IMS_Blog

I’ve been away, so no comment until now (I’d only vaguely heard the resolution had passed and Pluto demoted—only just read the actual resolution).

First the good bit: They’ve seen sense and demoted Pluto to something which isn’t a planet. I maintain this is obvious (unless you go the originally proposed route which just ends up with so many “planets” that you need to come up with another word for the things we now have as planets anyway). So well done for getting the planets right….

Now the bad bits…

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A few days ago I noticed that the laptop’s battery indicator had appeared in the taskbar despite the fact that it was plugged into the mains. Hmmm. A tiddle of the connector solved the issue but it kept returning with increasing frequency. Obviously a failing wire. Today it finally got to the point of unworkable. From what I’d been doing in terms of wire twiddling I was fairly certain the break was near the end connector. So, armed with penknife (which my finger can attest is quite sharp) and multimeter I cut away molded pieces and started trying to find the problem. Having made sure everything was actually soldered still I got lucky in finding the break, as it was under the first place I stripped wire insulation away (well, I say luck…it had broken just on the far side of the strain relief, which seems a logical enough place).

Not having soldering iron to hand I’ve performed what is technically called a “bodge” :-) Fortunately the break was in the stranded, outer “shield” wire rather than the inner core, so I was able to jump the break by twisting wire together. It’s all bonded together again with electrical tape (red because there wasn’t any black). It’s not the prettiest or best job but it’ll do until it gets done better (which knowing me will not be until this bodge fails!)

There’s still argument about what a planet is. Things aren’t really progressing either. Rather than one proposal there are now three separate, but not alternate, proposals which, as I’ll go into, haven’t really changed anything. Anyone interested might want to watch the video of the latest meeting. Judging from that things are far from in large agreement with the leadership…

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The Farn is a measure of length I made up in my head whilst lying half asleep this morning. I document it here because I’m in that sort of mood. In my (probably warped) imagination the Farn was decreed to be the unit of length by a medieval lord in the eleventh century. This probably happened in an alternate universe. It just so happens to be three metres long.

The Farn came about because I was thinking about the convergence of length scales and I wondered if a physical length scale automatically has convergence at zero. The zero of temperature scales don’t match because where the zero should be isn’t immediately obvious. For length though there’s an obvious physical zero which leads naturally to all length scales converging to have the same zero. The thing about the Farn is it doesn’t. To measure length in Farns you must ask what is the difference in length to The Farn (the wooden rod original produced by my medieval lord). In this way the natural zero shared by other length scales is -1 Farn and a distance of 6 metres would be 1 Farn. Anyway, there’s absolutely no point to this, or any pretence at deep thoughts. I just felt like writing it down.

It’s all over the news. We’ve got some new planets. And we didn’t even have to tender contracts to get them built. Well I might as well add my own thoughts to get lost in the noise.

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Decrypt Text (If you're: Me)

In which it gets so much worse…

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Anybody looking at the last entry may think I’ve started talking even more rubbish than usual. It’s actually all due to a post by Vincent Cheung which I came across. I was bored enough to give it ago, though not without adding my own touches of course ;-)

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Decrypt Text (If you're: anyone)

I’m just fiddling around!
To check something out
Move along.
Nothing to see here