Nojay

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  A youkai is a spirit, usually evil but not always. The usual plot of youkai stories is that you mustn't engage with the youkai which can at first encounter appear human and even alluring. Refuse their attention, run away and...
• Commented on Place your bets
  There's probably a few dozen bucks worth of gold, palladium, copper etc. in such a rangefinder. If people think they can make money ripping out catalytic converters from under cars for the scrap value then junking out the shiny bits...
• Commented on Place your bets
  A remarkable amount of oil and gas infrastructure technology around the world is mired in the 1980s for various reasons, including investment, engineering best practices, regulations, legislation etc. Sure it looks like a good idea to rig your oil refinery...
• Commented on Place your bets
  How about shattering the pipelines and wrecking the pumps and storage will for sure stop the pumping... Until they get repaired. It doesn't take that long to repair that sort of infrastructure, it's sort-of accepted that it will blow up,...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Oil executives don't pump the oil, workers do. You'd have to kill a lot of workers to actually impact oil production while knocking off some fungible and easily replaced people-in-suits wouldn't even dent the bottom line. The real targets to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Moz said: If you asked me to build a drone capable of taking out a mach-ish bizjet at 20km altitude I could definitely do that, given the necessary resources and 90% by buying COTS parts. Bruce Simpson caused a few...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Well, widespread satellite observation will mean that convoys will be spotted wherever there is relatively clear sky. However, winter in the Arctic Ocean would be a totally different thing should we ever want to send convoys to Murmansk again. RORSATs...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: fusion patents held by Lockheed Martin... According to Richard Feynman, just after the Manhattan Project delivered two different types of nuclear weapons, a memo went around the engineering teams with a list of patentable nuclear technologies including propulsion etc....
• Commented on Place your bets
  I came up with an idea for an engineering solution to reduce the spread of COVID-19 -- UV-C light is dangerous to people but deadly to viruses so install air recirculation units in high-population areas like schoolrooms, supermarkets etc. Inside...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I have a huge photo library (over 10 TB) I really really REALLY hope you have the files backed up, at least twice, on different media with one copy stored offsite....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: MacOS and security -- I am reminded of a comment on a altsexual blog I read a long time back, "I like pain but it mustn't hurt". People like online security but they don't actually want to put in...
• Commented on Place your bets
  elephants appear to be intelligent, social, and communicative sophonts The same could be said of pigs. On the other side of the scales, bacon. There's apparently a restaurant somewhere in Siberia that sells mammoth steaks, deep-frozen for your delight. It's...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The Royal Navy tried 18" guns before WW1 on HMS Furious but they weren't workable for various reasons. The 18" guns themselves were eventually fitted onto shore-bombardment monitors, one per ship in improvised mounts with the shells and propellant charges...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Tokyo's Yurikamome line is another unmanned train system, similar to the Docklands Light Railway in east London. There is no conductor on board, just a control room with staff who can intervene if something goes wrong (fire, accident etc.) There...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Most universities were theological diploma mills aimed at churning out clergymen even if they never actively worked in ecclesiastical affairs afterwards. A typical example would be Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll who, after graduating from Oxford with high honours in...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I on the other hand find the "serial" comma somewhat of a distraction when reading text, like tripping over a mislaid flagstone on the pavement (ObUS: sidewalk). See also "er" instead or "re" at the end of words, the invisible...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Not being a pedant I haven't done a deep dive on the subject but I understand the use of commas is one of those US/RoW things that divide the English-speaking nations. Strunk & White supposedly differs from the Oxford Comma...
• Commented on Place your bets
  If you regard ChatGPT and other AI systems as an entertainment service then it's just like the computer games industry which as been a fertile field for "entrepreneurs" to make money while millions if not billions of people are entertained...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I just had the idea that most places in the south of England like Manchester were accessed from Edinburgh via the east coast line through Berwick hence they'd set off travelling east and not stop in Haymarket. My mistake....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Not if they're heading south, they don't! Oddly enough... For Novacon last year, my train down to Manchester Piccadilly from Edinburgh departed from Waverley station, as I expected. What I didn't expect was for it to stop at Haymarket. I...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  There's a tram-rail interchange (Edinburgh Gateway) out on the ring-road that reduces the time to get from Edinburgh airport to a rail station. Saying that it only has train services covering the east of Scotland (Fife, Aberdeen etc.) as far...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  The US has had at least one centenarian Senator. There are currently some elected reps who are over 80 years old and a third of the Senate and a fifth of the House is over 70. Surprisingly the new class...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "what if the nature of the transport changes?" Stuff needs moving, people need moving. My back-of-the-envelope estimate for the increased electricity requirement was based on the number of cars in the UK and the reported average mileage per year of...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  There's probably 50GW or so of home PV and off-grid generator-produced electricity in the US to add to that grid-metered 460GW of consumption/generation. That's a SWAG though. For comparison China generates and consumes about a terawatt on average but it...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  "England for the English! Angles and Saxons go home!"...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Weird, isn't it, that hundreds of PWRS around the world have had their steam generators replaced without issue during their operating lifetime when you say that they weren't meant to be replaced ever? The San Onofre situation is more complex...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Steam generators are consumable parts for nuclear reactors, meant to be replaced every thirty years or so. It's not unusual, pretty much any steam plant boiler system like a locomotive or a coal-fired generating plant would be expected to face...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  The PWR is the de-facto power reactor design because all the other power reactor designs that were built in the first generation reactor period (1950-1970) didn't "work" as well as PWRs, defining "work" as functioning with high uptime for decades,...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler. It's one reason the PWR (and to a lesser extent the BWR) design became the de facto power-generating reactor of choice....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  A nuclear power plant is basically a large steam generating station. Just a different way of powering the boiler. It's one reason the PWR (and to a lesser extent the BWR) design became the de facto power-generating reactor of choice....