Interesting Items...

Depends if you give credence to the conspiracy of silence preventing the real expert deniers speaking out for fear of losing funding and career.
 
Sky & Telescope magazine is reporting an asteroid occultation due to happen next month, visible from a narrow strip crossing parts of USA/Canada. This is when a body in the Solar System moves in line and blocks the light from a star. In this case the star is Regulus, the brightest in the constellation Leo.

It is staggering that the positions and trajectories of the Earth and the asteroid are known to this level of precision, such that the shadow cast on the surface of the Earth can be predicted within a few miles (it is only a few tens of miles across). The occultation will be visible to observers (in the right place) as Regulus flicking off and on over a few seconds, and video recordings sync'ed with GPS time and position (easily within the means of the amateur), taken in a variety of places, will reveal the size and shape of the asteroid, refine its position and orbit, and could potentially provide data on the size of the star (if the light fades rather than suddenly extinguishing, the time over which it fades indicates the size of the star; the outline of the asteroid can be reconstructed from the extinction timings, which are effectively scan lines across the silhouette of the asteroid). An observer right on the edge of the shadow might see flickering as Regulus is revealed through valleys on the "horizon" of the asteroid.

Ironically, it is only because of a previous occultation that the position of Regulus is already known with sufficient precision.
 
I was in Marks & Spencers yesterday and strawberries were on offer: £2 a punnet or two for £5. I didn't dare buy a second one.

I then went to the salads and they were £2 each or four for £10.

:frantic:
 
I have seen similar in Tesco. Somebody can't count (I wonder if M&S employed somebody Tesco had sacked...).
 
Mike0001 said:
I was in Marks & Spencers yesterday and strawberries were on offer: £2 a punnet or two for £5. I didn't dare buy a second one. I then went to the salads and they were £2 each or four for £10.
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They're obviously trying to discourage bulk buying :)
 
Seen on the GIMP home page:

In the past few months, we have received some complaints about the site where the GIMP installers for the Microsoft Windows platforms are hosted.

SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green "Download here" buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.

The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.

From now on, Jernej Simončič, who provides the installer packages, uploads them to our FTP directly, and from there they will be distributed automatically to our mirrors. Please check Downloads page for updated information. http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net will remain active for the time being and direct users to the new download locations.
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That's good. A lot of those download sites are really hard to use because the link you actually want is in a corner in small print.
I nearly got caught once but realised before the 'false' download finished and killed it. I'm really careful now.
 
Being a very critical user of word processing packages, I had problems with Libre last time I looked at it. But I have yet to review the latest offerings from Apache and Libre. I currently use OpenOffice 3.3, better the devil you know than the devil you don't. Even Word has quirks that have to be worked around.
 
Trev said:
False generalisation, wildly out. Not everyone else uses it. I've never even heard of it, let alone used it.
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Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice are forks from the once supported OpenOffice division of Sun, which was closed down by Oracle, all its developers being sacked. LibreOffice possibly has the moral high ground and I believe it is the more used of the two.
 
The original Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (AKA HHGTTG, H2G2) is being re-broadcast on Radio 4 Extra from Saturday.
 
Scientific American (March 2014 page 61) said:
Here is the real danger of the Einstellung effect. We may believe that we are thinking in an open-minded way, completely unaware that our brain is selectively directing attention away from aspects of our environment that could inspire new thoughts. Any data that do not fit the solution or theory we have already clung to are ignored or discarded.
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Old hat and grossly misleading. Then again, looking at some of your posts... :)
 
Okay, so you know more than the research scientists who contribute articles written for the general public after their research has been peer-reviewed in the likes of Nature then...

I recommend you get down the library and read the whole article before dismissing it.
 
The difficulty lies, not in the new
ideas, but in escaping from the old
ones, which ramify ... into every
corner of our minds.
John Maynard Keynes, 1936


Try

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&r...NK4-O8TlNukzA3Q&bvm=bv.62578216,d.ZG4&cad=rjt

if you must, but there is better stuff in:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/We-Are-Our-Brains-Alzheimers-ebook/dp/B00HEW79B0/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Consciousne...des-Thoughts/dp/0670025437/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Very few things enter consciousness, of all the things being processed in parallel in our brains. Consciousness only notices one thing at a time, and it is only when a brain activity goes global that it even enters conscious thought.

I no longer have my Uni library card. It expired 10 years ago. It is needed to get past the barriers. When I first became a lecturer in 1971, anyone could come and go. Very sad!
 
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