Posts by Daniele Procida

No experimentation required

"Galileo's suspicion was that all objects (in the same gravitational field) should fall at the same speed, irrespective of their mass, and he was eventually able to conclude that in a vacuum this would indeed be indeed be the case."

It wasn't really a suspicion that required observation to confirm or confute. It was based on reasoning alone, based on what would happen if a lighter (supposedly slower-falling) object were connected to a heavier (supposedly faster-falling) object.

The lighter object would retard the fall of the heavier object, so the speed of the pair would be a bit slower than that of the heavier. Yet by the same principle, the two connected objects would now constitute a single heavier object, so would be faster than both.

It's clearly impossible for both conclusions to be true, so the principle ("heavier objects fall faster") that leads us to them can't possibly be true.

An image from Playboy magazine

I can't imagine why more women aren't attracted to careers in science and technology. It must be because they can't hack it or they have no sense of humour or something. Or probably they just spoil it for the other scientists by getting all huffy when everyone in the lab is nominating their favourite porn magazine pictures to illustrate the research.

FIGnition

I think the Raspberry Pi is a great idea, but I think the FiGnition - http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition - is an even better one.

And it really works - my 14-year-old thinks that the most exciting thing is to program the Game of Life, in Forth, on a little black and white screen, on a computer he had to solder and test himself.

Thank goodness...

... that there's no historical precedent in which successful German men were rewarded with the systematic and well-organised procurement of women (categorised according to who was permitted to make use of them, and marked on their arms) in Eastern Europe in order to provide them with sexual gratification.

Finds routes that don't go up hills?

Where's the fun in that then?

Daily-Mail-style-ludicrous-hyperbole warning required

This really has to be one of the daftest pieces of political writing the Register has published in a long time.

Lewis Page is coming dangerously close to having a single-issue bee in his bonnet.

I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that space migration or nuclear missiles are amongst the country's most urgent priorities needs to have his head examined, but I wouldn't go anywhere near it until that ridiculous bee has been dealt with.

Technology: a solution in search of a problem - again

This is likely to follow the trajectory of many other technology-led 'advances' in patient care.

20 years ago PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy - through a tube into the stomach) feeding was the hospital nutritionists' great new hope.

Now it's recognised that a) iPEG feeding is not indicated in many cases where it previously would have been urged, and b) it can actually diminish the quality of care a patient receives, because the attention of nursing staff can easily become focused on reading signals from the machine providing the feeding, rather than attending to the patient.

But until those lessons were learned, an army of medics and nutritionists wielding PEG equipment were convinced that what many of their patients needed most was to have it plugged into them.

In the less medicalised environment of a care home, which relies enormously upon the sensitivity of care staff to subtle signals from people who often can't express their needs at all, this could become a kind of barrier masquerading as convenience, and could be entirely at odds with the interests of those receiving care.

My goodness...

... it's Serge Gainsbourg with flat ears.

Was this an advertisement for Teradata?

Now that commercial television will apparently be allowed product placement in its programming, is The Register going to follow suit?

Interesting, the format of this piece followed exactly that of Radio Four's "Thought for the Day":

1. a description of a tasty real-life problem with a more-or-less novel analysis of it

2. an abrupt switch into product-selling mode without skipping a beat

3. a reassuring single-sentence revisiting the original issue, to help you forget the evangelism without actually escaping it, and to seal the pretence that the whole thing has really been an investigation of a problem and not at attempt to sell you something.

Not very nice.

Mental health problems are *so* funny

In the 19th century, people used to visit lunatic asylums for entertainment. In the 21st, we can get the same thrills over the web! And it's OK, because seriously ill people in pitiful states of misery and distress are still funny.

No bears or wrestling

This almost sounds as though it could have come from a John Irving novel.

Which freedoms do you want most?

This all seems to be a bit of a muddle. Alongside the outrage at Google's photographic violations of privacy by, there is an equal and opposite concern that the right to photograph is being eroded.

If it's OK to go down the street with a camera photographing people and things, it has to be OK whoever is doing it. And if it's OK to publish those pictures, then it's OK, no matter who publishes them, or how.

Merely not liking the fact that it's Google doing it, or being taken aback by the scale of their operation, don't make a difference to questions of whether it should be permitted.

I know nothing!

Ah yes. You're quite right about the names, Anonymous Coward. I'd forgotten that. It looks like I have the pleased/dismayed spectrum covered, anyway.

Fostering?

"fostering everything from Battlebots to Friends onto our TV" - I don't think we need to worry to much about what Google's foisting upon us, if that's what you're going to be doing to "our very language".