Posts by Stevie

Bah!

Never disabuse friends of their ghost.

I once went to a friend's house which was an old brick house with heating made by black iron pipes hanging in mid-air through which hot air was ducted. The kitchen, they said, had a ghost that would rap on the table when they were cooking.

I looked at the large, heavily varnished, butcher-block table against the wall. I took a gander under it.

"Would I be right in saying the ghost knocks again about an hour or so after you are done with dinner?" I asked. They were stunned and said it did.

So I told them that I thought it was more likely that the pine table, which was varnished only on the top, was expanding as the steam from the cooking made the air moist. The table was bolted by a large steel bracket to the wall which would grip and grip and grip and then let go, rather like a tectonic slip-strike fault, making a sharp noise. When the air dried out again after dinner, the table would shrink with the same effect. I said they could exorcise the ghost with a wrench by loosening the nuts on the securing bolts a turn.

Never saw people I cared about look so sad so quickly before. Lesson learned. Now I reckon I would say "Wow!" and shut the fuck up.

Bah!

If you think Paris' Eau D' Bladder is bad, you should check out Manhattan in August.

Many years ago my folks came for a visit and I took 'em into the Big Banana on a sightseeing trip. On exiting Madison Square Gardens my dad's face wrinkled up like a dried prune and I was about to ask what was wrong when I realized that *his* nose hadn't acclimatized to The Nasal Lullaby of Eight Avenue.

Before any British get uppity, they should know that I once visited Sheffield before the steel industry died. The sulphur stench was 10 times worse than anything I've sniffed since, and anything you brushed up against would ruin your clothes from the soot.

They tale pollution seriously in the steel industry (which is why I can't fathom anyone wanting to live in a steel town).

Bah!

No-one could be this witless as to release two idiotic brickware updates in as many weeks.

I see two possibilities:

a) A counterfeit Chinese Microsoft Corporation is now pushing out updates derived from stolen fragments of the real Micorsoft's git-housed codebase

2) Foreign agents have infiltrated Microsoft's coding force and are working from within to undermine this formerly trustworthy bastion of A Job Well Done.

There are no other possibilities.

Bah!

All your automated production-line are belong to lightbulb in CEO's desk lamp.

Bah!

I'm not certain projects like this need to be justified based on "scientific advance", but I am interested when they offer the chance. One aspect of this sort of thing is that modern land speed record chancers face a difficulty in that after the Campbell-era focus went off the idea, the tyre manufacturers stopped producing the tyres capable of being spun to such high revs without either disintegrating or walking off the wheel, which is why Thrust used solid wheels if I remember correctly (it is possible I am conflating two different stories here and I can't be arsed to look it up).

Anyway.

I read all the linked stuff trying to get the skinny on the Nammo "hybrid" rocket motor, but am no nearer understanding why the Nammo motor is any different in principle to any other binary fuel rocket motor. Is it all about the throttling and re-startability? I am aware that this is a significant technological achievement in and of itself, but what is it about the Nammo motor that warrants the appellation "hybrid"? Nothing in the linked materials (including those on Nammo's own site) offer any insights.

Bah!

If this were a movie and not real life we would have a scene where two NASA bigwigs (I'm thinking Clint Eastwood as the old duffer in a sinecure job and Dulé Hill as the new-broom director) would be strolling through a certain Kennedy Spaceport attraction while discussing the shortfall in vehicular inventory when one would say, well there *is* an option (and the other would say what, no, you're crazy! and so forth) as the camera swung round to show the men (or perhaps one is a woman - swap Clint Eastwood for Cloris Leachman) standing in front of Atlantis in all its glory as the music swells.

Later, a rag-tag team of former Thiokol employees cobble together a working rocket on which the Old Girl can hitch a lift into LEO carrying an if anything even more rag and quite a bit more tag pair of astronauts, maybe two who washed out of the shuttle program years before or, no! Who were due to fly but got shitcanned when he shuttle was pulled from service. One of these should be Jack Black because he's in everything and the other could be any hot property du jour.

Tension mounts when it turns out that the special rescue module (mothballed at Boeing years before but easily pressed into service by the Boeing CEO who should be like Jason Bourne or the last James Bond) has a stowaway - none other than the treacherous Doctor Smith!

A fight ensues in the shuttle just before docking and it turns out that Doctor Smith is an android with Elmers white glue for blood when his head gets pulled off by the astro who isn't Jack Black! Dr Smith's headless body goes berserk and smashes the shuttle controls, forcing the team to pilot her in on manual controls.

They rescue everyone on the ISS, but cannot undock because the door latch doesn't work! Jack Black, who it is revealed is some sort of electronic genius works with one of the astros from the ISS - maybe a Russian, NO! A Ukranian! - to improvise a conversion of Dr Smith's body into a telepresence Waldo, allowing everyone to escape in the nick of time.

We cut to some exciting CGI of the shuttle re-entering and some stock crises so the actors can shout at each other and work all those switches and levers, all the while an anxious CAPCOM played by that Idris Elbow limey actor tries to establish radio contact.

We cut to a picture of the shuttle breaking through the clouds and a cheer goes up. Montage of the astros returning home followed by a twilight shot of Cloris Leachman (or Clint Eastwood) on the stairs up to Atlantis' door patting the skin of the shuttle and saying "That'll do, girl, that'll do".

END CREDITS

BLOOPER REEL.

Bah!

Nonsense!

These "ice blades" will flash into steam when bathed in the superheated gasses of the lander's mighty descent stage engine.

The astronauts may then safely walk about on the re-frozen ice-plain with the aid of non-slip space-crampons.

What?

Bah!

Argh! Facebook! Argh! Always on microphone!

Ooh, see how shiny it is.

Bah!

Airport security is lax?

Who knew?

I mean, it's not like the baggage handlers are just hired off the street is it?

Anyway, everyone knows the real threat is the bottle of shampoo or hand sanitizer passengers willfully try and smuggle on the plane.

Bah!

Well, "yea science!" and all that but of what value is this other than in refining technology? I mean, any life "discovered" will be 8000 years ago, no?

If you want to see planets* circled by other bodies, each with their own moon system, one need only watch "Firefly" or check out any number of paintings by the great artists of SF.

* Arguably. Since we cannot resolve the orbital crap over such distances, we cannot claim that any "exoplanet" has cleared its own orbit and - according to the wisdom of the De Grasse Tyson Claque - cannot therefor classify them as planets at all.

Bah!

Nice Ghostbusters reference there Mr Speed.

Bah!

Unobtanium powered rocket uses imaginary star drive.

I'll believe it if I see it.

Bah!

"The images of neighbourhoods across Europe reduced to rubble due to wartime air raids are a lasting reminder of the destruction that can be caused by man-made explosions."

Hmm. A bit "revisionist" for my tastes and doesn't go far enough.

How about:

"The images of neighbourhoods across Europe reduced to rubble due to countries making war on their neighbours are a lasting reminder of the destruction that can be caused by bellicose politicians and the racist/jingoist idiots that attend their rallies"".

Let's put the blame squarely where it belongs. No annexation of the Sudetenland, invasion of Poland, Blitzkrieg in France, no rubble, no explosions and the ionosphere remains placid.

Bah!

"I'm sendin' out a two-phase commit

Sending out a two-phase commit"

Bah!

While I have never seen a kernel panic from a yanked keyboard cable I wouldn't write it off as BS. Pulling the plug cleanly would have caused a stop-a I think (in-head memory is faulting when I try and access long-term storage for useless facts) but if the plug deformed and the pins separated from he motherboard connector in haphazard order, who knows?

I once worked at a place that issued their staff those neato IBM Thinkpads with the butterfly keyboard - the one that sprang out all steampunk-like and assembled itself into a full-sized keyboard when you opened the lid of the decidedly tiny computer.

The way IBM managed the miniaturization trick was to move all the peripherals normally fitted into the case (floppy, CD etc) out into external units that connected via a parallel or serial port as appropriate.

Problem was, the back of the lappy had a proprietary port the width of the laptop designed to dock into a "workstation" frame, and to break out the pins of this enormous harmonica-like port you needed to snap in a special accessory that hooked over one side of the laptop and snapped onto a spring-loaded pawl on the other. Still with me?

A colleague was madly typing away one Wednesday afternoon when the plastic pawl broke and the port adaptor thingy ejected. But it did so in an arc, starting on the left and not completely disengaging from the right side when the laptop reacted.

The bizarre unplanned unplug resulted in the lappy hardware sending all sorts of interrupts to Windows 95 in rapid succession, which decided that the laptop obviously needed to load a new profile as it was clearly undocking. From something. It didn't have a profile to load, but didn't let that get in the way of an attempt to do so.

It got about halfway through this before the laptop hung (or was turned off in a panic; I was suspicious but couldn't prove anything).

There were lots of company-revenue-generating ideas on that machine's hard-drive, but because of the new-fangled RIDs 'n' SIDs 'n' Bellz 'n' whistlez all now were unavailable without recourse to advanced low-level digital spanners and hammers.

They were still recovering the machine when I left work on Friday afternoon.

Bah!

A possible explanation.

If only there were someone nearby able to give the thing a tap with a Brummie Screwdriver ...