Pigeon

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• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "Sorry, can't let you use that soldering iron, you might burn yourself. No, you can't use a saw...." Oh, you mean health & safety regulations? I'm sure I have read some story about health and safety ninnyism being unavoidably enforced...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "Congratulations, you've just described genomics!" Well... you did :) Paul's comment @ 91 was basically setting out the details of one of the things I had stuffed, unlabelled, into the jar of "very generous assumptions about the operating environment" when...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "Or deduce the laws of magic underlying LOTR without Tolkien's notes." Sufficiently advanced technology....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  ...or the evolution of collective intelligence among sufficiently large groupings of individually-stupid nano-demons, so although each demon itself is not intelligent, a blob of bacterialdemon slime is. One could well imagine also that the collective intelligence is more blindly nasty...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  You could put pink dye in the grid everywhere except where it supplies a set of official taxed charging points. Then sometimes at random a cop will stop you and use a piece of official police wire to make a...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  "read an instruction from an input, write an output, and execute a very limited number of tasks ("put this atom on top of that atom", "pause", "resume", "halt and catch fire" ...)" OK, so this demon is basically a Turing...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Big Garratts, like this: http://www.nigeltout.com/assets/images/autogen/0079_MagaliesburgSouthAfrica_19920726_s.jpg And in Zimbabwe: http://www.farrail.com/bilder/zimbabwe/zim-2008/tj-christine's-curve-414-st.jpg They're a lot bigger than the driver: http://www.norgrove.me.uk/glimages/G623-7.jpg Freight vehicles: basically the same in the UK http://c8.alamy.com/comp/PERFXM/freightliner-intermodal-container-train-passing-kings-sutton-on-the-cherwell-valley-railway-line-carrying-deep-sea-shipping-containers-for-export-uk-PERFXM.jpg but what we don't have, anywhere, is the ability to stack two containers one...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Thing about Brunel's broad gauge was that it was an idea from the time when it was still not well known where the diminishing returns bit kicks in. (And also part of the point was to support having carriage bodies...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  ...of course the C&SLR also had a different electrification system: +500V on the third rail in one tunnel and -500V in the other. With the juice supplied by the Lord of the Dynamos. I thought Teesside airport was the one...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Oh, I see. I thought that since one bike had a wheel missing and was bolted on to the other one, it was all one machine....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I don't understand that three-wheel bicycle. I can't see any means for getting the drive from the third wheel to the actual road wheel, and it can't be that you can pivot the upper frame downwards until the wheel touches...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  If I may take your question as being intended for me, rather than Moz - No, I haven't. It's not the sort of thing that it would ever occur to me to do. I build things for myself, because I...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  No, no - read the second paragraph. My design does not deliver concentrated bursts of energy at such an intensity as to cause explosive disintegration of the target. It uses a high impedance high voltage AC source to power the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  My first thought was "Really? Someone has actually finally realised that if you're the one who hands out the licences, you do have other options than merely moaning ineffectually about it?" My second thought was "...and, of course, it's the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Still common over here. They're a pretty standard sight on the wall behind the counter anywhere food is being handled in the open, like butchers and fish and chip shops. I think I've seen one actually kill a fly about...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Indeed, it wasn't unknown for the railway company to end up buying the canal company out, sometimes so they could fill the canal in and build the railway on top of it, but sometimes just because it was the simplest...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I spent nothing at all to kill lots of flies with an old TV. Line output transformer, with one transistor, one capacitor and one resistor connected to the LT-side windings to make a blocking oscillator, run from a 12V supply...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Many modern roads follow the courses of the more important Roman roads. Far more do not, and many of those that do have been downgraded, bypassed, or simply not used so much, since cars got to the point of beginning...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  ...aviation: fit a Schrader valve stem (without the core) in the lid, part-fill them with water, pump them up as hard as you dare with a foot-pump, then release the locking lever on the valve connector. (Also at least four...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  If only you were in Britain I might well ask you how much you wanted for one of those....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "If hands and feet get cold, they lose control and strength - the same is much less true of legs, because there is a much thicker fat layer and better vasculated muscle underneath." And that muscle is usually working, too,...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "heat is lost from exposed skin at about the same rate no matter where the skin is located" ...which returns to my original point: this includes much of the heat generated in muscular effort. Naturally some of the heat generated...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "Neckties? I don't think there's one in the house currently and I never wear the things." They are a foul abomination, and seem to have absolutely no function whatsoever apart from giving other people a convenient ready-made means of strangling...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "Lower-middle-class and working-class England in the 1940s and 50s, for reference." School laundry schedule as considered appropriate for Diana Spencer's cousin and people of that ilk: Clean socks and pants, every 2 days (or 3, since 7 is prime) Clean...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  No, only bits of it would. The non-smoking carriages would not be, and they made up the majority of the accommodation (or came to, since adjusting numbers to match demand was as simple as putting no-smoking stickers on windows that...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  ""there's a lovely cool spray from them"...then he told them what it was." Hanging out of the window once somewhere around Ribblehead I was hit by drops of moisture from a stream that had begun to emerge from the side...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "Humans are almost uniquely good at long-distance walking because we're adapted to sweat copiously through our buttocks which gives us built-in evaporative cooling (we can use up to half a litre of water per hour for cooling that way)." The...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  What's happened to the comment about "horses are not grass-eating motorcycles"? As an illustration, at the beginning of Wuthering Heights, old man Earnshaw walks to Liverpool and back - sixty miles each way - rather than riding, even though he...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "With a sign saying not to use the facilities when at a station..." Everyone knows those signs who has travelled on British railways. Absolutely standard and it's only in the last few years that it has ceased to be the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Portsmouth vs Bristol for that journey is probably an easy choice. Bristol isn't much further from London than Portsmouth is, but when you're heading up the Irish Sea in any case, it cuts off a massive corner and the reduction...