Posts by Stanislaw

Mixed feelings

Whilst I salute the achievement of bacon-on-demand, I find the term Department of Meat Sciences ... disturbing.

Um..

Brundle is famous for his "talk to a random person on the grid" spots and minor faux pas are practically the objective, or at least an acceptedly high probability. Nothing unusual in this one at all.

So Much For Subtlety

Just a GSV having a larf, I expect.

I'm Sorry, I haven't a clue!

"Samantha has to slip out now because she needs to go to the supermarket to buy something for dinner. She's very fond of Mr Sainsbury's steak-in-ale but this evening, by way of a change, she's looking forward to trying Mr Dewhurst's tongue in cider."

Humphrey Lyttelton* 1921-2008, and much missed.

*OK so he won't have written it, but it's all in the delivery.

"A dipolar component of anisotropy is predicted...

...with an amplitude that exceeds existing bounds at EeV energies"

Been saying that for ages. Only last Friday down the pub, for instance. "Lads, " I said, "there's no way these high-energy particles originate from the Milky Way. You wanna know why? Cos they'd have to have a dipolar component of anisotropy with an amplitude bigger than our galaxy can manage. That's why not. And as for that Donald Trump..."

Etc.

Looking for a bunker

You know things are bad when you find yourself really hoping that Theresa May will be the next PM. Sheesh.

Buried

I wonder why they chose today to announce this... oh, hang on...

They never ever got it, did they?

I have a couple of Nook devices and I love 'em. Really nice little bits of hardware.

They have always been thoroughly, utterly, totally let down by B&N's appalling online store. It does not surprise me one bit to hear they botched their web site relaunch too.

I've been waiting, waiting for them to see the light and realise where they've been going wrong with digital sales, but clearly they never had an inkling.

And I'm sure they'll have to do better than maintaining access to the "vast majority" of what I've bought from them. There must be consumer laws governing this sort of thing?

Cheer up!

I'm not sure why people are being sniffy about this one. SpaceX do appear to have achieved a soft landing almost dead centre on a moving target. The loss of the vehicle seems to be unrelated to the actual landing.

Yes, I know the rocket went boom so the result is the same - but faced with either having to engineer the whole landing system or having to engineer a better landing leg, I know which problem I'd rather have.

Idle curiosity

Because I am not a rocket scientist, I wonder how many times you can fill & empty the tanks on one of these things before the repeated contraction & expansion degrades something to the point where it's no longer flight-worthy.

Or once on the pad, do they keep the tanks cold all the time (not full - just cold) to prevent such a thing?

Not long now (possibly)...

1. Serve the public trust

2. Protect the innocent

3. Uphold the law

4. (Classified)

And all on one leg too. Not bad.

Backatcha

I have often looked up at Mars in the night sky. Kinda cool to think it was looking back at me the other day.

Louis Vuitton?

Surely not. Those are clearly primitive beer tankards, laid ceremonially on their sides to indicate that the ritual emptying of their contents is complete.

What were they thinking?

The whole Windows 8 adventure thoroughly perplexes me.

We all love touchscreens on our mobile devices cos they're great for the odd email or a bit of web browsing. Nobody (who's sane) expects to do much serious work on these devices. So why on Earth MS thought we'd all like to do our word processing, spreadsheets, computational fluid dynamics and so on through a touchscreen is entirely beyond me.

But then I'm not a highly trained, highly paid, top exec in the software industry. Just a guy who uses a PC every day.

"Netbooks done properly: Cheap, the right size and without Windows"

So, like they were meant to be then? Before some idiot turned them all into small laptops? My cup runneth over.

Won't somebody think of the middle-aged?

Jolly nice that they're going to build on the technical success of Curiosity (too early to pronounce on the scientific success), but...

"... another significant step toward sending humans there in the 2030s."

So that'll be about ten years after the Chinese then. I'll be almost 70. Looks like I'm never going to get that holiday on Mars promised to me by my Wonder Book Of Science when I was eight and a half.

Genuinely...

... the best FPS I have ever played.

The graphics are naturally primitive by current standards but for the time they were really good, and what it now lacks visually it even now makes up for in terms of sheer fun. There's a mission progression that actually makes proper logical sense, a coherent plot (unusual for anything Star Wars), intricate levels - some of which require proper problem solving to complete, a real sense of "you're on your own now" in not being able to save progress during a mission, and while the weapons may in themselves be a pretty standard assemblage, there is huge scope for using them creatively to get past the next baddie. It's a shame that as the visuals have improved in more recent FPS, many of these elements seem to have been left out.

Our robot servants are getting more subtle

Clearly they have decided violence is going to be too wasteful. Economics is faster.

Shouldn't this one be filed under Rise Of The Machines?

Nice one

Interesting that the range was being called in metric. Is it only NASA-built projects that go into space using feet & inches now? Just askin...