Posts by Jim Birch

Pebble: The brilliant stealth wearable Apple's Watch doesn't see coming

Re: "the steps counter was counting an arm flex as two steps"

Increased heart rate, higher metabolism, lowering of blood pressure, what do you want?

Wikipedia won't stop BEGGING for cash - despite sitting on $60m

Let's bitch, bitch, bitch!

I'd really love to bitch about Wikipedia too except that I use it all the time and find it the most useful site on the Internet so it wouldn't make sense. It appears that a large chunk of the connected population does too.

On the other hand, we could make a principled stand and leave the dissemination of information to Internet mega-corporations with more-or-less opaque management practices, billions in the bank, and an interest in optimising the content and style for their own financial gain. WTF.

Antarctic ice at all time high: We have more to learn, says boffin

FFS. Stop trying to explain complex processes with one line answers.

The original article was bad science already but some of the commenters have taken things to a completely new level.

1. Antarctic ice is always melting. Basically snow falls on the continent then the ice gradually flows to the edges of the continent and then melts. It may melt on the land, it may form ice sheets over the sean and melt there, it may break off as icebergs, float away and melt. It is not about to stop.

2. This means that fresh water is being added to the sea at the edges of the continent. What happens to this fresh water is complex. There is a lot of mixing but this depends the weather. Anyone who has a one line answer is wrong.

3. The net gain or loss of antarctic ice is the snowfall minus the melt. This is a simple mathematical result but it seems to be too much for some posters. How they think they could possibly understand climate change without being able to do simple maths is beyond me. Even if there was a net gain in Antarctic ice there would still a massive amount of melt occurring.

4. In fact, there is good evidence for a net loss. This is calculated from measurements of the change in ice thickness made with satellites. It would be impossible to calculate accurately by measuring ice flows and melt without a mass of data points that we don't have.

5. The formation of sea ice is complex. It is not simply a function of temperature, or temperature and salinity. The wind and ocean circulation play a major part. Some weather patterns are clearly much more conducive to sea ice formation than others. The actual processes and drivers of sea ice formation are not fully understood. Current models are not perfect. Research is continuing.

6. Global warming is a potential cause of changes in weather patterns. Thus global warming could actually result in more sea ice. It could also result in less sea ice - as would be expected from a simplistic look at temperature increase alone - however, it depends how the patterns actually change. Year to year variations in Antarctic sea ice extent are quite large and can't be explained by simple temperature variations.

7. The presence of sea ice itself also changes the weather patterns by altering the energy exchanges at the air-sea boundary and by reflecting sunlight back into space. These changes in weather patterns will in turn affect sea ice growth. Some of these feedbacks will be positive and some negative.

8. Even if global warming has never happened, has stopped or is paused as some deniers claim, this would still not explain the record sea ice extent. You would need to look for changes in weather patterns and ocean circulations for an explanation.

9. If global warming is occurring it won't mean it gets hotter everywhere, every bit of ocean warms up, and there is less ice everywhere. This is only the average result not what will happen everywhere. It's a complex system with lots of feedback, both positive and negative. In addition, global warming would change circulation patterns that have major impacts on local conditions. So we should expect deviations from any trend, and various places and times.

10. The appearance of more sea ice does not prove that global warming is not occurring. It is an interesting anomalous data point and should help to improve our understanding the processes of sea ice formation.

Bottom line: Sea ice is not temperature.

Supermassive black hole dominates titchy star formation

Don't look! Don'tt touch!

Unfortunately, by the time you get to actually see a black hole your eyes have disintegrated. Likewise, never try to touch one.

Turnbull says NBN 'most reckless commitment of Commonwealth funds in our history'

Most reckless use of Commonwealth funds?

Personally, I'd go for the crazy billions spent on a making life miserable for a handful of refugees for no real purpose other than to capture the votes of the 20% of Australian voters who are hardcore racists...

'Guess what: If you use the internet, you’re the subject of experiments'

Experiment?

The internet is an experiment.

Would it be bad if the Amazon rainforest was all farms? Well it was, once

Pageism, again.

Right. All we have to do is revert a couple of thousand years - destroy modern industrial civilisation and reafforest the rest of the world world - then it won't matter if the Amazon rainforest is cleared.

Ha ha. This is serious news or some kind of weird ritual incantation of sacred truths?

Google pries open YOUR mailbox, invites developer partners

Luddites of the world unite.

Seriously, isn't this just enabling the kind of intelligence that is appearing everywhere and will become completely normal in a decade or two. Do you really think that in 2010 people will still be using email as a paperless version of a box of quill and ink mail kept under the bed? Seriously?

It worries me that people will hand this kind of access out blithely, but that exists? No.

How practical is an electric car in London?

Meanwhile, outside the square...

Self driving cars that wander off to charge themselves as required during off peak usage times seem a more likely future to me. This not just an energy issue but also as much to do with the unreliability of human drivers and the ability to use the transit time doing something more enjoyable than swearing out your cortisol at other drivers. All right, what could be more enjoyable than that but you know what I mean. Supply and demand can be balanced in part with peak charging. Seriously, if there is no parking why would you want to own a car that you aren't using it 95% of the time? Currently, we own cars for two main reasons, firstly, car manufacturers want us to and devote a massive resources to normalise the idea, and secondly, and soon historically, paying for a driver is very expensive so we supply this component ourselves.

Glacier's hot butt melts ice, boffins say

Oh, dear...

It appears that some people have just found out that geothermal heating is a factor in ice sheet dynamics. The disgraceful global community of glaciologist has been holding this information totally secret from the public to aid the Great Global Warming Science Taxation Conspiracy and Research Funds Scam. By restricting this information to obscure places like thousands of journal articles, glaciology courses and text books, IPCC reports, general articles on ice sheets, Wikipedia, and so on, a leakproof system to keep outsiders in the dark has been maintained.

Why were we not told?

Well, you glaciologist scum, the gig is up! Quake in your snowshoes! Truth has prevailed. Ha! Ha! Ha! I laugh as your Global Warming Fantasy collapses.

Help. Mailing blacklists...

You could move your domains onto Google etc mail servers. You would become a secure source.

IMHO this is an appropriate punishment for sending thousands of spams. The less unaccountable, poorly-managed mail servers on the planet the better.

Privateers race to capture forgotten NASA space probe using crowdsourced cash

Loopy loops

Who drew that amazing loopy orbit graphic? He doesn't appear to have a good grasp on Newton's Laws and may secretly wish to be a TIE fighter pilot.

Curiosity finds not-very-Australian-shaped rock on Mars

I'm not interested in any of this accidental shapery until Darwin's face appears on a piece of toast.

Melting permafrost switches to nasty, high-gear methane release

While methane could be a problem it has the redeeming feature that it is quite reactive so disappears from the atmosphere - basically, converted to CO2 - over a few years. CO2 on the other hand is very stable and is only converted in large quantity by photosynthesis. A lot of what we pump into the atmosphere ends up in dissolved in the ocean so doesn't cause global warming. Unfortunately, the resulting ocean acidification impacts marine life: they find it increasingly difficult to build and maintain carbonate body structures. This includes not just the obvious "shellfish" but also sea grasses, algaes and plankton which are the bottom layer of the ocean food chain. Carbonate is already slightly soluble in seawater so marine organisms expend physiological resources battling personal dissolution. They are able to tweak the solubility in their favor slightly by tricks like adding other minerals to the mix and using biofilms. As the acidity increases the effort required to run these processes increases and limits their productivity. At a higher level the required effort becomes too much and they die. This "dead ocean" scenario with little primary production appears to be well within our capabilities*.

Worth noting: Half the worlds oxygen production takes place in the sea. Also: I like eating fish.

* including our capacity for self delusion.

Helpdesk/Service Desk Recommendations

Jira?

Have you looked at Jira Service Desk? We use Jira here (for problems, projects, etc) but not the Service Desk (incident management) component. I wish we did.

Inmarsat: Doppler effect helped 'locate' MH370

Geo- "stationary" satellites actually do a small daily "tidal" figure of eight loop due to the gravitational effects of the sun and moon. This loop shape and timing vary over the month. This adds to the relative velocity equation, I don't know how much but this is the critical bit. (In fact, if you think about it, the doppler effect would be the same for mirror image north- and southbound planes with a truly geostationary satellite.)

It is unlikely that the exact satellite path is known accurately but this isn't actually required. The trick would be to scatter plot the frequency shifts for pings from different planes at around each time of interest against some actual known velocity components and find where the MH370 pings fit. You would have to eliminate the east west component. From the statements made it appears they used an approach of matching similar known flight paths rather than a fully mathematical/statistical all data analysis. My guess is that the effect would be small but detectable, with confirmation coming from correlation across the the six or so pings on the terminal leg of the MH370 flight.

Another climate change myth debunked by proper climate scientists

Misreporting

Another piece of tribal antiscience junk from Lewis Page. Anyone surprised?

This is basically a null result because of lack of data. Nothing proved, nothing disproved, not enough data yet for the noise level in tropical cyclone frequency. How hard is that to report correctly?

As usual Lewis has selectively reported it as a goal by the Good Guys. Pathetic Dill.

Boffins: Antarctic glacier in irreversible decline, will raise sea levels by 1cm

Re: How commentards do science: word analysis on a writeup by El Reg

@Mad Mike

Oh dear. When was this mythological time when "even the most ardent warmist has agreed no warming has been occurring"? [spelling corrected]

Maybe you need to do a little reading of alternate views to what's bouncing around in your echo chamber. If you are referring to the cherry picked period that mysteriously happened to align with some El El Niño extremes, then (1) you FAILED basic statistics and (2) you FAILED science. It was known at the time that if you removed El Niño and volcanic aerosol effects the supposed flat period was significantly reduced. Subsequent research also indicates that if poor estimates of Arctic warming are improved the effect basically gone. In science, you incorporate all data, add new and improved information, correct your ideas and move on. In ideology, you find an emotionally resonant story and stick with it come Hell or highwater by playing with words and repeating discredited factoids. Take your pick.

In any case there's an even more basic logical error here. Even if the global averaged surface temperature had actually stopped rising, this says little about the temperature of the water arriving at the base of that particular ice shelf that is causing the melt. Which has, over a limed period of measurement, risen. Which is consistent with the shelf ice loss.

Where's Lewis Page when you need him? He could spin this the right way.

Fair winds and following servers: The art of flight prediction

Hot air

This is what hot air balloon pilots do. In city flights you may need to drop onto a park or a football ground (or else.) A balloon that might be moving at a couple of metres a second and wind changing speed and direction on the way requires a canny brain function running a three dimensional path integration with imprecise parameters, plus a good dose of self confidence that stops short of hubris.

Nexus phones carry SMS crash bug vuln

Shouldn't that subhead read you have been "DOSed" rather than "pOwned"?

AFAICS this bug doesn't allow any code injection, it just crashes the phone. Nuisance, yes, disaster, no.

Cow flatulence, gas emissions much worse than thought - boffins

Re: Significant digits?

No, 5 ± 3 is less accurate. Best guess is 4.9 with an uncertainty of 2.6. Even though it's unlikely actually to be 4.9 this is still the most likely figure. Think of a "bell" probability curve: In this case, it is centered on 4.9 not on 5. The spread of the curve is given by the ± 2.6 bit. It's not a spread of 3, it is 2.6.

If you wanted a rough intuitive figure, 5 ± 3 would be ok. More accurate is 4.9 ± 2.6. This is more likely to be correct. It may be possible to go even further to describe the probability curve shape even further, not just mean and standard deviation (spread), but also skew (asymmetry), kurtosis ("peakedness"), and so on, if your data is good enough.

Re: Serious question

Ever heard of evolution, Mr Serious. We got here by exploiting our environments better than than competing individuals, tribes, and species. That's how we are "designed" by evolution to work. Exploiting the environment feels good and natural. That is not really in dispute. Along the way numerous organisms starved, succumbed to disease, were killed by competitors, and, were eaten by predators. Living this way is pretty natural, it doesn't require a big brain. Game theory says that in a variable environment you have more offspring than the environment will support, just in case. The remainder die. Evolution uses death lavishly. If you want to be part of this system, you can, but the odds are you wouldn't last a week. But no one actually wants to live like this. We choose security and creature comforts.

Somewhere along the way, the strategy of cooperation developed. This meant less stress since you weren't relentlessly competing with everyone, you had a few buddies to hang out with. It also meant that you could achieve new levels of exploitation by acting in groups. Humans are startlingly good at this cooperation thing compared to any other species, except perhaps some social insects (who don't have the smarts we do.)

The industrial revolution bumped up our ability to exploit the environment by several orders of magnitude again. in fact, to the extent where we can trash the planet, either now or soon, and we are actually are doing this just by being the type of organisms that evolution made us. Just because you are biologically designed to feel like successful exploitation feels good, doesn't mean it will continue to work. Things have changed from when you were genetically constructed. We are not programmed to restrain our exploitation, this function was provided by the environment, in the form of death and suffering when local limits were reached.

You don't need any funny moral stories about the Koch brothers to get this. This is pretty basic science.

Right now, we have the choice: go with what biology gave you and reap the result, or take a more enlightened approach, limit your children, be smart with resource usage, preserve the planets biological systems. It's not that hard, it just requires a little thought, and renouncing a bit of your biological programming. Personally, I'm not 100% sure that humans are up to it, but as far as I can see it's certainly possible.

'Best known female architect' angrily defends gigantic vagina

The world is littered with phallic buildings. If a woman wants to call herself an architect she must follow the tradition. Anything else is plain uppity.

Last living NEANDERTHALS discovered in JERSEY – boffins

That guy is very clean and his furs freshly laundered. We are going backwards.

Diamonds are forever POURING down on Jupiter, Saturn - boffins

If it costs $10k per Kg to lift stuff into orbit of the piddling little earth they would have to be great diamonds.

German researchers claim 100 Gbps wireless transmission record

This technology will be great in niches. It won't beat fibre for throughput, reliability, or durability. Could come in handy for instant or hard to cable point-to-point application though.

This sort of technology is more or less line of sight, subject to rain attenuation, chugs relatively high power relative to fibre, but the real usage lid is interference between systems. There's only one radio spectrum available and carving it up spatially becomes increasingly expensive with more users.

Let police track you through your mobe - it's for your OWN GOOD

There's a difference between tracking and having a location that is available on request when required and tracking. Phone companies record this information for their internal management, eg, provision and levelling of resources. Police can request it and it is commonly used in criminal investigations, but on request. Interesting that USA is mandating an accurate level of information be available, smells like the NSA.

What we are talking about here is an automated request on every 999/000/911/etc call. The accuracy is not perfect but it's good enough to send a cop to find the person visually who calls in "I seem to be inside a dumpster" rather than having to peek in every dumpster in the city. There goes another standard movie plot device...

Torvalds suggests poison and sabotage for ARM SoC designers

This was a tongue-in-cheek way of expressing extreme dislike of closed systems. This kind of design either locks out Linux and/or makes a lot of work for Linux devs and makes systems that are hard to fix when they break. And It's not like Torvalds invented recreational outrage or the use of murder as a rhetorical device, is it? That's everywhere. Does Torvalds reside on someone's Imaginary Pedestal of Purity perhaps?

End of story. Move along.

YouTube Wars: Microsoft cries foul as Windows Phone app pulled again

Turning the tables: Google are microsofting Microsoft, aren't they?

Microsoft announces execution date for failed QR code-killer

MS tags make better psychometric tests.

NBN study: we didn't make it, but may have made a point

The NBN debate is a mostly tribal ideological crap. Better than a deep analysis would be to knock some of the dumb ideas out of the "debate"

1. Can wireless ever replace a cable/optic infrastructure? No.

Data throughput is of the order of available bandwidth. This is textbook physics. Get over it. There are loads of noisy dills "participating" in the debate who don't understand this. Techno golden age mythology won't trump information physics. If we could just get these wireless nuts to shut up the debate could move on to real issues.

There are strategies for dealing with radio bandwidth limits. Build more base stations. They need to have low power to share the bandwidth. Low power signals don't go far and can't go through walls. That's why it is smart to place them in our houses and supply them with high bandwidth cable links. Another strategy is directional antennas. Reuse bandwidth in different directions. Designs for these systems are around but they are big and expensive. There is a trade off between cost/size and directional resolution. You can get phenomenal radio resolution out of the Square Kilometre Array but it costs billions.

The other strategy is to use cables to channel the signal. This works well.

2. How much data do we need? Funnily enough, this question is hardly discussed probably because it's speculative - and because people are innumerate anyway - but it's important. The ways you might guess this are to look at the household bandwidth usage, currently growing exponentially, and project out say 20 years. Presumably it will taper off it is currently showing no signs. Any realist guess based on this chartist's method says fibre. You could also consider applications. Video is the big hog. There are limits to detectable resolution and useful screen size but if you take a few screens of live video at twice the current screen size at bluray resolution and faster frame rates you've blown ADSL (or your own personal phone tower) and need a better cable. Can it work on a fast copper cable system? Maybe, but you're up against the cable limits. Fibre will handle anything we try to throw through it. If something like high-res 3D video becomes the norm the chances are you'll really need the fibre.

3. Economics I. This is a big public infrastructure project, like electricity, reticulated water, roads, the sewerage system, the phone system. The cost of digging up the roads and laying new cables is significant, like a couple of thousand dollars per premises, depending on where, how long, etc. Reality check: This is like 10% of the cost of a low-end new car or 25% of the cost of a cheap kitchen renovation or less than 1% of your typical home price. People spend money like this on a new TV that will be chucked in maybe 5 years. NBN fibre will last 50 years plus. (The routers and transceivers won't, but they are cheap.) The headline project figures are tens of billions but per house it's really not that much for something you use all the time. Worth the money? Well, that depends, but while it is big but it's not a major life purchase.

4. Economics II. Can the private sector do it? Yes. Can they do it for nothing? No. It's about the same cost either way but if the cable is privately owned they won't itemise the cable cost in your bills. If a company owns the only cable to your house, would they like to screw you forever? Yes, that's how the market system works.

Alternately, insert your own ideologically motivated answer from the government-is-wrong or capitalism-is-wrong myths.

5. The fast copper v fibre trade off.

Fast copper:

Initial Cost - Cheaper by 30 to 40% upfront

Maintenance cost - High

Speed- Good enough for current applications, probably too slow

Lifetime- 10 to 20 years. We hit bandwidth limits and/or maintenance cost before too long

Fibre:

Initial Cost - Higher by 30 to 40% upfront

Maintenance cost - Low

Speed- Fast enough for any foreseeable applications

Lifetime- at least 50 years

Take your pick.

Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week

Re: Brassed off

An airport metal detector relies on magnetic induction to detect metal. Small pieces of magnetic metal - iron, cobalt, steel, nickel - go through a detector. As do non magnetic metals including lead, chrome, zinc, copper, aluminium, tin. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc and is nonmagnetic.

AFAICS this is likely to result in other scanning methods being used that do shape detection. However, it should be possible to print these guns to look like other friendly things. Tricky.

Another negative climate feedback: Warmer plants cool the planet

Paleoclimate

The argument "it was warmer at geological time X" only really works if you don't mind being personally involved in an extinction event.

Some people look forward to these things with either lust or fear; others glibly assume it will be someone else who carries the can. Delusion coupled with comforting stories has been the natural state of humans since we developed the capacity for abstract thought. It's easy to put into place. Science is a radical shift in ways of knowing and it doesn't sit comfortably with 99% of the human race.

Flexible flywheel offers cheap energy storage

Mobile flywheels

Thinking aloud...

A mobile flywheel would have to be in a chassis that allows full rotation relative to the vehicle, ie, so the flywheel can maintain its orientation as the vehicle changed direction. Exactly the same mounting principle as a gyroscope. Not sure how this would work with all magnetic bearings but it could be a simple mechanical harness for orientation and magnetic for the rotational bearings. The electric connections used to store or recover power would need to handle donuts.

In the case of a flywheel in a hole in the ground in a fixed orientation to the earth there is still a deflective force caused by the earth's rotation, aka Coriolus force, that would need to be handled. A fixed flywheel at the equator would need to completely reverse it's considerable angular momentum over a 12 hour period. There could be a lot of force involved on a high energy flywheel. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if you could site the flywheel at the either pole but you may need a few thousand km of environmentally hardened extension chord :)

At first looks, even a "stationary" flywheel would need to be able to rotate so that it's axis will always point at a fixed point in space. This is actually applies to the vehicle flywheel too; it you left it parked for 12 hours at Entebbe airport the flywheel would try to fully invert itself.

OTOH there may be some kind of cunning low-loss magnetic arrangement/trick to gradually deflect the flywheel at a rate that matches earth rotation component at the latitude of the site. In which case, there'd be no problem.

Antarctic ice sheet melt 'not that unusual', latest ice core shows

More tribalism

X happened in the past, X is happening now, therefore nothing has changed.

Anyone notice the logical fallacy?

The hippies believe X therefore X is wrong.

Again.

This is yet another piece of tribalism from Mr Page. It's funny but Page's mob and the "hippies" he despises so vehemently are both completely hooked into the tribal way of knowledge. Choose what is "obviously" true - that is, what resonates psychologically - then come up with whatever to support it, crap, truisms, logical fallacies, cherry-picked science, it really doesn't matter at all. The difference between the two sides is just which hole they happened to fall into. It is just like being born a Christian or Muslim, nothing to do with any kind of smarter process for working out which beliefs actually correspond to the world out there.

Yes, Mr Page, you are in AGW Denier Tribe, we know that, and yes, you can find quite a few factoids to beef up your position. Cool.

German boffins aim to burn natural gas - WITHOUT CO2 emissions

I've invented a new form of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere in large quantities without causing the water vapour content to increase. It's going to make me billions but it's the Nobel Prize that will really do it for me. I've also created a new form of light that travels 3.6 times faster than the old type and a machine that makes salt from nothing.

Furious Stephen Fry blasts 'evil' Reg and 'TW*T' Orlowski

OTOH The Register

The Register, OTOH, is always correct on science, presents balanced arguments, never engages in bitchery and doesn't sink down to the level of presenting opinion as solid research.

Twenty classic arcade games

This might sound weird but I still play Asteroids regularly. Love the simplicity or the task, the vector interface.

NASA melts mysterious 'metal Martian flower' myth

There's actually a good succinct Wikipedia page on ventifacts but it's good to see ER keeping up the fight against Wikipedia by linking to an weird amateur page on Long Island ventifcacts complete with a snap of the teenage web page "designer" doing the double thumbs up. The artists impression of a woolly mammoth pasted on an out of focus pic of some ice and glacial moraine adds to the effect.

Right On!

Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago

Does Lewis Page use a pattern to alternate his articles between "climate change isn't happening" and "well it is, but it doesn't matter"? Or is it just random?

Climate watch: 2012 figures confirm global warming still stalled

Cherry Picking

Why 14 years exactly? Cherry picking the El Nino high. 20 years doesn't work, neither does 8.

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

Hate trip.

Sorry, you're wrong.

Any organisation as big as a pie shop has done some dodgy things with money. It would be interesting to see the innards of The Reg laid bare for all, wouldn't it? This doesn't mean that it's above reproach or something, but what about a bit of a reality check here. Name your MORALLY PERFECT INSTITUTION for comparison, pulease. Or your morally perfect person for that matter. I'm waiting...

Bringing in hackneyed questions about Wikipedia's errors is just a red herring. This has been done to death. Reliability: Good but not as perfect as some people expect. If you want to criticise their funding process why turn your article into a FESTIVAL OF RECREATIONAL OUTRAGE. It works with some people who are addicted to this type of entertainment but really, it's not a good look. Just loading up with a general whatever bitch says more about the author than the subject.

Wikipedia remains a great information resource for quick general-purpose articles that are typically more accurate than you'd get from an hours googling and reading. If you want to dig deep you'd go elsewhere but it's usually enough. Maybe not 100% complete and accurate on everything, but hey, have you ever looked at the rest the freakin net!? Just in case you haven't, I can reliably inform you it's loaded, past bursting point, with corporate spin, untested beliefs and plain uninformed crap. Maybe we could have truth competition between El Reg and Wikipedia. I know who I'd back. I've seen a lot of opinionated crud and just plain BS in the Reg (along with a fair bit of good stuff.)

As for donations, it's a great thing that ordinary people contribute both their edits and small amounts of money to maintain, grow and improve it. And to own it. I do, and I don't expect perfection in return. Obviously if you have some kind of religious view that everything should be privately owned by rentseekers then it's obviously bad thing but for the rest of us it's a massive, handy, reliable resource. In this kind of article, The Reg seems to be falling into the conceit of the MSM: "We are the source of knowledge, the punters are clueless."

Copying Wikipedia's lies is not just for hacks, right Lord Leveson?

This report is great recreational outrage material: There's also a missing comma on page 2,358.

Sandy Island does exist - on a 1908 chart

Ha. There are lots of these things on nautical maps. They usually have a note like "Reported 1937" and everyone knows they don't exist. The captain may have been drunk and may have been looking at the wrong chart. (I have personal experience of similar events. The sea is a strange place.)

These marine "features" are traditionally retained on paper maps with a dotted outline and the note, just in case, because hitting a non-existent island in the middle of the night kinda sucks even if everyone was pretty sure it wasn't there. With GPS positioning, methodical oceanography surveys, satellite mapping and reduced nautical alcohol consumption most of these tenuous features can be conclusively ruled out and are being ditched as new maps come out.

No increase in droughts since 1950, say boffins

Keep it up Lewis.

Keep it up Lewis. You might be the last denier left on earth if you persist long enough, how cool will that be. Just keep plugging away with these cherry-picked factoids. They prove something for sure. You're an absolute freaking hero mate.

It’s official: Google shrinks the world!

The earth always looks a little like a bus to me when viewed from certain angles. Maybe Google is right?

Conroy wants telcos to wear undies on heads

Sooks

What a bunch of sooks! Conroy is just telling it like it is. Australia does have a legal system that centralises comms regulatory power on the federal government almost exclusively. It offers a good environment for actually screwing better deals out of telcos if used well. This hasn't been achieved historically since privatisation, it's been more of a case of the telcos telling the government what they want and the government saying yes, but in Australia the option is there. Conroy knows it and the telcos know it.

You might not like Conroy or some of his policies but he's right about this. Conflating everything into a single dumb narrative is, well, dumb.

Google spikes old MS file formats

The nasty side of progress

This has to be the beginning of the end for Google. These labyrinthine old data formats don't have proper specification documents, aren't even reliably interoperable between different Microsoft products, and were actually designed with the (then, smart) objective of being read as fast as possible from a floppy disk into clunky old memory chips using a glacially slow processor without a minute or two of reprocessing before becoming editable. Someone has to look after them in their dotage and if Google won't, I can't see that company going anywhere.

Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual

Lewis Page

Say no more.