Posts by Eric Worrall

Aussie Customs in presentational-aid crackdown

Reduce Aircraft Noise - install a laser art fixture

What a great idea - if you want to force aircraft to avoid your area, to cut aircraft noise, sponsor a laser art fixture.

If the artist is a black muslim lesbian activist, what is the chances of your "aircraft noise clearance" piece being refused by timid politically correct authorities?

Heathrow protestors take note.

Linspire CEO defends Xandros buy-out

ASUS won where Linspire Failed

Anyone who wants to see a Linux desktop for the masses could do worse than buy an ASUS EEE PC. But be prepared for a wait - they are selling so fast, PC World and other big retailers regularly run short of stock.

Who is buying them? Not the strange, non existent target market ASUS tried to reach. They are being bought wholesale by internet cafes, large hotel chains, and businesses in the third world.

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO₂ than thought

I'm getting a petrol generator

and wiring it to my house grid.

You guys can have your feel good brownouts, I like the light to come on when I flick a switch.

An iPhone with a keyboard?

How about handwriting recognition?

My fingers are too big to comfortably use IPhone touch keyboard or those tiny querty physical keyboards. There's a few dodgy third party recognition packages, but how about native support for handwriting recognition?

Warning sounded over black hole in UK physics teaching

Better off in Finance or Academia

Good physicists can make a mint using their knowledge of arcane applied mathematics to model financial markets, or can achieve fame and fortune by pursuing a tertiary academic career.

Compared to these options, teaching secondary school physics is a distant third place resort, except for those few individuals who really want to teach kids.

UK abandons train and tube scanners

Lets abandon public mass transport

We are far more vulnerable to terrorist attack in a train or bus than we are in a car. Surely its time we stopped throwing money into the transport black hole, and started investing in a decent road system.

Gas crunch: Jatropha, kudzu, algae and magic to rescue

Hombrew nuclear reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

If some oddball kid could get the materials to build an almost viable nuclear reactor in his parent's shed, maybe its time that all of us consider cutting our home power and heating bills, with a little box which sits in the corner which we dont talk about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

Police detain Tariq Aziz's cigar case

Can I play?

If I steal the cigar case of Boris, does that make me a thief, or does the "moral ambiguity" defense allow me to claim it was never his in the first place? Do I get off the hook if Tariq Aziz writes me a letter saying its OK?

Looting is looting

Pretty unacceptable of Boris to try to overturn the rule of law to avoid the inconvenience of facing prosecution for looting.

If a Labour politician had been busted "souveniring" a memento from Iraq, Boris would have been first in line to lambaste their villainy.

Cap, trade, subsidise - Obama's energy plan goes off piste

Just another job destroying tax

Given the way global temperatures crashed last year, and the ludicrous number fiddling by global warming advocates (see below), it is doubtful we need to do anything about carbon emissions.

This makes Cap and Trade just another job destroying tax, which populist politicians are trying to sell to the gullible under the guise of caring for the environment.

Crashing temperatures:

http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm

Number fiddling:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

Veteran climate scientist says 'lock up the oil men'

Climate NAZIs

Vendicar Decarian, if you would kill someone for holding a different belief to yourself, you are a NAZI.

CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe

Where are they?

The universe seems full of planets (more discovered every day), yet intelligent, technological life seems rare. If it was common, the SETI project would have detected their radio traffic.

One possible explanation is that technological civilizations evolve and start broadcasting radio, but disappear within a short period of time - possibly in a cataclysm triggered by taking one chance too many with a high energy physics experiment.

I'd feel a lot better if the darn thing was built on the moon, or in a space station.

Pentagon hacker vows to take extradition fight to Europe

Prosecuting the wrong person

The people who should be in the dock are the turkeys who left the allegedly sensitive US Govt. systems so vulnerable that a dope smoking UFO freak could walk all over them.

Thief swipes cabinet minister's laptop from Salford office

All those poor double agents

I feel sorry for all those poor British double agents, who traded their integrity for the dream of owning a Swiss Chalet or estate in the Bahamas. What foreign spy would pay them for their secrets, when all the spy has to do is ride the circle line until some idiot drops a dossier?

RM relaunches Eee PC 900 as miniBook

Windows Killer

EEE PC is a Windows killer. As a long time Windows programmer, I'm hedging my bets - There is an EEE PC with me now at all times, and I'm brushing off those old Linux skills...

GLAST sets its sights on gamma-ray bursts

Alien Communication?

One possibility that is being ignored is that high energy gamma rays could be residue from an alien communication system.

As technology advances, we have moved to using higher and higher frequency radiation to carry our communications.

Higher frequency systems can carry denser payloads of information, which is why fiberoptic systems, which use laser light, can carry far more information than any radio system.

Similarly, blu-ray discs are displacing older CD-Roms. Blu-ray discs use blue light, which is higher frequency than the red light used by CD-Roms. The higher frequency allows larger amounts of information to be packed onto the blu-ray discs.

Researchers are already looking to use ultra-violet for high density media. X-rays will be the next step after ultra-violet.

http://dennismaliekal.blogspot.com/2007/03/ultra-violet-disc-uvd-next-generation.html

Advancing this trend to its logical conclusion, an advanced interstellar alien communication system could conceivably use hard gamma rays, generated and manipulated using technology we have yet to discover, to pack enormous payloads of information into their communications stream.

That could be the source of the anomalous hard gamma rays detected by observatories.

Scientists warn on climatic 'tipping points'

Carbon Cult

The ecofreaks remind me of the bible bashers who urge that the return of Jesus is imminent, and you better join their cult now. Sadly though, the Carbon Cult is infinitely more sinister than a few over enthusiastic evangelists.

Last time the Eugenics catastrophists, confident in their scientific consensus that genetic pollution would return us to the stone age, killed 7 million Jews to improve the race.

Now poor people are dying because only rich people can afford the self inflicted expense of trying to appease the Carbon God. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1/3a3e7eb6-c5ae-11dc-8378-0000779fd2ac,authorised=true.html

How many poor Africans and Asians will die because of the great global warming swindle, before their pseudo scientific bluff is finally called?

http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html

http://eric.worrall.name