Posts by Dave 126 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Wikipedia tells me that the US test fired a rail gun with a muzzle velocity of 2.5 km/s in 2008. When I was a little boy, a picture book suggested that a linear accelerator would be used to get Lunar material into orbit. IIRC, the same concept is present in Duncan Jones' film Moon.
On Earth we would use cement, mud or adobe. I guess one could sinter (fuse) the powder material by aiming an array of mirrors at one spot (then spread more powder on top and repeat - effectively the same process as Selective Laser Sintering of titanium powder on earth).
The mirror array can be relatively lightweight, seeing as how it doesn't have to withstand any wind, and not too much gravity. However, it will require a mechanism to shed off lunar dust that settles on the mirrors - perhaps a rapid vibration such as is employed on DSLR sensors.
How does this 3D house printing compare with an inflatable structure which can be used as a former for polyurethane foam?
Yugoslavia was the first overseas country to buy Monty Python's Flying Circus, if you don't count Pakistan who bought it by mistake thinking there would be elephants and clowns.
Source: Micheal Palin
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/australia-day-monty-python-special/3285508
Space Elevators push the limits of what materials are theoretically capable of - and without a safety factor (typically 3x for bridges, 1.5 for aircraft).
It's pleasing that such structures were considered by Buckminster Fuller, and after his death his name was given to the class of materials that come closest to making Space Elevators possible. If we could get the materials, the construction would still require a lot of rocket launches - at least until we can gather and fabricate material in space.
Still, The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke is a good read (and the author's notes a good background on those who first conceived of the idea) and Feersum Enjinn by Iain M Banks is just staggering.
Where did it say this research was motivated by environmental concerns? Hops like any other crop are susceptable to good years and bad - a coupla of years back English fuggles had a poor harvest so French grown fuggles with a lower quantity of some compound were used instead, causing the beer to be less bitter.
It would appear that these researchers are attempting to make a beer independent of hops for consistancy reasons. It won't interest traditional brewers, but the big brands love consistancy - and cost savings.
The environment affects hops far more than hops affect the environment.
Now, where this sort of research can really aid the environment is if they could put the active parts of the coca leaf into yeast and render the result into cocaine without pouring tons of waste solvent into the Amazon. It would seem that making the stuff illegal has had little effect upon its consumption, but has blighted thousands of lives along its supply chain.
One of Terry Pratchett's lesser known books is called Real Cats, some parts of which are a thinly disguised dig at the committee in-fighting of self-appointed CAMRA blokes. Though they are much better behaved now than when the book was written, the dynamic of impassioned amateurs swaying decisions can still hold true.
One such decision is the CAMRA ban on using a nitrogen blanket to replace the beer drawn from the cask. Nitrogen is inert. It does not enter the beer. Its only role is to prevent prevent oxygen from harming the beer. Now, in a busy pub with high turn over this is seldom an issue, but in the current climate pubs need all the help they can get.
To be fair, decent beer was probably harder to find where Randal Munroe grew up. Even those of us who were blessed enough to be surrounded by good beer and a good beer culture had to grow acclimatised to it as youths.
Note that the XKCD stickmen are drinking bottled beer from a fridge. A lot of cold things taste much the same.
To clarify, I'm writing from the UK. In the USA 'craft beer' is a legal term because it can only be used by breweries whose output is less than X gallons a year (where X is actually a fairly big number). Such beers used to be referred to as 'Regional Beers' since the sheer size of the US means that it is impractical to transport anything which isn't pasteurised and kegged. In the, 'craft beer' doesn't have any protected meaning, unlike 'Real Ale' which does.
In the UK this fashion for US style 'craft beer' started in London amongst those follow anything else to come out of Portland, Oregon.
We used to have the same Beer Purity Laws in England a hundred odd years ago, but some brewers became so rich that they successfully lobbied to have the law repealed.
In Germany and the Czech Republic, the title of Brewmaster carries serious social standing, just as they respect proper Engineers. Shit, in the UK the title of Engineer is abused by applying it to the *technician* who fixed your photocopier. It's like calling a paramedic a Doctor.
I'd normally say each to their own, but sadly many pubs put on three or four overly hopped pale ales and neglect to offer a standard Best Bitter.
These so called 'craft beers' ( purely a meaningless marketing term) usually come from new inexperienced breweries and they all taste of grapefruit or elderflower due to the American variety of hop used.
It's the lack of choice masquerading as diversity that gets me. And the 'lets just whack a load of cascade hops in' masquerading as 'craft'.
Lib Dems harvested data from MySpace
THE Liberal Democrats harvested data from millions of MySpace accounts, it has emerged.
The party was found to have employed controversial tech company Humberside Analytica to comb through the data which they hope will give them an unfair advantage in the 2022 general election.
Investigative journalist Francesca Johnson said: “It’s not just MySpace. They’ve cross-referenced with Bebo and Friends Reunited.
“With that weight of data they’ve already run simulations which prove they could enter into a coalition with the Conservatives in the 2010 election, and after that apparently go from strength to strength.
The road in question in this Uber case has a huge paved pedestrian walkway across its central reservation at that spot, with a tiny sign saying 'Do Not Cross'.
Anyone who has seen a little book called The UK's 100 Most Stupid Cycle Paths will recognise this sloppy thinking.
Whilst the jury is out on this case specially, and autonomous cars generally, I think there's scope for using their algorithms and data collection to identify and redesign dangerous road features by running simulations.
Lots of RISC in schools.
Primary school was BBC then Acorn Archimedes, big school was, after a couple of years of CISC Mac LC IIIs, PowerPC Macs.
I don't think we saw a normal Newton (ARM) in the flesh, but the Design and Technology teacher was given an Apple eMate (a clamshell Newton with a keyboard only sold in education market, the translucent curved design foreshadowing Sir Jony's first famous product, the iMac) to play with. He didn't bother.
Obviously being a schoolboy, it was the contrast in how these things ran video games that interested me. The Acorns ran games very well compared to the PC I had at home. Lots of sprites and colours and sound, loaded from the native WIMP GUI.
Serious Bitcoin miners, and miners of many other crypto currencies, have switched to specialised hardware generically known as ASIC - silicon which can only do one thing (eg run the Bitcoin algorithm). The development cost of such dedicated silicon is high, so only bigger miners use it. Having only a few large players in the game runs contrary to the point of crypto currencies i.e the work on the ledger should be distributed amongst millions of users so that no one entity can influence over 50% of the work. Apparently having having fewer big players over many small players leads to fluctuations, too.
Ethereum - perhaps the largest CC after Bitcoin - uses an algorithm that is deliberately suited to GPUs over current ASIC designs because is requires a lot of memory. In addition, Ethereum keeps threatening to switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in an effort to dissuade anyone making the investment in an Ethereum ASIC.
Ironically, it was the idea that millions of people already possessed powerful CPUs and GPUs for non-mining purposes - thus combined they had more power than any Bad Actor might hope to acquire - that was central to Bitcoin.
Just to report back - I've taken a fine nail file to the case bevels and can happily report a small improvement in comfort. However, the polycarbonate is hard stuff so I'm going to dig out some rougher grit sandpaper or an angle grinder.
I had been tempted to give it texture by damping a course cloth in acetone and placing against the case, but luckily I remembered it was polycarbonate (which will crack widely in contact with acetone) and not ABS (which melts more gracefully).
> There's no reason a type c mini usb hub with type c passthrough for power and hdmi/dp out couldn't become a standard.
Because USB C can carry HDMI/dp, you don't need a HDMI socket on the hub - just a USB C to HDMI cable. As noted above, USB C hubs play nice with Samsung Galaxy phones, Nintendo Switches and laptops.
It's the trouble with the Galaxy S8 - the curved screen makes finding a bomb-proof case and screen protector trickier than it could be. I'm using a glass screen protector by Tate - it's okay, but reduces the sensitivity of the screen a bit - though it's tolerable if you you turn off the 'hard press to home screen' feature for some reason. Apparently older Galaxy S phones had 'glove mode' to up the sensitivity but Samsung doesn't give it any more.
My Spigen Tough Armour case so works with the screen protector (not all do) but it's uncomfortable in the hand - I might take some sandpaper to the case and round off the sharp bevels. The extra height of the phone over my Nexus 5 doesn't help much.
> Docks tend to not work well
or happen to be incompatible with last year's dock model / next year's mobile model / both.
Docks possibly, but the actual connectors - USB-C to video and USB - are generic; hubs that work for DEX also work for the Nintendo Switch.
It should be noted that many tech companies charge a lot for accessories. An official Samsung or Sony phone case might be forty quid, a third party case less than a tenner. The official case for my Lumix camera is upwards of 80 quid.
Even some official OnePlus cases, made for them by Evutec, can be pricey.
Apple aren't the only offenders here, nor were they the first, though I acknowledge their proprietary cable situation.
I mentioned DEX to a friend. He thought that it would be handy setup for his shed - he can leave an old monitor, mouse and keyboard in his shed, and just plug his phone in.
This use case sounds more plausible than using a DEX dock as a laptop replacement for travelling, since one is dependent upon finding bits of hardware at one's destination.
Well, if we're to send a Generation Ship or Seed Ship to another system, it seems all we need is water, rock and energy to survive. We will have found some alternative to a magnetosphere,too, to protect us from those pesky waves and particles. A lush green planet is just a bonus.
Still, by the time we're in a position to do that, we'll have had plenty of experience living in domes* or caves on Mars so we'll know if spending your whole life in a giant Centre Parcs will drive you nuts or not.
*Buckminster Fuller on BBC's Horizon:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z2ltf
We can't jail him for contempt but we could possibly hurt his business operations in the UK - though I don't know how that works legally.
I'm amazed that our Government still allows Google to place rip-off websites above official .gov.uk sites when people search for European Health Cards and Driving Licence Renewals etc.
The journalist who has been working on this story for a couple of years, Carole Cadwalladr of the Observer, being interviewed by Phillip Adams today. Covers the origins of CA from a private Psy-Ops firm called SEC, through Bannon and Facebook, to today's events.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/the-cambiridge-analytica-files/9567134
A study has suggested that the more people know about media organisations, the less susceptible they are to conspiracy theories and other rubbish.
Of course, the study may not have been replicated yet (a shocking number of published psychological experiments didn't produce the same results when replicated), so follow up research might be a good idea.
> Re: Collapse of Facebook
he IS being ironic and / or baiting. And what is truly ironic is the amount of downvotes he received. The register's been facebooked, we're doomed :/
I saw him as just using a cute twist on 'when hell freezes over', and didn't mean for him to be down voted.
We don't know yet. If we step out of this sad event and consider the hypothetical: how could both a autonomous car *and* the human 'backup' fail to spot and stop for a pedestrian, there appear to be two major scenarios:
a, The human backup driver was distracted because he'd effectively been a passive passenger for X number of incident-free miles.
b, the pedestrian moved at such speed prior to the collision that the car was incapable of stopping.
Now, writing as a fallible driver and wary pedestrian, it is the first scenario that interests me as one that could be addressed with engineering solutions.
I believe school children in WW2 were asked to collect walnut shells and then their school would send them to a PO BOX. The military were looking at using the shells to make heat shields.
I can't find a link on Google though. Some one with a New Scientist subscription might be able to dig it out.
The Apple Watch is overkill (and highly priced) if all you want are vibrating notifications on your wrist or step counting. It's in Apple's interests to define a smart watch of capable of lots of things, and having done so it's not in their interest to undercut that with a simpler 'iWatch Nano' as they did with iPods.
Beyond those factors, it might be that the iPhone owner prefer circular watches, or enjoys activities that benefit from a more specialised smart watch for outdoor activities (from Garmin or Casio, for example).
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