Posts by LesC

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Re: chlorine trifluoride

Excellent, sir indeed the large drum of the stuff that split in the 1950's must have been quite a sight.... Clark's excellent 'Ignition' is of course the source :)

John Conway must get an honourable mention: Life and the concept of the (spreadsheet) cell: you can still get a hold of Life today in these days of AI and Kuberdocker :/ Unfortunately Conway is still alive but us pre AgileCloudAmazon old schoolers will have run Life amongst our S-50, OSWRCH and Data General Nova code (Wild Hare) :)

(Edit) Baird's ideas are still with us with slow scan mechanical TV was never going to work but the electronic equivalent works just fine with the amateurs.

Brit Boffins

What about Bernard Lovell (Jodrell Bank) and perhaps, more importantly, El Reg's very own Lester Haines (PARIS, LOHAN, spam wusubi, etc, etc)

Mines is the one with the chlorine trifluoride in the pocket :)

Bombing raids during WWII sent out shockwaves powerful enough to alter the Earth's ionosphere

Re: Duke Nukem

El Reg has touched upon this before too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/18/atmospheric_nuclear_weapons_tests_caused_space_weather/

A nuke detonation is at the atomic level (it's a geometric space time device with the elements fissioning, fusing or both to create mindboggling amounts of energy) whilst TNT, Torpex, C4, ANFO, what have you just creates huge amounts of gas very quickly in its bang.

In an old Top Gear (?) Richard Hammond fried a VW Golf's electronics under that old lightning generator that the CEGB used to run.

The name of the Van Allen exoatmospheric nuke test was Starfish Prime fortunately all the equipment at the time was still mostly valve (vacuum tube) else Hawaii would have had all of its electronics fried if Uncle Sam tried a stunt like that today. An airburst high over the North Sea would hose electronics in the UK and a big chunk of Europe.

High energy physics is a fascinating subject especially the effort in getting more bang for your pound.... the Tsar Bomba had more explosive power than all the high explosive used in WW2.

Damnation Alley is also available on the grumpy cat channel. Complete with gigantic scorps.

Re: Duke Nukem

EMP, ionospheric disruption, fallout, comms disruption, Van Allen detonated a nuke in what was the soon to be discovered Van Allen Belt and disrupted HF comms in the Pacific for days. Get a copy of "Nukes In Space: The Rainbow Bombs Movie" (edit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ2B8vrqdFw on Youcat. The special effects in Damnation Alley were remarkably close istr - not the giant scorpions but the atmospheric ones!

Event warning... Serverless Computing London early bird offer about to expire

Where's ¡Bong! when you need him? Still it has 'unlimited refuelling', avocado toast by the container load?

https://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/

Creased Lightning: Profits wobble at Virgin Media while fibre project stays sluggish

They're going to wobble even more now that they've ditched UKTV in favour of Horsey TV, Paramount HD, Vice(!) and Nascar, fortunately their broadband is good enough for UKTV Online and <cough> Kodi <cough>

Kubernetes and Containers? We’ve got 3 ways to take you deep

Very Possibly a better container stack....

http://www.cargolaw.com/2004nightmare_unstacked.html

http://www.cargolaw.com/2000nightmare_singleonly10.html

The Best Laid Plans of Devs:

http://www.cargolaw.com/2006nightmare_vine.ripened.html

:)

Which distant Mars-alikes could we live on? Ask these Red Planet data-sifters

Mars-alikes

Wouldn't starting with the Moon or Mars 1.0 be a good idea before considering Mars-alikes using (none existent) interstellar travel or am I missing something here. And what happens if life is found....

Then there's terraforming and kickstarting the magnetosphere. The Moon is terraformable (just) and Mars should be a walk in the park after that by that time FTL travel by hyperspace / warp drive should be possible...

It was forecasted we would have moon / Mars bases by now. Along with Jetsons style flying cars and Fireball XL5 to LEO.

Mines is the one with the Integrated Space Plan in the pocket.

Container ship loading plans are 'easily hackable'

Re: Overload

Brit insurance outfit the P&I Club have a few videos of managing containers (TEU not Kuberdocker) up on Youpewdepie the one linked has a rather entertaining start at what suspiciously looks like Alton Towers from a while back. There are the full length versions out there too. The title name's not that bad either - or the rollercoaster scenes - container devs please note ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6zUT55bnJ8&t=293s

Hotter than the Sun: JET – Earth’s biggest fusion reactor, in Culham

Re: Coal ash has another problem

Has anybody sat with a geiger counter downstream of Drax?

Didn't coal ash or flue gas contain usable amounts of germanium I've got an old 60's science book somewhere that says so,,,, all these legacy power stations must have kept Mullard, NKT, GEC, Ferranti etc wallowing in germanium ..

Mines is the one with the OC44/2N1302/AC127/AC128's in the pocket... incidentally the germanium NPN 2N1302 work well in {google it} Joule Thief due to the low VCEsat as well as computers :)

Police camera inaction? Civil liberties group questions forces' £23m body-cam spend

UK based Azure Cloud?

Is there such a thing as a truly UK cloud - being M$ won't this fall under the Patriot Act and $TLA up to Trump will get to see it first?

Russia launches non-terrifying satellite that focuses Sun's solar rays onto Earth

>>Just be thankful that they didn't name it "Goldeneye"

Or Grazer One :)

Boffins name 12 new types of cloud in first Cloud Atlas since 1986

Re: BTFH?

There's an article by M.A. Michaelis (Practical Electronics) from the late 1960's which seems to get it very right - he touched upon sprites / blue jets, etc then postulating upon high energy thunderstorms being driven by the ionosphere - it seems to be largely correct... my field mill experiments from this time seem to bear this out. At this time upward lightning 'flachenblitz' was largely discredited.

$deity make yourself a field mill or coke bottle magnetometer or the two plate charge meter around a CA3130 or mosfet / valve voltmeter atmospheric physics is amazing! Thundery conditions produce extreme voltage gradients.

This is Lester Haines - type science and not Devops. You can make a field mill or a positive lightning detector easily. The only clouds are cumulonimbus.

LC

Re: BTFH?

Erm, minute. 60 a second would be one hell of a TS :-(

Sorry.

My bad :/

Cloud Study from 1963 had some of these types istr pyrocumulus and fallstreaks / fallout. Complete with photos from above power stations and forest fires.

The first and only true cloud there ain't going to be any dockergenitus or azurestratus fractus (= shredded!) or stratocumulus stratiformis undulatus hainesii :-( anytime soon.

BTFH?

The "big bastard black one" spewing out lightning at 60 a second and thrrowing out grapefruit sized hail, torrential rain, tornadoes and such like is guaranteed to put an end to your barbeque /house /road /day with a tornado sending your bacon, prawns, sossiges barbeque, house, car and such like into the next country and is certain to spoil your day. And get a flurry of vids on Younyancat.

Like the one we got at 55N a few years back....

There's a nice positive lightning bolt on the clouds website. Can come from 20 miles away. One of these babies anywhere near you will spoil your day for sure :( You wouldn't want to be over a blue jet, sprite, elve, upward or whatever other ionospheric lightning bolt either. Dunno if the U2 or SR71 or leo spacecraft have ever been clobbered by one of these babies.

High energy physics $deity style.

Nuke as a supercell has the power of lots of 'em.

LC

Did you know? Today is International Asteroid Day! Wouldn't it be amazing if one were to...

Re: Meteor

.... or a bolide / fireball?

Wouldn't Interstellar or Interplanetry Asteroid Day have been a better title???

Also wouldn't evolution have taken a completely different route as the dinosaurs could have achieved intelligence (fire, wheel, what have you) after all you could achieve interplanetry space travel with dinosaurs in Simearth.

Nuke as one of these large lumps of rock has the power of lots of them.

How to avoid getting hoodwinked by a DevOps hustler

Re: DevOps!=Bullshit (at least some of the time)

Is that the team in the office where the walls are different colours, the floor is made of fifty shades of carpet and the ceiling is going to collapse under the weight of all the containers on top of it?

Hares are agile. Look what happened to them.

Mines is the one with Aesop's Fables in the pocket.

Blighty's first aircraft carrier in six years is set to take to the seas

Re: Well, its good to see the QE going out to sea.

Upvoted for the use of the word "carrier" as there are no "aircraft" maybe the UK will get their first carrier borne aircraft in the next six years????

Meanwhile this is just one big target and #1 on the list of any full of C4 boat borne insurgent wanting his appointment with their 100 virgins...

Horse named 'Cloud Computing' finds burst of speed to beat 'Classic Empire' in actual race

Re: galloping pet food

The Torygraph's cartoonist Matt came out with this at around the time of the horsemeat scandal, it just about took out Findus in the process. A lot of inexpensive (= $supermarket Value, SmartPrice, etc) meals were found to contain horse as well as percieved more upmarket Ikea meatballs istr.

Horse is eaten in most of Europe it's the horsey types over here that don't allow it. A quick visit to the chocolate factory's search site will soon find you some prime ex-pony steaks along with diced llama, moose and squirrel, probably tastes like chicken, delicious :]

Matt: http://www.slow-life.co.uk/one-rule-for-them/

Mines is the one with the Horsey Crispy Pancakes in the pocket.

DevOps and containers heavyweights' London meetup: Under 3 weeks to go

More containers!

Wouldn't Tilbury be a better location??? Or Felixstowe perhaps.

http://www.londoncontainerterminal.com/

https://www.portoffelixstowe.co.uk/

Plenty of heavyweight containers there ):

Too much Devops / containers / cloud / AWS / Azure on here.

/<rant>

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

Re: Should Have Gone to Specsavers

Yup and they"ve got spikes which don"t have rounded corners. Beer as no tequila icon, also made from cacti :-)

Baird is the word: Netflix's grandaddy gets bronze London landmark

Re: His mechanical system, even enhanced, couldn't compete

Baird did guano and marmalade too... today's amateur SSTV could be seen as a direct descendant of Baird's original mechanical TV system.

Pipe, well it's boffinry!

OVH decides to Fauquier the cloud in America

Being a Hubic subscriber hopefully this is for the USA an only and nothing from France is going to be held there????

Former Army Base specialising in eavesdropping. So the ilink to Maryland is already there.

Asian hornets are HERE... those honey bee murdering BASTARDS

Re: Killing bees at the rate of 40 per minute?

Indeed per hornet. European honeybees attack one at a time and are swiftly despached. Asian honeybees surround them and cook them with their body heat as Asian honeybees can survive at higher temperatures than the hornets can.

A Euro-Asian honeybee hybrid needed here???

Revolutionary Brit-made SABRE hybrid rocket engine to burn in 2020

Looks like it's going to go like a scalded LAPCAT - Reaction Engines should call their first iteration of SABRE 'Fireflash' ok it doesn't have Anderson's preoccupation with wheels and wings everywhere but this baby could revolutionise LEO / terrestrial flight. And give Beardy / Musk a run for his money.

Hopefully their next project is a recombination / Bussard ramjet or a scramjet along the lines of that Orbiter Delta Glider IV effort that I flew from London to New York in 35 minutes at around FL500 with the scramjets on at full blast (doing around Mach 8 at g/l the ground / rear view was somewhat fiery) although some dev could replicate the physics of SABRE on this beastie and it would still move along plenty quick :)

LC

Lester Haines: RIP

A Sad Loss

Here's a chlorine trifluoride to you, Lester, for bringing SPB / BACON / PARIS / LOHAN / rocketry to us commentards.

Will be sadly missed.

RIP

:(

Brits seek rousing name for polar research vessel

Re: OK, I probably have diferent ideas of Arctic state of the art

Now that is an Arktika-class nuclear beast but you need a lot of laser power to defeat the specific heat of ice / water at 4200j/k/degs C. Greenland laser packing sharks are pretty scarce...

The brute force method is better there's a video out on Younyancat blowing diesels off the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVtDX46cTJQ this is before Murmansk Shipping CO Atomic became Rosatom.

Vessel does her bit for climate science too a shufty at sailwx will find where she is...

I proposed Sir Edmund Hillary but Ranulph Fiennes must be a close second.

LC

Hi-def ExoMars launch vid lacks volcanic lair vibe

That's a nice transparent blue flame with mach diamonds looks like the rocket's burning n2o2 or acid & MMH / UDMH / hydrazine / Aerozine 50 or similar hydrazoid propellant. Hypergolics in a first stage now that's not seen every day.Typical Russian space truck these Proton rockets must be the Lada Nivas of the space industry - solid, chunky, clunky and they do exactly what's said on the tin.. Wonder if they still use hi-tensile bolts meant for steam locomotives?

Boffins: Comet Lovejoy is a cosmic booze cruise spewing alcohol across the Solar System

Propoosing to the Reg Weights & Measures Soviet: if one CAMRA equals the amount of alcohol requiring the required sliding under the table effect (say 4 pints of 7.2% Coastal Erosion Dark) then this is around 276 CAMRAs.

Beer Icon.... it's beer!

LC

BOFH: This laptop has ceased to be. And it's pub o'clock soon

Laptop solution is about 2'09 in but the rest is very funny. Still.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE94BJg3U1Q

Celebrities fronting startups again? Now we're interested!

¡Bong!'s Way????

Mines is the map to Shoreditch in the pocket.

That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done

Re: British efforts

Project Zeta from (get the date, commentards) 1958???? just about old enough to remember the unlimited energy this device was promising... believe this was the granddaddy of the tokomak type design and was a false dawn at the time as the device was releasing neutrons :(

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7190813.stm

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Re: Looks as though it requires a high-wing aircraft configuration.

Antonov 225? That managed to lug the Shuttleski about and now carries hundreds of tons of cargo in one go. Ukranian too but a 747 can't land on landing strips or gravel runways.. Some footage on Younyancat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYF6fYteIq8

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Re: Aeroflot Flight 593

A few years ago when doing some server work for Canuck outfit IT Telecom out of Halifax. I'd upgraded my Zoom Air flight GLA --> YHZ from cattle class to premium cattle class and ended up right by the cockpit - there were a few pilots from TACA and Buffalo jumpseating up the front, once we were out over the Atlantic the pilot stuck his head out of the cockpit door and invited them in - this was a 757 but it still goes on post 11/9. Im no aeroplane nerd but got a very good look in it's like the Enterprise in there -

On our 5th anniversary in 1997 we got into the cockpit of some United Embraer from LAX to San Diego as the pilots heard our accents and invited us in. Once SWMBO had finished the lecture trail we ended up in Minneapolis and after a crapload of voluntary work in flood defence we eventually wound up at Brize Norton having bummed a ride on a US National Guard Herc. Made CBS too as we'd both collected suntans in California and we were sandbagging in St. Paul Minneapolis :)

Changed days now :(

LC

Re: So long old friend

The very same Kalitta legacy B747 fleet do a good job of blowing stuff away- taxis, light aircraft, school buses, personal tornado shelters..... they've cropped up on Mythbusters.

There's one does DHL that goes from Liege to Cincinatti most nights that goes over me here in NE England. BTW any pilots in here can apply to jumpseat travel on these old birds.

Helicopter as there's no 747 icon.

T'was the night before Christmas, and an industrial control system needed an upgrade

Was working in Northern Ireland on point of sale stuff for a well known agency a few years ago on Christmas Eve after finally winding up at 6pm installing some point of sale system in Belfast headed off home to NE England in worsening weather. At Belfast Ferry Terminal the RUC took exception to my green Skoda Octavia estate full of boxes of decrepit IT which I intended to drop off in Watford on the 27th. Went something like this.

"Random Search, sonny"

"Why"

"Terrorism Act do you have any ID"

Experience meant I carried my passport in NI as my driving licence at that time was the old green paper one - one with a couple of speeding tickets - "why the passport, son?"

"It has a photo in it"

"You have an Irish name" - and a bright green car which would be ignored in the uk "empty your car out NOW. Do it now. You have no rights" said RUC officer with an increasingly itchy trigger finger over his holster.

Emptied car of old Cisco hubs, 486 Compaq Presarios, isdn bridges and HP4 laserjets in the car park.

"Nothing here son. Move along"

I caught the ferry with 5 minutes to spare it turned out it was the last one as the wind went to Force 9. I never went back in the New Year and haven't been there since.

Got home at 2355 to one very agitated wife and sleepless daughter #1.

:( .

LC

So. Farewell then Betamax. We always liked you better than VHS anyway

Re: V2000 Philips

I had a V2000 system from years back that used to pick up stray VHF RF from the Newcastle Metro CCTV at South Gosforth - far more entertaining than Knight Rider 2000 which was the only tape I had. The electronics in this beast were fiendishly complex.

Betamax = Umatic this is probably why it's lived so long.

LC

Deutsche Bank's creaking IT systems nervously eyeing bins

Moving all of Deutsche Bank's data to the HP cloud, which, of course, is a US company with servers that may or may not be on US soil (does it matter - US company = accountable to the NSA) ???

With Merkel already having been PRISM'D, is this really wise, after all what could possibly go wrong...

Ten years on: Ronnie Barker, Pismonouncers Unanimous founder, remembered

Re: Let me be the first to say...

The Worm that Turned this would never get past the BBC PC Soviet now... But still very funny.

UK.gov unleashes 3D virtual world to train GCHQ's kiddie division

Why does this remind me of the Dr. Who "School Reunion" featuring Sarah Jane Smith with the Krillitanes wanting world domination????

China launches 'pollution-free' rocket

Clark's excellent "Ignition" goes into all this in detail, a quick google will get you a PDF. A must read, a basic grasp of maths and chemistry is handy but not vital. There are quite a few amusing moments too.

Plenty epic fail on YouNyancat. Rocketry fails provides the best Guy Fawkes fireworks!

Explosion - due to a tank of HTP and one rat.

If that's a current long march the luminous flame means hydrocarbons not being burned efficiently if they were the flame would be blue with shock diamonds. . LOX & RP-1 have been propellants since the early days of rocketry and was used on the Saturn 5. Kerosine or JP fuels tend to sludge up rocket engines. When the fireball is burning nicely this'll burn to CO/CO2/H20 probably with some remaining unburned hydrocarbons as it'll run slightly rich to keep the temperatures down. And some NOX.

Best propellant combo are liquid hydrogen and LOX but the thought of all that seriously cryogenic LH2 sloshing about puts the rocketeers off.

A Big Bang as that's what you get if these things spontaneously self-disassemble.

Long-memoried boffins re-invent 1950s ferroelectric tech

I still use a Data General Nova in an olde world lighting desk the OS is on one core and the backup decorates the dining room wall - all of 8k x 16 istr in 1971 when it was made it would have cost thousands. Problems can arise with the drive transistors, recirculate logic chips and the diode arrays apparently. They're a pig to debug / replace. The core is 6" x 9" and is hand made.

On the upside the core is radiation hard and you can now get a DG emulator for your PC (ReNOVAte - Wild Hare) RISC these babies aren't :)

LC

Blood-crazy climate mosquitoes set to ground Santa's reindeer

Re: biting pests...

No see-ums. We were plagued by these, mozzies and these infernal blackflies (they're like eye seeking missiles) at Meaghers Grant in the upper Musquodabit Valley in Nova Scotia when I was fishing for trout there. Les Stroud Backwoodsman strength DEET out of Canadian Tire the aroma of this stuff lingers to this day, the friend I was staying with called it 'Eau de Canada'.A good spray of this concoction certainly saw the little sods off, unfortunately it took out my Gul Force surfer's watch too :(

Scotland is the same with added cleg but Scottish outfit APS's Smidge doesn't melt plastic and is just as effective at dealing with the little bastrads.

Nuke as these little sods will live through it.

LC

Chipzilla has its knockers … and now they’re cool in this venting sports bra

Sports Bar

>>The companies have produce a sports bar which opens vents when it senses a certain level of heat and sweat

Is that the George & Bragon?

You tried to hide your extramarital affair … by putting it on the web?

Re: Theatre 625

Looks like you can still get it:

http://www.amazon.com/YEAR-OF-THE-SEX-OLYMPICS/dp/B001LNOLDM

Paris - well, you know...

Black helicopters?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_UH-1_Iroquois

Theatre 625

Nigel Kneale saw it all coming in the 1960's in 'The Live Life Show' when istr a load of contestants were shipped off to an island somewhere ...

Paris, well it was The Year of The Sex Olympics...

Happy NukeDay to you! 70 years in the shadow of the bomb post-Trinity

You can always get a bigger bang..

Kuran's Trinity & Beyond, Nukes in Space and Atomic Journeys (Welcome to Ground Zero) should keep all nuclear device afficionados happy for a few hours in all their digitally restored goodness... there's also some Nat Geo which repeats fairly often called the "World's Biggest Bomb" using footage culled from the above. Narrated by William Shatner. Available from all the usual sites.

Quest is running Treasure Quest which has the Odyssey Explorer hunting for low alpha lead, amongst other stuff like gold coins and old Roman wine.

Nuke, well, as that's what they are!

LC