Faraday The Blob

Here is the link to one weird and very funny comic.
This is Faraday:

Try these three, my favourites:
Your New Favourite Bland
Voodoo Economics
 . . and what is probably the ultimate Faraday comic:
A Right Beating for the Wrong Guy

Something to brighten a stinkin' hot day.

Minus One Twelfth? You must be joking!

Have a look at the video on this page: in it mathematicians claim that the sum of 1+2+ 3+4+5+6+7+8+9........  is minus one twelfth.

I don't care who the heck these people are: its crap.

Look at their "proof" : it involves serial sums of numbers that are added in funny ways.  This does not prove anything to me, what's worse, the guy at 3:27 moves one serial sum to offset it from the other with no excuse at all and then proceeds to sum them vertically. This is garbage.
Anyone can fiddle with numbers until you get funny stuff like this but it does not make it so. 

I am not a mathematician and this sort  of crud is the reason why.
Groan complete.

SCAM ALERT !

I just got scammed - well, they tried anyway.  Here is the page that appeared in my browser.

 Yes, it looks very official, but there is one serious problem with it:  The AFP do NOT do this.
Look closely : "criminal's procedure" is not good english.
Of course, there is more phoniness to be seen too: "All your files are encrypted",  "your browser has been blocked" - well clearly it has not or I ould not be able to post this !

Whoever it is should be getting the rewards of their work soon enough. I have sent all the details to Scamwatch already.  I'll enjoy  thinking about their suffering and misery when the real AFP turns up to give them a serve.

Instruments . .

These come from "Futility Closet", an interesting blog I just found via BoingBoing.

This is not unique, of course. I realised a while back that my own nom-de-net had been "borrowed" from another person . . . . . but I have never recieved any communcation from said person, so I assume that it does not matter.

This just might be the source of the "King Kong" story . . . . .
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Music for today: Art Of Noise
I bought some of their music on the iTunes Store but hte record I really wanted "In Visible Silence" does not appear there.  What is really strange though is that some of the songs although named the same are completely different, specifically "Instruments of darkness", which includes a chunk of spoken word from a South African Politician in the version I remember.  eventually I got the orogianl recording n a vid and stripped the soundtrack off it to get the songs  . . . . must be some political footsie going on.

Finally,  Relax.
Some songs just stick in your head, and today I honour what to me is the sexiest song ever: RELAX by Frankie Goes To Hollyood. It still sounds good to me today.

I don't even need to give you a link, you can already hear it in your mind, right?
Happy 2014 Frankie wherever you are.

What is this?

Recently I went to the Mini Maker Faire at The Powerhouse Museum which was good although mini, but afterward as I was leaving I saw this:

No, this is not trickery. What IS this huge overhang being built onto the UTS building?
The mystery is only increases when you se that the "roof" is being built about eight stories up.
I am still amazed by this.

DATA IS STILL DISAPPPEARING

Here is the link to a page where someone has pointed out that scientific data is disappearing . .

Even today when we have an always-on internet, truly huge storage spaces even in our own home PCs never mind "cloud" services, scientific data is disappearing to the point where "for the papers that were written more than 20 years ago, there was a 90 per cent chance that no data was available."

This is SERIOUS crap.
THIS is the kind of thing that will come back to bite us in our collective a**es in future.  This means we are losing scientific information, and not just that : the most important part of all the information of science is the raw data itself.  The bit that's being dropped.

The end of an era?

I just read this article on the F-35 program. It does get technical in places, but I'll try and summarise it, long with a few thoughts of my own:

1. Not for the first time, the US military is trying to develop a "universal" military jet : the trouble is, this did not work the last time it was tried (F-111) and this time it's even worse: they don't have any other plane projects (apart from drones). they cite the F-4 as being a successful example of this idea but I'm not seeing it. The F-4  was not designed for multi-role operations and it certainly was not designed with a VTOL version in mind. 

2. The main problem is that the Marines want a VTOL version of the F-35 to replace their "Harrier" VTOL planes. This has meant that the design is a lousy compromise between the needs of the three different air forces (Airforce, Navy and Marines): if it were not for the Marines' demand for a Vertical Takeoff version, the whole thing would be a whole lot simpler, lighter, thinner and as a result, cheaper and faster. 
As a general theme, maybe the Navy starts with an airforce plane and toughens it up for carrier landings with stronger airframe and landing gear,  adds the tailhook and larger, folding wings so it can land on a carrier, but mostly the plane is not that much off the land based model: not so for the Marines version though.

This half-assed idea that you can make "universal" plane is really the source of the problem. On the surface it looks like you are going to save money -  which looks good on paper, only the savings are more than offset by the fact that you will end up with a dud that doesn't do any of the three or more jobs you wanted it to because the requirements are all different. 

3. The bureaucracy has exploded. I chalk up the death of the British aircraft industry mainly to the burden of bureaucracy that was visited on it by their government: check out the TSR-2 project. It was actually a good design that would still hold up well today but the whole process of getting it into the air was dragged out by endless committees and and dithering about things that should have been decided by one manager and then done. The result? cost overruns, huge burdens of paperwork that achieve nothing and the decrease of the plane's effectiveness . . . It sure looks to me like the Americans have the same sort of problems here. 

I suspect the real problem here is the same one the Brits had: the budget has shrunk so they are trying to "economise," except the nature of bureaucracy itself works against such things: in tough times, huge swathes of people try to shoehorn themselves into public servant jobs since it is "secure", and where is more secure than the defense related industries?then there are all the "watchdogs": office buildings worth of paper pushers who are there to make sure that things get done wihout waste . . . . except that they themselves are part of the problem itself.

Okay, you can take that last one with a grain of salt if you like, but the signs are there: any industry where all of the competing companies are being swallowed up into one is a sad sign.  Competition is what keeps costs down and performance up: when there is no real competition, those two things go south.  BAck in the time of the F-4 there were at least six aircraft companie making jets that could compete for contracts. Sure , there was a bit of derring-do and crookery going on but the competition was still there: what we have now is a monoculture: Boeing (who really make airliners) and LockMar. 

I just hope our own defense folks are looking relly carefully at the next cheque for the F-35 project because it looks to me like a waste of money we don't really have . . . .

Uncle Sam better be hiding some good aces up his sleeve or he's gonna hafta hand in his World Sheriff badge.
Will US stealth drone fighters really wipe the asses of those uppity Chinese fighter pilots - or will Chinese hackers jam their signals and render them useless (or worse!)?
We may find out soon . . . .