Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - 17 Year Old Radio Astronomy Mystery Traced Back to Kitchen Microwave (bbc.com)

Bo'Bob'O writes: The BBC reports that the scientists at the Parkes and Bleien Radio Observatories in New South Whales, Australia, have tracked down an earth-based signals that had been eluding observation for 17 years. These signals, which came to be called Perytons “occurred only during office hours and predominantly on weekdays.” The source, as it turned out, was located right inside the antenna's tower where impatient scientists had been opening the kitchen microwave door before its cycle had finished. As the linked paper concludes, this, and a worn magnetron caused a condition that allowed the microwaves to emit a burst of frequencies not expected by the scientists, only compounding the original mystery.

Comment just wanted to say thank you (Score 1) 203

git is an essential - spent a lot of the later part of my working life trying to build something similar, but linus did it just right.

there is something about mr torvalds and the way he thinks that we cannot do without.

he finds methods that actually really work.

doing software without torvalds would be like riding fish without a bicycle.

Comment broken idea from the start (Score 1) 71

if you make the frame from wood, you lock up carbon. steel is a total waste of resources, also conducts lightning through the frame of the building.

plastic is the worst possible choice for the panels, almost anything else is better, as long as it is reasonably fireproof.

sometimes long life is a bad thing - plastic is damned hard to keep clean, and harbours disease - it would be far better if the panels were made of something local, cheap and recycleable, that needed to be replaced at least yearly.

with a little bit of careful thought, just about any country could produce it's own emergency shelter system out of local resources.

funny how the western world becomes less and less competent at anything, the fatter and more ikea it gets.

these people should give up saving the planet, and learn how to feed their own children properly, they are becoming as dumb as the cows that seem to be the only thing they eat.

Comment this is NOT news (Score 1) 486

the tests they show only serve to demonstrate how slow python string concatenation is.
they then go on to say that disk writes are bufferered more sensibly, and this is why they are faster.
the key thing to notice is that disk buffering happens in **memory**.

memory is still, and will remain, much faster.

you just have to use it properly.

Comment the australian government (Score 3, Interesting) 328

(or related agency) published a detailed study on this subject in the late 90s.

as far as i remember i found this report on The Well, but i have since lost track of the file, and if anyone knows about it, i would really appreciate a chace to study it again.

the report was notable, as i remember, because it actually went so far as to suggest that weed makes better drivers - basically because they are more relaxed and therefore more likely to make the correct decisions in an emergency.

Slashdot Top Deals

Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.

Working...