Prof Wolff and the Great Egg Race are the reasons I took apart various knackered household appliances and tried to cobble together improvised machines. I never got very far, but inspired a love of engineering that has lasted into well preserved middle age.
Posts by MyffyW
2013 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013
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Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died
Forget Bruce Willis, Earth's atmosphere is our best defense against meteorites
Barclaycard website goes TITSUP*
SpaceX to try reusing both rocket and spacecraft for historic ISS mission
Bitcoin price soars amid technical troubles for exchanges
Short
If I had a spare couple of quid (some hope at this time of year) I would definitely short BitCoin.
The key, as ever, is timing - or knowing quite when the whole shebang will come crashing down. End of 2018 is my best guess, there's still a few irrational expectations to be piled onto this Christmas turkey.
NiceHash diced up by hackers, thousands of Bitcoin pilfered
Current situation seems to be a perfect storm of risky exchanges and (relatively) long lead times between asking to sell and the transaction completing.
And I still don't understand what problem a crypto-currency is actually solving for me: the only-slightly-paranoid (and very occasional) purchaser of politics, polemics and handbag-friendly phalli.
Hyperloop founder goes on immediate leave following sexual assault 'smear campaign'
Viagra's Irish plant STILL giving local men and dogs stiffies (not really)
Once again, UK doesn't rule out buying F-35A fighter jets
Re: Why go totally F-35?
I used to think F/A-18 Hornet's were the answer (until fitting a catapult turned out to be more difficult than balancing several tonnes of aircraft on a jet exhaust).
Then I thought drones seemed like a good idea.
And then finally I thought sod it and decided it would be easier to learn French / German / Russian / Mandarin / Sanskrit [delete as foreign adversary changes] and really hit the military-industrial-complex where it hurts. Take your cancellation clauses and shove them up your venturi pipe, BAe.
Quentin Tarantino in talks to make Star Trek movie
I'd pay to see Peter Capaldi reprising his Malcolm Tucker role aboard the TNG-era Enterprise:
"Ferengi! More like Snow White does seven dwarves. Rules of f#cking acquisition you say? Have you and Dick Twattington f#cked all the I's and fisted all the T's on the latest Private Finance Initiative?"
Citrix cracks Windows Store's monopoly on Windows 10 S apps
Today is your last chance to pick up a piece of channel history
The six simple questions Facebook refused to answer about its creepy suicide-detection AI
Re: Don't go there
Some learned wonk on the Today programme the other morning suggested social media provides the same sort of dopamine hit as any other addictive behaviour. Having observed my own mood rise and fall based on likes and upvotes I'd tend to agree. So Facebook really is the last place a clinically depressed person should be. Still, if they were there anyway maybe a pop-up that said "Why don't you switch off your PC and do something more interesting instead?" would help...
Elon Musk says he's not Satoshi Nakamoto and is pretty rubbish at Bitcoin
Watchkeeper drones cost taxpayers £1bn
Russian rocket snafu may have just violently dismantled 19 satellites
Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project
'Water on Mars' re-classified as just 'sand on Mars'
Baaa-d moooo-ve: Debian Linux depicts intimate cow-sheep action in ASCII artwork
Bitcoin outfit 'Tether' reveals US$31m BitBuck BitHeist
From Vega with love: Pegasus interstellar asteroid's next stop
Nathan Barley blamed for global GDP slump
Warren 'Mr Moneybags' Buffett offloads huge chunk of IBM investment
Rocky Ross 128 b might harbour aliens – and it's headed right for us
Q: Why are you running in the office? A: This is my password for El Reg
World Vasectomy Day: 15k men line up for live vent-blocking
IBM asks remaining staff to take career advice from HR-bot
Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'
Rackspace, HPE pitch pay-as-you-go private cloud
Los Alamos National Lab fires up 750-node RPi cluster
Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart
Re: Whilst I have sympathy..
"Tell me one country in the last 50 years, that ceased to exist , overnight and that had their currency made worthless"
Even with the examples quoted by @scrubber, nation-state Fiat currency is an order of magnitude more stable. Sure it can become worthless quickly, but nowhere near as quickly as someone can fettle with your e-tulips.