Posts by TitterYeNot

"Now imagine sticking it in a kebab shop on a Friday night..."

Nah, they have another model for that sort of situation, Pepper's sibling ED.

"Please put down the red-hot chilli sauce - you have 20 seconds to comply.

You now have 15 seconds to comply..."

Re: That's quite a pro-vaping article.

"I'm struggling to see any significant difference between nicotine gum and nicotine vapour, other than vaping _looks_ like smoking."

There's a quite significant difference.

Nicotine in gum and sprays is absorbed slowly though the relatively thick lining of the mouth and/or nose, so while they reduce the overall effects of withdrawal if you're attempting to give up smoking, they do not give you an instant nicotine 'hit', more a background level of nicotine in the blood.

Cigarettes and vaping products, on the other hand, produce a nicotine vapour that is inhaled and absorbed through the lining of the lungs. This lining has a large surface area and is very thin, so nicotine is transfered into the blood, through the heart and up to the brain in a matter of seconds, giving a 'hit' as it binds to certain neurotransmitter receptors and relieves withdrawal symptoms.

This 'hit' is presumably why it seems so hard to give up smoking/vaping, as the act of drawing on a cigarette or vaping machine is strongly associated with the relief of nicotine withdrawal a few seconds later.

Re: re: Government representation on the board

"Could do with fixing the liberal bias too, but to do that would mean replacing the Guardian reading staff at every level."

While I agree that governance at the Beeb over the last few years has not exactly been stellar, I have a hard time believing that replacing the current staff with Daily Mail and Sun readers would have a positive effect on the quality of the programmes it produces...

Re: No.

"It would mean Katie Hopkins would never die."

Yes, but would anyone notice the difference if she suffered brain death?

"It was the wrong way around on the launch pad?"

I know you're joking, but you're probably right.

I'm not sure about the Soyez vehicle, but I'm guessing it's similar to some other rocket stack launches in that it requires a roll programme after clearing the tower. Umbilical and support connections usually require that a vehicle has a fixed orientation relative to the tower before launch, but the location of telemetry and comms equipment within the vehicle may mean that after liftoff it's not in an optimal orientation relative to the ground, hence the roll to correct its position.

Re: McSheepFaces.

"What's the collective noun for the group of people who resort to the clichéd 'sheep' epithet?"

Ovipopulolambasticators - otherwise known as Sheptards...

Re: Surprising?

"it doesn't seem surprising that we used complex tools only 50,000 years ago"

If I remember my history correctly, the significance of this isn't so much that complex tools were found from 50,000 years ago, it's more that the use of ground rather than chipped stone tools is used to define the dividing line between the mesolithic and neolithic periods in a given region. This has many other implications i.e. in many cultures it marked the change from nomadic hunting and gathering to domestication of plants and animals - the beginning of farming.

Re: tests in Germany, China and at NASA have corroborated

"I thought the results were statistically dubious and within margin of error?"

I saw a Horizon programme on the BBC recently which looked at attempts to manipulate gravity. They showed a team of researchers (in Germany I think) who built their own EmDrive and tested its thrust using extremely sensitive and accurate equipment. They demonstrated that it did indeed produce a very small amount of thrust when powered up.

Unfortunately, when they turned the device through 90 or 180 degrees, it still showed the same amount of thrust in the same direction, so it wasn't due to any exotic EmDrive propulsion, as the direction of thrust should move with the orientation of the device.

Doesn't disprove anything of course, just means we need a certain degree of healthy scepticism when looking at these sort of claims.

"I feel like eventually we're going to find out that black holes account for most of the dark matter out there, and just other mass in interstellar space that we have no means to detect"

Except that black holes are almost certainly not what physicists refer to as dark matter, they are (as far as we know) composed of 'normal' matter compressed by gravitational forces until collapsed into a singularity. As it is estimated that matter that we can't see makes up over 80% of the mass of the universe, if that mass was accounted for by black holes they would be far more common than stars (which they aren't, otherwise we'd see their effect on the movements of planets, stars and galaxies.)

Dark matter is so called because we can detect its gravitational effects, but it doesn't interact with normal matter other than through gravitational attraction, and it appears to be very diffuse (i.e. spread thoughout galaxies in lumpy clouds). You can't pick it up and weigh it, or have a look at it by illuminating it with a torch (flashlight for leftpondians), as it doesn't interact with either your hand or the light from your torch.

I looked it up, but... I'm aware that 'gigabit Britain' isn't meant to mean anything at all in the first place, but purdah still has my stymied.

'Purdah' is the political practice of delaying government announcements till after an election, or in this case the EU referendum, to avoid accusations of unfairly influencing the vote.

'Gigabit Britain' to a politician means a gigantic bit of erm, oh, I don't know, my permanent secretary tried to explain it to me, but I don't really understand this technical stuff and I don't think he does either, but it'll be really good for Britain, really...

Re: Relief

"For a horrible moment I thought Our Alistair was going to be cut down in his prime"

Yes, I had visions of Dabbsy being forced to face the humiliation of walking the streets of London wearing a sandwich board covered with BT adverts. Die Hard 3 all over again...

Re: RRS It’s Bloody Cold Here

A definite touch of Iain M Banks' ship names there.

Alternatively, with a generous pinch of Culture humour, the RRS Whatever Floats Your Boat, alongside its sister ship, the RRS Fluid Displacement, Usually...

Re: You have to wonder

"Why there aren't penalty clauses for nondelivery."

There almost certainly are, the problem is getting an agreed definition of non-delivery. Say ACME Consultancy Corp. is contracted to deliver a system for a public sector department. The system is spec'd, built and delivered for testing.

Technically clueless big boss civil servant - "We can't use this! It's useless! It doesn't do X, Y or Z! We want our money back!"

ACME Consultancy Corp. - "Here's the specification you gave us, it's supposed to do A, B, C and D. Why didn't you tell us about X, Y and Z?"

Technically clueless big boss civil servant - <Splutters> "It's a multi-rotatory testiculator administration system, everyone knows it needs to do X, Y and Z!"

ACME Consultancy Corp. - <Sighs> "OK, back to the drawing board..."

I'm not saying this sort of situation is completely down to incompetent civil servants, as IT service providers sometimes demonstrate unbelievable levels of ineptitude or unethical business practice. But if you nail down a contract so tightly that it's chock-a-block with penalty clauses, service providers will simply not bid for the work, as many have been very badly burned in the past (see the NHS NPfIT as an example, where wildly moving goalposts cost some providers several hundreds of millions of pounds, whether they bailed out of the contract or blithely carried on.)

Water tight delivery contracts will only work once public sector departments employ a decent number of competent, experienced system and business analysts etc. who know their department's operation and current technology well enough to produce a properly specified contract, that, if delivered to spec, will be both functional and usable. If a provider fails to deliver in that situation, then it's fair and square penalty time, with an extra kick in the 'nads for good measure...

Re: "gutless" by the Liberal Democrats.

Ouch! If you're that bad that even the Lib Dems call you gutless, you know you really are a bunch of useless, spineless, lily-livered, impotent cowards...

Re: Keep in mind it's 90 000 feet on Earth,

"This is very impressive. The U2 (which IIRC did switch off its engine to conserve fuel) managed 70 000, but both it and the SR71 pilots had full pressure suits to do so."

The pressure suits that Lockheed U-2 pilots wear doesn't give them much protection from the low pressure at 70,000 feet - the cockpit used to be pressurised to the equivalent of 29,000 feet, and even then some pilots experienced decompression sickness i.e. the bends when under a high workload (for example during tours over Afghanistan when long sorties were flown with not enough rest between one and the next.)

There have been several incidents when pilots have blacked out, become disorientated, or have forgotton how to operate the controls due to the effects of DCS and have come close to losing an aircraft, so the airframe of the U-2 fleet was updated in 2012 to allow a cockpit pressure equivalent of 15,000 feet to prevent any further occurrences.

Apart from efficient oxygen delivery, the primary funtion of the pressure suit is to make an ejection at 70,000 feet survivable (i.e. to prevent almost instant loss of consciousness and nasties like boiling bodily fluids.)

Re: speak for yourselft

"I honestly do not think I will ever understand the uniquely American way of beating up those who are less well off than they - and the unique theory - that if someone isn't successful - its their own fault."

I can only think that it's similar to the way that many children who are bullied by older kids at school in turn bully younger children when they themselves are older, or the way that some crusty old Consultant doctors who went through living hell when they were junior doctors in the 60's think that today's junior doctors should work the same 48 hours in a row with no sleep just because they had to.

Of course nice, decent people learn from these past experiences, and feel empathy with those who are suffering what they themselves have suffered in the past.

Wankers don't.

Re: Non sequitur of the week.

"Why?"

I'm guessing that what the the paper's author is referring to is that single changes to a complex evolved system are more likely to have deleterious consequences than changes to a simple one. For example, if you take a simple machine like the wheel, making it bigger or smaller will sometimes have good consequences, and sometimes bad, depending on what the wheel is being used for. However, take a more complex machine like the watch, changing the size of an individual cog is much more likely to break the watch than improve it or have no effect.

Another example would be genetic mutations - if these happen in a bacterium's genome, it may kill the bug or it may increase its antibiotic resistance and help it survive. If mutations happen in the DNA of one of my skin cells however (and I hope I'm considered to be a bit more complex than a bacterium), the result will almost certainly be cell death or cancer.

Re: Step 1 done

"But...no one has yet established they travel at the speed of light"

Yes, as far as I'm aware this was a pretty contentious argument throughout the 20th century, with no-one finding any concrete evidence either for or against the idea. However IIRC an experiment in the early noughties involving the observations of a quasar as it passed behind Jupiter found strong supporting evidence that gravitational effects propagate at approximately the speed of light, though I think it was also argued that what was being measured was actually the speed of light, and not gravitational waves. Hopefully these latest experiments will help clarify exactly what the hell gravity is and how it works.

On a less serious note, I wonder if the boffins involved have been the very first people in history to hear the whalesong of the universe, and if so, should I start investing heavily in really, really big joss sticks...

"Draw inspiration from the BOFH..."

Ooooh yes, a robot with a kiloVolt cattle prod - what could be better?

Hmmm. <Thinks> A robot with a megaVolt cattle prod....

"This is from memory, but I have heard that breathing oxygen mixed with an inert gas like helium at normal pressure can also be used to ward off the bends, as the helium displaces the nitrogen. I'm not sure how accurate this is though."

Perfectly accurate - heliox mixtures are often used for commercial & technical dives, which can be far deeper than those performed by recreational divers using compressed air (40m depth is the recommended absolute limit for recreational dives in order to avoid nitrogen narcosis and/or decompression sickness, AKA the bends.)

Using low pressure oxygen has another advantage - a space suit inflated to a pressure of one atmosphere can become extremely rigid in a vacuum, so a lower internal pressure makes movement easier. The first ever human EVA almost ended fatally as the cosmonaut's space suit became so stiff that he couldn't get back into the Voskhod airlock. He had to let much of the air out of his suit via a release valve just to be able to get through the hatch. I'd hate to find out what the inside of his suit smelled like after that experience...

Re: The Mumbai plod.

"Also known as 'Peelers'."

And rightly renowned for their fondness for bananas and custody...