Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Oh dear

I feel an urge to install a couple to make our new home machine not just dual boot, but triple, quadruple, quintuple boot, if only to freak out the missus

Must resist, must resist

Let's have a beer to calm the shaken nerves.

Simon is on form

"... or the slow crawl of a progress bar across the screen as a windows boot prepares to fail..."

Having struggled with a series of installs lately, I can relate to that. Really I can.

Time for some percussive maintenance!!

Where is that cricket bat?

Note to self

IF I ever log on to facebook, remember to make rapid random cursor movements to confuse system

Better yet: do not log on to facebook (resisted so far, not tempted yet)

And it isn't even a ruggedized phone

sorry, time for me coat already

Ah, Memory Lane, 128kB of it

I had the Enterprise 128, and had a lot of fun with it. Hooked it up to a Brother electronic typewriter and could then print stuff with the ear-splitting sound of a daisy-wheel printer running at full clip. We even got the word processor to print things in cheapskate boldface by hammering down the letter twice with a tiny shift. The BASIC was very slow, as I remember. I programmed an FFT on it, which took quite a while on a 256 entry 1-D array. Quite a pointless exercise, but I just did it because I could.

Sorry, could you repeat that story?

I wasn't paying attention

That guy doesn't even know what an ID10T error is

I code,

I teach,

I even teach coding, if you must

I actually teach programming, which only needs coding the way a car designer needs to know the best shape for a wheel. Coding is a tool to turn algorithms into programs, or put differently, to turn your thoughts into actions. The real hard work is to crack a problem, to define exactly what must be done to solve it. This is a skill that everybody needs at some level. Turning the result of that analysis into code is comparatively easy (but also teaches a high degree of discipline in execution, which isn't a bad lesson either).

Regarding the idea of being an exceptionally boring weirdo:

I have been called exceptionally loud/weird/funny/smart/tiresome and a whole lot of other things

But never boring, never boring

Excellent selection!

I tip my hat to the little felt-tip prodigy who came up with it (it's the roo leather Barmah again (the hat, that is))

Interesting, but...

As others have stated there is a host of prior research on this.

I have done some modelling and simulation research, which shows that the presence of non-host bacteria (i.e., not the target of the phage) can scupper its attempts to fight the pathogen. I called this effect the "decoy effect". In complex bacterial ecosystems such as the intestines, the harmless bacteria can easily outnumber the harmful ones by a huge factor.

There are quite a few observations support this idea, showing that phage treatment, or treatment with bacterium-eating bacteria such as the wonderfully named Bdellovibrio bacteriovorax (there is also a Vampirococcus) help most in those cases when the host microflora is absent or is outnumbered (see M.H.F. Wilkinson, Predation in the presence of decoys: an inhibitory factor on pathogen control by bacteriophages or bdellovibrios in dense and diverse ecosystems. J. Theor. Biol., (2001) 208:27-36. Pre-print version available in PDF (292 kB)).

This does not mean the opportunities offered by phages should not be researched. We should not expect them to solve every (bacterial) ailment. Personally I think we will keep having to find new antimicrobial strategies. It is a case of what in evolution is called the "Red Queen Effect": you have to run just to keep in the same place, in terms of fitness.

Do women really want to be from Venus

I wonder if women putting forward that men are from Mars, women are from Venus have thought this one through. It suggests men are from a planet which is fairly cold, has a thin atmosphere, but is not totally inhospitable. Various robots set down on its surface which work for years on end, it is that hospitable.

By contrast, Venus is a positive hell: the atmosphere is highly acidic (containing sulphuric acid), the temperature is high enough to melt lead, and the pressure is high enough to crush any probe sent there. Thus, saying women are from Venus associates women with acid, molten lead, and unbearable pressure.

Is that really the message they want to send? ;-)

Hey, guys! There is this thing called TLS!

Let's not use it and develop our home-brew crypto. That's bound to be safer

Encryption 101: don't think your roll-you-own solution is going to be better than strong ones others have already thought about; 999 times out of 1000 you are dead wrong. Sure, there may be weaknesses in existing crypto, but who says there aren't worse weaknesses (not to mention gaping holes) in yours. When you develop something new, it is up to you to prove it is better.

No wonder the Dutch know how to make the most of sunlight

They have to make do with so little at home

Can you be voted "Best Bang since the Big one"

or does that title firmly belong to Zaphod Beeblebrox?

Icon, well, because I like things that go bang

Puts a whole new spin of the Trusted Computing Platform

doesn't it

BOFH time

Let the boss blow up his mobile phone by assuring him that the cattle prod (beefed up) is the latest charger. Ultra-fast on the go for busy executives who cannot afford to wait for their phone to charge

Darn, still no BOFH icon.

Oh well

May be we should not blame CO2

Hot air emissions by politicians might be far more hazardous!!

Maybe the Eastern Mediterranean and European Lowlands have suffered from this type of emission for longer.

They could use Lord Vetinari's argument

He stated that it makes more sense to spy on friends than on enemies, because you already know what your enemies think of you. By contrast, understanding your friends better by spying on them makes you even better friends.

So really, the NSA want to be your friend

Really

Honestly

We are only spying on you for the best reasons possible

Love these reports

Great stuff from the special projects bureau

I might consider going

If they find Martian beer (or vodka)

Diatoms, its full of diatoms!

That picture is definitely a diatom. We did a project on automatic identification of diatoms together with a number of diatomists, and I have seen loads of these creatures. The specimen is too damaged fr our software to handle, but I bet the people we worked with could tell you which species it is.

"Likely to be injured"????

Likely to be toast, with that amount of fire.

Poor fritter, I mean critter!

Her actions so far have lowered my bill considerably, while using more data abroad. If she keeps up her track record, she gets my thumbs up!