Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Any interest in

moist.von.lipwig.trust ?

OK, OK, I'm going. The one with "Making Money" in the pocket please

WHEN WILL THIS END??????

Like Reg Shoe I have nothing against zombies, but like him I hate it when they lurch and groan, and lurching and groaning is what the SCO group are doing.

...

I am getting my coat. The one with Night Watch in the pocket please

Strange to see NATO back down from vague NORK threats

OK, I'll get me coat

Very interesting read

We live in exciting times. It is great to see many different groups of extremely smart people trying to create breakthrough technologies to make impossible things possible

So on the next mission they will bring a vacuum cleaner?

Alternatively, the colour scheme was dreamed up by the same designer who labelled the black buttons in black on a black background, and when pressed a little black lamp lit up black to show that you had done it.

Only this time they used dark grey, probably chosen from one of those colour selection pages which has 24 identically coloured squares in them (at least to my insensitive male eyes, my wife swears they are different, and only number 42A matches the drapes)

Strange: how much power must a Lenovo laptop draw (I have one) to overheat a mains cable. Even a mere 0.75mm^2 cable (uncoiled in the open) is rated to 6 amps. At 230V that is 1.380 kW. They may have used 0.5mm^2 rated at only 3 amps (only 690 W), but even that kind of draw seems a bit high (toasted genitals high, even). At 110-120 V the issue is different, of course.

Icon, well, obvious, innit?

Is it just me

or is that Ford trying to look like an Aston Martin, by the look of that front grille.

Nice try, but given the choice I would rather get an Aston Martin for Xmas ( wouldn't mind getting a Ford, and then of course neither are very likely, but a man may dream).

Interesting and humorous read. I will point my students to this whenever they complain about difficulties in the computer lab (which is computer heaven compared to what you need to go through)

Well obviously

If the document is a legal one, it is very likely the DNA makes more captivating reading

The effect is even more pronounced in the case of accountancy

Lakes of methanol and ethanol

Have a lakeside holiday on Titan, OK it's cold, but you can get blind drunk for free once you get there (ethanol will see to the drunk, methanol to the blind).

If it is a disk world .....

DOES THE PERMANENT ERASE FUNCTION SPEAK IN CAPITALS ONLY?

Sorry, couldn't resist. Mine's the one with "Thud" in the pocket

Plus ce change, plus c'est la même chose

Ah, reminds me of an old BOFH episode

Of course it can fly

About 1% better than this half brick I have here

On a more serious note: I do not care about the political reasons for the project, if it can get people deeper into space, I am all for it. Maybe it's nostalgia for my days as a kid stuck to the TV screen watching all Apollo-related programmes, but more likely its just that I applaud all serious exploration of space.

Maybe the history of drinking has a similar three-phase pattern as warfare, which has the Retaliation (I am going to kill you because you killed my brother), Anticipation (I am going to kill you because I killed your brother) and Diplomacy (I am going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it) phases. Here we have

Avoidance: Don't eat that fallen fruit, it will make you drunk for a week!

Tolerance: Do eat that fruit, it won't make you drunk for a week

Binging: Let's brew our own stuff so we can get drunk for a week again

Raises glass and doffs hat to Douglas Adams

Very interesting image. It is stunning how well modern mosaicing software works compared to the older stuff. I use those methods a lot in lunar (33 pane mosaic here) and solar (31 pane mosaic) imaging. Different deconvolution techniques really help as well.