It does sound like a badly done odd-one-out list, doesn't it?

"For 10 points, which of these are people who may actually be able to cure your cancer? Surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers."

I love the juxtaposition of your comment and your sig.

Random off-topic trivia: £ on a standard British keyboard layout is reached by shift+3 - all the more confusing when referring to the pound sign with someone using an American keyboard layout as the convention is to call the # symbol a pound sign and it too is shift+3.

It is off a bit ;-) ((335,258,000 sq km * 0.77mm) * 1000 kg per metre cubed) / 200000 tonnes = about 1.2 million suezmax tankers.

The argument Stallman uses against this is that we, as voters, have no way to know whether the code actually running on the machine in front of us is the same as the open code that we have reviewed. Ultimately there will come a time when a very select number of people are responsible for compiling the code and putting it on the machine. If those people have a vested interest in some outcome or other then they could tamper with the machine and no-one would know any better. In fact, we would all be thinking it was a secure system because of the "open" nature of it. These things aren't like our PCs, we can't just install VotingMachine From Scratch and be done with it.

Topical case in point: Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn. Instagram was launched in 2010, has 13 employees and has just been bought out at a minimum rate of around $30 million per employee per year. That's an astonishing yield and all without actually taking the business to the full term.

They're brilliant aren't they? They crop up everywhere now. The BBC uses them with gay abandon and whilst I'm sure that they're just using them in their traditional sense (i.e. to delineate a quote) the results can often be hilarious.

Here's another amusing example from today on the BBC: 'Cloaking' a 3-D object from all angles demonstrated. You can just hear the derisive journalist as he writes the headline...

As per the post above, you can use longurl.org to see where it goes (in this case, here) without ever clicking on it. I'd not seen the service before but can see how it would be handy in situations like this where you are unsure whether to trust the link.

If you do a lot of scientific or similar work, a lot of machines have dedicated PCs, each with their own keyboard. For myself, that's two HPLC machines, a mass spectrometer, a microplate reader, a real time PCR machine and a fluorescence microscope all without touching a "normal" computer.

I did wonder about the exact temperature required and naturally assumed it was a carefully controlled centigrade temperature. Of course, it's just another case of mis-conversion from one unit to another. 1382 F is the exact conversion from 750 C, a value only given to 2 sf. 1400 F would be a more appropriate conversion if you have to convert it at all.

But it has happened...

Some quick back of the envelope calculations: FTFA, each tile generates "2.1 W" per step. If we assume a typical step time of 500ms based a pace of 120 steps per minute this could be interpreted as about 1.05J captured per step.

The casing is made from stainless steel which required about 53 MJ/kg for production in 2004. If we assume a tile casing mass of 2kg that is 106 MJ required for the steel production alone.

The shopping centre may be open around 10 hours a day with perhaps 20 seconds between each step averaged over a typical day. This is 1800 steps per day at 1.05J per step giving a total of 1890 J captured per day. Assuming 100% efficiency and a never-closing shopping centre, this gives an energy breakeven for the steel alone of around 56000 days or 153 years.

I know that other factors are in play such as the potential to raise awareness of environmental issues but this is ridiculous. I noticed that the award that the guy is in the running for is sponsored by Shell and part of me suspects that they know that these things are crap but want to be seen to promote something like this which appeals to the public and appears "green".

This is something I really need to look at in more detail. If you try astrophotography with a lot of digital cameras, you'll find that the H-alpha wavelength (around 650nm, red) is greatly diminished by the filter. However, an IR LED (peak wavelength about 960nm) shows up brightly in digital photos taken on the same camera. It seems more sensible to include a short-pass filter as they are cheaper to manufacture but perhaps they are band-pass? Just a thought; may be totally off here.

There's also a very similar SMBC cartoon (although a little later than the XKCD one).