Posts by Carl Zetie

Is the world ready for a Raspberry Pi-powered Lego Babbage Engine?

Re: Adder

Sadly, you're right. My first reaction to the headline was to assume it would be a working model... and then I thought about it more carefully / drank more coffee and realized that I wasn't thinking very clearly.

Jupiter Ascending – a literally laughable train wreck of a film

Channing who?

From the trailers, I thought this was a Sean Bean movie. I didn't even realize Channing Tatum was in it.

Chipotle insider trading: Disproving the efficient markets hypothesis

The paradox of Strong EMH

There's another problem with the Strong version of EMH: anybody who sincerely believes in it would never buy shares, since there's no profit to be made if the price is completely efficient. Rationally, they should invest their money in a market that is not perfectly efficient and that provides an opportunity for excess profit (or "rent").

You're inventing the wrong sort of tech for bad people who want to buy it. Stop it at once

Re: Human nature doesn't change

Roger Bacon was a Franciscan, so what does that make Francis Bacon?

(It helps if you read that in Dennis Miller's voice).

How to catch a fraudster – using 'top cop' Benford and the power of maths

Yes please Re: More!

When I was taught statistics it was from the dull and dry perspective of "work out how likely something is to happen". It turns out that in real life, a much more interesting question is "here's what actually happened, work out how likely it is that it was random". Not only is that great for detecting fraud, it's also a basic tool of science; for example the discovery of the Higgs Boson basically boils down to "here's the decay events we recorded, how likely is it that we'd see that distribution of events without a Higgs Boson in the mix? Vanishingly small? OK, that's the discovery."

More of the same, please.

Exposed: bizarre quantum sibling love triangle

No, this doesn't undermine Einstein

No, there is not "information transfer" faster than the speed of light. The effect here seems to be non-local, but we've known for a long time that QM is almost certainly non-local*.

In order to transfer information you first have to entangle the particles, then separate them (slower than light), then do your experiment, then bring the results back together to compare them (slower than light).

The subtlety that many people miss, including the Uni of Waterloo's PR department, is that the entanglement results appear completely random when considered separately, and there is no information /until you bring both sets of results together/ and measure the correlation between them. This last step is still slower than the speed of light.

So no, this doesn't undermine Einstein. If anything, it underlines how brilliant he was to deduce such a basic principle of the universe even before QM was understood as it is today.

*There's still a slim hope that locality can be rescued -- even Bell's Theorem doesn't completely rule it out -- but it does require other sacrifices in our understanding of reality that are probably even worse.

BuzzGasm: 9 Incredible Things You Never Knew About PLIERS!

Needle nose pliers

Needle nose pliers should not be used to remove nose hair. It's a complete misnomer.

Black hole boffins close in on gravity waves

Gravitational waves, not gravity waves

Pedant point: correct in the article, incorrect in the headline, it should say "gravitational waves". Gravity waves are something else entirely, i.e. a meteorological phenomenon that produces seriously cool cloud formations (worth checking out on Google Images).

Having said that, the term "gravity waves" is used loosely all too often so El Reg is far from alone.

US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'

The clue is in the name

Like most American lobbying groups, you have to assume that they are the opposite of what the name implies. There aren't a million of them, and they mostly aren't "moms".

As for their affiliated organization, the American Family Organization is in favor of families... so long as they comprise a churchgoing working father, an obedient stay-at-home mother, and a gaggle of well-scrubbed kids that were conceived by pleasure-free sex within marriage. Anything else is not a "real" family.

MEGAGRAPH: 1983's UK home computer chart toppers

Two things make me feel old

One, remembering most of those machines and two, not being able to tell the colours apart.

Musos blast US copyright bods: 'ARTISTS MAKE LOUSY SLAVES!'

Angered down in Anchorage

Is it just me or do most Web 2.0 businesses rely on somebody else not getting paid for providing content?

Jubcropgate: El Reg in snake-fondling nude nipslip outrage

Finally some nipples!

Thank goodness. I thought we never going to see any naked breasts on the internet.

The cooler side of the Big Bang

Entropy and gravity Re: Cosmic strings

One of the (many) confusing things about entropy is that opposite things happen with and without gravity.

As you correctly note, in the presence of gravity, matter clumps and entropy increases. A black hole represents the maximal entropy that a region of spacetime can contain. (It's best if you read that in Stephen Hawking's voice).

But in the absence of gravity, the highest entropy state is one where all the stuff is homogeneously spread out -- much the way entropy is taught in 101 science classes. And what these guys appear to be arguing is that in the very early universe there are no spacetime dimensions, hence no gravity.

HP to spin off webOS division as Gram stealth subsidiary

No, it's American

In American, it's OK to verb any noun.

Neutrinos still FASTER THAN LIGHT in second test

Eventually...

In case anybody is wondering, when Jacques Martino said "eventual systematic errors" he meant "possible systematic errors". It's a very common mistake when native French speakers speak English as a second language because the French word is "éventuel" (the French call words like that "faux amis" -- false friends).

LaCie LaPlug

Wrong name

Surely it should be LePlug? Plugs are male.

Seven Dwarfs password gag declared Fringe's best

Eating for two?

When my wife was pregnant she gave up caffeine and alcohol, so I had to drink for two. Honestly, there were some nights I wasn't sure I could finish the whole bottle. And was she grateful?