Posts by aeonturnip

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

Re: You perceive time as motion

Congratulations - you win my "Biggest BS Post" award this week.

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Re: Military spending

They didn't launch them - the scopes are in storage. Also, they aren't complete:

'"They’re “space qualified,” as NASA puts it, but they’re a long way from being functioning space telescopes. They have no instruments — there are no cameras, for example. More than that, they lack a funded mission and all that entails, such as a scientific program, support staff, data analysis and office space. They will remain in storage while NASA mulls its options.' (Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-gets-military-spy-telescopes-for-astronomy/2012/06/04/gJQAsT6UDV_story.html?utm_term=.795aae0547e8)

NASA boffins may just carve your name on a chip and send it to Mars if you ask nicely

Re: I for one....

I'd go for the Fry & Laurie collection:

Suckmaster Burstingfoam

Peter Cummin-Myear

Frigmy Popplehate-Fresharse

Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report

Re: US components

Debatable. George Boole first introduced his algebra in "The Mathematical Analysis of Logic" which was published in 1847, when he was still living and working in Lincoln. He didn't got to Ireland until 2 years later, and whilst there did more work and published "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" in 1854 where he discusses it more thoroughly.

Space policy boffin: Blighty can't just ctrl-C, ctrl-V plans for Galileo into its Brexit satellite

The new quantum accelerometers being developed by Imperial College and partners could, if they can be made small enough, mean we don't need to bother with satellite navigation systems at all - if you have a sufficiently accurate and sensitive accelerometer, and you know where it started, then you can work out where it is precisely.

Let's give the £92m to Imperial to help them develop this tech instead of spunking it on a stupid proposal to spend a further £Xb, where X > 5.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/188973/quantum-compass-could-allow-navigation-without/

NASA's Mars probe InSight really has Mars in sight: It beams back first pic after touchdown

According to the prevalent hypothesis, the moon didn't form in the same way as the inner planets, which coalesced from the protoplanetary disk when the sun formed. The moon was the result of a glancing impact event on the Earth, and as such is made of the lighter stuff of the crust and mantle and therefore has a very small iron core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Moon

Paris, just because we're talking about bumping heavenly bodies.

Boffins build a 2D 'quantum walk' that's not a computer, but could still blow them away

Re: 10 Billion starts and buys one. .... [for those with a Need to Know]:-)

Have an upvote for your Iain M Banks reference, sir.

Astroboffins spy the most greedy black hole yet gobbling a Sun a day

Re: Go on I dare you

"if this monster was at the centre of the Milky Way it would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of x-rays emanating from it"

Substitute "the President" for "the centre of the Milky Way", and "vainglorious belligerent BS" for "x-rays", and the article is pretty accurate.

Scratch Earth-killer asteroid off your list of existential threats

Re: n-body problem?

True, but luckily they're mostly all going around in the same direction in a flattish disk, so their approach velocities are fairly small. The solar system is sufficiently old that (hopefully!) almost all the rogues ones have been either smashed to bit, ejected from the solar system or eaten by Jupiter which has been a very handy guardian angel for Earth over the years. Thanks Jupiter. Thupiter.

DeepMind boffins brain-damage AI to find out what makes it tick

Just like the brain

A lot is learned about the brain from people who have had traumas or strokes - the work of Broca & Wernicke, Sperry & Gazzaniga, the study of Phineas Gage's injury, etc.

Samsung’s DeX dock clicks the second time around

"google Ass Zenscreen Go" - not sure that's SFW...

We need baby Googles, say search specialists… and one surprising VC

Re: I'd settle for a Google that ****ing worked.

I know in an ideal world you should be able to google with any search phrase, but for now you need to choose your search phrase more carefully. Simply googling "space conveyor" did a better job. If you google "space conveyor practicalities" or "practicalities of space conveyors" there are no results - it's just possible that there isn't anything out there on this topic.

Essentially invisible: Android big-daddy Andy Rubin's hypetastic mobe 'flops in first month'

Re: First I heard of these

Hadn't seen the Mi Mix 2. Nice hardware and body, but the camera appears to suck, and its lack of wireless charging, water resistance and expandable storage kill it stone dead for me.

Don't panic, but.. ALIEN galaxies are slamming Earth with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Re: Don't worry!

He'll be fine in his apartment with the "eight-inch concrete walls" "which is all sealed" - if his hair spray can't get out to damage the ozone layer, those cosmic rays ain't getting in. They're probably a Chinese conspiracy to make US manufacturing non-competitive anyway.

But, on the offchance that a high-energy particle did enter his head, it would find itself very lonely.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

Perhaps just make a phone case with this keyboard

The guts and screen of the device would then just by your regular phone - I'd rather just have one device.

Alien 'lava lamp' with dying magnetic field orbited Earth a billion years ago – science

Re: When is the last time you used yours?

Reminds me of a previous job where the dumbest remark or most heinous coding failure won the "Terry of the Day" award - a picture of Terry F*ckwit (from Viz) attached prominently to the top of the person's monitor.

Virgin Media's profanity warning triggered by chief exec's name

Seconded - I worked for the neighbouring council to S****horpe at the time Tony B. Liar was giving out wads of cash to schools to get them online. Internet filtering was a big concern as there's nothing teenagers would like more than unfettered access to the kind of pictures they previous had to scour hedges/older siblings bedrooms for. A senior member of staff wondered whether there may even be a way to filter pictures based on their content, but this was the 1990's and things weren't that sophisticated - he wondered if we might have been able to block pictures which featured a large amount of pink, but clearly there'd be a lot of false positives, never mind introducing racial bias...

I've got a verbal govt contract for Hyperloop, claims His Muskiness

I think the main reason people are calling BS on the Hyperloop is that there are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome which they haven't really shown their workings for yet.

It's very easy to sound like a Victorian train-skeptic about this, but I'm not convinced that they've figured out solutions to the problem of rapid repressurisation (huge scale evacuated tubes not being all that easy to maintain), coping with temperate-change induced expansion of the above-ground tube type of HL, and how to safely protect the rather squishy occupants from rapid decceleration in the event of a mechanical problem.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: injuries....

Ah yes, reminded me of my days fiddling around inside PC cases.

As is traditional, I was doing some hardware maintenance late into the evening, and as the ceiling lights were pretty dim, I thought it would be smart to have a work lamp clamped to the case itself. Given that this was probably 20 years ago, the lamp wasn't a nice cool-running LED affair, it was a bare 100W tungsten filament bulb, and I proceeded to burn my forearm on it, probably when attaching the heatsink and fan to the CPU with those dreadful "push so hard you fear you're going to snap the motherboard" fittings.

Wouldn't have been so bad, but I didn't do it just once, or twice, but three or four times, and in exactly the same place on my arm each time. It blistered up like the big version of bubble wrap after the first couple of times and after it burst on the third burning I had to be careful not to let the fluid drip onto the electronics. I still have a nice round scar to show for it.

One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass

Dark energy?

Katie Hopkins is extremely dense, and only interacts repulsively...

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

Rather than have to buy another device, perhaps they could work on a mobile phone case with this keyboard connecting via Bluetooth. As other people have pointed out, it's the keyboard and the hinge which are so great about this with the rest being likely an also-ran Android phablet. Most people already have a phablet of one sort or another - S7 Edge here - and don't intend to replace it anytime soon.

Bring it BACK... with MODs! Psion 5 storms great tech revival poll

Re: Bit pricey and it'll be a few more months until it's out but...

Fails on at least three core criteria : it's too chunky, has an inferior keyboard, and it's way too much money. I can't comment on the OS, but this type of device needs to be "instant on" and very quick and easy to use - the screenshot of a full desktop OS doesn't fill me with hope.

Self-stocking internet fridge faces a delivery come down

Re: On the plus side on holiday cat feeding sorted.

Unfortunately, a friend of mine has disproved rule 1. A neighbour's cat had been lost for a while when my friend noticed an increasingly strong and unpleasant smell in their garden. They tracked it down to a tree and discovered said cat stuck in the fork of two branches, very thoroughly dead. They suspect it had fallen and got wedged there.

Random ideas sought to improve cryptography

Way back when

A friend and I had an idea for an "infinite adventure game" (text based dungeon) for which we needed an infinitely long, yet reproducible, random sequence. We were going to use decimal places of pi, starting at a predetermined place, given that pi is easy to calculate and (afaik) has passed every test of randomness thrown at it. I guess they don't want it to be reproducible, but I wonder whether a similar method could be used?

Hell, high water, and ice: Facebook's Dublin data center choices

Re: Ouch

...and it's Ivanpah, not Ivanpath

Apple growth flatlines ... Tim Cook thinks, hey, $80bn is still $80bn

Re: A sad day

Well, no - someone will come out with a hot idea soon, and then Apple will take it, make it pretty and market it as if it were their own. Like they did with absolutely everything they've ever sold.

Short weekend break: Skegness or exoplanet HD 189733b?

Viz had it right

Skegness

Is China dumping smartphones on world+dog?

For me, the additional money isn't all that justifiable, but things I look for are a really good large screen (for the not-so-young eyes), excellent camera (as I don't want to take two bottles into the shower), removable battery and microSD slot. Generally only the high-end phones have the first two, but I haven't found one that ticks all my boxes - my Note 3 is still going strong. The MS Lumia 950XL or LG V10 may replace it when they come out, but until then there's no low, mid or high end device out there to cover all my requirements. Given how much use I get out of my phone, and that it's good for three years, I'm prepared to pay the premium.

Don't Panic: Even if asteroid showers cause mass extinctions ...

Re: says:

The science says it won't be a biggie (see arxiv link). There will be a lot more things to worry about before that.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04655

Acer CloudMobile S500 Android phone review

Re: Another alternative

Got mine on Ebay - there are a couple of Titanium Power Sellers on there doing them for £299.

Another alternative

Just wanted to throw another option into the sub-£300-decently-specced-Droid mix. Ladies and gentlemen, the Sony Xperia Acro S (LT26W): 720p 4.3" screen, 16GB onboard, v4.0.4 out of the box, micro SD slot, 12MP camera with a physical "shutter release" button, 1910mAH battery, dual core with reasonable graphics, and the main selling point for me - it's waterproof. As my wife has killed two iPhones in the past by dropping them down the toilet, this has been a required feature ever since...

Old men who use computers less likely to get dementia

Quoting the great Mr Adams...

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”