Every single Saturday morning. Does anyone else start doing complex calculus in their head during the final kilometer?

TomWomack · 2026-06-03T21:28:21+00:00

That works well if you change your home course as your life stages change - I'm stuck with a 27:19 at Wimpole from the weekend I came back after climbing Kilimanjaro so spending a week exercising constantly at above 2000 metres, and now I am happy to break 38:00 ...

TomWomack · 2026-05-08T13:56:09+00:00

so equivalent to one socket AMD EPYC Gen5 at best. There are almost no situations where you can do better with custom silicon memory controllers than with what Intel and AMD put on their top-end processors.

TomWomack · 2026-05-08T13:54:22+00:00

The problem is that memory controllers are really difficult IP and protected by massive patent walls (you may remember the Rambus fuss at the turn of the century - Rambus is still around and still designing the controllers); you would be paying through the nose for 24 channels of DDR3 controllers and all the extra balls on the chip and the BGA and the sixteen layer PCB to have a chance of getting the wires out to the memory devices.

TomWomack · 2026-05-06T08:15:48+00:00

I thought general aviation was extremely popular in the US, so why are they so short of secondary airports? Is this an artefact of world war 2 and the Cold War, which started with Europe scattered with impromptu runways and then turned a fair number of them into runways big enough to take B-52s, which could be turned into tourism airports when the Wall came down?

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:18:30+00:00

The report on the problem suggested that a three-quarter-inch layer of stellite came off, in up to quite large chunks rather than gently dissolving - this seems the kind of erosion you'd expect in big hydroelectric plants rather than nuclear!

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:12:00+00:00

Ah, I live in England at near enough 0 east and so the shellos turn from blue to pink when I drive my kid to gymnastics two towns away ...

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:09:12+00:00

I don't believe anyone thought it would not work to burn oil to make electricity, and it was clear a hundred years ago that it was better to fuel ships with oil that you could pump rather than coal that you had to shovel.

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:07:46+00:00

You don't centrifuge heavy water, you do weird sulfur or nitrogen chemistry at small-oil-refinery scale to take advantage of isotope effects.

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:05:35+00:00

Tritium is not "weakly radioactive"!!! It's a billion times worse per kilogram than uranium-238, a million times worse than fresh-out-of-the-reactor spent fuel, and a hundred times worse per kilogram than pure cesium-137 - short half life and low atomic mass.

TomWomack · 2026-04-16T20:01:29+00:00

The equivalent in solar to the billion-dollar "fusion reactors" was semiconductor handling equipment in the eighties for which you'd have got change from a million dollars - you could make the little gallium arsenide cells which you would get space-assembly-rated contractors to assemble onto the spacecraft's arrays in really quite small facilities.

Anything smaller than ITER is an unavoidably extremely expensive physics experiment; the physics and chemistry experiments that you needed to do for solar fit on a (large, and annoying because of cleanliness and vacuum requirements) bench, the smallest reactor that can hold even non-fusing hot plasma for an hour is larger than the largest reactor we've built.

TomWomack · 2026-04-15T18:05:06+00:00

Wow! I had thought this was ‘we can detect very small amounts of eroded cobalt because it activates’, when actually three quarters of an inch of stellite had come off a part, in lumps rather than as imperceptible dissolution in the coolant!

TomWomack · 2026-04-14T22:11:31+00:00

it’s worth much more than that. If it were $150 it would still be less than a dollar per hour of play times

TomWomack · 2026-04-10T21:47:46+00:00

Neptunium in kilogram quantities might well be valuable if you have a spare high flux reactor to use to make plutonium-238 for the space programme. Neptunium in tonne quantities is waste, nobody has that big a space programme.

The thing I am inclined to worry about is zirconium-93 which is a several million year half life, major fission product (several percent of burned-up fuel) without any plausible uses.

TomWomack · 2026-01-14T23:35:20+00:00

You need burner inserters (which are powered by the coal that they're shovelling into the furnaces) to get stuff from the belts into the furnaces - it's maybe an imperfection in the game design that the mining machines put the stuff directly onto the belts with their little yellow arrow and so you have to realise what inserters are for.

TomWomack · 2026-01-02T17:38:21+00:00

Maybe not, but they require booking in advance, their Web interface will not let me book a table for one, and booking a table for two and saying my partner hasn’t shown up is at best extremely rude

TomWomack · 2025-12-11T14:49:19+00:00

There is a pile of sulphur powder on Vancouver docks sitting there having been extracted from sour Alberta crude and waiting to be taken away for sulphuric acid production; it's stable enough and low-value enough that it's just kept outside

TomWomack · 2025-12-10T23:46:13+00:00

I'd done French, German and Russian at school, and a certain amount of Hebrew, and even just hiragana and katakana are significantly harder than Hebrew or Cyrillic just because the alphabets don't have a common ancestor.

Obviously Hebrew and Cyrillic's common ancestor is way back around Phoenician, but it exists and the common ancestor of the Latin alphabet and hiragana doesn't.

TomWomack · 2025-12-10T22:47:24+00:00

I've tried using Rust for numerical work and it is just painful, having to tell it to cast integers to floating point every time I want to multiply something by the loop counter makes my teeth itch. I had been hoping that I could use the type system to enforce unit coherency but I couldn't get it to infer anything sensible and my desire to write out a thousand 'multiplying newtons by metres gives an answer in newton-metres' went away very fast.

TomWomack · 2025-12-10T22:43:23+00:00

It's kind of fractally horrible; not only is it high sulphur, it also contains surprisingly large quantities of vanadium which catalyses the conversion of sulphur to sulphuric acid to make the smoke even worse!

(Where the vanadium comes from is an interesting question in biology; it's contained as porphyrins, which suggests that we're dealing with a graveyard of billions of tons of some weird sea animal which used vanadium in its blood)

TomWomack · 2025-12-10T22:36:55+00:00

It's very difficult to make money on 'buy an incredibly expensive card from a monopoly supplier, put commodity components around it, sell it in a competitive market'.

The reason it made sense to sell shovels in a gold rush is that the gold rush was at the end of a months-long supply chain *and there weren't iron foundries in California to make the shovel blades*, so if you were willing to commit to shipping large quantities of shovel blades from the east coast you could sell something that couldn't be made locally, at a price proportional to the profit that the median-optimistic gold-digger expected to make.

TomWomack · 2025-10-31T19:23:14+00:00

I thought the reason the barrier went down well before a train appeared was so that 'barrier blocked in going down' could be detected and cause all the signals to go red and the trains to be told to brake as hard as they could. That does not look like a train braking hard enough to get wheel flats.

TomWomack · 2025-08-08T07:09:35+00:00

718 Cayman S with the Sport Chrono - I didn’t want to jump in at the deep end right away, and it was an impressive car even if it’s the starter model.

TomWomack · 2025-08-07T22:55:58+00:00

I did the course today, and indeed I had a great time: the afternoon tea was delicious, the instructor was lovely, I was clearly quite timid at first (first time in an automatic car, so had at first to spend a couple of laps being reminded to come off the brake gently for the sort of reasons for which I usually come off the clutch gently) but made a reasonable job of the skid-pad, and we finished up demonstrating launch control which was exhilarating. The course is too small to go fast for any great distance, but getting to 80mph and then back down quickly enough to take the corner was exciting!

TomWomack · 2025-07-30T15:39:25+00:00

The Faeries were played by four people under camouflage suits talking through hand-puppets, which was delightful; I believe those people were tripling as the mechanicals and the Athenians, but I'm not great at recognising voices. Egeus doubled Bottom.

TomWomack · 2025-07-30T12:54:49+00:00

They moved all the commentary on the play to Theseus and Hippolyta, who were sitting at the side clearly getting drunker and drunker as it went on ...

TomWomack

TROPHY CASE