Posts by Arthur the cat 3377 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
the biggest-ever historical trebuchet
It would be interesting to see what a trebuchet designed by engineers with modern materials and techniques could do. I know someone has build a supersonic trebuchet. There's also an old Harry Harrison SF novel with, inter alia, a steam powered trebuchet(*).
(*) I have absolutely no idea whether such a thing is feasible. Is there a hardware engineer in the house?
ballista
Or maybe a trebuchet. They seem to be more common than ballistas.
Larger historical ballistae could apparently chuck tons over miles.
Not sure I'd want to be anywhere near the landing zone for that, especially in gusty weather.
I imagine some sort of soft landing might be contrived with a drogue chute or like
Single use crushable honeycomb cardboard would probably be sufficient. Stick it in the recycling afterwards.
hey Elon
NO!
If people haven't read it, this article by Charlie Stross about a visit to the Torness AGR is fascinating.
true random generators are pretty much impossible to make in silicon chips
It's actually pretty easy, look up ring oscillator for the basic circuit and more detailed papers like this IEEE paper on TRNGs on FPGAs for how to use the idea. The biggest problem is that the output is usually biased and needs whitening. That's often done by passing the raw output through something cryptographic like AES, which is why it can be slow.
arthur@arthur[5]▶ host -t aaaa theregister.com
theregister.com has no AAAA record
arthur@arthur[5]▶ host -t aaaa www.theregister.com
www.theregister.com has no AAAA record
arthur@arthur[5]▶ host -t aaaa forums.theregister.com
forums.theregister.com has no AAAA record
[Well, someone has to do it.]
From ageing memory, so not guaranteed to be 100% correct:
In version 6 the tty driver had one line (setting device register bits IIRC) commented with "Eat flaming death, fascist pigs!". In version 6+(*) this had been changed to "Eat soggy cardboard, pinko wimps!".
(*) 6+ was the update which meant that the C compiler could handle identical structure field names at different byte offsets in different structures. If you've ever wondered why all system structures have unique prefixes on all the field names (eg st_uid, st_gid in stat(2)), it was because cc originally handled field names in much the same way as BCPL, as manifest constants equal to byte offsets from the beginning of the structure.
Same problem with a Cinnamon machine living in Germany; locale is set to UK, language is set to UK, keyboard is set to UK
I've got a UK layout keyboard, my language is set to en_UK, my timezone is Europe/London, I live just 9 km east of the Greenwich Meridian and my ISP is a major UK one that various geolocation services will say is in Manchester, Bolton or London. Nevertheless TwitterX and occasional other random websites will every once in a while start talking to me in Swedish (Bork, bork, bork!). I have absolutely no idea why this happens.
Considering his rocket was only supposed to get to 5,000 feet and he could have got a plane flight at 30-40,000 feet for much less, I think he was mostly committed to getting gullible idiots to fund his eccentric hobby of building steam rockets.
The Tuskagee syphilis experiment took 25 years to be exposed. Roswell was supposed to be in 1947, 76 years ago.
Seminal paper on conspiracies and how long they can be kept secret:
Grimes DR (2016). On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0147905.
I've just had a divine revelation! God is a mimic octopus!
[Got to have an xkcd somewhere.]
That sort of "lost the superscripting" error occurs pretty much everywhere, including El Reg on occasions. Whenever I see a number 10xxx in print/pixels I automatically convert it mentally to 10xxx.
The Grauniad's appalling science(*) coverage is something else. I reckon they've become the left wing mirror image of the Mail, wanting only attention grabbing headlines to get an audience for their ads & "support us" begging rather than trying for sound reporting. These days I tend to read The Conversation more than the dailies.
(*) And technology, and economics, and …
It doesn't look hard to replicate
That's the really good thing about the paper – it gives a simple recipe with easily sourced ingredients for making LK-99. As you say, this should be replicated within days by a number of labs. If it wasn't the long vacation(*), you could even get a hordes of undergrads trying it as lab work.
(*) No idea what other countries do, maybe it's already happening.
Because it's so much easier to bill users to make more money than it is to pay out to fix the leaks
Not that I'm excusing Thames Water from being bloody awful(*), but they do have the problem that a lot of their leaks have this thing called London on top of (and around) them. Moving it out of the way so they can work on the leaks is a tad problematical.
(*) Thames plus a lot more of the water companies used to be customers of my company in the 90s, immediately post privatisation, and we got to see a lot of their problems. If ever there was a better use for the phrase "if I was you I wouldn't start from here" I've not met it. More recently my wife spent several years involved in regulatory oversight of a couple of water companies. Even on the occasions when they want to spend money fixing a problem, Ofwat(**) often won't let them. Add the positively surreal debt structures some of the companies suffer from, and the poor grunts who are actually trying to get us safe drinking water have my deepest sympathy.
(**) To say Ofwat is as inutile as a fishnet condom would be English understatement at its finest.
This meant though that you could screw up some old OSes by declaring 8K of stuff on the stack. Which you would have to be a complete psychopath to do in practice, but hey.
When my now wife was the company's latest, fresh out of Cambridge University(*), programming hire, I had to explain to her gently why using alloca to get a 64kbyte buffer on the stack of a Motorola 68020 Unix workstation was not a good idea.
(*) She had been invited to do a PhD with Andy Hopper, but had decided that academic computer scientists were all mad. So she moved into the software industry. [Imagine a facepalm emoji here.]
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
James Davis Nicoll
don't want to admit that your "correct" English is...French.
Ah bless.
The Yanks have such simplistic notions of this country and its language. Completely forgot German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Old Norse, Brythonic, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Cantonese, Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, Mandarin, …
A lot of sites absolutely lose their shit when they see a non-Windows/non-Apple UA
<voice mode="bewildered">Umm, err, but it's 2023!</voice>
Would I be right in thinking you're talking about US institutions? They've always seemed to me to be so far behind the curve that they're still in Flatland. About a decade or two ago I had a Bank of America investment account. They gave me online access to my (not insignificant) portfolio, protected by what they considered to be the highest password security. My password had to have all of a lower case letter, an upper case letter and a digit. It couldn't contain control characters or punctuation marks. It could be a whole six (count them) characters long.
And the last time I looked the typical GNU/Linux system had more lines of code from FreeBSD than from GNU. But whatever.
[I had real problems deciding whether I wanted the troll, fire or nuclear explosion icon for this. Readers should imagine all three apply. Yes, I'm a bit bored.]
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