* Posts by Mips

514 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2010

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Truck, sweet truck: Volvo's Chinese owner unveils methanol/electric truck with bathroom and kitchen

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Truck or jail cell

Hello

Is this 1st April? Ha ha ha.

Let me out now.

Please let me out now.

I want my mummy.

British naval food doesn't look half bad... so we're going to try it out for ourselves

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Camouflage

I once had the task to design a replacement galley in a shore based establishment. As I was surveying the building I noticed that a large cockroach had fallen off a duct into a tub of custard on the servery counter. I noted this to the crewman manning the servery expecting him to do something about it. He did. He stirred it in.

Added protein I suppose.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Mips
Childcatcher

62.8 trillion

Why stop there?

UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger

Mips
Childcatcher

Softbank

You may not have noticed but SoftBank do not bake silicon.

'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Tesla boss Elon Musk has not explicitly responded to the incident

Who? Me? Nothing to see here.

Do batteries make hotter fires than good old petrol?

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Mips
Childcatcher

Queen Elizabeth

If you’re going to introduce a Queen Elizabeth unit of length then you need to be clear if this is QE1 or QE2. As we cannot be clear how big the QE1 would be but the QE2 is less nebulous (if possibly a bit shorter) so the question is how big is HMS Queen Elizabeth in QE2s?

Europe promises all-out assault on batteries to counter China’s lithium-ion domination

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Hmmmm

Now here’s a thing.

Each electric car needs 10kg of lithium, each truck or bus needs 50kg and the there are all the vans. Each wind turbine needs 10000kg for backup and solar power a similar amount.

For the UK to go all electric as planned we will need over 500,000 tonnes of lithium metal.

Now here’s the problem the provable world wide recoverable reserves of lithium are only 350,000 tonnes. So go figure. Will this work?

We need to make sodium batteries work.

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

Mips
Childcatcher

Now there’s a thing

For once dear old Bill is right.

But here’s a question for Elon Musk: how much carbon dioxide is

produced for each Bitcoin?

Come on now; has anyone got the answer?

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Mips
Childcatcher

Dear Donald

Never mind you can always use Tiktok

Titanium carbide nanotech approach hints at hydrogen storage breakthrough

Mips
Childcatcher

Inefficient

The conversion of fuel to electricity, hydrogen, storage, hydrogen to electricity is very inefficient. It is not a problem that will go away.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Summon the lawyers!

Nail duly struck on head

Get it out there people this is a real problem.

However we should also be aware that the contravention of BS7671 resulting from the dangerous installation of said power cable would require the energy supply company to disconnect the supply to the house.

EV users should also be aware that should an accident caused by the cable result in death they might be charged with manslaughter.

I have not yet heard of any “charger rage” incidents. But give it time.

Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: nonsensical ?

Let’s hope that they got into Donald Trump’s account.

Now that would be nonsensical.

Spare some change, guv? UK's CCTV regulator pitches for £100k budget increase

Mips
Childcatcher

How much!!

£100k for two bods. Oooh cheapskates!

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Order of magnitude error

But EM interference is not news.

Back in ‘85 We had a project to install a mainframe in a site which backed onto the Liverpool/Southport rail line: 1500V DC. The EM survey showed huge induced voltage spikes as a train went past. This site was abandoned.

Somewhat later we had to abandon a project near Blackpool airport. This was blasted by the airfield approach radar.

There is nothing new under the sun.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Mips
Childcatcher

Hey; thought this was about ALGOL

Yes

At college in ‘68: Elliott 803B. Wow! 8k memory; compilers on tape deck. Ran Elliott Autocode FORTRAN and the beloved ALGOL.

Yess it was that good in them days.

Are you extracting the urine, ESA? Why, yes it is, from Moon dwellers to build homes out of lunar regolith. Possibly

Mips
Childcatcher

01.04.2020 Har! Har!

Yes. Har. Har

After 20-year battle, Channel island Sark finally earns the right to exist on the internet with its own top-level domain

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: South Sudan

CQ? That was replaced by SOS in the days of morse code. What are they trying to tell us?

Post Office burned £100m in UK taxpayer cash on Horizon IT scandal legal fees, MPs told

Mips
Childcatcher

Who is responsible

It is like Grenfell.

There are people who know what happened. Someone signed off on this defective system. They must be rooted out and prosecuted. It happens too often and I am angry.

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Riddle me this:

I think time is the issue here. That the Hubble constant at the Big Bang may be different than now. If we were able to measure H0 now at the CMBR location it might well agree with the local H0. I do not see a way of testing this and we just have to accept the fact and make a rational explanation.

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Things change slowly

Now here’s a thing.

If Andromeda got big by gobbling other galaxies has anyone asked how the Milky Way galaxy got to be so big? Perhaps we are guilty as well.

Oh dear me how did we get so fat? Porker.

'Lightweight' UPS-style flywheels to power naval laser zappers

Mips
Childcatcher

Hang on a minute....

... 3.2MJ storage. Now let me see, that would be about half a cup of diesel.

Wow really! So big. Wouldn’t even get your electric car out of the garage.

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Screw Your Rules

On the other hand....one two three four five.

What’s that Primus and Septimus, you don’t like that?

Northern UK smart meter rollout is too slow, snarls MPs' committee

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Stupid gimmick from the start

Too right.

I wouldn’t have one in my house.

Why do you need something to tell you to turn it off? Just turn it off stupid.

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Mips
Childcatcher

Oooh!

I am sooo glad you got that off your chest.

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Mips

Re: I'm not worried

Yeah but:

Thermal system cannot be more than 50% efficient and more like 40% whereas lithium ion systems are going towards 70%.

How does that factor.

Has science gone too far? Now boffins dream of shining gigantic laser pointer into space to get aliens' attention

Mips

60W light bulb

Here we go the journalists are at it again. What! No Olympic sized swimming pools?

This is a site for technologist. Why do they need to have a megawatt explained?

Anyway my A size lamps are 7W LED not 60W incandescent. So there!

Good news: Largest, most ancient known galaxy supercluster is spotted. Bad news: It's collapsing on itself

Mips

Re: Symmetry

Yeh. But this is really old news. It's nothing like that now.

Whoops. There goes the neighbourhood again.

New theory: The space alien origins of vital bio-blueprints for dinosaurs. And cats. And humans. And everything else

Mips

But still...

...the Universe made us!

What about God? Oh! It is out there somewhere. Or everywhere.

NASA's Kepler probe rouses from its slumber, up and running again

Mips

Plow...

... or to plough.

OK. So it is American.

No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull

Mips
Childcatcher

Yes and...

...not only will the days get longer but the moon will fly higher still until eventually it departs orbit! (Yes this will happen; look in Wikipedia). Just think of the fix we will be in then with no tides and very long and cold nights and long red hot days. How's your beach holiday now?

And another thing; some lunatics want to build tidal power plant. Mad! It will slow the earth's rotation even sooner.

Mips
Childcatcher

More like...

....you would not have any time for work.

UK rocket-botherers rattle SABRE, snaffle big bucks

Mips

NOX

Forgive my ignorance but air plus fuel and high temperatures equals NOX. Yes? How is this good?

Spadadam might be wet but has more of a problem with snow. However the last time I was there it was very much a military site. Eintrit verboten. It is also full of snakes.

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Mips

Re: Not useful

Quite right. And they are too faint to hear anyway.

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

Mips

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

It is not about vehicle range it is the infrastructure capacity that is lacking.

To fix it will cost more than £250bn, yes, £250BEEELION.

Who is going to pay. Hey you, are you listening?

Another day, another meeting, another £191bn down the pan

Mips

Re: The simple rule of corporate meetings...

I hate meetings to.

But do you prefer the Stones or Stone Roses? I can't make my mind up. Perhaps we should have a meeting about that.

Full shift to electric vans would melt Royal Mail's London hub, MPs told

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: So, not just a question of...

Well here is the answer and we are all going to need a bit more than 50p.

Whilst there is the option to go hybrid, if these are plug is it will only provide a marginal reduction to the increased electrical demand. And hybrid vehicles are not fuel efficient as has been proven they use about as much petrol as the equivalent straight direct drive. At this moment sales of petrol cars are increasing and diesel is declining with the possibility that manufacturers will be fined for increasing CO2 emission.

The Post Office are saying they have a problem and fortunately this news has entered into the political arena because this is where the problem originates. They say ignorance is bliss and there is none more blissful than a politician, The decision to go electric is ill founded. Here are the consequences.

The power supply to most dwellings is based on average consumption, whilst you might be able to call on 14kW in your house on average the supply might only be able to provide as little as 750W and as much as 3kW depending where you are and when the property was built, commonly it is 2kW. Vehicle demands are about 3kW for a range of 100 miles and 7kW for 200 miles. This means that your house will now be taking as much as 9kW from the supply, more than 4 times what it was designed to provide. It is ok if a small number of electric vehicles are connected, the system has some flexibility, but if penetration is more than 10% problems will arise as the system will be overloaded and voltage drop will exceed statutory limits. Beyond this point, to make electric vehicles work the network will have to be replaced. To provide power to all electric vehicles using the existing approach would require 4 times the number of substations and all distribution mains will need to be replaced. The resulting disruption would be huge.

The cost would also be huge.

KPMG have reported on recent research into how we can deal with the reducing availability of gas. They estimate the cost of replacing the electrical network at between £150bn to £250bn. Yes, 250 BEEEELION POUNDS! As it happens this is the figure I came up with AND we have to add in the cost of three nuclear power stations at about £35bn each.

Conservationist will say we can use photovoltaic and wind sources, but we need more power not just energy and these will not cut it. Anyone who does not understand the difference between power and energy should not comment. Sadly this group includes most journalist, politicians and ecowarriors. Yes we have to go nuclear; convention power generation will be inadequate after all we are running out of gas.

It is amazing that the government has committed so much expenditure with a short statement and with no opposition. The cost will be more than Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq, HS1 & 2, Crossrail and all the windfarms put together, How can this be allowed to happen?

You might think that the bright sparks in the executive have an answer, but clearly there is not one single technical mind present. They think it is all about batteries and drivelines. It is not.

If we don't do anything I can see that we might have civil disruption, "charger point rage" incidents, generators in the back of the garage, or the Clarkson view: a generator on the back seat. At the very least planning law should include that all new developments have the capacity to charge vehicles.

There is a solution; we have not looked at alternatives. We need to invest in exhaust scrubbers; this should prolong the life of diesel. We need to invest in fuel cells. OK hydrogen is difficult to produce and store, but we could also use ammonia.

It is a difficult question but there is no doubt that the policy came as a knee jerk reaction. It is not adequate, not fit for purpose and like the poll tax will cause no end of problems.

Time to start protesting.

Oxford Uni boffins get things rolling at new electric motor factory

Mips

Power

My son was a STEM graduate but he is now an accountant. He followed all the power, cudos and money and made the appropriate career choice.

That's just the way it is.

Don't panic... but our fragile world is drifting away from the Sun

Mips

Lunartics

But we already knew the same is happening to the moon (about 10mm per year) and we have a lot less time to think about it. We will loose the moon a long time before we drift away from the sun.

Up, up and a-weigh! Boeing flies cargo drone with 225kg payload

Mips

Test Bed

Just wondering. It does look like a bed. Suppose I slept in it could it deliver me to the office in the morning. It would beat some of these TV ads. Yeh.

UK waves £45m cheque, charges scientists with battery tech boffinry

Mips
Childcatcher

The BIG issue

It would be great to have better batteries but this is not the solution they still require charging.

It is not just the generation capacity it is the distribution network which is inadequate. Recent estimates show we need six additional nuclear power stations at a cost of £120bn. The distribution network has to be replaced or supplemented every street in the country will have to be dug up with huge disruption at a cost of £200bn. That is £16k for every electric vehicle. Then there is the question of rollout. Will this be another broadband debacle?

Would we not be better off going hydrogen and spending this money to make this work?

H0LiCOW! Hubble's constant update paves way for 'new physics'

Mips
Childcatcher

Paradox

I have never been clear to whether this has been explained or not and if the following has been factored into the calculations.

When we observe distant object we are also looking at the universe at an older state; further object are older than nearer ones. Is it not the case that OLDER object are faster than nearer ones. It is age that gives the velocity not distance. This thought is prompted by Big Bang theory and that from a single point there are some objects more distant than others i.e. they are going faster.

However if the Hubble constant is measured to be the same in all directions and this says that we are at the centre of the Big Bang. I think this has been disproved.

Dutch students serve up world's first 'drone café'

Mips
Childcatcher

Brings new meaning to the word

OI! YOU SPILLED MY PINT

But there is no one to head but.

Google emits Android N developer preview early to smoke out bugs

Mips
Childcatcher

N Ho Ho wait till they to Z

After digesting all these sweeties it will obviously be ZITS

European Space Agency lights up new Australian antenna

Mips
Childcatcher

New Norcia

I thought that was is SE Asia.

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Dunno about warming

Doesn't matter whether you do or not it is a question about where do we go next. Fosil fuel is just about dead and renewables will not do it especially when electricity will replace most present fosil consumption. Nuclear is the only way. And big time as well. This means we will have to get into Thorium or we are dead.

German government orders local CIA station chief to pack his bags

Mips

Sour Krauts?

No racial stereotype comments please. We are British.

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Interesting

Treadstone is it not?

OHM MY GOD! Move over graphene, here comes '100% PERFECT' stanene

Mips
Childcatcher

"suffix du jour"

Never mind stanene I like "suffix du jour". Quick get onto the Oxford English Dictionary

Saturn's moon Titan had swamps, say astroboffins

Mips
Childcatcher

Re: Polypropylene?

Yeah and propylene does not a marine environment make. For that you need salt and water.

(I don.t know the standard of journalism these days. I despair!)

They're back: The coffin-punting naked Polish calendar girls

Mips

Why is it?

Why is it that it is always El Reg that gets the tasty bits?

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