Viewing profile — zzbn00

Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to he…

Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody kno…

Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from cus…

Moved out of TCL and into Python in 2001. Perl was big at the time. But Python had REPL and numeric/numarray which swung it in my case. (Worked out well I suppose? Almost 1/4 centu…

Many comments here focusing on secrets and problems. But here is another way to look at this: Environment variables are the "indefinite scope and dynamic extent" variable bindings …

No need to go as far as Africa. Basic landline telephones spread into poorer/more rural parts of Europe only in 1980s and 1990s. Until then it was either taking the bus to see peop…

Yes, and it was a huge thing at the time. The social effects of all this time coordination and time tabling are one of the underlying themes of Stoker's novel Dracula.

Exactly this. But you don't really want to bundle straight away -- think about the exact problem you have and then solve exactly that problem. After you've sorted a few problems li…

“studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.” -> Ende…

I didn't know about that, would have been right that Amazon pays damages to the copyright holder. But they did at least refund the price paid, so the readers were no worse off than…

The terms of service in UK seem better in this regard than USA. Which/why did they remove the book?

I agree. And the cost of ebooks is often very reasonable, Amazon are selling lots (more than one can read in a lifetime) of superb stuff in the $1-$4 range. (Makes things really di…

Its great for when people need to be in the loop, looking at the data, maybe loading in Excel etc. (I use it myself...). But not enough humans around for 21 GB/s

Yes, but if you have decades of data, what turns on having to wait for a minute or 10 minutes to convert it?

I think these would add only small amount of information (and in a DB would be modelled as joins). Only adds lots of data if done very inefficiently.

Humans generate decisions / text information at rates of ~bytes per second at most. There is barely enough humans around to generate 21GB/s of information even if all they did was …

There is also https://tiddlywiki.com/ that you can save anywhere

Maybe that would be enough. But the belt-and-braces approach of superglue with silica gel bags in a closed jar, in a fridge, seems to work well and has meant the superglue is still…

I reuse ones I find in consumer goods by putting them into a jar, together with open superglue bottle(s), and putting the jar into fridge. Not a scientific study, but it does seem …

> "A lack of vigilance and discipline" I would agree, and perhaps add that strictest discipline is need in answering the question: could we just get on with our job using existing …

This is a good and subtle point of law -- The City of London is a corporation "by prescription". But while it was created by neither statue nor royal charter, I doubt the parliamen…

But do general people know who is a scientist and who isn't? How do they find out? It isn't by membership of a learned society, it isn't if they are working at a university. There …

The whole episode is a nice and timely reminder of the difficulty of the society as a whole in dealing with scientists and understanding which ones are good, which ones can be trus…