Posts by Hugh Pumphrey

Like Julian Bradfield, I am an employee of Univ of Edinburgh. And, yes, this whole thing is a poo hitting the fan episode, on the scale of Scotland's entire daily sewage production colliding with a large offshore wind farm. It is affecting everything in the University, from large-scale research activities via Ph.D students' stipends down to the fact that there are no pencils and pads of lined paper in our stationary cupboard, and no immediate prospect any new stock. We have even been told to avoid printing stuff as we are going to run out of printer paper at some point.

Re: "hinting at some severe trouble within the university's on-premises infrastructure"

The IT staff may very well be on strike. They count as "academic-related" so if they are in a union at all it is UCU, along with the academic staff. And they are in the same pension scheme (USS) which those overpaid vice-chancellors are complicit in the gutting of. If they are not on strike it is probably because they are not paid enough to to be able to afford to lose a few week's pay.

Disclaimer: I work at one of H-W's neighbours and I am currently on strike. They do not call me "Red Shuggy" but I am angry enough that they will probably start doing that Real Soon Now.

Bridges that are not there

Even more entertaining was driving across the new Forth Road bridge in a car whose SatNav was unware that they had built the thing. Realising that she was installed in a FLYING CAR, the bossy lady was stunned into awed silence until I rejoined the M90 on the north side of the bridge.

Re: H2

Hydrogen from steam reforming of methane is only "blue" if you then store the resulting CO2 in the ground. If you just release the CO2, the hydrogen is "grey". All the talk about hydrogen assumes that we will soon be producing huge amounts of "green" hydrogen by electrolysis with renewable electricity. Currently, most hydrogen is grey and very little is green. Hydrogen comes in more colours: see https://energy-cities.eu/50-shades-of-grey-and-blue-and-green-hydrogen/

Re: "The power lead approached the PC..."

I too have blown a power supply with the 110-240V switch. The computer was misbehaving for some reason and I decided to try a proper cold start by shutting it down and turning the power off and on again. The previous machine had a physical on-off switch next to the power cord. I located the switch on this one by feel, but there was no power switch, only the 110-240V switch. My subconscious was too stupid to ask "Why is the switch so small?" Bang!

In reply to

"Ooooh ... those I know to be taking statins tell me the side effects are nasty."

and

"This may be observer bias, since those not having nasty side effects are unlikely to be informing me of the un-nasty effects of said statins."

Most people can take statins with no noticeable side effects. I am one of "most people": possibly a good thing as I had a dodgy coronary artery stented a few years back. If statins give you side-effects that means you have to stop taking them and do without their statistical benefits. But it does not mean that everyone put on statins will experience the same things.

"NI --> I'd include soda and potato farls."

As a consequence of living in the People's Republic of Sturgeonia for over two decades, I have come to believe that a proper cooked breakfast includes haggis, preferably with black pudding as well. And probably tattie scones, but these are surely so similar to soda and potato farls that you would not want both.

On potatoes, away with this yank hashbrown nonsense. The best fried potatoes are actually the boiled new potatoes you cooked too many of the previous day, fried on both sides until brown and crispy. I can wake up and feel unreasonably excited about the day ahead if I realise that there are leftover potatoes to fry.

Re: Ask any actuary

Odd. five years back, when my boring family C-Max died I got a dodgy old Audi TT as my mid-life crisis car. It looked hot, and it went like a scalded cat: it was the 225HP version with the bigger turbo and the twin exhausts. The insurance costs hardly changed at all: the industry's attitude seemed to be "You have driven for a long time, with very few accidents. You are boring. We don't care what you drive"

It had to go this year because too much of it was worn out for it to be worth fixing it up to MOT-passing standard. <fx: sob> I enjoyed every minute I was driving it.

Re: Enquiries

I, too, was about to question whether there was anything worse than Blackboard. When I saw who had posted the question, I realised that we both suffer from the same instance of Blackboard --- this may not be a coincidence.

Re: I swear...

Jemma, I exhort you never to go to Majorca on holiday, or, if you do, do not rent a car and attempt to drive it around. The entire island is infested with middle-aged blokes in rubber shorts, forming massive pelotons and restricting your average driving speed to about 25km/h. Everyone else: sure, go to Majorca if you are insistent on eating pamboli and seeing the La Seu cathedral. If you just want to visit a sunny island and drive around a bit to look at the scenery, try Crete or the Canaries --- they are cheaper, less up themselves, and you can drive about without staring at an array of rubber-clad arses.

Re: STEM Education is Expensive

"Edinburgh Uni flushed its Chemistry department down the drain around 2000 (give or take 5 years)."

We did? What, then, is that big building across the street from here which has suspicious smells coming out of it?

Re: Dr King

I remember being taught by Frank King to how to log on to the mainframe and compile my first Fortran program. I'm not sure if I ever met him in person, or whether I just remember a series of short video clips of him showing how it was done.

Dr. King is also a well-known figure in the world of bellringing --- the only sport for people who like permutations and group theory.

Re: Travesty...

What Adair said deserves its 48 upvotes and zero downvotes. The disnification of Winnie the Pooh has made me want to do something violent since I first saw it. A hell of hard radiation would do just fine.

Re: Launch partner?

This was noted as a problem by John Clark in his famous book "Ignition" --- see one of my blog posts from a couple of years ago for this and a few more quotes: https://hughpumphrey.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/rocket-science-it-should-impress-you/

I heard recently that "Ignition" is going to be re-published legitimately; I suspect that more than one Reg reader will want a copy.

Re: Marshall McLuhan?

... There's Howard Hughes in blue suede shoes

smiling at the majorettes smoking Winston cigarettes ...

(The Lamb lies down on Broadway, of course, about halfway through side 1)

Re: BlumBlum-Shub?

Surprisingly, yes, really. Google it and you get lots of hits about random number generators and none (on the first page) about porn.

"[...] finds they're called something else there [...]"<br>

As any old Cambridge man knows, Chelsea buns come from Cambridge (and preferably from Fitzbillies, if they are still in business). You used to be able to get sweets called "American hard gums" in the UK. I never saw them in America, a place where you can get "English muffins" which are nothing to do with the thing that is actually called a muffin in England.

Re: Bright

I suspect that the NASA boffin didn't mean that he personally didn't know the Moon's albedo, more that most people find it surprising that it is so low because the only time they see the moon is against the background of space (albedo = 0.0000...). Compared to pure black, the moon looks white, so the natural assumption is that it has a fairly high albedo. I introduce the concept of albedo in a basic meteorology lecture, explain that the Earth's albedo is about 0.3 and ask the students to guess the albedo of the moon. Most of them go for values that are far too high. (The actual value is not all that well defined because it is strongly angle-dependent, as well as varying from place to place on the moon. But it is a lot lower than 0.3)

For all you PFYs out there ...

.... who can not remember the 1970s, the lyric is from "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath. Many thanks to Rich 11 for cheering me up on an otherwise annoying day.

Re: Distribution architecture vulnerability

Although we don't tend to have medium or high voltage on the same poles as the domestic supply in the UK we do sometimes have all three live phases of 240V plus the neutral. If something causes one of the three live phases to touch the neutral, and your house is supplied via one of the other two phases, you can end up with about 400V instead of 240V. This happened at my parents' house about 30 years ago and it was quite enough to blow a lot of light bulbs and to fry the control board in the washing machine. I can not recall whether the electricity meter survived the experience.

Re: Not sure about the IT angle but...

Give us a shout when your book comes out, Pen-y-gors. There may be no IT angle, but I remember visiting some of those mines as a child, and was left with more questions than answers.

Re: Pern anyone?

I ploughed into these comments with the assumption that I would be able to count tens of posts mentioning Pern, thread, dragons and so forth. I suppose it was just too obvious ...

Re: Great, but....

can't help thinking that it's not going to help the space junk situation. Maybe not this project, but one like it and soon

Probably not this one, and probably not for a good while. To be a proper space junk problem you need to be leaving stuff at the orbital height of the ISS (400km) or higher. Below that, the junk drops out of orbit fairly fast and there are not many satellites for it to break, because they too would drop out of orbit rather fast.

Once people start building amateur rockets that leave junk around at 700km, that will be a very serious problem as it takes ages for the junk to fall out and there is lots of expensive hardware for it to mess up (including the satellite I have been working on for the last decade). I am not actually a rocket scientist, but I get the impression that reaching 400km and leaving stuff there is a whole different game from reaching 100km.

Re: Sensors

"So put some sensors aboard normal commercial aircraft, map the concentrations, and publish the maps. "

The problem with many of these Cl-bearing compounds is that down here in the troposphere they are essentially indestructible and hence become very evenly mixed. These molecules are not like farts: if you can smell farts, someone near you is farting and you can probably find out who by following the smellyness gradient upwards. And the entire planet doesn't smell of fart because the molecules get destroyed and rained out of the atmosphere quickly. Ozone-depleting molecules, OTOH, are emitted in tiny amounts but do not get destroyed until the air reaches the stratosphere. So if you measure them down here you tend to get the same answer nearly anywhere, unless you are right next to a leaking factory (in which case you probably knew where the CCl4 was coming from already).

Re: weather

>>GPS location is okay but it's very poor at telling you your altitude

> Really?

Depends on what you mean by "really bad". The height precision on a normal GPS tends to be about half as good as the horizontal precision. The latter is what they tell you about, so if your GPS says it is working to a precision of 5m, the altitude reading is probably only good to 10m. You may have a large offset (several 10s of metres) from the heights on your OS map IF your GPS is not correcting for the difference between the geoid and the ellipsoid.

So, if your geoid correction is working, the altitudes from your GPS are good enough for hiking etc. They are probably as good as you get from the cheap-ass barometers --- these are only good to about 1 hPa or 10m, and you have the additional problem that changes in the weather can re-calibrate the altitudes from your barometer by several 100s of metres.

The GPS altitude is therefore definitely as good or better than you will get from a cheap barometer, and better in some ways than even an excellent barometer. It still isn't brilliant: if you want centimetre accuracy you need to use differential GPS (MUCH more expensive) or old-fashioned surveying gear (heavy and slow).

Read it. Now!

"This is from Clark's excellent and entertaining book 'Ignition' available out there on the interwebs."

I just went off to look for this, and I suggest you do the same. I'm up to page 10 and it is utterly gripping and pants-wettingly hilarious. Chuck out whatever dull novel you are reading --- this is guaranteed to be better.

I'm sure that the BOFH has a copy that he has not lent to the PFY.

Re: No early casio?!?

"check em under a magnifying glass to see the slightly glowing red anode lines..."

cornz 1, your post inspired me to put some batteries in my 1975(ish) casio fx31, just to see the turquoise glowing display light up again. You can indeed see the anode lines glowing; I can't remember if I ever noticed this before.