Computer: The answer to Life, Covid-19, and everything is...

Crowd: Yes?

Computer: ...you are not going to like this...

Crowd: Get on with it!

Computer: The answer to Life, Covid-19, and everything is...

Crowd: Yes?

Computer: ..is wear a face mask when you go out.

Crowd: What?

Computer: That's the answer. I checked it very carefully.

Johnson again presents his ideas as the opinion of Britain. If you disagree, you cannot be British, right?

I actually doubt his intention to actually do this. This is yet another 'dead cat' flung on the table to distract us from the virus, which in turn is distracting from Hard Brexit which he hopes to manage in a few weeks, to distract us from selling off the NHS. But it might work.

I learned emacs in the early 1985, because I was working on DEC, PC, and Linux workstations and you could get it for all of these. I am still using it every day, and I am still learning tricks. If I started on a new text editor, I would be reaching a similar level of expertise in 2055, when I would be 99, if I am still here and learning new tricks.

Our younger readers may need to understand what a computer was back in the sixties. The first computer I actually got to see face to face rather than sending off punched cards was a Hewlett-Packard arch-mounted machine in the NPL. This had 16 registers with 16 bits, and that as all the memory it had. The program and data was continuously read on and off a magnetic drum. Computer languages often had dialects for each complete - getting the same result on different machines didn't really happen until 'C'.

It gets weirder. Accountancy programs had particular needs. You may want to total billions of dollars but not lose track of a penny, which would need about 40 bits. You may also spend lots of time converting from binary into decimal just to print out the figures in columns, so a common solution was to use decimal packed into hexadecimal, so the CPU could actually work all the time in base 10, and numbers could have variable length. I remember PDP-11's in the 1980s had still had decimal instruction set options.

If these firms are using ancient machines, we would need to simulate these weird instruction sets. I suspect someone has actually done a simulation of the old machines on more modern machines, so we need to pick apart layers of emulation to get at the actual program function. Once we have that it may be easy to get a 64-bit machine to do the same thing. I am a programmer in my sixties, and this sounds like fun.

True. But she noticed the new smell on a particular day, and the Parkinson's slowly manifested itself over the next ten years. This rather suggests that something happened to her husband, or something already within her husband reached some crisis over a period of maybe days, maybe hours. If we could learn something about that period, rather than mapping the degeneration ten years later and trying to slow it down, we might have a chance of prevention.

Naah, brats they are. But cunning brats. The species is tough. They give me hope: we and the will survive. Meanwhile in the UK we have people fighting in the arena for packs of toilet rolls. They will probably survive too, but I am less happy about that.

I welcome this work, but I doubt there is a reliable test for bot-ness. The study uses a particular tool which has been developed at a university. A cutting-edge bot farm is probably very protective of its techniques, and is unlikely to give them any hints, or a good sample of their output to analyse. Probably the original report is clearer on this.

I also wonder whether the 5% of bot comments for global warming are real, or just the background noise.

Apparently you can change the name and all the properties of a product and keep the old reviews, which can skew your scores. This is why reviews may suddenly change half-way down. This sometimes shows up as a rating distribution with two peaks. You can also get this if something works on some computers but not on others, or breaks easily for some users. Or if one product has been substituted for another. Or if all the friends and relations of the seller gave it five stars. All these give the same distribution. The only way to tell these apart is to actually read the reviews.

If there are too many reviews to read, it may be worth checking a scattering of the recent ones and some of the outliers. If all the poor reviews say "flimsy construction - it broke first time I used it" then there may be a fault in the gadget, or it may be some users whack it with a hammer when parts don't seem to fit. If all the good ones have very similar text, be suspicious. Or if you have a glowing five-star report for a bag of washers.

Get your Sherlock on. There is often good info in the reviews if you questing everything you read.

This is a known strategy. If you have a successful product that you no longer sell, then you can change the name and the description and all the settings until the product has completely changed, but still keep all the old ratings. According to some people, Amazon themselves suggest you can do this if you are a good customer.

This is true. I was trying to keep the explanation short, and to match the original article. Now that people know to look for them, they have fund a number of galaxies that are 'light' in dark matter. I agree, it is unlikely that they have zero matter - just that some sort of slingshot process may have partitioned their matter differently. Presumably there are other galaxies with a double helping of dark matter.

Ah. You got me on that one. This was a sentence that got lost off the bottom of my editor. I had thought I had deleted it, because I decided not to go down the rabbit-hole of 'what happens when dark matter meets itself. But the first half of it seems to have survived.

This is not in fact as surprising or controversial as the press love to make out.

The original evidence that convinced many of us that what we called 'dark matter' was the 'Bullet nebula' in the Abell cluster, where the dark matter, as imaged by the red-shift of the galaxies behind it, did not follow the visible mass of two galaxies that had narrowly missed each other. Before that, all the errors we had seen were from galaxy rotations, and these could be explained as some fine tweak in the gravitational constant at galactic distances. But this showed the dark stuff could be 'flung' off when the visible matter is stopped by other visible matter. It is not surprising that galaxy formation may have the same irregularities in dark matter distribution. If you have a cloud of material that condenses onto two galaxies that fly apart, the dark matter may well not get split evenly. Probably buried in this data is some clue as to dark mater interaction, but we are not there yet.

On the other hand, if you don't want to believe in 'dark matter' as actual stuff, then how would you explain the two sorts of rotation they find in galaxies?

Dark matter must have some interactions with itself or it would not be clumped like this. We do not have any to study, but we can simulate some likely forms of self-interaction, and can model

That's Huygens coupling. It's a neat effect that will cause two clocks to tick together if they are mounted on the same wall, and it is caused by the sound waves of the ticks travelling through the wall. The actual forces are tiny, but it needs very little to advance the escapement of one clock by half a tick in 10 minutes. it is almost certainly not what is happening here but it is a good analogy: weird things like this do happen.

What is probably happening is the the original flows of matter are not uniform: the velocity will depend slightly on position, just as a river will flow faster I the middle than at the edges. If the local region of matter condenses into a galaxy it will probably inherit the average spin of the surrounding field of matter, so it will probably have a spin in the same plane as its neighbours.

This is not mysterious, whatever the original article may say. It is slightly surprising that the flows are quite as smooth, and the spins of some galaxies are aligned to the exact degree they are. But the idea that they should have been influenced by a common cause is not surprising: indeed astronomers tried to measure this effect, which suggests they had anticipated it.

Imagine a single atom in space. What is its temperature? The answer is we don't know from a single atom. If we had lots of atoms and they were all moving in random directions, then the atoms would have a temperature. If they were all moving in the same direction then they would have zero temperature, but the would have a temperature.

Temperature is a property of things in steady equilibrium with other things. In space, there are lots of atoms which are too spaced out to be interacting very much. There are interactions and that is what makes the heliopause, but there isn't a lot of it. So if you were Voyager 2 you would not be losing or gaining much heat from the surrounding 'atmosphere' because there is so little of it.

Voyager 2 is losing heat by radiation. Space is very transparent to most radiation: we can see almost all the way back to the Big Bang. We haven't got true thermal equilibrium, which would mean we haven't got temperature as we normally measure it on Earth. They can give a 'temperature' figure to the atoms in space because they are exchanging almost no radiation, so the equilibrium is dominated by the other interactions that made the heliopause.

It's a bit of a weird answer, I'm afraid. The answer depends on the definition of temperature, and that can get a bit weird in deep space. But you and Voyager 2 will radiate heat, so it will feel very cold out there.

I work for a company that produces software for the motion picture industries, so we get to work with the studios that are being used as an example. Here, we have a process made of people, and people don't fit into processes. Or rather, there are some people that will have an exact niche, but you can't always fit the others around them. But the whole thing has ti come together somehow. All management models are wrong: some management models are useful.

Here, I would pick out "having a vision" is key, where the vision is often something that the customer does not know they want until the see it. The exponential cost of change is important to recognise, but there isn't a lot you can do about that beyond being occasionally prepared to rip out something central because it is holding you back. The changing nature of the job again is important, as the project evolves from the people working o their separate bits, to something with a regular build and smoke test 'heartbeat', but there isn't a lot you can do about that either.

Silicon can be doped to make useful semiconductors. Silicon oxide is a good insulator. With these we can make circuits, but it has taken half a century to get this far.

Carbon can be a super resistor, a resistor, a semiconductor, a conductor, and probably a superconductor without any other element, just by changing the bonds. If we could arrange the bonds just as we wanted them, we could have a mole of bytes in a few hundreds of grams of carbon. We might be able to trap flux quanta in pi orbital rings. All carbon circuits could be tremendous. But not yet. So far every carbon circuit has used a very high rejection ratio so we have one or two tubes in the right place to make a simple amplifier. And suddenly we have this. But it still isn't useful.

There is a wire bonding technology that is used to get from the sub-micron scale of the silicon to the millimetre scale of the macro connections to a chip. If we are going to get to the molecular scale, then we are going to need an extra level of this sort of technology, to get from conventional microns to the nanometre scale of molecules. This is perhaps all we may get out of this. Early days, though.