Posts by Ed Blackshaw 627 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007
The last time I got up and went to a polling booth (just a few weeks ago as it happens), I was dismayed to find that all the names on the ballot papers were those of politicians, and I could not 'VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!'. As it turns out, I had to vote for one of them, or not at all...
Here in England, we use SI units, and have done for some time, except for specific applications (such as the print industry where inches are commonly used, or pubs where beer is sold in pints). This is a hang-over from the use of Imperial units, since a lot of equipment still in use can be quite old.
Note that I use the term 'Imperial' units - this is not even the same system as our Septic cousins erroneously refer to as 'English' or 'British'. As far as I am aware, the imperial gallon has never equalled the US gallon (being about 20% larger). It is almost as if the 'Merkins are so ashamed of their backwards set of units that they wish to blame them upon someone else, and chose us because of 200-year old chip on their shoulders.
Good points, but to put my pedant hat on, only those elements heavier than iron and nickel are typically created during R-nucleosynthesis in a supernova. 'You, me, the air you breathe and everything in your imediate vicinity' are all things that are typically composed of light elements -e.g. hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur, etc., which are created once a star moves off the main sequence and becomes a red giant.
That said, don't you think it might be better to employ a doctor to run the NHS? You wouldn't expect a doctor to be in charge of a bunch of lawyers, so why the hell should it be the other way around? The best thing the gummint could do to help the nHS is to remove all the 'league table' bullshit that Bliar introduced, slim down the myrad layers of management and actually employ more trained clinicians. Oh, and get rid of the whole 'every patient must see a consultant' nonsense - all that has resulted in is that the NHS now calls registrars consultants and we don't have any REAL consultants any more.
So tell me, why you didn't have any candidates standing in this country? I'm pretty sure I would have voted for your agenda. Government accountability and transparency being pretty much the biggest thing our political system is missing in this country. FFS, even the US has better oversight of their politicians than us.
Seriously, get your act together in time for the next general election (within the next few months?) and you'll probably get some seats in the Uk parliament.
'Phorm plans to offer the system to publishers as free embeddable code, claiming it will increase their page views and so revenues. It does not stand to make any money from Webwise Discover, but will use it to build relationships and encourage publishers to join its behaviourally targeted advertising network, OIX.'
What's the betting that this 'free embeddable code' is something along the lines of a closed-source browser plug-in which could be soing pretty much anything behind the scenes, such as -ooh, I don't know - tracking your web activity for fun and profit!
...not yet. Make sure you vote in the Euro elections though - your MEP is the one who represents you on the European legislature, which is arguably the one that matters more than the Commons. Lets make sure we get rid of the New Labour snakes in that house first, THEN worry about kicking them out of our national parliament.
...also, as well as being inefficient and only working at high intensities, nonlinear optics which produce sum-frequency generation only work at specific wavelengths.
Mercury vapour lamps work by exciting the vapour, by passing an electric current through it. This produces a series of specific wavelengths, known as an emission spectrum. This is because the atoms in the mercury vapour are separated, as a gas. It is specific fequencies in the ultraviolet that excite the phosphor to produce reddish light, to counter the otherwise blueish light the mercury produces in the visible spectrum.
In a metal element, such as the tungsten in an incandescent bulb, the atoms are together in a metallic state. For several boring, quantum physics related reasons, exciting such a material produces a band of emissions, rather than specific frequencies. This is to do with the way electrons can move in a metal.
The upshot of this, is that to do any frequency doubling, or other sum-frequency operations would require a number of materials, each tuned to a different frequency, or set of frequencies, to absorb and reemit the light at a range of shorter, visible wavelengths. The R&D and manufacture of such composite materials would be prohibitively expensive, so the costs would outweigh any benefits by several orders of magnitude.
"Can anyone explain why they don't put coatings on the inside of tungsten bulbs to react to the IR radiation, the way that they do with fluorescent tubes?"
It's all to do with the wavelength of the light, and therefore the amount of energy contained in each photon. flourescent tubes produce ultraviolet, which is more energetic than visible light. This hits the phosphor which will absorb the UV and reemit the energy at a shorter, visible wavelength.
With IR, the wavelength is already shorter than that of visible light, so any coating working in the same way would actually produce microwaves, or even radio frequencies, which most people can't see by.
Materials which can absorb multiple photons of one energy and remit single photons at higher energy are known as a type of 'nonlinear optic', which typically only work at very high intensities and somewhat inefficiently. Ones which work as you describe are somewhat of a holy grail of materials chemists. If you can come up with such a thing, you'd probably get a Nobel prize for your trouble...
You appear to be somewhat confused as to the difference between the coin and the unit of currency it represents.
For example, I have, in my pocket, a ten-pound note. If I were to refer to it as a 'tenner', others would understand that I am referring to a ten pound note. This is despite the fact that nowhere upon the money is the word 'tenner' printed.
I do not live in, and have never travelled to our former colonies but even I know that in the US, a one cent coin is referred to as a penny. I'm not sure what the point is that you are trying to prove but I suggest that you give it up...
Measles can be very nasty in adults. However, in this country AFAIK the MMR vaccine was introduced fairly recently - so that most people over the age of 30 or so won't have had it. However, many adults (myself included) gained immunity to these diseaes by actually having them in childhood, so it could be argued that the 'awful scaremongers' are those warning of an epidemic of measles. That said, it would be a Good Thing to eradicate such nasties, and the whole MMR = autism thing was so clearly nonsense that all it really acheived was to expose a lot of sloppy journalism.
On 'contentious' issues like this, of course it is going to be full of twaddle. However, don't dimiss it as a useful source of information. Just remember, it is NOT a primary source, so check everything you read there, or take it with a pinch of salt. For example, a friend of mine sufers from a rare genetic disorder, and the information on wiki on this is quite useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnitine_palmityl_transferase
...and I have to confess that I'm no lover of cats myself, although I would probably stop short of killing the little bastards that dig up my vegetables and shit on them.
However, sending threatening email to people is illegal. The artist in question chose to 'name and shame'* those who has threatened her. These were people whe were not only stupid enough to threaten someone but doubly stupid by not doing it in a particularly anonymous fashion. This woman would be, AFAIK, quite within her rights to make a complaint to the police about these people in their respective countries of origin. She chose the arguably more humane option of turning it into 'art'.
*I hate this Daily Mail-esque phrase and am truly sorry and ashamed for using it
You may find that what is actually happening* is that your phone is set (usually by default) to use 3G services for internet access where _any_ 3G signal is available. The signal strength shown on the front of your phone, however, is most likely the GPRS (2G) signal strength. In an ideal world, 3G coverage would be as good as 2G coverage, and nobody would get this problem but unfortunately 3G coverage is still fairly patchy in this country.
*All this is, of course, pure conjecture but in my experience, changing the settings on my old (Sony Ericsson) phone to not use 3G sped up data access remarkably.
Your list is, shall we say, somewhat selective. The list in full (wiki warning):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#List_of_countries_using_proportional_representation
Which comprises some 83 different nations (out of 194 odd, depending on how you define them, in the world). It is worth noting that this list includes Greece, the country that invented democracy some 2500 years ago.
the internet is "quite a dangerous place".
I put it to the honorable gentleman that the internet is not, in fact, a 'place' at all.
For examples of quite dangerous places, I refer him to pretty much any UK city centre on a Friday/Saturday night, despite all the magic crime reducing CCTV cameras.
Twonk.
£160 per KWh equates to 3 orders of magnitude over the going rate - are you sure that's not meant to read MWh, which is the unit of normally used in energy production? That would make the rate of payments more like 1.6 times the average which is a much more sensible incentive...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
