Posts by Dr Chris Thomson

The True Confessions of an Election Official

Fantasic article

Its nice to know that some people really do care about the vote.

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

@A J Stiles

And I suppose you prefer the 10-15hrs on the ferry looking at the north sea? I admit that it may be a little more eco-friendly but it probably tops out the boredom and inconvenience meter, and sadly I don't think there is an eco-friendly way to speed up the crossing time.

If you don't live in London

If you don't live in London then you might not have noticed that the chunnel is not a terribly green or viable way to get to the continent, if you were to live in Aberdeen for instance, and say wanted to go to Amsterdam, it would take around 20 hours on a train, and you would have plenty to look at I'm sure. Now about 13 hours of that is actually on the train, the rest is at stations, so lets just look at that bit.

A plane from Aberdeen takes 2 hours in a direct flight to Amsterdam. Now even if the trains were faster (the UK leg could certainly be reduced by a couple of hours) and better connected (less waiting in stations) then I'm sure that train journey would still take at least 8 hours say. I'm pretty sure the plane journey is both greener and less boring than the train, and lets face it currently all fast major city trains tend to be over crowded both here and in the rest of the EU, so the plane would probably be more pleasant.

AT&T freshens tourist-trapping iPhone data plans

$.15 a minute, cheap!

Well the standard per minute rate in the UK out of contract is about 10-20p a minute or $.20-.40 so that rate sounds rather attractive, ther per kB rate in the for data is about .002p on most carriers so you could argue that the rate is quite good on that basis, and data is cheaper still as many have a cap of £1.50 a day on data charges or something similar like £1 for the first 15MB. urk.

Boffin shortage will blight Blighty's prosperity

Where are the jobs?

Well as a holder of a PhD in Software Enginnering I'd like to know where the highly paid jobs are that a PhD (and only a PhD) graduate can get? Perhaps if there were more jobs, and people recruiting people with a PhD more people would take them!