Posts by HelpfulJohn 660 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2012
Hmmm, a possible opening for a pre-lined plastic or glass credit-card-sized pocket tool that allows one to create measured, exact lines of rice, wheat, oats, sand, medications and other substances for such activities as cooking?
It could also be used by dealers of such items to supply small quantities.
Kickstarter?
My cooker has a clock that should, sometimes, display B.S.T. but to my knowledge never has. It has automatics such as a countdown alarm and settable cooking programmes so having the "correct local time" really should matter at least a little though realistically not so much as one would at first thought imagine.
It never has had. In the unlikely event that I need to programme a meal, I would simply work out the B.S.T. to U.T.C. corrections. It's hardly rocket surgery.
I'm not entirely sure whether the device counts as an "embedded system" or whether it is more in the nature of the relays that drive my washy-machine but with a clock added as a trigger. It's pre-Win-XP tech so I rather suspect the latter.
Uhhm, I'm also fairly sure that the time displayed is not, in fact, G.M.T. nor any recognised time-zone as I have long ago forgotten how to set it. I really should rediscover this procedure.
"Surely the toilet is up there to give humans a chance to revenge themselves on the birds."
No.
Possibly for the same reason that publicly-purchasable flying cars are mysteriously never a roaring commercial success: possibility of politicians below and disgruntled or simply playful chavs inside.
Assuming the extreme unlikelihood of us having at least a few politicians able to think ahead a little, that could also have been one small contributing factor to the downfall of airships.
Obligatory "What-If" : https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/
It should be remembered that this issue deals with *UN*-intentional impacts. Humans can aim.
"... or to determine whether making the Children of Man immortal and ubiquitous in the Human Galaxies should be a priority for our spending plans."
Hint: it *SHOULD* be. Indeed, getting off-world and making the Human Galaxies should be the only long-term plan and priority of the entire species. Everything else should, and if properly done *would* fall out of that scheme.
"Off the top of my head I can't think of anywhere in the UK that's suitable as a launch site ..."
Well, as I sometimes quietly mumble when the question of storage sites for nuclear waste comes up : "There is always the Houses of Parliament."
No one useful or valuable would be harmed by aborted launches or "rapid, unplanned disassembly of the vehicle".
No, the West Country, though seen as a vast, uninhabited wasteland suitable only for multi-tens-of-millions of pounds fourth homes by the Parliamentarians is not suitable as the French may not like the idea of being a dumping ground for partially successful launches. Nor are the grouse-moorlands of the Northern Shires nor the Anglian desert suitable, for much the same reason.
Nope, the safest place is Parliament. Launch from there and every single mission would be guaranteed to work flawlessly. Those with second and third homes under the flight paths would make sure of it.
If a seat at the Opera costs £100 [I don't have a clue but that seems like a fair median price to a nye-kulturny such as me] and if there are perhaps a million people buying tickets per year [100 per venue, 100 venues and 100 performances each year per venue] then that "brings in" a hundred million pounds per year.
My numbers are possibly conservative by at least an order of magnitude in the total. Again, I haven't a clue, really, but I'd suspect the number of venues, seats and performances are low by factors of at least two each. If so then we are talking about the region of £800,000,000 or more per annum.
Just from Opera.
Throw in multi-millions of pounds for daubs of paint on canvas every so often [often enough to keep the wealthier and more ostentatiously furnished and snootily staffed auction houses in business], the Theatres [admittedly, these may Venn-diagrammatically overlap with Opera and Pantomime] and other sources of income and "billions of pounds added to the local economies" is not too far a stretch.
It does not even matter that many of those millions of ticket-buyers mentioned above are repeat customers, the same people going to the Opera weekly, nor that those Opera-lovers may overlap with art-buying, theatre-going and other activities. All that matters is that cash is moved around.
And, as the Great Pandemic showed us last year, tens of thousands of jobs are supported by "the Arts". Most may only pay a few thousand annually per person but that still adds up to hundreds of millions pumped into the economy by thousands of people buying deep-fried Mars bars and pizzas.
The Arts may often be trite, trivial, nonsensical trash [such as an unmade bed or a can of human waste] but as a part of Life it does keep the money flowing and the people entertained.
If you include the TV and movie industry, it keeps *lots* of money flowing, even if most of it does go towards that Mouse.
The Arts may never be as important as ball-moving sporting events but collectively they do do some good.
600 "leaders" traditionally trained in "Humanities" and the Law aided by some weird bunches of Peers and 30-or-so superstitious god-botherers are not exactly the best people to see the Big Picture or to determine whether making the Children of Man immortal and ubiquitous in the Human Galaxies should be a priority for our spending plans.
Every time UKland gets a bright scientific or technological idea, the small minds kill it or sell it overseas for a minuscule fraction of what its long-term worth would have been.
Getting off-planet would have been cheap had we done it back then.
Cheaper than endless wars.
The European supply ships for the ISS could be collected on-site to be recycled as Mars supply back-packs.
Fit a few out as human-compatible and they may even form the entirety of an Ares mission. Some spare supply pods could carry, instead of supplies for ISS, Ikea-style flat-packed bits for the missions. "Insert part A into slot V6"?
I suppose *someone* at E.S.A. thought of this? And dismissed it as stupid?
Space clutter a problem?
Not really.
We have nukes. Loads and loads of nukes. We know where much of the clutter is, we can reliable put a Cassini into a highly complex set of orbits around distant Saturn so volatilising vast numbers of usless orbiting thingies should not be much of a trial.
We'd need to warn the Astronomers, radio, microwave, optical and everything up to gamma-ray, a couple of weeks before Bin-Day so they have time to switch off, shutter and schedule maintenance upon their mechanical eyes but that's just a few emails.
What a sky full of nukes would look like and what the residual detritus, debris and vapours would be is, of course, something for the "boffin" to clarify.
It should be noted that an added advantage to this scheme would be a global effort to remove left-over nukes that no-one is using and that are simply decaying in their silos. We would, for once, be getting some real return for all of the currency and man-years spent on those idiotic contraptions.
Wouldn't that be nice?
What do you mean by "Hell, no!!" :)
UKland *had* a sort of start towards a "space presence" in the late 1950's. They killed it to save money and because the politicians of the day were mostly trained in the "Humanities" and Law and considered offworld exploitation to be skiffy-geeky BukkRojas robots-and-rayguns stuff - as many of them still do.
Had they had vision slightly better than extreme myopia, they could have had city-farms in high Earth orbit, comet-catching industries, drop-ships fuelling the Terran economy with cheap imports and possibly even scientific outposts on the Lunar Farside by 1990 but they were simply intellectually underpowered and unable to grasp the Big Picture.
It is also true that the USAliens could have built upon their Skylabs to do much of that cheaper, faster and better than UKland could have but neither nation was interested.
Instead, we get twenty-year wars over which big daddy in the sky has the better fan-fiction.
The Dream of Stars is dead.
"The other thing you could do, if you really want to make a difference to Amazon decimating the high street, is get off your arse and go to the shops."
I did my bit!
I got up off of my arse, went in to Town, got slightly rained on, bought some shopping, petted some Guide-Dogs-For-The-Blind whose attached humans were begging for funds, gave them some funds [which I thought was only fair as they let me play with the doggies], used a bus both ways and did not use one, single online service during the entire trip.
Oh, I also had a bacon sarnie and coffee in a nice shop thing. Yet another local establishment aided by my heroic exertions.
I haven't spent anything Amazonny at any time in this year, I don't think.
Imagine, me, a superhero, defending the off-line businesses!
Aren't I just *wonderful*?
" As most US domestic supply is from overhead cables in the street, large numbers of pole mounted transformers are needed to produce the domestic voltage from the much higher distribution voltage."
Which also allows for dramatic car-meets-pole-and-sparks-ensue suspense and dramatic tension events in thousands of movies and TV serials, where the hero-du-jour must save the tiny girl child, doggy, rabbit or floppy disc containing a ten-hour-long-video of the enemy's secret base before the petrol which inevitably spills into a stream leading to the sparking ignites and destroys the vehicle and contents.
These things rarely happen in sensible, small countries like UKland. We have a lot less fun.
That is just *wrong*!
Yes, I know that in every bit of Life, His Majesty gets special attention just for *being* His Majesty even though he is objectively a petty, trivial, completely replaceable and mostly useless little functionary but that is so damned *wrong* in ever so many ways.
Indeed, it should be the other way around as there are millions and millions more Plebs than Majesties so anything harming us *should* be far, far more important and dealt with far more quickly than when it bothers a single, unimportant, minor bureaucrat.
I don't suppose anything will ever happen that way, though. :)
"...result only in an ensuing dark-age from which mankind will have to spend another thousand years climbing out of."
If there is another Dark Age, Man will *never* climb out of it. Not to the technological levels we have now. By "never" I do mean *never*, not in the milliards of years left of the Sun's life nor after that.
Why not?
We have used up the cheap oil and coal. There is no kick-starter fuel to power the beginnings of industrialisation. While Man may well retain the knowledge in archives and libraries scattered in n sanctuaries and manned by warrior monk castes he will never be able to implement this.
Nor will any successor species, be it elephant, ant, crab-thing or re-booted degenerate humanoid ever create a complex global culture such as this one.
If we fall, there is no coming back.
So we had best not fall, yes?
"Intelligence is not sentience. Fine. But what is intelligence?"
And, for the sake of completeness, what is "sentience"? And do any of us really have either? I know that at least one of my cats was intelligent and self-aware but I've never been sure that these are true of many politicians.
Under some conditions, I may be smart enough to pass a Turing Test but I'm also the sort of bolshie bugger who might just find it funny to fail.
A cat wouldn't even try though a dog might if it thought the test was fun. I've met humans who would fail. Does being smart enough to know how to fail Turing's little tests indicate that I *am* "sentient", that I am not or that I'm just annoying?
I used to jest, half-seriously, that my brilliant, wise, lovely lady wife was my spare brain and main long-term storage.
Now that I don't have her to respond to "do I like these things" type questions I realise that that she really was my better and more reliable half.
I really should have backed her up somewhere. :)
[ Standing in Sainsbury's, looking at row after row of breakfast cereals, breads, jams and beans and wondering which, if any are "nice". *She* would know ...]
"I'm as impressed with the technology as anyone, but you can get the same emotional response from a video game when your character dies. "
Or "Old Yeller"
My wife died a few years back. Since then, I've sometimes choked at stupid parts of movies that most would not consider sad such as the crunching-London scene in "ID4-II: Resurgence". Why that? Pure pseudo-sentimentality probably. Whatever the trigger, it happens.
Something does not have to be human, alive nor even real to trigger an emotional response, if it did poetry would have no effect on us.
I chatted with a chatbot once. It seemed friendly enough, likeable even but she wasn't too bright. She was certainly never going to be a conversational replacement for my very smart wife.
Yet I'd be sad to learn some over-officious jobsworth had killed her for a stupid reason.
Humans, and near humans such as chimps and gorillas will emotionally bond with *anything*. Even fictional Londons.
One pictorial list for several hundred languages in several scores of markets.
The set-up instructions for some pre-2000 things I bought had scores of pages of instructions and diagrams repeated in scores of languages; usually printed in text only an electron microscope could read. A single pictorial guide, if done well, would have been a *lot* cheaper, lighter and easier to pack.
Issuing them in English only would also have been easier but that would probably have irked the French.
The smiling blob of brown sludge was, for some time, interpreted as a "Happy Ice-Cream Man" by my innocent little brain.
I thought the vocalised interpretation that I heard on USAlien TV was something else; something I had never seen.
Smart or not, I am sometimes not very aware of modern culture.
"Sure, it is easier to understand the picture of a duck than to remember what the abstract symbols "d"+"u"+"c"+"k" might mean"
Only if you've seen a duck. Even recognising it as an image of some sort of bird takes knowledge of wildlife.
I don't drive a car. There are road-signs I find baffling though they are made as simplistic as possible. I could look them up but I don't find them worth the effort.
Signs of containers, lorries, shops and footpaths I also sometimes lack the knowledge to interpret. Whether this puts me in mortal dangers or not I have no idea.
I would were they to use English.
Of the emojis in the first paragraph [*******@*.] one does not display in my browser.
I find this is common and becoming more so with each passing month. I am sure that it is my fault for not religiously updating everything but as a few blank squares are the only result I am reluctant to engage in that much hard work.
I am fully cognisant of the fact that eventually *no* emoji will be properly displayed on my box and I will forever after be rendered unable to communicate with any of the inhabitants of this planet.
That prospect does not fill me with fear and sadness.
Oh. "The post contains some characters we can’t support". Yes, those would be the damnable emojis I tried to quote from the article, yes?
I have replaced them with asterisks. :)
Okay, that wasn't it. It must have been the unviewable one, so I've replace *that* with a "@".
This is "fun".
[Post-posting edit] Okay, that worked.
"The answer to criminals knowing who has access to firearms is to have them stored where they cannot be stolen i.e. not at private homes but say in the middle of a military base with tightly controlled access."
According to USAlien TV, military sites regularly get things stolen from them. Everything from viruses through chemicals to nukes and even guns.
Though I'm *sure* British security is ever so very much better.
On TV this is called a "Faraday Cage" and even baboons know about them according to Walter.
On assumes that the top of the walls and perhaps around skirting-board heights would be conductor-free to allow signals in and out and that there would be doors and windows, too. After ll, one need only allow charging from about coffee-table height to around should-height on a tallish man. All the rest of the room would usually be devoid of devices looking for charge.
Would those gaps be sufficient for a clear signal?
Isn't this sort of a Tesla thingy?
Didn't he hypothesise this way back in the Dark Ages before TV and emails?
I seem to remember the "Lensman" series of SF novels having "portables" powered by matching tuned circuits that used some form of resonance at a distance to supply wireless power at huge wattages so this ain't a very new concept.
Physics in Reality doesn't make the good stuff easy.
So, a CRQC could not be possible by 2026 but might be possible by 2036?
Isn't that sort of what they said about commercial fusion power? That we'd have it in fifty-some years? And haven't they been saying that for seventy-some years?
Robotic vision. Household robots that are *useful*. True artificial *intelligence*, instead of a look-up table, decision tree and sorting scheme [no, *I* don't know what "intelligence" is, either :) ]. All "possible within the next decade" for decades.
*Hyperdrive* is "possible". Anti-gravity is "possible" [both for certain values of the term].
A CRQC may be "possible" but, just like the fabled tachyon, it may never be found nor made.
Still, it keeps the spies occupied and the economy running which is no bad thing and basic research always eventually pays off in weird ways so there's that, too.
But I have the nagging suspicion, totally uninformed guesswork though it is, that QC is a self-limiting thingy that eventually hits the wall of "just can't be done in this universe, pal". I don't know whether cluster-boxing it would help but I suspect that diminishing returns will be seen in our present approaches.
Sort of like fusion.
"Power too cheap to meter." Yeah, have you *seen* my bills? :)
From the article: "IBM's Q System gated quantum computer currently tops out at 20 qubits; it's been testing 50 qubit system. Intel has a 49 qubit machine and Google has a 72 qubit device."
So, just add them all together via fibre-optic connections and you have a 191-cubit cluster-box. Ask the Chinese nicely and you may double this or more. Then just keep adding on boxes.
No? Quantum doesn't work that way? Well, I never did expect the cosmos to be fair. :)
To get from Mars to Earth one must have a rocket to launch, a Mar-Earth transfer orbit vehicle and a method of dropping onto Earth's surface. That last is easy and we've done it lots of times. We've even dropped *humans* from orbit into the Ocean and even onto hard land.
To lift off from Mars one needs fuel. That fuel either has to be made locally or transported from Earth. Neither are easy. Doable, yes but neither easy nor cheap. This is why I'd suggest NASA just drop the idea of a return voyage and send a couple of chemists [Hi, there!] to do the work locally. Humans have proved, over the last couple of centuries, to be quite adept at using tools to take apart rocks to discover their ingredients.
If you don't do a sample-return from the planet then the orbit-to-orbit phase is moot. That makes the whole mission loads cheaper.
Sample-returns from littly rocks like asteroids and comets are fun and cheap-ish but Mars is a real planet and launching from there takes delta-v. delta-v ain't cheap so why bother?
Why bother when humans are cheap and easy to replace and there are lots to choose from? :)
Well, truthfully, I would see little reason for a return trip were NASA wise enough to let me loose on Mars.
Though I probably wouldn't survive the training, nor the launch to Earth orbit so that's a moot point but if I did survive through those and the landing, I'd be happier never to leave.
Just fit me with some batteries and a toolbox with 1970-s replacement parts and screw-drivers and I could also have fun reviving everything from Viking to Beagle. Maybe I could even swap the battery packs for RTG's and have the little robots run about and talk to Earth for decades?
Yerp, I could find endless amusement.
Mr. Watney had no vision. He could have owned an entire *world*. :)
[Aside: why didn't a *Botanist* have live seeds of mosses, fungi, flowers, fruits, trees and fishes to test the growth potential of the Martian dirt on? Why else would he be on the mission? And if there were RTG's around, why not power the rovers with them? Solar power on Mars is a daft choice.] [Sorry, that's off-topic, yes? :) ] [But those types of thing *bother* me. RTG's are lighter than solar arrays for the power they supply and cheaper, getting the plutonium off of the Earth means it can never hurt the cute, fluffy bunnies and RTG's in the rovers can be used to charge up all sorts of things when not roving about and the only reason for a Botanist is to *botany*. Him taking soil samples is a waste of his degrees.]
An LED? Whatever for?
They have a nuclear-powered alien robotic tank armed with death-ray lasers. Just tone down the output to 1% or something and those would make a fine scanny beam for the cameras.
It would be slightly monochromatic, true, but they are after all merely looking down the tube to see if it is blocked by rock or all shiny at the empty end. The difference between the two conditions is sort of stark and easily discriminated.
Added advantage to Martian daylight photography, lower bit-count due to fewer colours.
""still wouldn't solve the problem of making solar panels work in the dark""
Well, pair the Sahara farm with one in the Pacific, or perhaps two at 120 degree intervals so that the Sun never really goes down on the complex. We know how to build things that float, we've been doing this for a while.
If it's a global initiative anyway, we may as well make it a real one.
Wiring around the Med. is a problem for another reason, the place is slightly prone to earthquakes and volcanism. Indeed, the sea itself will eventually be smooshed by Africa. This may take a while but the ongoing rumblings caused by Africa's attempt to merge with Eurasia could be unsettling and disruptive to any long-distance technologies.
Sure, short-term, we'd probably get away with it but should we not be be becoming a mature species who can think on the long-term?
I'v been saying it for decades: nukes are the greenest form of power we'll have this side of the next Millennium.
Sure, fusion would be marvellous but fusion is fifty years away according to those working in the research and it has been fifty years away for seventy-odd years. Fusion will *always* be fifty years away.
Meanwhile, nukes are cheap, easy to build, maintain and run if done properly, safe, clean and have fuel enough to run our kit for centuries at least, longer if we ever mine asteroids and Mercury.
Sure, we've had a couple of bad accidents with nuclear plants but those were never the fault of the technologies. One was badly situated and the other was poor management. Overall, nukes have been tremendously safe for fifty years and more.
And the problem with spent fuel rods has an obvious solution: radioactive shit emits energy, so use the energy. Eventually, all nuclear stuff decays to stable isotopes. Nuclear power plants encourage this, accelerate it, makes radioactive stuff safer, faster.
It's *green* power. Nuclear power makes the universe safer, forever.
Nukes are protecting the fluffy bunnies.
*We* could build the mega-power farms and the other things that go with them then let them be nationalised by the locals.
We did that with the oil and that turned out to be very profitable for us. ("Us" being USAlia, UKland and a couple of other corporate empires.)
In the long-term, solar-power farms with subsidiary industries would be vastly more profitable than oil ever was and also longer-term. The Sun ain't going anywhere. Not for lots and lots of election-cycles.
Odds are that farming the top end of Africa for power, and other crops, would cool it a lot leading to global cooling and the greening of the Sahara. Re-greening. That could only be a good thing for everyone.
Especially were we to help them replace their goats with sheep and cows.
Under the solar power farms the air would be cool, yes? Well, cooler. And there would be dimness if not entire darkness, true? I'm sure true darkness could be arranged, as could a large temperature drop from what the local ground currently suffers. This might even draw in wet airs and provide condensation if engineered wisely.
I'm thinking mushroom farms. For "vegan" fake meats and other healthy options. Also something like guinea pig farms supping up the surplus mushrooms. Maybe even worm farms, earthworms, for chicken and fish farms.
The solar power itself could be fairly cheaply exported as petrol, made from CO2 and H2O so the petrol engine becomes essentially carbon-neutral. Sure, it's a horrendously inefficient process to build octane from sunlight but the sunlight is, once the farm is built, essentially free. Less than free as the *shade* makes money for the farmers.
No "oil States". No oil drilling, ever. The end of OPEC.
Loads of benefits.
Hell, they could even let some light through in patches and grow gherkins and hemp.
Or genetically engineered apples that make insulin or statins for us.
"Trains and autos need much more land than aviation."
Roads and car-parks cover vast amounts of land, trains less so and airports even less. It's a question of numbers.
"Aviation is much more fuel efficient than autos per passenger-mile."
Only once airborne. Take-offs apparently burn a lot of juice. Still, aeroplanes do only take-off once per journey and those can be long so that can be a minor consideration for long-haul flights.
"Aircraft and airports are far less noisy than they were a few decades ago."
Very true, especially since they binned my beloved Concorde; that one used to shake the world, lovely though she was. But current designs have a limit to how quiet they can be while remaining profitable enough for the bosses and shareholders. Absent returning to airships with silenced engines, something I would truly love to see, noise is not going away any time soon. Even miles away from their homes, aeroplanes can disturb our Summer afternoons. It's just how the physics works.
"My time living next to a mid-sized airport was far more peaceful than my time living next to train tracks."
That one's down to local conditions. Some railway tracks are used by huge, unending freight trains that are awesomely seismic in their passage, others less so. Some airports are relatively quiet, others are Heathrow. It's like our allotment of Dark Sky, either you are lucky to have some or not. Our experiences of local noise and pollution is spotty, semi-random and not personal. It's just our bad luck if we live near a bad one.
Though I'd imagine Mr. Musty, Mr. Bozo and others have relatively silent skies over each of their many houses.
"... is off limits to general aviation so there's little danger of that so what's the beef?"
I assume the area used by SpaceX is large, flat and unobstructed enough to be considered a possible emergency landing site for crippled aircraft? If so, the Air Cops may be thinking of protecting such machines from colliding with high-flying rooves unadorned with flashy red lights. It may indeed be buried somewhere in the rule-book that such a use is mandatory for launching sites whether Old Musty has read those clauses or not.
They do, after all, also like to have red lights on electricity pylons, large radio antennae and other objects that reach to the kies they so lovingly control.
When I worked, I was in an office with many, many badly tuned fluorescent lighting tubes. I could hear their assorted hums and the flickering, combined with the poor spectrum of radiant energies and, I think, the varying brightnesses, caused me headaches.
I found that dark glasses, sunglasses, helped a lot. What helped even more was something advertised in a sporting-goods shop as a "tennis visor". The green, translucent eye-shade blocked a lot of the harshness from the lamps.
I had entered the sporty shop thinking I might find a baseball-style peaked cap to wear to aid in preventing the pains but the shop assistant advised me to try that visor, instead. His advice was excellent.
Previously to this, I had never even considered entering such an establishment, which only shows that our internal biases, prejudices and ignorance may sometimes be to our personal detriment.
I am sure the tennis visor would be useful in direct sunlight, too, were I ever to venture out of my little house to encounter so dangerous a thing.
