Gordonjcp

Which is strange, because taking off is far easier than landing.

It basically doesn't.

Even without the oil - 2-stroke engines will run on straight petrol, albeit briefly - they still emit an obscene amount of unburnt fuel.

> New vehicle will burn fairly completely (if you include the cat as part of the process), leaving a miniscule amount of hydrocarbons (incompletely burned fuel) and a small amount of CO

So will old ones, if you run them on the right fuel.

My 25-year-old Range Rover has a 4.6 litre engine adapted to run on propane which is - under the right circumstances - a *negative* emission vehicle. It can have measurably less CO and HC in the exhaust than in the intake air (city air heavily contaminated with CO and HC for example from bus engines).

At present? Price at the pump is 72.9 pence per litre, which is represented internally in the software as 7290 1/100ths of a penny.

You can do the same thing with cassettes but they're so fiddly to splice.

> as a child of the 80s/90s attempting to master the art of the perfect mixtape

I hit upon the plan of taping stuff off the radio onto 1/4", and then I could splice a not-talked-over beginning onto a not-talked-over ending.

Later, I worked out that I could extend or shorten tracks, particularly if I could get a tape of the instrumental version, using the same trick.

No-one uses tape and razors these days, but it was good fun.

You don't use floats for money, because it's an integer.

Can you give an example of why you think the first significant digit of "0.1+0.2" is 2?

Unless you're displaying an unreasonable number of places to the right of the point, it's 3.

Nothing - *nothing* - needs more than about four or five significant digits.

The neat thing about floating point is that it works well to represent real-world values.

It turns out that the real world is amazingly inexact, to the point that the inaccuracies of floating point just never even show up.

You could say the same about any other faith, including atheists.

The Spectrum manual was good, with the usual programming guide and a breakdown of the memory map and system variables, but the Jupiter Ace manual also included example circuits so you could build your own peripherals...

> They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.

Which is what's happening.

Its natural state includes devastating wildfires every so often when lightning touches off dry undergrowth that hasn't been cleared away for years.

Where I used to live, a little north of Glasgow but a little south of Stirling, there was a big flat bit of low-lying ground where a modern housing estate was built, with a nice little stream at the bottom.

The ground was flat because it was the bottom of a loch drained in the 1500s, by a culvert to a river a few miles away.

All the rubbish that people threw from their cars washed down the stream, into the wetlands that it flowed through, and eventually began to gunk up the culvert. The wetlands got bigger, the stream got deeper, and by the 1970s the housing scheme had a nice little pond instead of a stream, and cracks in every foundation.

It's not as bad as the proposed housing scheme further along the valley, where I have a photo (which I can't find just at the moment, sorry) of the developer's 4m tall sign boards just barely sticking out of a pond the size of the entire fenced-off bit.

Don't drain wetlands then build on them, folks. Geology will always win against you.

Or Led Zeppelin - The Rain Song.

What's PFAS? <reads article> Oh, something with a scary-sounding name that Californians can be frightened of, like hydrogen hydroxide.

Is that really the best phrasing for the title, today? Like, particularly today?

I remember my dad telling me years and years ago about an arbitrary function generator that they used at university, where you had an oscilloscope with a cardboard mask representing the function's graph in front of the screen, and a light sensor in a light-tight funnel that controlled the spot height. When light shone on the sensor it would reduce the input voltage, and so the spot would trace the top of the cardboard mask.

This actually works quite well!

You've got hydraulic cutters on board.

If a robotaxi gets in the way of your fire appliance, chop it up.

I think you'd enjoy this two-parter:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-gx1-synthesizer-...

So what you're saying is, I need to set up an IPFS gateway and populate it with lots of videos that I hold the copyright for, which happen to have names that match commonly-pirated movies?

I wonder if they bother to download them to check? Hours and hours of bars and tone...

Yup! That covers it!

> Also, "Gravity is 9.8 m/s^2 on Earth." Not a story a but definitely true and explainable to the average person.

Okay, so explain it, what does it mean?

Don't use a story though.

Pretend I didn't do physics in high school.

That's an average across the entire population.

Most people barely drive further than the end of their street.

> when you’re driving more than 6 hours in a day, which is not uncommon for Americans

Most Americans do less than 5000 miles per year. You totter to the shops and back over distances that people in other countries would just walk.

You can spot American tourists in Scotland, because they can't cope with everything being 200 miles apart when they drive at a maximum of 15mph.

Depends on where you live, I guess. Where I grew up in NW Scotland you can easily rack up a couple of hundred miles a day without actually going anywhere.

Turning the blur down, changing the shadow to a nice bright colour, turning up the number of layered shadows, and then wibbling the X and Y parameters around gives a nice oldschool Winamp Milkdrop plugin rotozoomer type effect.

Freedom and power are orthogonal.

The next person I see who is blasting music from their idiotic bluetooth speakers up on a remote hilltop is going to have to be taken off the bottom of the nearest corrie by the Mountain Rescue Team.

Power to just do what you like. Power to go "you know what, I'm going to look and see what's down *that* road, I've never been that way before."