Bought a paper hat. It looks, at a distance, like a black straw hat, but is in fact made from paper. I look cool in it, though. Of course. 19 CHF at C&A. I expect it handles water considerably worse than my Wegener. I can now enlighten the audience further: Most felt hats, like my black felt Wegener, should not be exposed to water, lest they lose their cool shape and become unwieldy felt rags.
Monthly Archive for July, 2004
Why stop now, when I’m on such a good roll?
The hospital Octavius was sent to looked pretty nice and expensive. So. Tell me, ladies and gentlemen. Would you trust a surgeon that tries to use a meat saw on hardened steel?
Finally got my allocated CERN bike. Whee. Off we go. But now can’t morally drink before biking home. See recent entry.
And one rantlet more. Or maybe two.
Hello, Hollywood, this is for you: Fusion energy is not renewable energy. Allow me to restate that: Fusion power is not a renewable form of power. Once the tritium or deuterium is spent, it’s spent. You’ll have to get some more. There’ll be a limited (albeit vast) amount of deuterium in the ocean, and some atmospheric tritium, though it’s probably easier to make your own. To summarize: Vast fuel supply != renewable energy source. Got that? Fusion power is not renewable power!
One could say, of course, that nearly all the power we use comes indirectly from stellar fusion: The Sun’s radiation drives the rain and the wind, and feeds the plants we burn for heat, eat to live or leave to rot for sixty million years before burning as oil or gas. Uranium is forged in supernovas. But that’s not relevant. See above paragraph for point. Mindwandering will now halt.
Can now claim moral victory over self, having turned down free beer on grounds that person driving me home would also have been drinking.
Went to Annecy with a bunch of people. Nice lake, very nice, very crowded market along narrow streets, nearly warm water in the lake at the beach with the very sharp rocks. Got my back quite red. Ouchie. But still fun. Jokes along the lines of “Where’s Juan?” will be funny for a few days.
Saw Spider-Man 2. Where to start, where to start. As for logic and consistency: Puh-leeze! The inhibitor chip, to take one bit of random nonsense. The SE people forgot the “press here to disable” sticker, not that it was all that neccessary. It would have worked better if the mad scientist’s answer to the question about mind takeover had been simply “Nope. Can’t happen.” which also leaves the way open for a bit more of Octavio’s darling “you dare question my infinite wisdom”, but that would’ve been going into overkill again.
The subway. For one thing: Emergency brake. Trains have those. They override the driver’s controls. Another: ATC systems. Automatic train control systems are quite common now, and can for example cut power when a train goes somewhere it shouldn’t. So could Spidey have, for that matter: Tear an aluminium strip off the train and short-circuit the third rail. You’d (I’d) expect a physics student to know some basic electricity. But factualities tend to ruin the action, apparently.
So, lessons learned:
- Don’t set off controlled thermonuclear explosions in urban areas.
- Requiring human operators with cybernetic implants to be standing relatively unprotected at all times while explosion is ongoing is a bad idea. [Are you just going to shut off during his coffee breaks?]
- Thermonuclear explosions can be stopped with water. [I think not, Sherlock.]
- Controlled fusion reactions look like miniature suns, but do not emit UV, γ or neutron radiation. [Og hvor vil De så have Deres Garage?]
- Random physics buzzwords make sci-fi movies look more authentic.
The list goes on and on, but now I’m not going to bother right now.
So other than reaching nearly to Armageddon on the daft-o-meter, a freqently fun movie with nice fighting, a very boring love story (the bit with the landlord’s daughter was one of very few nonboring scenes on that topic) and, well, CGI-looking CGI. But no boobs. An unresolved question is whether Octavio’s mechanical arms are any good for masturbation.
ImageMagick comes with an utility called convert. One use I frequently have for it is to run my digital photos thru it, like so: convert image.jpg conv/image.jpg. So what I do is simply to uncompress and recompress it. This is of course a lossy process, but in practice I can’t tell any difference from original and recompressed even when I zoom quite far in. And the disk space saving can be quite significant, up to 50%.
