Posts by Mips

Euro space truck prepares for fiery death

Burn baby burn

I always wanted to set Kepler on fire.

DARPA issues call for notions on Starship-for-2111 plan

How about..

I think a PARIS Mark2 would just about suffice.

Living, biological raygun produced in lab

Just wait for the reply...

.. when you get home and say "Ooh I had such a hard day at the office dear my laser is really aching"

Robot air fleet can launch mid-air from cargo plane's ramp

You have to be joking

You know that the "Airheads" will always win out. So there is no chance of the UK buying an economic solution.

Where is my favourite icon when you need it.

Earth receives picture postcard of Milky Way

What happened to..

... my favourite icon?

Aarrgh. I am about to explode and you do not want to see resulting the mess.

Mr Creosote and then some.

Space shuttle Endeavour: 'An incredible ship'

Buutt...

...for most of the 122m miles it was gliding.

Oi! Who nicked my favourite icon?

Much better wireless power transmission possible - boffins

Robert A Heinlein

There is so much more in the Waldo story much orf it achievable or already achieved, why pick on the wacky stuff?

Engineering student cracks major riddle of the universe

Like I said

What is dark matter but the stuff that was too thin to condense out of the proto-universe after the big bang to form stars and dust clouds etc: what we can see.

£1.1bn Royal Navy warship finally armed, sort of

What happened?

MOD That's what. Under their brass hats there are no brains.

Stargazers spot dark energy

Creation Part 2

In the beginning was the Singularity and it knew not time or space nor of what it was made.

And lo the Singularity was touched by the hand of God and as a mighty blow space and time did exist.

The Singularity found that it was no longer in one place but scattered over 100bn light years of space. The Singularity was discomforted by the lack of self comfort and tears condensed from the void forming all that is visible and the stars which spread across the firmament. But part of the Singularity was so thin it kept to itself and hid amongst the brightness of the stars. Because this part eschewed the light it became dim and was transformed dark matter and dark energy.

Heavy coffee drinking wards off deadly cancer in men

"for pity's sake"?

Surely that should be "for pi**ing sake?

Yes, and my coat is the one with "And don't call me Shirley" on the back

Schmidt: Android will bring DEMOCRACY to the WORLD

Democracy?

Yeah. As in everyone knows your passwords.

Bin Laden's porn stash: Too good to be true?

OH you have really let the genie out of the bottle now

"Let's face it, the only way the US administration could have got more column inches out of the outrage was if bin Laden had been caught in bed with a Las Vegas hooker and a bottle of Scotch, toking on a post-coital spliff while reading The Satanic Verses."

You wrote it so it must be true.

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Some people think I'm a freak, but I wouldn't have it any other way.??

So you like people thinking you're a freak?

Glass aeroplanes and iPads on the way, say boffins

Carbon fibre mixed with amorphus metal

Urgh!

Now we have joint problems

We are talking spot welding

Are we not?

Shuttle mission: SPAWNING of the SPACE KRAKEN

You are really not into science fiction are you?

Of course the the octopus escapes and invades the body of first one astronaut, then all astronauts are melded together. Then when Endeavour returns there is only one being on board having common features.

Pure unadulterated Quatermass.

MIRACULOUS new AIRSHIP set to fly by 2013

Zeplin with a Z please

None of your lower case names here please.

COSH, Diesel and gas turbine power, exhaust condensate recovery! Oh the complexity. Oh the weight. Will it ever fly? May I have another 5000m3 of helium please.

Obama gets personal V-22 Osprey tiltrotor

Don't bother cutting the grass...

.. we will just burn it of or blow it away.

German prangs dad's £275k supercar

That's what you call..

.. a Clarkson moment

DARPA aims to make renewable power practical at last

H2 Ha! Ha! Ha!

Cylinders are not the issue. Tis hydrogen that is the trouble sir. It is very easy to ignite and if there is a leak there is likely to be an explosion. We go to great lengths in designing battery charging facilities to ensure hydrogen can get out of a building and not accumulate under the roof.

Basically if you have a 100ton H2 storage that is the same as a 200ton bomb. Do you really want that in your FOB compound?

Geostationary generating satellites

This is old hat but maybe DARPA can get it off the ground. They would be steerable to target the FOB energy collection area. If no operations are current then they could be put to civilian use (fat chance of that).

Of course DARPA black hats could propose they be weaponised to defend the FOB, might even be better than Reaper .

Flywheels a no no: I don't know about that...

...some years ago composite flywheels were proposed with TJ capacity. Big truck. Yes, maybe several. But it was supposed to be doable. Thing is I never heard of them since.

Paramount to recount The Martian Chronicles

When did common sense have anything to do with Hollwood?

Never let the screeplay get in the way of a good visual effect.

Now if you want really BORING...

..just try reading "Report on Planet Three and other Speculations" Arthur C Clarke. Even I who will read every word skipped bits, but I did persist to the end where there is, how can I put it, a joke.

Deep-space travel bad for astronauts' tickers, say boffins

Oh! What a surprise!

Lying around in zero gravity with no work to do. Of course you get a dick ticker.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

Oh! What a surprise!

The truth is out at last.

The one thing you can rely upon is "Wind can give you a pain in the belly"

South West Trains puts squeeze on commuters

MWM?

Much more fun to be WMW.

Or maybe?

We are all getting too fat.

You see, it is not just the elbows.

The problem really is the shoulders.

You start to develop the "Pompy slump". If you are in the middle your shoulders come forwards, and your arms, your hands go on the knees (your own knees, oh do keep up).

If you are on the corridor side, you lean into the corridor space, putting you directly in line to be whacked on the head and other parts of your body by the continuous line of corridor travellers with bags and briefcases, rucksacks, suitcases, brollys, the odd AK47 etc. You can get a really good workout shuffling about in your seat to avoid these.

What's not to like!

Vince Cable to cut training and flexible work rules

Fiddling whilst Rome burns.

Never getting to the core of the problem the Department for Industry has failed to recognise the role Government has in setting the tone of purchasing departments.

For example in financial limits:

Here is the scenario. EU regulation requires that annual turnover should be balanced against the size of order a firm can be given. Fair enough. Then Vince Cable's Department converts this to a recommendation that turnover should be four times the order value. Again maybe fair enough. but wait to see what happens next.

Purchasing organisations: Local Authorities, Government departments and Universities etc produce a marking scheme that says if four times turnover is OK then 10 times is better and 20 times is better than that to get the top marking you have to have 100 turnover.

Then we have framework contract where large numbers of small orders are put together in a framework agreement generally lasting for 4 years. These might typically contain orders between £2000 to £20,000 with a total value over 4 years of £1m. This is small business country. But in comes the marking scheme and the top marking goes to a firm with over £100m turnover. What chance do small firms have?

The final stoke is that four firms are appointed to the contract.

The problem is the apparatchiks who blindly operate these systems need more direction to give small firms a chance. Is this going to happen. Well, I can still hear fiddling; smell the smoke, Rome is burning.

Hadron Collider 'could act as telephone for talking to the past'

The face of God?

It is a funny title but I will get that that in a minute.

We have recently observed the most distant visible object. It is a galaxy approximately 13.5bn light years distant. The age of our galaxy is 13.5bn years and the Big Bang was only a few million years earlier. We are moving now but only a very small fraction of the speed of light.

There is an apparent paradox. How can our galaxy travel 13.5bn light years in just over 13.5bn years and not get up to light speed?

The penny finally dropped. Before the Big Bang there was a singularity: everything was in one place so space and time had no meaning and velocity could not exist. It does not mean it was physically small, but then it was impossible to measure. At the Big Bang things changed: there was expansion. Well it is described as expansion but that is misleading as it implies movement, I prefer to think that suddenly time and space exists and that bits of the singularity were now in different places. Travel faster than light cannot exist when velocity cannot exist.

Consequences:

Researchers are trying to find lots of mass missing from the universe: "dark matter" etc. However no one appears to consider that it cannot be seen because it is too far away. Who is to say that the "expansion" of the singularity was small, we can see only out to 13.5bn light years, maybe the rest is further away.

Whilst we can surmise the nature of the dimensions of the multi-dimensional universe and we might manage to perfect a model. It would appear that the M-brane dimension set is responsible for the nature of our universe but we will never be able to say why it is like that. So is the M-brane dimension set the face of God? This god is cold, dispassionate and not the slightest bit human, not the sort you would be comfortable with.

Bloke with hammer fixes London's Olympic clock

Press the Reset!

Plenty of opportunity to comment here:

"next year's celebration of performance-enhancing drugs sporting excellence." Yeh. That's what the clock needs: enhanced performance. Hur. Hur.

"developed by our experts and fully tested", as a Swatch spokesman put it. But will you ever get it on your wrist?

Sexy eco-bulb wins Design of the Year

Form over function

If that is good design I would not let the judges loose anywhere near me. They might suffer brain damage.

And then. The design is so bad that only a few will be sold. So, if you would happen to pick up a few when the price fall through the floor, in another 50 years they may be worth quite a bit. So do you buy them or not? ..... Nah.

Just because something is possible does not mean you should do it.

New 'supercritical' generators to boost nuclear output by 50%

20mW in the back of a transit van?

For Gods sake don't tell Jeremy Clarkson

Headlines: "Transit van out drags Ferrari"

There you go, we were right

Carbon dioxide cooled reactors, now where have I heard of this before.

Oh I know AGR.

Street View Terminator warps into Dublin

Alternative solution

That is actually the Black Opal's driver nipping out for a pee.

Of course, he has to time warp back so his employers do not notice. You pee on your own time at Google.

Solution found for climate change: Nuclear war

Dr Strangelove

"Stop worrying and learn to love the bomb."

That's all folks

Eurofighter Typhoon: It's EVEN WORSE than we thought

The RAF...

... is still pissed off from loosing the nuclear deterrent. So it's Spend! Spend! Spend! all the way.

Blighty's expensive Watchkeeper spy-drone in further delays

Maimed

So no weapons capability because of the fear of turf grab by the RAF.

Whoa! This is not the first time: the army need Blackhawk but it is "too big" for army flyers. The RAF has to fly it: RAF turf grab. So the army goes for something it can fly: Lynx Wildcat, a super compromise which cost £1.2bn and does not do the job. Been there. Got the T shirt. Got the overspend.

What is wrong with the services. "Service " is the wrong word, "bragging rights" is the correct phrase. They are completely mad, certifiable, woof woof barking. They are so full of self interest they do not give a sh*t about effective management or use of resources and they complain when programmes are cut. It is time for a single Ministry of Defence with an integrated strategy.

By the way is anyone interested in supplying mini copters? You to can have a go at another big undoable MOD purchase at http://www.publictenders.net/tender/95176.

Official: Booze prevents senile dementia

German habits

"only a handful of the German wrinklies "fulfilled the criteria of harmful drinking"."

Have you ever lived in Germany? Well the reason there are few wrinkly drinkers is the rest are already dead.

Portsmouth redefines the Olympic-sized swimming pool

Olympic storm in a teacup

As of 17:00hrs on 1 March it was declared that the pool is the correct size with the time boards inserted.

The another thing is, was it wise to use a variable quantity like this for a universal measurement? With time boards, without time boards. What if the time boards are not 50mm thick? Did you allow when referencing volume that the pool has 10 lanes but only 8 are used in competition? Bad decision.

On the other hand I am still pushing for the unit of "house per day" as used by the tabloid press in "wind turbine produces enough electricity to supply 1000 houses per day" to be named the Godzilla. This is based on the fact that Godzilla can consume one house per day or five cars or 20 people.

Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

Xenophobia?

That was not xenophobia but stereotyping. That is probably worse.

'You don't even know what change management is'

Pretty picture

Were you were trying to make a point about this? Well you failed. So much for management. Says a whole lot about journalism though.

Assange traveled in drag to evade gov spooks

He is only telling us..

..what we knew anyway. He dresses in women's clothing

LCD pushbutton sunglasses issued to US Navy SEALs

When you are the president of the galaxy...

...it is imperative to look cool all the time. So what's your excuse for wearing them?

Hubble squints at most distant galaxy

Mathematics

Now here is an interesting thing.

No one seems to notice that when we look at distant objects we are looking back into history. If this galaxy when seen is 450m years old then one would assume it is close to the big bang centre, certainly closer than 450m light years. If it is 13.2bn light years from us that would mean we must be between 12.75bn and 13.65bn light years distance from the big bang. I read that the estimated age of the universe is13.75b years. The question is how did our galaxy manage to travel that distance in that time without getting close to light speed?

I think there is something suspicious about these numbers.

Antique Nimrod subhunters scrapped – THANK GOODNESS!

Sopwith Camel

No. Just whittled out of wood. I believe we are still good at that technology.

What is surprising..

.. is the speed with which the break up is happening. The usual RAF ploy is to roll old aircraft into the corner of the airfield and let them moulder. Is the MOD telling us there is NO way these are comming back?

Beeb say sorry for Stephen Fry A-bomb quip

I used to think he was claver

And now I can see he is just a prat, especially with his description of how GPS works. First class idiot, if you do not know, don't tell everyone about it.