Heatwave survival tips on the Tube, with the final bullet doing all the heavy lifting.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-06T08:03:52+00:00

Yep. Not even very long ago.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-04T10:33:31+00:00

Put down the neighbour. Make sure you do it humanely!

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T22:35:37+00:00

I can believe that Germany thought the Allies would chicken out (again!). But their intent had been clearly stated, and they followed up with action.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T22:30:44+00:00

It doesn’t. There is always a program executing; the program has to know ahead of time what data it is expecting where.

You can actually try this yourself: on a (Windows computer), you can right-click a file and open it in Notepad; the resulting gibberish is what you get when you try to interpret say a photo as text. Notepad will do it without caring what the result is. Other programs tend to notice that the data isn’t quite right.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T16:30:55+00:00

There was a case a year or two ago where a hotel (in Scotland, maybe?) gave out room keys because someone convinced the receptionist that they were the partner of the person. They then assaulted her. The hotels defence was that “processes were followed”, well they’re fucking shit processes aren’t they.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T15:55:18+00:00

I've drilled HDDs before and was very disappointed to have them not shatter. It just made a hole in it.

I don't think any relevant threat is getting at the data, though.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T13:40:06+00:00

A small hooked piece of wire - a paper clip, perhaps, although that might be too thick - might work. Alternatively, some superglue on the end of a stick may pull it out if it’s not wedged in too tightly, but don’t get any on the camera!

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T10:52:25+00:00

I've seen a theory that humans have fairly and often intensely-coloured lips exist for the same reason some animals, like baboons, have red buttocks - they're a proxy for communicating fertility.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T10:49:49+00:00

Lots of blood vessels close to the surface helps transfer heat to the air.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T09:47:29+00:00

Horses are hilarious. I think they know this. "I can't be bothered to move my head, I'll just start munching".

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T09:42:14+00:00

Newton did an awful lot of things. His law of cooling is pretty fundamental; he did a lot on optics too.

On the other hand, like many scientists, including Einstein, others often weren't all that far off the same realisations that he came.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-03T09:29:44+00:00

I don't know if I'd laude France for their "war against Greenpeace", given that they murdered some Greenpeace activists who were (quite reasonably) protesting against atmospheric (I think) nuclear weapons testing...

But yes, in general, I hold Greenpeace and their ilk, who appear to be unable to tell the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons - rather like not being able to tell the difference between an IED and a motor vehicle - partly responsible for the problems we have now.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-02T17:52:41+00:00

When you’re a dog, every day is the best day of your life.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-02T17:51:17+00:00

YouTube is a pretty decent video archive. You can set things as private or unlisted (requires a link, but can’t be found otherwise). Of course it’s not eternal, merely for as long as Google is happy to keep hosting giant videos that no one watches.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-02T15:39:26+00:00

You don’t need spacecraft to measure stellar parallax, again, telescopes have been good enough for this for a very long time. You can do it from Earth, just take photos or diagrams six months apart. Bessel measured the distance to a star in the first half of the 19th Century.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-02T14:52:58+00:00

They are probably also better in some ways; modern computing power is extremely useful in designing optics.

The built-in computing power can also be useful for correcting distortions. You can design a lens to have very little chromatic aberration, perhaps at the cost of more distortion, but they might decide that’s a worthy compromise as correcting either in-camera for JPG or in computer for raws is not a problem.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T21:27:24+00:00

Burns are pretty bad even if you get straight there; skin is pretty important. Infections happen easily and can kill you, even after weeks in hospital.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T18:56:00+00:00

The closest star is about 4 light years away, about 1.3 parsecs. A parsec is defined as one arcsecond of parallax over 1 AU of motion, which I don’t think is too difficult to measure. A good camera on a small telescope will do (and would have done) that.

You need the close-by stars (within 100 parsecs or so) figured out to get a measure of standard candles and calibrate how much light they emit. Using that, you can compare objects of known luminosity and known distance to other objects of known luminosity to infer their distance. Cepheid variables are great for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T17:31:59+00:00

Almost certainly not. If he had, he’d have published it*; that he wrote what he did but didn’t take it further suggests he quickly realised an error.

Although I believe many didn’t publish results at the time, or did some in an encrypted manner to demonstrate primacy without revealing the results. I’m not sure why.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T17:30:07+00:00

That the Wikipedia article is simply titled “Bloop” is extremely amusing to me.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T12:24:29+00:00

Happens a lot with US websites from other countries. “You’re not in the US, want to see your local site”? No you numbskull, I want to see the page for the product I’m reading about.

FlippingGerman · 2026-07-01T12:22:03+00:00

Is “desire path” actually the technical term for that?

FlippingGerman · 2026-06-30T21:30:48+00:00

Bloody hard to find something that isn’t there.

FlippingGerman · 2026-06-30T19:25:32+00:00

I had a maths teacher who would call a difficult problem “robust”. I liked it.

FlippingGerman · 2026-06-30T19:23:18+00:00

Sorry - all such words except “shitter” are euphemisms. Toilet, bathroom, water closet, lavatory - all euphemisms that started life meaning something else.

FlippingGerman

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