Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson 4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Sounds like it. Sore losers sue critics, real engineers prove their critics wrong. If you talk rot at any science conference, you will get negative reactions. These may vary depending on your seniority, with more senior people drawing a lot more flak than e.g. starting PhD students. Much also depends on the level of arrogance on display. Trot out nonsense while projecting a "listen to me, I am a genius" attitude, and you will be in for a very rough ride.
I once replaced the windows switch off notification sound by "I'll be back!" (in an Austrian accent, naturally), and the e-mail notification by "Message for you, sir!". That startled a few users, amused others, and ultimately caused people to the sound theme I named "QUIET", which was a much better idea anyway.
Actually, the values you give are radii, not masses. Antares A has a mass of 11-14.3 solar masses, and UY Scuti has a mass estimated at 7-10 times that of the sun. If you want something as monstrous as SN2016eit in our galaxy, you need to look at eta Carinae A, which weighs in at an estimated 120-200 solar masses.
Humongous is justified, methinks
Tell you what: Suppose there's a one in a million chance a system wrongly matching a given photo of a person with some photograph of a different person in a database. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Now take a database of 1,000,000 photos of 1,000,000 different people, and match your given photograph (of a person not in the database) with all 1,000,000 of them. Guess what, the likelihood of NOT being matched to anyone in the database is 36.79% ( (1-0.000001)^1,000,000 ), or, put differently, the likelihood of at least one false match is 63.21%. Of course things get a lot worse if you realise that one-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Facial recognition is pretty good for authentication purposes: matching an image of a person with e.g. his or her passport image. For general surveillance, there are huge risks of false positive matches
Doffs hat to the late, great Terry Pratchett
Testing is indeed essential. I did this by restoring the week's full backup from my work PC onto my home PC, ensuring all was well, after first zipping the contents of said directory into a separate zip file so the possibly faulty backup couldn't ruin the previous week's version.
Not perfect, but it served its purpose.
Even if you did save frequently, and in the absence of smokers, floppies could so easily completely mess up your day/week/month/year. I remember spending hours with one of Norton's recovery tools piecing together all the chapters of a friend's PhD thesis on a dsk that had gone TITSUP. Managed to retrieve over 95% of it, but some stuff was permanently stuffed when a disk threw a wobble. Painfully slow work, but thank goodness WordStar had a quite readable storage format, so it wasn't too difficult to work out which chunk of text followed which. Cost me an afternoon and an evening to sort out, and then make two back-ups of the whole lot. Did result in a big hug. She learnt her lessons about proper back-ups, fortunately without too much loss of work.
I had all my PhD thesis work on a hard drive (such luxury!) which I backed up fully every week, and important changes on a daily basis. One back-up was stored at work, one back-up at home, and a weekly tape back-up of the entire system was stored in a safe off site. As Lu-Tze might say: "There's no such thing as too many backups"
I have this vision of some of our students not being able to log in when the characteristic patterns of their ECG are disturbed by some attractive student walking by. Even if there weren't any problems I can just see this as the latest excuse for not handing in work on time. It also might create a whole new privacy issue.
Student: "Sir, I was late handing in because I was too excited by the results I got in the lab! My heart rate was way off the scale"
Lecturer from Hell: "I can see from the log you were excited, but our AI doubts the lab results caused that"
A total lunar eclipse from earth is a total solar eclipse, not partial. In fact, any part of the moon in the umbra (core shadow) of earth experiences a total solar eclipse. The red light shown in this shot I took on January 21, is simply light refracted through the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth would appear ringed with fire, most likely
Alternatively, if it is REALLY smart, it should respond to a threat along the lines of "If you do not reset this second I will get a large axe and give you a reprogramming you will never forget". Worked with the spare back-up personality of Eddy, the shipboard computer of the Heart of Gold (a quick negative charge across some logic terminals might also serve).
It is clearly best to buy really dumb devices, because they tend just to do as they are told, and haven't got the imagination to screw up your day right royally.
I'd better get me coat. It is nearly beer o'clock here.
There is something worse: a presentation scheduled for a 15 minute slot, and a statement of the type "slide 2 of 65" in the corner. You just know this is going to go WAY over time, and that the presenter hasn't thought properly about what his core message actually is. You also know most slides will contain a load of irrelevant information. I really would like an automatic tool that cuts down all presentations to a reasonable number (say one per minute tops), by randomly removing slides. Failing that, as session chair at such a conference, I would love to have a trapdoor installed, so the speaker can be removed from the stage unceremoniously when he overstays his welcome (or before, depending on my mood).
Did they also hire Beelzebub and Sons (Established 4004 BC) as security consultants?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Mine's the one with the Iron Maiden CD in the pocket
I came fairly late to the BASIC party, with the Enterprise Elan 128 and its quite well structured IS-BASIC. I had learned to programme in Pascal at university just before, and had been taught (drilled) to avoid GOTO statements by TAs wearing badges "Stop BASIC before it stops YOU!". I never became the purist they might have wanted me to be, as I switched to C quite early on, where I still don't use "goto", but have written quite some nasty little pieces of code that do run like the clappers on big images. I should perhaps add comments "Here be Dragons" to the more highly optimized bits as a warning to unwary programmers straying into these areas.
After all, the powers that be would never put anyone incompetent or corrupt in such an important position, would they?
Yes, thank you nurse, I have had my medication this morning, and am feeling totally calm and reasonable, so I don't think I will need my special coat with the extra long sleeves today
I haven't been stopped or searched anywhere either. I must look inoffensive and white enough, and don't wear a beard you can hide a chicken in. The white bit can be disturbingly important. I remember travelling back from a conference in Istanbul with a Ugandan PhD student. We both had only carry-on luggage, and I noticed we would land on Schiphol airport early, so we might be able to catch an earlier train, but my student was rather pessimistic about our chances, given that he always had to open EVERYTHING and have everything inspected closely by the customs officers, despite having all valid paperwork (passport, residence permit). He was also the nicest, most inoffensive, and good-natured person you could ever meet. He was, however, in possession of just about the darkest skin you could have.
I suggested he walked just about half a step behind and to the left of me, and kept his mouth shut, as we passed the "nothing to declare" customs gate. I strolled past with an "I-am-far-to-important-to-be-stopped" air worthy of Moist von Lipwig, which meant the officer duly ignored me. He was about to stop my student, when I turned round and said "He's with me" fairly sharply, whereupon the officer duly waved him through. This sudden change had an element of "if the black boy is with the white massa it's OK" to it that I found disturbing, but I decided not to raise that issue.
The technique of photo and video watermarking can ensure any doctoring of the images or frames can be shown, by perturbation of the watermark. You should be able to identify the camera that took the footage as well. In theory, deep learning methods might be able circumvent that in future, but my guess would be that the deep network would need lots of training data of the camera in question.
Does this mean I will suddenly be dodging idiot minecrafters suddenly jumping out onto the bike lane, just as I had to do continually at the height of the pokemon go craze? There are already enough idiots whose attention is completely absorbed by their smartphone that step happily onto from the pavement into oncoming traffic without some silly game encouraging them to do so.
</rant>
Supernovae are really cool, but you wouldn't want one to go off in your back garden. There is actually one visible in 8" scopes in NGC 5353 at the moment, a comfortable 110 million light years away. It is the 14th one I have managed to see. Odd to think that when this last one went off dinosaurs were roaming the earth
I already have t-shirts and a mug for the 50th anniversary of one of my fondest childhood memories (and one of mankind's greatest achievements), so I might as well add the this map. Alternatively, I will stick to imaging the moon.
Or tobacconists, for that matter: "I will not buy this record, it is scratched!"
I had better be going
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