?

Why is it......

that anytime plod appears on one of these videos he chewing the cud?

Maybe they have to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time

during training.

Georgia cops cuff terrorist elf

He's Lucky

In the UK he would have found himself in trouble with the "Elfin Safety Executive".

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber

@Baguette bomb

If it had been the Taliban then they would have used a chapatti.

Watford council punts parents from playground

Undercover Playgrounds

Undercover playgrounds! I know what an undercover policeman is, but an undercover playground. Do they go around looking like cemeteries or something?

Egyptians uptight about 'Artificial Virginity Hymen'

Good grief

you can buy them in boxes of 50!

Nothing wrong with 50 bonks, but 50 first times is stretching it a bit.

Well, I suppose it would .

Good Housekeeping readers play hunt the G-spot

Apple iProd

I just had this vision of Apple making a device called an iProd. The advanced version would be an iProd Touchless with blue tooth and handsfree kit. Randomly exploding batteries would be a special feature.

The icon? Well, if all the girls had an iProd, all the guys would need one of these.

Bubbly-belly-bugging boffins battle bovine belch peril

It's been done before.

Men returning from the crusades brought tales of Greek Fire with them. As a counter to this terror weapon, the Brits ( a guy called George actually) developed a method to ignite cow farts and belches and aim them at the enemy. This caused great consternation in the Holy Lands at the time and probably gave rise to the story of dragons belching fire and the myth of St. George.

Flames for obvious reasons.

Police drag feet following DNA law change

Not a victory

Mr Green is reported as saying: "I am delighted the Metropolitan police has recognised that keeping the DNA records of someone who should not have been arrested in the first place is wrong. This is a small but significant victory for freedom.

How far have things sunk that this is regarded by anyone as a victory? To be able to go about life without the police searching ones office without a warrant, without being arrested for a crime that was not committed, without having ones home invaded by the police who then remove personal records, without having fingerprints and DNA samples taken are minimum requirements in a free society. The right to walk about without being subjected to a search or being required to identify onesself when no crime has been committed, the right to walk home without being killed by the police are basic rights in a free society.

So, the police said that they are sorry, so they should be but where are the rolling heads?

The ACPO is really interesting. Who is it within the ACPO that issues advice to the police chiefs? If they need advice on how to run a police operation, have we actually managed to employ the correct people, or should we employ the people in the ACPO doing the advising? Could it be that the police chiefs are, in fact, advising themselves and then hiding behind the ACPO smokescreen, "I was not my fault, I was only obeying my own orders guv' "

Lad passes gruelling 'getting on bus' test

Dressing and undressing

Unit 89751 Dressing and Undressing Oneself is interesting.

OUTCOMES TO BE ACCREDITED

In successfully completing this unit the

student will have

demonstrated the ability to

1. recognise at least six items of clothing;

2. remove and put on own clothes

correctly;

3. manipulate at least three fastenings

properly, e.g. zips, laces, buckles.

EVIDENCE TO BE OFFERED

Youth leader completed itemised checklist and/or

video evidence of the session (1-3).

They are actually going to video a kid dressing and undressing! I wonder how many laws that breaks.

Paris because she probably has a PHD in the subject

World's first electric Chopper parks up

Electric Chopper

I thought you meant how it goes all sparky if you rub it hard with beaver fur.

Spooks' favourite IT firm tells Reg readers to grow up

I have a grown up question........

Over time my personal data will change. Very simply, phone numbers, home address, employer, vehicle registration numbers etc etc will change. The changing data will result in an accumulation of errors over time. Also, there will be data entry errors in the data base resulting in an accumulation of errors as the size of the database increases and as changes are made to it. How are they going to manage this problem?

Just think of all the people leaving home to go to university/college every year, all those leaving university/college to go to work or on the dole every year. Who in their right mind would think that these people are going to update their personal information at every move? Hands up all those who are driving around with drivers licenses with an incorrect address on them.

It is not too difficult to imagine some poor serial suicide bomber being shot on a train because he lives where an evil Brazilian electrician used to live and the electrrician failed to update his information before dying.

Disney punts hetero luuurv to wide-eyed kiddies

Pantomime is the answer.

A young woman dressed as a young man falls in love with a young man and they marry and live happily everafter. The fake young man's mother is usually a middle aged bloke in drag who often falls in love with some male relative or friend of the non-fake young man and marries him. All of this overseen by a fairy! So all the good guys are cross dressing, same sex kissing and marrying types and all the bad guys, of either sex, are as straight as they come.

Don't get me started on what goes on inside the horse or the cow.

The troll is as close to a pantomime character as I could get.

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

So then,

I can sign the form and still eat my friend's horse. In fact, if I don't own a horse at all I can eat any old horse that I find lying around. I have never eaten horse (sort of thing the Frenchies and Egyptians do), I have eaten donkey though. I was wondering about a pony, is that just a snack sized horse or is it a different thing?

Archbishop says Catholics confusing confessionals with couches

I know what they need

They need electric monks.

From "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams ."The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. "

Edifier Luna 2 desktop speaker set

Greater Complexity?

The reason for using class D is to build something cheap and nasty. Class D is power efficient and will put up with crappy power supplies so it is much simpler and cheaper to design and build. Small drivers are not exactly efficient, class D is a cheap way of getting loud noises out of them. Nobody uses class D because it sounds good.

It's US vs Europe as world e-car plug standard race nears end

@Something not quite right...

In the US the HV distribution is generally a delta system. Now, to get the LV domestic supply they use an open delta system. To do this, you get two single phase transformers and connect one between red and blue phases and the other between blue and yellow. On the LV side, you connect one end of one secondary winding to one end of the other. You can now get 120v between the wire that connects both transformers and the other end of one of the transformer windings. You can get about 210v by going between the other two wires on the ends of the secondary windings.

Now, if you only want the single 120v, you only need one transformer. Very often one transormer is larger than the other because it will be used in oproviding both the 120v and the 210v.

This is a nasty but cheap system. The point that connects the two secondary windings is usually grounded. When you look at the two legs of the 210v supply they may be at different voltages with respect to ground and voltage regulation in general is crap.

You can get propper 3 phase but it is going to cost you 50% more.

Scots to pioneer remote sex via glowing ring

@Quantum entanglement ?

If you had entangled light pens, you wouldn't need a comms link.

Oh no! my mind has now strayed to entangled dildos and even the possibility

of couples getting their nasty bits entangled so that they can perform spooky bonking at a distance.

Profs: Human race must become Hobbits to save planet

Eat less meat....

..and eat more beans. That will cut CO2 output. The only thing is, and I speak from personal experience, the fart output goes up. Fart is far worse as a greenhuse gas than CO2.

BT chief: People don't need fibre to the home

Wrong Question.

If BT have been wandering around asking people if they want fibre to their home or if they want symetrical 1Gb/s to their home and here is how much it will cost, they are not going to get many possitive answers. If ,on the other hand, they ask people what services they want, they will get more useful answers. People buy services, not the technical means to deliver them.

The question should be, "here is a group of TV packages (lets say 50, 100 or 200 channels), here is a selection of phone services (local, long distance, overseas), Here is a selection of what you can do on the internet with your computer, here are some added extras like recording 4 TV programs whilst watching another one, controling the DVR from any computer or cell phone anywhere in the world, listing missed calls on the TV screen, placing caller ID on the TV or computer screen, etc etc." Now you know what people want to do, you can work out what speeds they need in each direction and what the latency requirements are. This is how you go about dimensioning the customer end link, the local network and the major backbone.

The customers don't care how it is done, only that hey can do what they want to do.

Now, living in Texas, I am just about to order my phone, internet connection and 200 TV channels from AT&T because they will give me more free stuff than Verizon (like the magic DVR that can be controled over the net and. It all uses IP and is delivered with fiber to the kerb or fiber to the premises (in my case to the kerb), they planted a new plastic box in the alley out back a few weeks ago. The kerb to house link is, I think, coax.

'Soon soldiers will have 3 tiny choppers in their pocket'

I wonder.....

if it can stop engines and sit still for several hours. That could be really useful.

No charges for terror arrest Tory

Wasting Police Time

"The Committee found senior civil servants played up an imaginary threat to national security posed by the leaks in order to encourage the police to take action. " So they lied and in so doing wasted police time. When can we expect arrests? Oh! sorry, SENIOR civil servants, that would make breaking the law OK then.

Bucks village repels Street View spycar

@Umm, the blurring doesn't work

I looked at this and thought "it's a bit dark". I then looked around the area and found that moving only a few yards makes the difference between daytime and almost night. Is the earth radius different in Birmingham I wonder? Could it be that Google has the same problem as the city council and some of the photos are from Birmingham England an others from Birmingham Alabama but all taken at the same time?

BBC Trust moots new licence laws to cope with net

Let's be sensible.

The age of blasting MegaWatts of RF in all directions from multiple sites should have passed.

It must cost a fortune in electricity bills alone, never mind maintaining the blooming great masts and towers.

What is wrong with the TV broadcasters renting space on satellites? They can collect their fees just the same as everyone else with channels on the satellite.

If the government needs a public service channel to feed the view screens in every home, then let them negotiate a rate with the satellite companies and put up a free channel.

The same goes for domestic radio channels.

EU issues ultimatum on internet privacy

@ Ask Jacqui Smith is she still in favour?

"How would you like PHORM to profile your broadband or better still your husbands?"

Good grief, she has more than one husband? No wonder they need dirty movies, she obviously cannot service all of them and govern a whole country. Is she one of them polymomial types, you know, like Al Gebra from Arabia?

Boffins: Atlantic temperature ruled by dust, not CO₂

@An experimental test---

"Nuke a volcano, especially one that produces lots of dust." Umm, didn't the scientologists try that one a long time ago?

Flames 'cause it looks like a scientologist in a volcano.

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

I Blame TV Myself.

Its all these here violent police programs like The Sweeny, Dixon of Dock Green, CI5, Morse, and so on. Plod now thinks that he has to behave like the heros on TV and has become insensitised to the suffering of the ordinary people because of the unmentionable horrors splashed across the screen in his very home. We take these young, impressionable and tormented boys, some with as many as 2 O-levels and a pet hamster, force feed them violent police dramas and RoboCop games, dress them in black uniforms with silly hats, and wonder why they turn out anti-social.

Won't anyone think of the poor boys in the force.