Posts by WFW

Eddie Murphy heading for worst movie ever glory

Re: Not the worst.

Clearly you are all wrong. The worst movie? The Trial of Billy Jack. A pretentious and lame sequal to a lame original. A friend of mine told others to go see it because he knew they would never otherwise believe how bad it was.

SUNKEN LINER Titanic iceberg riddle answer FOUND ON MOON

Three months before, maybe

From the article: "[...] the Earth had passed its closest in a very long while to the Sun just the day before."

Not exactly. The Moon's orbit precesses so that its perigee changes constantly. The Earth's orbit around the Sun precesses vastly more slowly, with its perihelion currently always in the first week of January.

On Jan 4th, 1912, these two events coincided to within 5 hours, a full Moon. There would have been much larger than normal spring tides around that date, possibly freeing grounded icebergs as the article stated. But, it's a reach to give this a major place in the circumstances of the Titanic's disaster.

Celebrating the 55th anniversary of the hard disk

305 RAMAC as cargo

It weighed about a ton.

See: http://www.yellow-llama.com/whats-being-loaded-into-this-plane/

I think I found this using stumbleon.

A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe

Tales of Woe

Years ago, we had shiny new ISDN phones. The UPS was even configured to call various sysadmins if the power shutdown.

Except that the ISDN phone system wasn't on the UPS...

How to choose the right screen size

Times two error in resolution?

'The generally accepted figure for human visual acuity is one minute of arc, so we need to calculate the distance at which one pixel is equivalent to that.'

We want the minimum distance to _not_ see pixels, so you want the distance at which one pixel is 1/2 arc-minute (or less).

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner's distopia has if all: computer hacking, a bit of Big Bad government & action. Come to think of it, _The_Shockwave_Rider_ is another nominee.

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

Jupiter, etc.

This occurred to me, too. Surely trying for a gravity assist would make the sail fail, so it must be that the trajectory would be planned to _avoid_ outer planets. Note that this probably means this sail is not good for any target closer than Neptune, or possibly Uranus.

New Reg comments system ready to launch

Wait a minute!

Good one. I actually got about 1/3 through the second page before I remembered the date!

To the Moon - with extreme engineering

Moon images

' It was the Orbiter that took the first "whole earth" picture (not Apollo) and provided the first pictures of the dark side of the Moon.'

Please, ot the "dark" side, the far side. And not the first. That was the Soviet Luna 3 flyby of

October, 1959. See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarussr.html for details.