Susan

Susan

  • Commented on Paging Agent 007
    I have no confidence that they wouldn't pull that one with a sleeper if someone thought it would be funny. Anecdote from the 1970s, when there used to be a sleeper service that ran from Inverness to Glasgow/Edinburgh—because the trip...
  • Commented on PSA: The Delirium Brief
    ...It's going to involve politicians being denser than osmium, isn't it? Considering that this is the book that had to be rewritten after the post-Brexit debacle convinced Charlie that he'd seriously underestimated politicians' similarity to headless chickens—yes, probably....
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    'virtual particles', i.e., bespoke items that magically fit the cut-out/missing pieces in the current puzzle for the requisite (typically) infinitesimal length of time. That's not what virtual particles are. They certainly aren't "bespoke items": they have the normal quantum numbers...
  • Commented on We get mail (contd.)
    Where I lived it was usually "Jesus saves! but Beckenbauer nets the rebound!" I recall Glaswegian graffiti, circa late 1970s, where it was "Jesus saves! But Dalglish scores on the rebound!" Elderly Cynic @21 It would help a lot if...
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    PS I did think it was amusing that their standard species for the theropod clade, which everyone thinks of as the big carnivorous dinosaurs, was, ahem, Passer domesticus. The house sparrow....
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    By the was, speaking of Empire, which we weren't, I see there's a new paper in Nature, where they're proposing, if I understand it, a new taxonomy and origin of dinosaurs... 15Myears earlier, and from the northern hemisphere - Laurasia,...
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    304—again, on random page of standard paperback (p253 of Neal Asher's The War Factory). That page has a fair amount of dialogue, and hence more than the usual number of incomplete lines....
  • Commented on The light at the end of the tunnel (is not necessarily an oncoming train)
    I did agree with one of the commenters on this In the Pipeline post that No Unplanned Detonations would make an excellent Culture ship name....
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    What I was thinking was that some people suffer from "observational blindness" where they fail to notice a narrow (and sometimes low) vehicle in plain sight, even when it's painted bright yellow or bright green! Absolutely. The first motorised vehicle...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    I actually prefer trolley buses My late father used to tell horror stories about the trolley buses in Huddersfield (this would have been in the 1930s). Apparently in the winter or in fog they would regularly misjudge corners and lose...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    Our hillsides are rock. Building into rock is expensive and time consuming. Also hillsides steep enough to be built into aren't so near places people want to say. Try going to Sheffield instead. The hills in Sheffield are steep enough...
  • Commented on Popcorn Time
    Re the A1 (which I avoid whenever possible when visiting family in Scotland, but in bad weather it's the only route that doesn't go over an inconveniently large hill)—you forgot the bit where some genius decided it could double as...
  • Commented on The internet of decay
    I've never tried either Hebrew or Yiddish, but I do have a working knowledge of German, which is a three-gender system, and sometime back in the distant past I acquired a 'A' in O-grade Latin, which is a three-gender system...
  • Commented on The internet of decay
    When I was at school, I was taught that collective nouns are singular (in English) but, in common use, they are very often plural. That's actually one of the areas in which American English differs from British English: the Americans...
  • Commented on The internet of decay
    The word "gender" derives from Latin "genus", kind, and in grammar need not refer to sex. There are a number of languages with more than three grammatical genders. This use of the word actually has priority over the "classification by...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Yes: my house is quite new (around 20 years old), but one of my colleagues lives in a house in Castleton (in the Peak District) whose core is mediaeval. He had a party there to welcome a new group member...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    I think that's right. The "depose first, then dispose of" route has been used several times in the history of the various British monarchies, and was pretty much standard practice in the Byzantine empire if I recall correctly. It's probably...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    The strategy of General Monte-Carlo always works. With or without the spiritual guidance of the Reverend Bayes?...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Should anyone actually wish to consider testing submarine detection technology, these may be useful......
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Okay, so this map shows only landmasses lighting up. Is this an artist's conception thing or real because it suggests that these particles are not viewable/measurable if in water? Neither of the above. If you look at the paper (should...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Until and unless someone develops an adequately directional neutrino detector. I shan't hold my breath. There are perfectly fine directional neutrino detectors—just not for this energy range. Fission neutrinos have energies around 3 MeV or thereabouts (see here for more...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    Would the detection accuracy be enough that one could narrow down a search area sufficiently to go and find the sub using more conventional means? I think the short answer to that is "no": Learned talks about resolutions of a...
  • Commented on The End of the British nuclear deterrent?
    I will note that there are some recent proposals to use reactor neutrino emissions to pin down the rough location of submarines Speaking as a neutrino physicist, I don't know of anything "recent". There is a current proposal—I'm not on...
  • Commented on I can't keep up
    Sadly, In The Pipeline hasn't published a "things I won't work with" post since 2014 Yes it has: you missed this one from September 2016. More recently, this one (a "How not to do it" rather than "Things I won't...
  • Commented on Placeholder? Placeholder!
    Yes, stainless steels all include lots of chromium—that's what provides the corrosion resistance. They don't all include nickel: there are three basic classes, austenitic, ferritic and martensitic, and only the first class contains nickel. See this page for a table...
  • Commented on Placeholder? Placeholder!
    "R" & ""S" have been renamed: "L" & "T" No, they haven't. Right from the very beginning of spectral classification (Fr Angelo Secchi, 1860s) it was recognised that some cool stars were qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively different from most...
  • Commented on Free ebooks! Get 'em while they're hot!
    Thanks Charlie. Given that I bought the original books in dead tree, I don't feel too guilty about being slightly inaccurate regarding my place of residence. Feel slightly more guilty about giving them a gmail account I never use to...
  • Commented on And the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth
    'The probe will study polarized light coming from black holes, neutron stars and other cosmic phenomena that cannot be directly studied.' Wonder how different black-hole polarized light is vs. regular light re: energy. The point about studying polarized light is...
  • Commented on And the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth
    Saw in some doc that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is made up of two very distinct materials which in fact form two distinct rings, one carbon/metallic and the other ice. Then there are the two other highly...
  • Commented on Ever Young?
    Yes indeed... A colleague in Manchester told me that they used to proudly display Ernest Rutherford's lab bench, until a passing radiation safety inspector noticed that all his detectors went ballistic whenever he got anywhere near it......
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