[Ed P]

Sounds good to me – it was just a suggestion.

[Ed P]

By coincidence I just happened on this Ars report on Kiwi volcanoes. Very true what they say about disaster preparedness. Most every home in NZ has a disaster kit (industrial gloves, torches, goggles, knives pry bars, axes, spare batteries, first aid, water etc), and everyone knows where the safer places are in a building. As a family we also had established meeting points and action plans. Very different in the UK, we now have none of this except maybe a store cupboard of dried pulses, oats and a darned great water-butt.

I get quite misty-eyed thinking about the place, had we not had a sick mother-in-law we would probably have settled there.

[Ed P]

Re Kiwis – very true. I used to live in windy Wellington and 100+mph winds were a common experience – quite scary looking at your reflection in the window flexing and distorting like an image in the Hall of Mirrors. I was told don’t worry about things blowing away. If they were going to blow away they would have done so years ago.

That said, I always found earthquakes a bit scary, particularly watching an office corridor flex while running for the nearest shelter (desk, door frame, or stairwell). Worst I was ever in was a mere (but shallow) 6.5

[Ed P]

The only section that was popular in MM but missing from Forumite is Photography (subset of Film etc?). Otherwise it looks an excellent comprehensive set of topics.

 

[Ed P]

It ‘Damien’ weather – the brown dust and red sun just arrived, the end of the world is nigh!

[Ed P]

Imo an even better video for Planeman – flying butterflies and penguins even!

IEEE link

[Ed P]

It appears that the exploit has a wider implication in that it can be used to attack phones using a wifi hotspot.

[edit] It appears that the attack is most effective against Linux users!

link

[Ed P]

Is the fan working on the gpu?

Try installing vlc and use that for one play. If it plays without issues then the software has become borked.

[Ed P]

Unfortunately Bob the EmDrive does not break any of the laws of Thermodynamics. Its real application is in space  EmDrive ‘just’ converts available solar energy directly to thrust without the need for any propellant to be carried.  Not really anti-gravity I’m afraid.

[Ed P]

Look again – apparently NASA  and the Chinese have shown that it works and has now been patented!

link

[Ed P]

Just a round-up. The real reason for Commodore’s failure.  Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first drive mad! There can be no other reason for the madness described in this half hour expose. e.g. shifting manufacturing to The Philippines just because some guy allegedly wanted to be closer to his mistress. The list of similar idiocies just goes on and on!

In my innocence I thought it was because they priced themselves out of the market. (My reason for never buying an Amiga)

[Ed P]

You can’t beat BT’s first line of help in Bangalore for unintelligible accents – and on& off I spent over five years in Delhi! The people who outsource critical customer contact overseas do themselves no favours.

[Ed P]

I simplified the scattering bit and only dealt with direct reflection. Due to the vector components of the photon the scattered light from irregular surfaces has apparently different wavelengths depending on the scattering angle and the surface of the target material. Wikipedia has a lbetter definition.

The wiki on Compton scattering is a bit funky in that it somehow assumes that this obviates light being packets of energy (does no such thing imo)

[Ed P]

Amazing what you can do with superglue.?

There was an interesting section on the learning process and mtb tricks on the Beeb.

[Ed P]

No idea wrt eyes, but generally speaking when a photon hits an object part is absorbed and part reflected/scattered. The part that is scattered generally speaking has the same wavelength as the incident photon, but we tend to see it as a measure of surface roughness or structure. The  story does not end with the bit that is absorbed as most often a lower energy photon is emitted/reflected out of the object. The wavelength of this is a characteristic of the material that was hit and we see this as colour. For example when sunlight shines on a leaf, the blue portion of the light is absorbed and the red-green bit reflected back out. see link for a better more full description. (you need an ir camera to see the red bit)

There are exceptions (there always are) to this generalization – first florescence and rather than my just regurgitating stuff see the wiki. Phosphorescence the second exception is something else again and can be quite beautiful on some tropical beaches. I believe you can sometimes see in on West Country beaches but I have never been lucky enough to see it.

[Ed P]

Boris wrote:

I’ve updated 5 machines with this Update so far – none have had any problems.

Big problem for M$ – nothing like random incidents to get the juices flowing! I must admit my three updates went ok if extremely slow.

[Ed P]

Sorry about that!. Link is below:

link

[Ed P]

Most of any mysterious quantum strangeness (e.g. action over a distance, tunneling, coupling etc) can be explained if you think of any particles such as photons as packets of waves with the energy of the wave packets following some sort of probability curve around the main path of the wave.

Einstein infamously dismissed this way of looking at things by saying ‘God does not play dice’.

[Ed P]

Don’t forget the EmDrive!  That will solve your anti-gravity dreams.

I have a sneaky suspicion that gravity and inertia have a relationship, as I have never seen a very satisfactory explanation of either. All the explanations I’ve seen are just definitions of their observed effects rather than a ‘Why they do what they do.’ That said I do like this little animation of both.effects

link

[Ed P]

Nasty thing Lyme disease. I once lived about 25 miles away from Lyme. Quite a wooded countryside with lots of water and deer everywhere. A friend of mine had one of the early diagnoses of full-blown Lyme disease. It causes all sorts of odd side effects – in addition to many of the usual symptoms he grew a damned great painful lymphoma on his forehead and the medical fraternity were completely puzzled. Following diagnosis it all cleared up with massive doses of antibiotics. However he complained that he had become subject to huge mood swings.

I see other reports that they are now saying that 50%+ of Chronic Fatigue disease may in fact be an undiagnosed variant of Lyme disease.

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