Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: Open YouTube

...although given how Einsteinium gets produced, maybe "We'll All Go Together When We Go" is more appropriate...

Re: Open YouTube

I'm not sure "The Masochism Tango" is going to help you.

Re: Open YouTube

It's almost as if the contestants have learned to memorise a list of 118 things (it was only 109 back when I studied chemistry)

Re: Open YouTube

A neutron should not be thought of as a sock containing two pool balls. It doesn't contain a proton any more than a photon contains an electron and positron.

The main problem with the physics of Very Small Things™ is that they do not have precise analogues in our world of Very Large Things™, so whilst we think of particles like little balls, and waves like ripples on a pond, these aren't actually very good analogues for the way subatomic entities work at all - they exhibit some properties of each, sometimes at the same time.

For instance, in experiments firing electrons at a double-slit, they interfere with each other like waves, and produce a pattern of high and low density on the other side of the slits. We generally think of electrons as particles, but in this case, they are exhibiting wave-like behaviour. They also do this, if you fire them at the two slits one electron at a time, with an individual electron interfering with itself, and the pattern made up by a series of electrons fired individually is the same as that made by sending a whole load at the same time.

Many subatomic particles also have other properties that don't really have any analogue in the macroscopic world, so once we get past charge, we start talking about things like "spin" then start running out of appropriate words and talk about "strangeness", "charm" and "up" and "down" as properties that avoid breaking the Pauli exclusion principle (which very crudely put, says you can't have two of the same thing in the same place at the same time).

So yeah, not pool balls in a sock.

A neutron actually "becomes" a proton through the decay of one of its constituent quarks (a down quark) into a different type of quark (an up quark). In the process, emitting a W^- boson, which almost immediately decays into an electron, and an electron neutrino.

So, if we are to stick with the very simplistic view of a neutron being composed of other particles, which we have already discussed, then the neutron actually also *contains* an electron neutrino.

Re: “It was discovered by accident in the debris in the first hydrogen bomb”

That's an interesting fact, until I googled it, I was convinced that napalm didn't make its "debut" until a decade later in Vietnam, and I was about to post asking whether you meant Vietnam, not Korea.

Just goes to show, "facts not opinions" - glad I checked before making a total tit of myself...

Re: Physics?

Philosophy is just applied sociology, and mathematics is just applied philosophy, and thus the circle is completed...

Re: Null and void

Sure, it's complex than can be captured in a short post, and I'm sure people would stop reading well before the end if we went into all the fine detail.

I think the essence is, though, that FPTP systems tend to lead to highly polarised 2-party systems, like we have in the UK, and in the US, where you end up with two camps that are so firmly opposed to each other that they can never meet in the middle-ground. PR tends to lead to coalitions, where you still have someone nominally in charge, but they do have to get the consent of their minor partners to get big changes through. In theory, in such a system, disasters like Johnson's ultra-hard brexit, which is only just starting to unwind, wouldn't get forced through so easily, as you wouldn't only have a single opposition party, which has to pick a single view-point and stick with it. Which is largely why Labour has been railroaded into the position of not having a position, which is useless for everyone.

In other words, in FPTP systems, you end up with the party that can get a slim majority taking all. In the case of the last election, this means a 70-seat majority for the Tories when they didn't even get 45% of the vote. They can then enact policies that the majority of the populus didn't actually want, or vote for, with impunity. The combination of the fixed-term parliament act, and the majority they have, means that they can then stay in power for at least 5 years, and can essentially call an election before then if they feel like public opinion is in their favour. Meanwhile, a sizeable portion of the public has no representation at all. If you support a minor party, like the Lib-Dems, Greens, or whatever Fartage's nationalists are calling themselves today you basically have no say, and populists can exploit this resentment in all these groups.

Re: Null and void

Indeed. Even as an avid remainer, I am quite willing to concede that the EU is far from perfect. I'm just of the general opinion that it is less imperfect than Westminster, and, on the whole, EU governance is done in favour of the interests of its citizens, rather than lobbyists. A big part of this is down to the fact that MEPs are elected via PR, which means that the EU parliament is formed from people who have to work together to get stuff done, whereas Westminster has FPTP, which means one party takes all and never has to compromise, except with its financial backers.

Re: confidentiality clause

If the official figures for infections are accurate (i.e. positive tests), then about 5.7% of the UK population have been infected. If 0.15% of the population have died from it, then the mortality rate from those figures is 2.6%, not 0.1%.

Given that a number of asymptomatic infections won't have had a positive test (and the lateral flow tests have quite a high false negative rate), it is a reasonable suggestion to make that the true number of infections is higher than 7.5%, so the mortality rate in reality is probably lower.

Studies of mortality rate show it to be somewhere between 0.8% and 1.6%. It is probably somewhere towards the lower end of this, because those studies are unlikely to be adjusted for asymptomatic infections, which you wouldn't know about unless you were conducting population-wide testing. Which we could have done if the government hadn't spewed all the cash into their failed "test track and trace" programme instead.

The new "UK" strain is purportedly more deadly, by about 60%, so that mortality rate for the new strain could be around 1-2%

I haven't seen anything anywhere that suggests 0.1%. Unless we are talking about the mortality rate in the population as a whole once it is all over. And as the previous poster has pointed out the total number of deaths in the UK is now almost at 0.16% of the population. Or, to put it another way, one person in 628, which means by now most people will know someone who has died from it.

Re: Disk Constraints

If you're worried about storage, why store dates as a 6 byte string, rather than an 8 byte one, when a 3-byte integer (a standard 32 bit integer with the most significant byte thrown away) storing days since the beginning of the Julian calendar on 01/01/1753 is good for the next 45,000 years and uses half the storage? I reckon a library function for conversion would probably only run to a few hundred bytes tops, the most complicated bit is working out how many days in a leap year. Plus, it makes date comparisons easier if you just convert today's date and subtract.

I suppose it depends on what you value more - disk space or program space in memory.

Re: 01/26/2004 would have been cleared

2021-12-31 or go home.

If you are talking about a date and time, then 2021-12-31T12:34:56Z or 2021-12-31T12:34:56+00:00 if you need a time zone. The T is optional, and the time doesn't need to include seconds (which can be fractional if you like)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I mean, if you can't agree on a standard way to tell machines what the date is, what hope do you have with fleshbags?

Re: Sounds

Remortgaging your house is also a much less useful tool for criminals laundering money. That documentation is required by law to prevent vast sums of money moving through the system from organised crime. See also: "unexplained wealth orders", and the wives of jailed Azerbaijani bankers who can't explain how they finance their shopping sprees in Harrods.

Re: Sounds

Indeed. The history of all transactions is written into the blockchain in perpetuity. It is essentially, a massive ledger that gets cryptographically signed again with each new entry (or "block"), so once a certain number of further blocks are "mined" (essentially calculating the key for the hash), typically ten, to statistically prevent race conditions, those transactions are set in stone.

Each transaction is between two "Wallets", each with its own id, so you can trace all transactions between wallets and know how much has moved from any one wallet to another.

What isn't so easy to know is who controls each wallet address, as they are essentially anonymous. However, it is not impossible to identify wallet owners with a bit of detective work, if you know enough about the timings and transaction amounts, especially if those transactions occur on exchanges, where they authenticate the users and their wallet addresses.

Sure, it's possible to "mine" a block, if you have the computational power to do so, and then transfer that to someone else's address, without anyone ever knowing who you are, but the moment you want to do that for cash, you either have to deal directly with the person paying, and take the risk of them ripping you off, or go through an exchange (and hope you can trust them) and your identity is known.

If governments got their act together, they would be passing legislation to ensure that such exchanges are well regulated, with requirements to properly identify users, and to make those identities known for law enforcement purposes, with a proper warrant. Encouraging established banks to operate bitcoin exchanges, for example, would reduce the need for in-person cash transactions, and then I'd really have no problem with such in-person transactions being outlawed. That would help put the pinch on cyber-criminals who use Bitcoin as a means for extorting money from people as well, as it would make laundering it potentially that much more difficult.

Re: Sounds

To be fair, it's pretty hard to short-sell bitcoin, when it's pretty hard to "borrow" from an anonymous bitcoin wallet without actually putting that transaction onto the blockchain. It has been up and down like a yo-yo for the last few weeks anyway, so there are plenty of "traditional" risks to take instead.

I see bitcoin as much more of a technological curiosity. I bought some cheapo "mining" gear for about £150 about 6 years ago, when it was still practical to use the USB miners in a mining pool. The fraction of a bitcoin I managed to mine while it was still practical is now worth around £2000, so on paper it's a profit. I'll hold onto it for another five years or so, and see where it is then. Either it'll be worth less than I "invested", or potentially enough for a deposit on a house. Either way, it's a long-shot curiosity, on an amount of money I can afford to write-off.

I don't know about you, but I get to choose which funds my pension pot gets invested in (and I have it split over several). I would expect all but possibly the ones rated as highest-risk steer well clear of short-selling, and anyone who puts all of their pension into a single high-risk fund either doesn't have much to lose, or is a fool.

Re: Casino metaphor

The brokers, who make a percentage on each trade. They don't care whether the person selling makes a profit or a loss.

Re: Would you pay $100 to screw a hedge fund?

I have to say, seeing these people get burned fills me with delight. Let's hope the stock price remains high until those short options expire (does anyone know when this is?) and the Redditors don't bottle it and cash out first.

Re: (((3xbody)++)++)++

It is, unless those bodies are far enough apart, that you can consider each separately as a two body system, and each is orbiting the centre of mass of each of the others, in much the same way that the Earth and Moon orbit the Sun together, and you don't have to worry too much about the separate effects of the Sun's gravity on each.

Re: ha

They dropped that some time ago in favour of "don't be mhhhmmmhhmmm HEY LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL"

I'm not sure it's that simple.

A lot of languages don't support the same types as C. In the most extreme cases, they may have no variable typing at all. If your C library expects an unsigned short, then how do you manage this natively with a language that only has the concept of a "number" type?

Add to that the fact that many languages also do not have pointers, they only have types that are either value or reference types (C# is a good example of this, if you ignore the shenanigans you can get up to inside 'unsafe' blocks). How would you pass a char* to a function that expects one, when your language only has immutable strings to work with? Or a block of allocated memory?

Things like function pointers are also likely to cause a headache.

By turning every language into something that contains a C compiler, you would in essence be making them all into something that is an extension of C. Some languages are going to be more amenable to that than others (AFAIK, you can, for example, make C# accept pretty much any C code if you tell it that your code is unsafe, but you have to jump through some hoops to make it play nicely with the concept of "managed code"). Some are going to require wholesale redesigning to make them compatible.

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

There's a good reason we don't use red=live and green=earth any more, and that reason is the most common form of colour-blindness on the planet, which affects around 1 in 24 people (one in 12 men, and one in 200 women).

Re: Professionals built the titanic...

...with a fictitious sky fairy and boat builder added in for teh lulz.

I'll not dispute that the prevalence of "flood myths" from around that part of the world points towards a prehistoric flooding event. I am disputing that some guy built a massive ship to save all the animals on instructions from "on-high". I'm also prepared to shout down any creation myths, flat-Earthism, or young-Earth fundamentalism you happen to have to bring to bear.

Re: what the fuck is wrong with using the key, anyway?

Back in the days when I used to ride a motorbike, I had one occasion when riding through freezing fog on the way to work, where I then couldn't turn the ignition off with the application of a lighter, due to the key being iced into the ignition.

Re: Hmm ...

So, whilst it’s not unreasonable to call me out for toxic masculinity, it’s not 100% sure to be the case…

Well, since you didn't act on it, it would be unfair to call you on it.

If you had, though, then it would.

Being tempted by something you shouldn't do is one thing, acting on it is quite another...

Re: Hmm ...

I'm not sure the "not cheating on your partner" is a particularly low bar to be honest.

As a mammal with a functioning reproductive system, I do appreciate what it is like to be influenced by those urges, but as an evolved sentient being, I also have a brain which is quite capable of overriding them.

Re: Hmm ...

One of the girls gave me her business card, with her hotel room number on it. I didn’t take her up on the hint - and now, more than twenty years later, I can’t for the life of me work out why not.

One would hope that it is related to the earlier part of your post, which mentions "my then girlfriend".

If not, then this is toxic masculinity at its finest...

Re: The whole activation scheme for a lot of stuff drives me nuts.

I have a Blu-Ray rewriter in my tower PC, which I think I bought 2 or 3 iterations back. It has never been used to burn a BR disc. I'm not sure I ever even bought any media. It is crazy how quickly we have gone through generations of removable media. At various times, I have used 5.25" disks, 3.5" disks, 3" disks (those weird rectangular ones in a hard case), Zip disks, Jaz diskx, CD/DVD/BR-R/RW (and various variations or writable/rewritable), compact flash (which were anything but compact), (mini/micro)-SD, Sony MemoryCard. (used by various phones, and the PSP), and various USB external disks and pen drives. I still have a USB "spy-watch" that someone bought me as a Christmas present with a 32Mb flash drive in it, which was already near obsolete when I was given it - cheap pen drives were at the 1Gb level at the time. Anyone remember the "memory cards" for the PS1 that were a great big plastic thing that cost about £20 and stored 128 Kb of data?

At least we now seem to have settled (at least for a time) on MicroSD for things like phones and cameras, and USB pen-drives for removable storage. A lot of devices now push all your data to "The Cloud" now without you even thinking about it. Who can even predict what the next iteration will be?

I don't think I'll ever burn a BR disc.

Re: Windows will eventually be free bait

That "still getting updates" thing is crucial to Microsoft as well. They have been burned once, with pirated copies of XP floating a round which didn't get security updates, and thus because the core of many botnets. That was not good publicity for Microsoft and help cement its reputation for Windows being insecure, whether that reputation was earned or not.