Posts by Swiss Anton 329 posts • joined 16 Feb 2009
Belgium has a stable electrical supply, hence the backup generators will usually only be fired up for a few hours every year for testing, so the CO2 implications are negligible. Batteries would be more useful elsewhere, for instance in storing excess renewable power for use on the national grid.
Courtesy of an inspirational teacher at my very bog standard comprehensive school I had already learnt how to program by the time I got my ZX81, but that computer gave me the space to try things out, and 40+ years later, I'm still hacking away with the kids writing stuff that is a million miles away from that start. Without doubt Clive Sinclair (and his team) gave me a massive boost towards what ended up being my career. RIP Sir Clive.
As demand for fossil fuels falls the governemt will need to replace the tax income from old tech cars with a new tax on electric vehicles. I'm thinking that it will be some software that reports your daily milage back to a central computer, and which then taxes you for each mile that you drive. Obviously it will charge more for driving into cities.
If they can fix Hubble's optics, then I can't see any reason whty they can't attach a small rocket motor to force it's re-entry. It would be easy enough to ensure that it then comes down over an ocean. As to creating more space junk - satellites have been known to collide, so I would suggest getting it out of orbit when it's of no furthure use should be a priority.
Hubble has far exceeded it original design remit. It has provided so much data that they will still be analysing it long after it stops working. My only hope is that when the end is really nigh, they point it back home, and let it burn up in the atmosphere so that it doesn't add to the ever growing "pile" of space junk
I suspect that it probably uses some solid state accellerometers and rate gyroscopes, much like the ones in my mobile phone. Its a simple enough job to integrate their outputs to get a measure of distance travelled in the X,Y & Z directions. Since the flights are so short, the cumaliative measurement errors will be tiny.
An "expert" on the radio (*) reckons we need to build 1 nuclear power plant, or a 2500 turbine wind farm, every day for the next 30 years to replace all of the fossil fuelled power stations in the world by 2050. He didn't say what the generating capacity of these units was, so I decided to do my own estimate based on a 800MW nuclear plant (like Hinckely Point B), or a 80x10MW turbines wind farm, and I came up with a more optimistic estimate of one of these every 4 days. My estimate based on current electricity demands and does not take into account the increased demand of electric cars and of replacing gas central heating systems.
So in short, I agree, we're fucked.
(* The radio show is a BBC world service programme How soon can we go carbon zero? )
We had a relatively near miss at the start of June this year from asteroid 2020 LD. A mere 100-150m in diameter, and it came within 200,000 miles of the earth (that's closer than the moon). It was only big enough to wipe out a medium sized town, say something like Bath, but if we saw it coming, then we could at least evacuate those in the danger area. As it happens it wasn't spotted until two days after its closest approach, and that was nothing to do with Musk's satellites, but down to it making a sneaky attack from the direction of the sun, but the point is, there are things that we can do, if the asteroid isn't too big.
In a recent murder case in Wales, the evidence against the accused was largely based on data sent from their Land Rover Discovery to LR's HQ. The car itself was burnt out after the murder. The data included the expected stuff such as speed and location, and also that the rear tailgate had been opened for a few seconds before the murder. The prosecution inferred that that was when they took the murder weapon out of the car. I call that mission creep, but since the accused were found guilty, then I guess that's all for the good.
Better still don't connect it to the internet, though there are some advantage to that.
When I first read this story, I dug out my old (15+ years) Garmin Etrex GPS to see if it still worked. Amazingly it does, and it is at least 30m accurate; however there is a slight problem. Whilst I still have a cable to connect it to my computer, it needs to plug into an RS232 interface. My computer doesn't have one of these, but I'm sure I can get a RS323 USB adapter (the irony). If not, then there is always my Raspberry Pi - now there's an interesting project for the weekend.
Not so long ago I got an e-mail (apparently from my company's training department) informing me that I needed to take a mandatory online course on computer security. The email even had a link, please click here to start your training session. Of course I deleted it. Some weeks later my boss moaned at me because I hadn't taken the mandatory training. The irony.
I use Nodepad++ a lot, but sometimes its text colour coding* is down right annoying, Sometimes a simple monochrome view is what I want, and MS Notepad does that. (*Yes I'm sure there is probably a config setting in Notepad++ to change this, but life's too short to find out how).
"...just try getting a mortgage if you don't own a printer."
Its kind of quaint to find that someone will except anything that you have printed as some sort of proof of income. All it proves is that you can use a word processor and a printer.
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