Posts by Dragon Dave

Google plonks reCAPTCHA on Street View, makes users ID your house

Re: What about the deaf folk?

The listenable captcha is completely independent of the text-based one; last time I checked it was a sequence of numbers read out over a noisy background of chatter.

Bring your backups out of the closet! It's time for 'Tape Pride'

Tape Pride

I know what we need: a little ribbon made out of magnetic tape that we can cross over itself and wear with pride!

New ATLAS particle part of 'everyday mass'

Not "responsible" for mass.

From the press release: "a lot of the mass of everyday objects comes from the strong interaction we are investigating using the chi b.’

It's like saying "A lot of the mass of people comes from meat, which we are investigating using mice"; meat's involved in both cases, but that doesn't mean we're made of mice.

Not sure how this is different to the bottom eta meson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_eta_meson

Aussie scientists develop radioactivity-trapping nanofibers

Probably not. The QUT article says it works on iodine and caesium - so it probably won't work on uranium.

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

They're not climatologists.

As the article states, this is only a single input into climate modelling. Particle physicists weighing in directly on Global Warming would be inappropriate, since they wouldn't understand the details of the various climate models this data will go into.

Hopefully in the coming weeks and months we'll see how this affects our view of the climate.