Be Excellent To Each Other

This made me giggle. "My science is tight, yo. Newton's my beyatch."



I have seen it and, regrettably, it isn't.

Will This Do-FTFY.

The amount of gay sex comments you make combined with your "out of the closet" thread gets me thinking....

Also: I now want to sneak "My science is tight, yo. Newton's my beyatch." into my thesis now...

Anyone see the front cover of the (spit - it was lying on the train, honest) Telegraph? The Tories are able to claim that the tax changes "will hit the poor" - wilful reinterpretation of the fact that they hit much harder on the big gas guzzlers, rather than the jalopies/no car that the really poor might have.

Anyhow, there are shades of grey in that, of course - what I find fascinating is that the government is so unpopular that the Tory party can make hay with a no-news piece of legislation *and* present themselves as fighting the good fight for the lowly. Where the hell do I live?

It doesn't just look awesome, it is the very definition of awesome.
These are naught but malicious untruths.

Caveat: I haven't seen it since I was a sugar-dosed 6-to-8-or-so year-old.

To quote a famous professor and MC: "My science is tight, I'm bad like dolomite."

Maybe.

"On the stage I rock the mic,
my science is so tight,
other rappers best step off,
I'm bad like Dolamite."

Actually.

I love that song.

Do I? Do I?



Yes.

Also, from initial Googling: 3.0l M3 front discs? £80. 3.2l M3 front discs? £210. They may be better on the Evolution, but faaaaaaack.

It could be like in that TV show, Survivors! And Grimm... could be the George Baker style authoritarian land holder who you become a vassal of - or at least with his lawyer skills his Grima Wormtongue.


I do think the idea of Astroknight is awesome though.

I think I should be in Band E (Golf 1.6) so it should work out the same. Academic at the moment mind.

50 years to look ridiculous? I give it 10 years. Here's a fresh faced young presenter reviewing the Rover 75.



Now over to The Stig for a laptime.......

A thought.

What with all of the issues around the use of oil and the growing scarcity thereof, why can't a fair chunk of the goods transported by sea be brought by old-fashioned sailing ships? Y'know, those ships that good old Blighty used to help establish and maintain the British Empire, and which were used to transport all sorts of perishables from all over.

The upsides to this are that (a) you can, if you want, make them out of wood (saving on oil as you're not using plastics) (b) you don't need smelly diesel to run them (saving on oil). Plus it'd be way cool - sailing could be a career again and it'd give people real jobs whilst potentially cutting down on the number of consultants, software programmers, faceless bureaucrats, and bloggers. It could also presage a return of proper pirates, rather than the AK-toting nutjobs in speedboats around Somalia we're currently stuck with.

Ha - no. I nicked his thought and did something a little more literate with it. I had started my post with "I saw something about this on the El Reg comments section..." but changed my mind and decided to hide my shame at reading the Reg's comments section.

Anyway - 's a good idea.

Hey, fuck you buddy.

There's a German company which has developed a *GIANT LIFTING KITE* which can be attached to a boom on the front of cargo ships. A computer controls winches on the kite lines, to "slew" the kite across the wind, to generate the maximum forward pull.
Apparently it can save 30% on fuel costs, on average.

Increase the fraction of wind power like that, invent airships again, and stop importing loads of unnecessary junk from China, and you'd save a hell of a lot of fuel.

Yeah, I heard about that. It seemed like a totally awesome idea, but it doesn't seem to have taken off yet. Whether that's because the designers haven't been able to get it to market yet, or because there's been a lack of interest, I don't know. But who wouldn't want to save money for the cost of a kite?

I'd still rather have one of these though:

Until you come across a dead calm. And sure, being able to tear off Nicole Kidman's shorts with one tug and have your wicked way with her sounds great, but that was a MOVIE, man.

Gaz "Read-o-vision" FTFY.

Unless that stuff about Peak Oil is true, in which case we'll all be dead soon anyway, so there's no point worrying about it.

I was reading in New Scientist about some Japanese dude who was trying to invent a sub like that in "hunt for red october" but the sub was crap. However, he thought that he could take the underlying engine and turn it into a dynamo, and create electricity from water motion (tides). To do that, you would have to have the turbines off shore, and get the electricity back to land would be uneconomical. He then came up with the idea that you could use that electricity to turn the sea water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, and then pump that to shore, and use those gases to fuel hydrogen engines.

NS preview here

I think it's a really good idea, and makes good sense.

Malc

Why is he trying to get the electricity back to land in a way that makes it uneconomical, when all the offshore wind farms and tidal generators to be built in the UK will somehow do it economically?!

Yeah I can't really imagine how pumping gas down a pipe is ever going to be cheaper than sending electricity down a cable. Someone subscribe to New Scientist and find out.

Resistance in the cable causes large losses for 'leccy, whereas separated gases don't suddenly disappear. If you do it below the surface, so the pipe runs uphill, you don't even need to pump it; even flat, the pressurisation-for-bottling process at the land-end would create plenty of low pressure to suck it along. Then again, you could use the spare energy to partially pressurise at the generator if you wanted (but would you really want a large bomb sitting a few miles out to sea, on your expensive generator?).

Which doesn't mean they're not on another wild goose chase.

Also, NS is the tabloid of the science world.

I'm still waiting for the introduction of their page 3 stunnas, though.

Look at the molecules on that!

Now you tell us, it's one of those magazines I only ever read when I have to use <eugh> public transport </eugh>, but I thought it made me look dead clever.

Like the Economist. Bleurrrrrgh.

I couldn't read most of the article because it requires registration, but frankly, it sounds like bollocks.

First, as someone else pointed out, there's not really any major difficulties with transporting power ashore in the first place. If you had a particularly vast source of electrical energy which was an incredibly long way from land, you might want to go for ultra-high-voltage monopolar DC transmission instead of bog standard 3 phase, but it's not really an issue. Mainly because there's no need to put the thing so far away.
Suggesting hydrogen to transfer the power sounds more like an ill-informed attempt to jump on the hydrogen hype-wagon (as well as the 'superconductorz OMG' bandwagon), which leads to the conclusion that the whole thing is probably nonsense.

Hydrogen from salt water? I'm not a chemist but that sounds like a good way to make a chlorine generator and not much else.
Oh, and electrolysis is only about 50% efficient anyway so that's not looking too clever. And then you've got to convert the gas back into energy on the shore, which you can't really do without wasting most of it again.

Bad idea all round.