Re: Won't someone think of the children!
The horror, the horror,....
4248 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
That's one solution. I also like the least significant bits of the output of a covered webcam with gain at maximum. Really random bits are easily obtained from noise in the outside world if your device has inputs like cameras and microphones.
For quick and dirty work NOT involving security (but e.g. for Monte-Carlo simulations) I used to use the additive PRNG from Knuth (with 2^55-1 period). This needs 55 seeds in my case, and webcam noise or similar is fine for that. With the development of the Mersenne Twister this subtractive generator is a bit out of date. I gather it is faster (and also faster than the LCG), however.
Nice one, really nice one.
Put me in mind of a fellow student living in the same student house as I did, and he was into punk musing of the type in which it sounded like somebody was vomiting violently into a microphone, and somebody else had hung a fireproof mike in an operational afterburner of a jet fighter.
He used to study quietly and conscientiously till midnight, and then put his music on at roughly 120 dB. As he did not hear our complaints I yanked out the appropriate fuse. He complained that that could damage his records; I retorted that that was peanuts to the damage my 5 lb sledgehammer would do next time. I suggested he had a perfectly serviceable set of headphones so he could listen to his music any time without disturbing us. He said the sound quality would suffer. He did not understand why we howled with laughter at that.
it was just a place that is very, very, ..... well, ... Australian, except that it had few snakes because they were almost all killed by the spiders (according to Dangerous Mammals, Reptiles, Amphibians, Birds, Fish, Jellyfish, Insects, Spiders, Crustaceans, Grasses, Trees, Mosses and Lichens of Terror Incognita, Volume 29c, Part III).
Nice bar though in Didjabringabeeralong, and I like the way they jailed every prime minister the moment he got himself elected (saves time).
Still, no worries, she'll be right!
Does he have a white Persian cat? And a headquarters in a volcano?
With a name like that and loads of money, he just has to be bond villain. Of course, Elon Musk has a similar predicament, and he even builds rockets (and other seriously cool stuff that fits straight into a Bond plot).
It makes everybody age prematurely.
According to the standard bureaucracy model of the universe, red shift is caused by red tape. Photons lose energy by having to fill out progress reports every 10,000 light years, and quality assurance questionnaires every 10 million light years. Galaxies need planning permissions at a galactic scale. If it is bad enough getting permission for three quarters of a shed, imagine how bad it is going to be to get permission to merge a nascent galaxy with the next-door dwarf.
Bet they would like a quick vodka to warm up in those chilly temperatures.
I spotted the ISS passing over last Saturday during an outreach activity of the university's observatory, and it never ceases to amaze me to think that there are people on that man-made dot in space.
Pure and simple.
I really feel somebody needs to bang some heads together and tell both trusts to act in the interest of the public, not in the interests of overinflated egos. I am not laying blame on any particular side (as I do not know enough of the details), but they should sort things out in a grown-up manner and get on with the work of preserving and presenting an essential part of both British and computing history
</rant>
And as so often, it leads to a cry of "bring on better instruments" (and rightly so). This might be something radically new, this might be a different version of something old, it might be a glitch in the instrument (after all, both reports rely on the same instrument). That's science in progress for you.
Fortunately, the Japanese mission is not too far away in the future (certainly no astronomically speaking). I'll raise a glass to the progress made
to the title on the same grounds as I have always objected to the entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on page seven-thousand-and-twenty-three: "Expect the unexpected" on the grounds that it is
a) glib
and
b) a contradiction in terms
Sorry, couldn't resist, where's that coat with the cassette tapes of the HHGTTG radio plays
Taking less than an hour over what the French consider a good lunch is a crime against culinary art. Simply relaxing under the Provencal sunshine whilst savouring first class food is an excellent way to relax and unwind (I realize that it can rain in France as well ;-) ).
Mind you, they are clueless about breakfast. For breakfast, bring on the British! Bring on the bacon, sausage, fried bread, eggs, baked beans ... THE WORKS!!
Maybe the French need their extensive lunch because they eat a tiny bit of bread and jam for breakfast, so when lunchtime arrives they are half starved. The British, being fortified at breakfast with a much bigger meal can survive off the odd sarnie for lunch.
Darn, I'm hungry now!
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving,
revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.....
....
..
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth!
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
because there's bugger all down here on Earth!
If I truly understood dark matter I would probably have an (Ig) Nobel prize (It's the surname that counts ;-) ). I must say as a scientist I am sceptical, but there have been instances when we needed hypothetical particles to explain certain effects. Neutrinos are the prime example. They were needed to explain the apparent lack of conservation of angular momentum and energy in beta decay. They were subsequently found. Anti-matter is weirder yet: the positron was postulated purely from mathematics as a possibility by Dirac, and subsequently it was found (in fact, it had been seen before, but misinterpreted as an electron moving in the opposite direction). The aether on the other hand was postulated but rather wrecked by the Michelson-Morley experiment.
It is hard to reconcile observations with theories without dark matter, and there are ways of observing its influence on matter and light, so there is circumstantial evidence for it. However, most cosmologists I have spoken to do acknowledge that a thorough re-write of our understanding of physics may be an alternative solution. It is just that we do not know how to.
Physics would suggest the irradiance on the retina (W/m^2) as a function of wavelength would be the deciding factor for disease. A 100W bulb at at 30cm covers a much smaller solid angle in the field of view than my laptop screen at normal distance (some ten times smaller according to my BotE (back of the envelope) calculations. Assuming an incandescent light bulb, and assuming LEDs are ten times more efficient than an incandescent light, this suggests the power draw of the screen would need to be 100W to deliver the same irradiance on the retina (albeit over a larger surface area). Given the 58 Wh capacity of my old laptop battery, I would drain it in roughly 35 minutes assuming the processor, memory and disk have no power draw at all.
I think I can safely say the irradiance on the retina is at least one, if not two orders of magnitude lower, as I know too well after replacing a 100W equivalent lamp, and it turned out some joker had flipped the switch to the "on" position while I was doing it. Having such a bright light popping on at about 10" from your face is not fun at all. Watching my laptop screen is not a problem at all.
1/2, so it is a fermion. It's existence was postulated because in beta decay, a proton (fermion) split into a neutron and an electron (both fermions). This violates conservation of angular momentum. Postulating the simultaneous creation of a third particle to carry the surplus spin (or minus the missing spin) solved the problem
This development could lead to a whole new series of BOFH plots. Remote access to heavy kit and power stations yield many new opportunities of <KZZZEEEERT>, <CRUNCH>, <SLAM>, and <CLUNK>, effects, after the usual <clickety, clickety>
Beer, coz Simon and the PFY are off to the pub
I suddenly had this image of a microflame miniature blow-torch solution for the heating problem. If you want to go down in flames, that's one way of doing it properly ;-)
On a more serious note: love the LOHAN project, and indeed, it should be shown in schools.
Icon, because, well, obvious innit?
My 8" can do mag 14 under good conditions, mag 16 is about 6.25 times fainter, so requires 2.5 times more aperture at least, or a massive 20" scope, and that would be borderline. Roll on that 32" Dobsonian (when serious men build telescopes, they don't mess about).
Same here. If I walk past perfume stores like the Douglas store close to my favourite book store, I have to hold my breath. I once had to buy a present there, and I really should have been wearing a gas mask. Next time, should it be unavoidable, I am sorely tempted to wear one (do designer gas masks exist?)
Worse, some department stores place their cosmetics department on the ground floor, near the entrance. I try to avoid these places, and if I have to enter, I walk through it swiftly and without inhaling. Entering a department store with a gas mask is probably an ill-advised manoeuvre, and might lead to overreaction from security bods.
be written in large, friendly letters?
And no, I am not panicking, as I do not gamble. In fact, I only ever bet on anything if I am 100% sure that I am right, and the other is wrong on some point of fact. For example, in my student days, some friends were adamant that the first castle approached by King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the one with the swallows) was French, whereas I claimed it was not (it was of course the one assaulted with the wooden rabbit that was French). They were prepared to bet a bottle of whisky on this, and I happily accepted the bet. We rented the video, each of us brought a bottle, and the loser had to open his bottle and share it with those present.
When that bottle ran out, I did of course open mine as well
I did a project on nuclear fusion at secondary school (1978 or so), and was fascinated by the images of SHIVA and the like as shown in the National Geographic magazine. I equally eagerly poured over reports on JET and the like. Many stories told how scientific break-even (as much energy into the reaction as out) was one or two decades away. Clearly development has not been as nearly as fast as anticipated, but I am well pleased to hear of this progress.
If you have successfully placed a rover on the moon and you have made it last longer than Jade Rabbit, then you have a right to knock the Chinese effort.
They launched and landed successfully, they gathered data and images, had the thing working for quite a while, and now it has broken. Not bad at all in my book.
I will be happy to raise a glass of Tsingtao beer in the engineers' honour this evening (although I might have to resort to another brand). I have several pieces of excellent Chinese optical kit, and know they can built excellent stuff when they "build up to a spec, rather than down to a price" as a friend of mine likes to say.
Nothing wrong with them per se, but when Amstrad came to the Netherlands (quite a bit later than the UK launch), the 3" floppy disks really hurt their sales, because by that time 3.5" was clearly the winner in the format wars. I seem to remember even some later more-or-less IBM-PC compatible ones also sported that odd format, but I might be wrong. I definitely remember advising people NOT to buy the Amstrads with these disks, because they would have a hard time exchanging data with everyone else.
Coding learned in a day? Such a statement clearly shows she hasn't got a clue about coding. Anyway, how can you claim that a skill can be learned in a day when you yourself haven't?
She clearly doesn't even know what an ID10T error is (or PEBCAK situation, for that matter).
Very good point. When teaching "Introduction to Computing Science" which runs in parallel to "Imperative Programming" in the first term of our CS programme, I always point our students to Peter Norvig's excellent page Teach yourself programming in ten years. Really top-notch programming is a skill that requires years of dedication to master. This is thoroughly underestimated by many.
This is also illustrated by our some of staff members regularly stunning students with our ability to find bugs near instantly in code that has been baffling them for hours or even days. This even happens to MSc students who have four or five years of course work under their belt. I then remind them that I have been making that kind of programming mistake (we all do) for 25 years at a professional level, so of course I can find them more easily.