Posts by Threlkeld

Follower pics?

There was a following probe that was supposed to photograph the impact, but I have not seen any images from that. Did it fail to work? Or was it photobombed by a LGM?

Useful fact

Schiphol is the only major international airport built on the site of a sea battle.

Battle of Haarlemmermeer was a naval engagement fought on 26 May 1573 between the Spanish and the Dutch. The Spanish won.

More appropriate technology?

He could have just tethered his wrists to his belt with pieces of string short enough to keep his hands from his chin. It would be irritating, I grant you, but no more so than any other device which prevents a frequent and unconscious action.

Might have made it difficult to get his jacket on, though. Perhaps a magnetic quick-release?

"... the North Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ... ?

That would be 'National', not 'North'. Suspect NATO got in there, somehow.

Stand up Jack, let John sit down!

I used to have a job that involved flying with parties of scientists and engineers. You could always count on 20% of the party at least self-medicating with alcohol to deal with the lack of implicit trust in technology which comes with (a) knowing how it works and (b) knowing how it sometimes doesn't.

Being in charge could be a nightmare, especially if a stopover was involved. My low point came when, returning home, we had a few hours in a capital city on the coast, the name of which I will redact to protect the guilty. A quarter of the party for which I was responsible simply disappeared from the airport. Nobody likes to be an informer, so it took a while for me to extract the information that the missing men had fond memories of a local house of ill-repute, and had decided that soft shoulders and warm thighs might be a good distraction from the anticipated stark terror of the second leg of the flight. By that time our planned departure time was about 90 minutes ahead, so I was pretty sure that they wouldn't make it back in time, and very conscious that the ethos of the organisation would require that I personally did not return home without everybody else accounted for.

I was saved by the unlikely intervention of the US Navy. My missing men returned unexpectedly and rather disappointed: it seems that the girls had quickly informed them that as a large number of Americans were in town and could be expected imminently, a bunch of broke techies from the UK were no longer so welcome. Size does matter, when it's the wallet that is being measured. 'Twas ever thus for poor sailors, even those with excellent technical qualifications. And was I glad of that!

" It's a system that employs portable, optical atomic clocks as a means of extremely accurate time-keeping that theoretically completely ends the need for navigation systems here on Earth to talk to an orbiting network of satellites."

My phone TALKS to an orbiting network of satellites? And there was me thinking it just listened.

Not smart

Google will not be pleased about this. Five years down the line Android could be facing powerful international competition in a field where at present it holds a comfortable hegemony. If Huawi is forced to replace the operating system on its phones and duplicate Apps and the App store, then that is what it will do. And there is good reason to think it might do it better. There are about a billion reasons why it might, and I can't right now of anything that would stop it,

Fire and forget ...?

It would seem to be possible to program a drone to fly for a short interval and then land in an obscure resting place and wait for a quasi-random interval on the order of hours before repeating the foray. How long would the battery last for 5 minute flights every four hours, I wonder?

It would also seem to be possible that an individual infuriated by the idea of folk flying half way round the world for a holiday might decide to discourage said folk for the future. He might even be smart enough to see that not getting caught would achieve his aim best, and also allow him to do it again some time.

He would not need to retrieve his drone from the hornets' nest of activity he has caused, as long as he had been careful not to let it be traceable back to him or his organisation. It could be left on a flat roof, or in an abandoned pigsty, or wherever else he had chosen for its resting-place. It could be a 'fire and forget' operation. Makes it a lot easier to establish a good alibi.

I'm sure that there must be a flaw in this argument, but I can't just now see it. Nor can I see any very convincing counter-measure, short of jamming GPS locally whenever a drone is detected. Which might be possible, but not without undesired consequences.

Macular generation?

I could do with some of that to patch up the holes in my vision caused by DEgeneration of the macular area of my retina.

I don't see how an app would help me to detect that I can't see properly. Walking into furniture already does that quite effectively.

But perhaps I can't see that because I can't see properly to read the puffery. Do I have to take a selfie of my retina and send it out on the interweb thingy?

Goodnight, Firefox

So, as I would like to retain this very useful way of quickly scanning for items of interest, where do I go when the light of Firefox dims and my bookmark toolbar loses its row of RSS feeds? Suggestions?

Player piano

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in 'Player Piano', published 65 years ago, any voting system can be hacked.

You can have checks on the system, (i.e. an audit trail) so that any hacker would need to hack them also. To make all this work, there has to be a strong intention on the part of the people involved that the system shall be fair, and seen to be provably fair.

This isn't about different practices in different countries, or one approach being intrinsically better than another one. It's about a having a continuous determination to test, review and check important procedures in order to ensure that they serve the public interest and no other. As William Penn wrote in his preface to the first Frame of Government for Pennsylvania, bad people can spoil a good system just as good people can mend a bad one.

Complacency is an enemy, because the 'mending' must never stop.

Get ID ... under your skin

Think yourselves lucky that she hasn't confused hashtags with RFID tags ...

... yet.

High-tech options

Oh! doesn't 'air-gapped' mean the same thing as 'no wi-fi, no bluetooth and chewing gum in all the Ethernet and USB sockets' then?

Who knew?

North Korea

The North Koreans seem to have a nuclear bomb, and a rocket capable or reaching a significant altitude with it. They don't seem to have a proven targeting and re-entry capability or much sense of responsibility, and it's quite hard to see them obtaining any of these things in the near future.

In the circumstances, they might be tempted to try a high-altitude air-burst as a way of 'proving' their nuclear credentials without actually frying a city.

Now, I guess that all GPS satellites are hardened against EMP damage, but I do wonder even so if enough would survive to maintain a continuous GPS and timing service worldwide. High-speed trading on the stock exchanges of the world might collapse, though personally I'd be happy to see that shut down anyway. But the consequent stock market instability would not be slight. And self-driving vehicles might become quite puzzled, along with a lot of human drivers as well.

It isn't hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which Kim Jong Un might, just might, try his luck with this one. Chances seem to be that folk would really notice if he did.

We have been here before ...

Anyone who has read 16th and 17th century pamphlets dealing with religious differences must feel a sense of deja vu when encountering many Mac/Linux/Windows discussions. The willingness to divert into argumentum ad hominem, the reluctance to establish common ground before addressing differences, and the total failure to read anything written by anyone else as carefully as it deserves are quite characteristic of both.

In the case of pamphlets, the availability of the Bible in the local European language was one trigger. Translators went back to the oldest Greek and Hebrew texts and found inconsistencies with the Latin text which had been in use for 1000 years. But relatively cheap printing was the enabling technology. Reformers like Luther exploited it brilliantly to push forward the Reformation. Indeed, they were in some senses dragged forward by the technology. Without it their arguments would have been made in handwriting to a minority: with it, they sent Europe (and eventually and rather later England) into schism and turmoil. And quite a few people got burned. Literally.

After a while, folk began to work out that showing politeness and respect doesn't undermine a strong argument, but actually makes it more likely to be heard and understood. But a good punch-up is always fun, no matter how pointless and counter productive. That never changes.

Clathrates

Methane forms clathrate or 'cage' compounds at highish pressures and low temperatures. Basically, methane is trapped within an ice-like water structure, and the presence of the hydrocarbon stabilises the structure even at temperatures rather above the freezing point of water. Methane migrating upwards from deep in ocean sediments along the geothermal gradient becomes trapped a few metres below the cold seawater present at the seabed (~ 2 deg C)

The effect is to 'stiffen' that layer within the sediment and produce an acoustic reflection horizon, visible on reflection profiles. Back in the 1960s geophysicists were quite puzzled. Took a while to work out what was going on.

You can actually set fire to these ice-like compounds. Looks very odd, burning ice.

So I suppose you could say that methane and water have been known to mix for quite a long time, at least as a solid phase. But clearly, it's a lot more fun with diamonds.

Keep it simple, why not?

The grid itself signals its state continuously, because the frequency falls below 50 Hz when there is too much demand, and rises above when there is an excess of supply. It is surely not beyond the wit of mankind to make use of this fact?

Some equipment, like battery chargers and refrigeration loads, can often be turned off for periods of up to hours without serious impact on performance. If the user could set a simple control that represented their choice between continuous service (on the other hand) and lower cost (on the other), then such loads could be shed automatically and incrementally at periods of high demand, and brought on line at periods of low demand.

Much of the practical functionality of control via the internet could be attained without having any of the potential problems of actually connecting to the internet. And the problem of how to hack the system would keep lots of potential evildoers occupied in harmless fun. Any suggestions?

Did you forget to add a message?

"In the UK and Republic of Ireland, the Samaritans maintain a free-to-call helpline number on 116 123. Hotlines in other countries can be found here." (with a link)

This message is appended to some Register pieces dealing with suicide, but not to all. Not to this one, as it happens. Personally, I don't think this message can be given too often. There are volunteers waiting 24/7/365 to provide confidential, non-judgemental listening.