Posts by Rich 11 4578 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
You just feed the pancakes to a hen and a cow, they will process them for you and return your eggs and milk.
Eggsellent idea.
If you add pancakes to your compost heap you can also use them to fertilise sugar beet and lemon trees.
Cor, this is an even better whiz than extracting sunlight from cucumbers!
4) (with stopwatch) drop barometer - Newton is your friend.
A barometer's rate of fall is too prone to influence from air resistance and updrafts. There are two objects which can be used reliably:
A) A steel girder (dropped pointy end first, naturally)
B) A human body (everyone knows the terminal velocity of an unconscious person is 120mph)
Whichever one you choose, be careful where you're standing with the stopwatch. Also, if you choose B, make sure no-one ever knows you were on the roof.
being hassled by desperately cheerful chuggers leaping in front of me
Gloucester Westgate, one Saturday last month. Three of the fuckers in a row, maybe eighty yards apart. I was polite to the first one, brusque to the second, and snarled at the third "Only if you suck my cock." The look on his face was priceless.
The washing machine can message indicating its progress through the wash cycle, but why bother?
I don't understand the appeal of mindlessly throwing so much technology at things which are simple and basic enough for human beings to run reliably on their own wetware. Once you know the wash cycle lasts fifty, sixty or seventy minutes (whatever it is for your machine) that's all you need to remember to be able to predict when it will be done. That's going to hold true for 85% of your household washing needs (more like 99.9% if you're a single bloke).
Does it become effectively more fuel for the star or can elements remain?
The elements certainly remain. Everything will eventually find its way down to the fusion surface on the core. Only when the star is most of the way through its life will it start fusing anything heavier than hydrogen: first helium, then carbon, and maybe oxygen and nitrogen (or silicon/sulphur) if it's massive enough. Shortly after that (cosmically speaking) it goes bang.
If you have a system which works flawlessly in one direction, why bother with something in the other?
It only works flawlessly as long as the choice of book remains unknown: discover it and you can decrypt all the traffic you've intercepted in the past between those two parties. Users of a one-time pad are supposed to destroy each sheet after use so that even if the pad falls into enemy hands it can never be used to expose historic communications.
the idea that water is magic and has a memory of compounds it has been in contact with.
About ten or twelve years ago I was wandering aimlessly in the area around Russell Square on one of those very rare days in my life when I was all museumed out. I found myself on a street running alongside the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital and, heeding the call of nature, nipped down an alleyway for a slash. I like to think that every subsequent shower of rain that strikes the back of that building potentises my contempt for the idiocy which is homeopathy.
I forgot to add that you're also wrong about it being a Chinese system of medicine. Homeopathy was invented by a German doctor in 1802. I think you must be confusing it with acupuncture, the other great steaming pile of bullshit which infests the brains of far too many people around the world.
homeopathy - the traditional system of medicine in many parts of Asia for thousands of years - cannot be dismissed so easily.
It most certainly can be dismissed easily. Homeopathy flies in the face of all we know about chemistry and dose-response biology. The idea that diluting a substance to the point where it is vanishingly unlikely that even a single molecule remains yet the greater the dilution the greater the potency of the cure is utter stupidity. You must also not be aware that homeopathy has been tested many times, and that the only near-positive results come from small, badly designed trials and not from large, well designed ones. No amount of claiming that it is 'the wisdom of the ancients', as you fallaciously argue, can overcome that. Shame on you.
Either that or is from the US..
No. If I were from the US I would have used obscure variations on medieval units of measurement rather than bog-standard metric.
(With apologies to the El Reg Standards Soviet for the obvious omissions.)
If you have critical kit which regularly gets above 45C, tightly wrap it in 20 metres of 6mm clear plastic tubing. Insert one end of the tubing into one upper femoral artery of your youngest and healthiest intern and the other into the basilic vein of the opposite arm once all the air has been forced from the tubing. The intern will act as an active heat sink for your critical device.
But to this day he wonders why he wasn’t vetted
Because obviously the Soviets would only ever recruit the right sort of people, the ones who went to Oxbridge and knew all about art and culture, and who would get to meet the Queen (especially if they were related to her).
Or just skip that stage and use sophisticated algorithmic scoring and advanced AI to distribute marks.
Why even both scanning the test responses? Just broadly allocate the marks according to the socio-economic class of the pupil, injecting a small amount of randomness, and the results will mostly accord with current outcomes. It'd certainly keep the Daily Mail happy and the education minister du jour will be able to point and say "Look, my reforms and spending cuts haven't disadvantaged anyone."
Am I getting too cynical in my old age?
If everyone can see you and hear you, people tend NOT to talk to people unless its about work matters.
Two-thirds of the chatter I've overheard this morning from the 30 or so people at my end of the open plan hellhole I work in has been about the footie or what they did over the weekend.
I would like to congratulate the new Foreign Secretary on his promotion, ensuring that at this critical time in the grand history of British diplomatic triumphs there will be a far more frequent set of opportunities for exasperated interviewers to address him by his correct surname.
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