Posts by Martin Budden 2493 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
2) They didn't need to sacrifice anything: if the pesky ISS hadn't been in the way the secondary payload would still have been delivered. Losing one engine out of nine did not restrict the vehicle's capabilities - that's why it's built that way.
We have regular "hazard reduction burns" these days.
Canberra has also set up "Community Fire Units" which are groups of locals who live along the urban fringe who have been trained and equipped by the full-time Fire Service to fight fires as they arrive. I was a member of my local CFU until a few years ago when I moved to a different area further from the fringe. CFU members are issued with full protective clothing and equipment, plus standpipes, firehoses, pumps, rakes, etc etc. They are have been properly trained, and practise using the equipment as a team once a month.
I was living just a short walk from the section marked ‘FT’ and I was at home when the fire arrived (preparing my house and yard for the approaching fire). I can assure everyone that yes there was a fire tornado, and yes the fire was generating multiple bolts of lightning just above street-light level. There was no sky, it was pitch black because the smoke was so thick, the only light was from the trees all around exploding into flame and the flashes of lightning. It felt like the apocalypse had arrived. I will never forget that day.
In addition to many houses being burned down by fire, there is no doubt that the strong wind destroyed some houses: it ripped their roofs off and flattened their brick walls. The day after the fire I walked around the area and found the roof from one of the houses shown in the article's picture had landed on the other side of Mount Arawang. Here is a link to the latest Google Maps satellite image of the same area, showing how the houses have been rebuilt now.
"I keep seeing this 'rule' being parroted, but can anyone actually find a source for it?" Yes, it's called 'derivation'. Look that up in a dictionary. A good dictionary will even give you the derivation of 'derivation'.
"I know of many acronyms in regular use which do not follow it" So do I , but they all should.
"and there is no such controversy over their pronunciations." There is plenty of controversy: see commentards above and below.
"Acronyms are words in their own right." They can become so, given enough use, though usually acronyms are just acronyms not words.
I'm in Australia, and I've never heard JIFF. Always the hard G GIF here. It stands for "Graphics Interchange Format", and because "Graphics" has a hard G so GIF must have a hard G too.
What does bug me is when people pronounce SAP as one word: "sap". It's supposed to be "S. A. P.", and I should know because I used to be a professional SAP trainer, so there.
I was really hoping that the FOI legal case would find against the BBC thus forcing the BBC to fix its FOI process.
Instead, the discovery of the list on the Wayback Machine has made the FOI battle irrelevant, thus letting the BBC off the hook and able to continue to (ab)use the FOI law as it stands.
This will help with conversion:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
Explanation:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/28/additional_reg_standards/
Original article about large bare breasts:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/25/barmaid_fined/
"I can't decide if NomNomNom has written a parody of the typical hysteria induced by ignorance of radiation, radiation safety and risk, combined with the media hyperbola and distortions or it actually is ignorant and ridiculous hysteria."
The odds are good that he was taking the piss. NomNomNom is a serial troll.
The main reason a proper keyboard has sprung keys which move down is so you don't get sore fingertips. Typing on a hard surface (e.g. one of those projected keyboards, and some roll-out keyboards) for a decent length of time does give you sore fingertips. Faking a click feeling on a hard surface isn't going to prevent sore fingertips.
The article says "Many human cultures have folk tales of wild, man-like creatures living in the wilderness. Possibly the most famous is the Himalayan Yeti.....etc"
Here's the big news: the most famous is not the Yeti, the most famous is in fact the orangutan, the name of which means "person of the forest". The orangutan has already been discovered and observed by science, and some have even been captured and put in zoos.
I got the 1 hour notice figure from the Australian ABC article which quotes the researchers as saying "Our numerical simulations with a shallow water model show that delta collapse in the lake generates a large tsunami at various locations along the shore, where a wave of 13 metres is observed after only 15 minutes, and at Geneva where a wave of eight metres arrives 70 minutes after the mass movement is initiated".
I allowed 10 minutes for sensors to detect and identify the moving wave and start the alert system, leaving 60 minutes for evacuation.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/10/29/3620543.htm
p.s. I didn't look at the Nature article myself because it's behind a paywall.
It takes 70 minutes for the wave to travel from the collapsing delta to Geneva, so a warning system should be feasible: water level sensors should have provided clear evidence of a wave within 10 minutes, giving the Genevois a clear hour to GTFO.
Coat icon because I'm practising my evacuation plan.
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