Posts by Some Beggar

BEST reiterates ‘no solar forcing’ claim

Odd.

It seems odd for a group that (supposedly) wishes to avoid the controversy that is rife in climate science to choose a publishing venue that is almost bound to be controversial. There's nothing wrong with being open access and there's nothing wrong with being a new journal - all journals are new at some point. But a paper that is supposedly a sober review of existing data ought to be able to get published in a more established journal.

("meh" icon because it's the closest to a "confused face" icon)

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

I'm not altogether buying this story ... but assuming that it is basically true ...

All the failures here are with the management.

Even putting aside the fact that the relationship between the firm and the employee seems to have been horribly dysfunctional, outsourcing technical work typically costs well above 20% of US costs. So either he's a demon negotiator or the company were employing somebody at far too high a skill level and salary for what the job actually involved. That's business-threatening incompetence.

The only real failure on the part of the employee is that he appears to have been pissing his own life away on the interweb. He could have outsourced the dull but well-paid work and then spent his office hours doing something interesting and constructive. Or at least built a lego death star.

I still don't quite buy this version of events though. Somebody has sprinkled some apocrypha in there to make it more interesting.

Drop that can of sweet pop and grab a coffee - for your sanity's sake

Re: @some beggar

@omgwftbbqtime

The idea that natural = good and artificial = bad is utterly moronic.

Is that less objectionable?

Re: @some beggar

And sugar has to be processed from sugar cane.

I didn't miss your point. You didn't make a point.

Re: sucralose..

"boffiny" research

Yeah. Damn those scientists and their science. Damn them all to hell!

Re: sucralose..

@John Smith 19

Ummm ... why have you linked to an article about aspartame when I asked for a citation about sucralose?

Re: sucralose..

Citation needed. Google Scholar says a fairly unequivocal "no".

The manufacturers presumably deny this because it is bollocks.

Re: strong unsweetened coffee

Espresso was invented because there were tax benefits for serving coffee to customers who stood up rather than sat down at a table. It tastes crap compared to a decent cup of properly brewed coffee. Anybody who thinks their life is too busy and important to spend five minutes having a real coffee needs to take a good look in the mirror. The fact that an Emperor's New Clothes snobbery has grown around it is mildly amusing.

Re: @Greg J Preece

Yeah, but it is actually healthier to eat something fatty at breakfast, since it 'sets' your body to deal with it throughout the day

Good grief. This is like a Gillian McKeith convention of nutritional nonsense.

Re: Sweet Poison

since it is a plant extract rather than something that is only found in a testube

Favouring plant extracts over synthetic chemicals is an excellent rule of thumb. I mean ... if you ignore opium, hemlock, belladonna, cyanide, ricin ...

Wait ... I don't mean an excellent rule of thumb, do I? I mean a really really terrible rule of thumb.

Re: Sweet Poison

Would that be Janet Starr Hull the self-appointed guru with an internet PhD who charges people a couple of hundred dollars to tell them how much lead they have in their pubic hair?

Yeah. I think I'll be taking her advice on nutrition.

2012 was warmest year ever recorded in USA

Re: Two grains of salt to take with this data

@DougS

Science modifies its models when its predictions don't match measurements. If climate scientists modify their models to match changes in weather patterns - whatever they may be - then they are simply being scientists.

You appear to be unintentionally demonstrating why your use of the label "true believers" is fatuous.

Re: 4 billion years of climate, 100 years of climate data

If you want to make this statement in future (and I don't know why you would ... it is utterly without meaning or worth) then you should at least get your numbers correct. The "climate" in any meaningful sense has only been around for about 600 million years. Hope this helps. xxx

Re: Two grains of salt to take with this data

@James Micallef

You seem to be nominating yourself for a Darwin Award runner-up prize.

Re: Two grains of salt to take with this data

@DougS

So your response to extreme weather "alarmists" is to point out two alarming examples of extreme weather in North America?

How do you extinguish fires? Kerosene?

Re: Uhh...

Texas.

Sir James Dyson slams gov's 'obsession' with Silicon Roundabout

Re: Web fads and video games@Some Beggar

@Ledswinger

See ... now I want a job title with "frippery" in it. Do I have to move to Shoreditch?

You're very probably right. The paper I was looking at doesn't have the breakdown but the total was ~£60 billion and "frippery" can only be a small fraction of that. I made another post somewhere else about the dubious reasons that they were concentrating specifically on Silicon Roundabout and pretty meedja tech.

Re: Actions speak louder than words

The MD at a previous company often came to work on an ancient push-bike. We must have been paying the poor soul in peanuts. I've no idea how he managed to buy that yacht and retire to Cannes.

Re: I say, can we have a daily dyson rant

Blustery Boris is (however astonishingly) one of the government's biggest assets at the moment. Spending a few million to bolster his reputation in London is probably better value for money (from a party political perspective) than spending it on low-profile developments in woolly liberal provincial towns.

And I say that as somebody whose UK workplace is in a science park in a woolly liberal provincial town.

Re: Have any of you actully attempted to use any of Dyson's products?

I have trouble getting under the furniture and into awkward corners with a Landrover.

Re: Web fads and video games

@John Lilburne

What does "socially useful earnings" even mean?

The "Digital, Creative & Information Services" sector generated 4.5% of GVA in 2012 and accounted for 3.7% of employment. That makes it roughly three times larger than the medium/high tech equipment manufacturing sector that Dyson would fall under if he didn't manufacture abroad, and fifteen times larger than the R&D sector that his UK-based business actually falls under. It is also growing considerably faster.

You can scoff at whether the Twitter Angry Birdbook sector provides any real benefit to mankind, but the figures suggest that it is an important part of the UK economy and something that any sensible government ought to be promoting.

Fading self-publicist complains that he isn't getting as much attention as the new kids on the block.

More news at 10.

Opposable thumbs for FISTS, not finesse, say bioboffins

Re: Was it just me or

Try telling that to a dairy farmer after a cow has caught him in the man-udders.

Re: Does any other animal punch?

Quite. But it does make it a bit of a chicken and egg question. At what point did we stop doing the gorilla-style slap and start doing human-style punches? Did we start punching because our hands had become less vulnerable to damage from a knuckle-first impact? Or vice versa? Or - as seems to be more common in evolution magic - was it a gradual feedback loop?

And is it easier to punch a chicken or an egg?

Re: I used to box as a yoof as well as playing both codes of rugby.

Was that instant thumbs down from a Warrington fan by any chance? I didn't know you lot had learned how to internet yet.

I used to box as a yoof as well as playing both codes of rugby.

But I'm pretty sure I'd have come off a very poor second in a fist fight with any of the other great apes who don't carry these supposed fighters' fists. And probably with our cousin Neanderthals as well (or "Warrington Rugby League" as they are currently known).

Incidentally, in stark contrast to your title and subtitle, the article actually says "Manual manipulation is central to human behavior and has clearly played a crucial role in the evolution of the human hand."

I do wish you wouldn't arbitrarily re-interpret people's research like this. It makes you look like the Daily Mail.

What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks

"almost all of them in the banking industry"

Now I don't want to veer into any general derision towards the process and quality control of the financial industry or the competence of engineers who work in backroom banking ... but I think you may have answered your own question here.

I've worked with embedded software in medical devices and network/consumer comms products for *cough* years and with a couple of notable (and horrifying) examples - typically code that was older than methusela and that nobody dared breathe on let alone re-factor - the quality of the code has been pretty good.

Canadian man: I solved WWII WAR HERO pigeon code!

OMG BBQ GSTQ

Boffins spot planet that could support life... just 12 light years away

Wait a second ...

Professor Jones ... mathematical models ... fake ... published data sets ...

IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

Ocean seeding a dead duck as carbon solution

Idea that sounded pretty bonkers turns out to be pretty bonkers.

I hate it when that happens. Which is annoying because that's what happens 95% of the time.

Frack me! UK shale gas bonanza 'bigger than North Sea oil'

Re: Some Beggar Posted Friday 14th December 2012 11:49 GMT

@peter_dtm

read this ...

An unpublished blog by somebody I've never heard of who seems inordinately proud of having an ordinary degree? No thanks. I'm sure it's terribly thrilling but I doubt it has any bearing on anything I've written here or anywhere else.

Re: Get it right next time @ Pete 2

Apple have a patent on Lewis spinning everything into an argument against climate change.

Re: Here's a mad, crazy idea.

It isn't raining and yet there's still water coming out of my tap.

It's almost as if the word "infrastructure" implies something that maintains a supply even when the raw source isn't currently and directly available.

Re: Get it right next time

Long-term benevolent thinking from self-interested and partisan short-term politicians?

What new madness is this?

White Van Man could become a rolling radio relay

Re: Why bother putting the relays on vehicles?

@Ledswinger

Genius. Now all we need to do is re-surface all the roads in Europe with something that reflects low-power gigahertz radio. Herp diddly derp derp.

Re: Why bother putting the relays on vehicles?

5 watts? These things operate at a few tens of milliwatts.

Re: Why bother putting the relays on vehicles?

They're looking at an ad hoc mesh network that passes information related to traffic by making use of the vehicles that form that traffic.

You appear to be looking for a solution to a completely different problem. In fact, I'm not even sure what problem it is that your solution is supposed to be addressing.

Re: Shouldn't this be automatic?

The experiments are looking at the best algorithms to route around the network. Road traffic is not particularly mesh-like - it typically runs in lines rather than being spread randomly in space, and members of the network might physically block other connections - so conventional algorithms for routing are unlikely to be the most efficient.

UK climate expert warns of 3-5 degree warmer world by 2100

Re: complete nonsense

Can't tell if trolling ...

Re: The other elephant...

I think you're being slightly harsh on yourself. It is basically a problem of scale. There's nothing fundamentally complicated about cleaning the gas in smokestacks to get pure-ish CO₂ and then compressing it and doing "something" with it. The same process - and similar processes for other waste gases - is already done. It's a solved problem. But the scale required to make an impression on global power generation is altogether bigger. It's an engineering and financing problem rather than a scientific problem.

The only place you've stumbled is in your guesstimate about the energy cost of doing it. It obviously will increase the cost per unit of energy production. But even the very worst estimates don't get anywhere near a negative output. But then ... nobody has actually attempted this at the scales required so the estimates are just estimates.

First pic of Ashton Kutcher as the great Steve 'jOBS'

Re: Annual remake?

Oh you cynic.

This film will be a revolution. It will be released in iMMersion - the patented novel all-sensory media format whereby iPhotons are propelled at extraordinary velocity until they dramatically collide with a screen coated in purest iSilver resulting in a pan-spectral iPicture that quite literally reflects into your puny mortal eyeballs.

I think it's the one about how they realised that The Social Network made tens of millions of dollars at the box office and was extremely cheap to film and Hey Look! there's another famous nerd let's cash in on that one.

bumfluff

That's a very weak beard. Even in his sallow youth, Jobs had a better beard than that.

I'm sure the acting and directing will be great ... but Beard integrity is very important for a nerd tribute film.

Belgian finds missus was born a MAN after 19 YEARS of marriage

Crass Daily Mail Mode: Engaged.

Boffin claims Bigfoot DNA reveals BESTIAL BONKING

the scientific method demands that disbelief be suspended until peers have reviews and retested

It does? I must have slept through the "suspension of disbelief" lecture. Did it come between the bit about not accepting anything on face value or the bit about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence? Or did you just make it up?

Acid oceans DISSOLVING sea life

Re: The Oceans are not Acid

Whoa there, hoss. Are you suggesting that the titles in an online magazine which is infamous for tongue-in-cheek titles might not be precisely representative of the content of the article or the research to which it refers?

I simply cannot believe this.

Humans becoming steadily STUPIDER, says brainiac boffin

Has he bothered to test this hypothesis?

There are still a reasonable number of hunter-gatherer groups dotted around the world who would not have been subject to this proposed decline. Compare their intellect to that of people in the industrialised world ... there's your proof one way or the other.

Am I missing something?

English Defence League website 'defaced, pwned' by hacktivists

Re: EDL != Far Right

Here's what I wrote:

"One example from nearly a decade ago of a person who was never actually labelled a racist? "

Apologies if you found that sentence too long to read all the way to the end.

Re: EDL != Far Right

"Please see my earlier post about the Guardian columnists"

... who, as I already pointed out, was never labelled a racist.

Re: So what are the lefties among you going to do when the diversity takes over Britain?

"immigrants will be expected to hold a conversation about the weather for ten to fifteen minutes without hesitation or repetition"

I'd vote for this.

Unless it's drizzling. I've just had my hair done. Democracy is very important but I'm not risking a frizzy do for it.