andygates

One for thudthwacker  : Quick 'n' dirty one-day hack of a Kinect as a puppet driver.  One. Day.

So, the Tories are in power and their special friends in the NFU are after some sweet sweet blood, or so it seems.  There's only one bit of large-scale science done on badger culls here -- and it says, unequivocally, that it'll suck: it won't be effective in stopping TB, it won't be cost-effective, it'll mess with an apex predator and that's never straightforward, it's basically dumb knee-jerk thinking.

So, of course, the government will do what it always does with science it doesn't like, and ignore it utterly.  The author's even turning up to campaign meetings now.  The RSPCA are doing the big sane campaign thing here (sign up! write in!); there will doubtless be less calm campaigns from the usual suspects as the whole thing gets momentum. 

Instead of vaccination and movement restrictions (the NFU wanted those lifted, talk about petards), it'll be a spasm of head-taking, cull sabbers getting in fights, and no reduction in bloody TB in cattle or sodding badgers.  Pathetic.  

Bibble one: ravenbait  shows off the new Rabbids with mad flying bicycle stuff (CAEK!) and at minutes later, BBC1's excellent Wallace & Grommit's World of Inventions shows off bonkers flugtag propcycles invented by some Euro-madboy spark.  Of course they don't fly, that's not the point: they make the Heinz Wolff shaped organ in my chest leap for joy.

Bibble two: I am considering making a model of the kayak frame to better grok it.  If I make it 1/6 scale (2" to 1'), which would be correct for a Playscale figure (Action Man, GI Joe, Barbie, et al), the thing would still be nearly three feet long.  Holy cats.

The point is not that this attempt at reality-engineering is harming ebooks, so much as that it is being blithely and routinely ignored. 

The article goes on to miss its footing in discussing potential for ebook resale or lending, which fails to see that readers will fill with once-read trash and forgotten tomes just as your iTunes folder has that Shania Twain album and the Sibelius thing you got because of that movie.  Storage is cheap tending to free (for ebooks, especially so, as ebooks are tiny little files: a regular novel is under a meg - that would fit on a floppy disk). 

There is no market for selling the clutter off your virtual bookshelves, because you have the TARDIS's library.  It only runs out of space if you move the swimming pool into it.

The first stage in turning a notion into a project is to work out what it is you actually want to do.  Well, the notion is to build a folding sea kayak that's more capable than my fun-but-limited Sevy Pointer.  What are its specific limitations?

* It's short, 10ft, so it doesn't exactly slice through waves.  Long days out are tiring, and it turns to beam a bit too eagerly.
* Seaworthiness is nominal - a force 4 is the friskiest it'll play in.  
* Being inflatable, it sits very high, and thus it weathercocks like a chicken on a church roof.
* While it's spectacularly stable, it cannot be rolled. If it ever capsizes (and being short, that means going beam-on in surf) you've got to exit the boat. 

When it comes to home-build folding sea kayak plans, there's really one place to start and that's Tom Yost's Yostweks. There are lots of designs, so there's some whittling to do.  First, general displacement: Allowing 100kg for paddler and kit, and wanting some gear stowage as well, we quickly get rid of all but the long models.  Next, stability: I'm no ninja, so the twitchy designs are out.  Beam comes into both of these.  Finally, gear: I want some but not a daft amount -- this is a dayboat, not an expedition boat. If I build a barge, it'll be bargey all the time and I'll just overload the thing with unnecessary junk. 

With all that in mind, I've settled on the Sea Tour 17.  17ft long, about the right cockpit size, 300lb displacement, but not the expedition-scale extra volume of the EXP.  Here are the design drawings. 

A couple of LJ friend arcs have been on a "feminism in SFF writing" trip lately, so in case you'd missed it, here's an interview with Vonda McIntyre in io9 that's just gone up. 

So, the Plans are Afoot to build a new reactor at Hinkley Point.  Reactor C would be an EPR, a new design which is, apparently, "an evolution of the PWR" and there's tons of bumf at the wiki.  The Finnish and French early adopters are having problems: some of these are to do with safety-control systems (which I'd say are non-negotiable!) and some to do with workmanship (is this a "big project tendering for the lowest bidder" problem, because it seems common?).  Would a Westinghouse AP-1000 be any better? 

I'm of the reluctant opinion that nuclear power is a necessary stopgap in our decarbonisation of energy; it's just a scale thing, really, and very much a lesser evil: I want to see the inherently-safe Generation IV designs in play until the Energy Revolution is completed (and we all have fleets of replicating windmills and space solar and fusion anna Gwendoline), and then mothballed with a "thank feck that's over," like some sort of horrid mecha we no longer need (too much Evangelion before bed) but the evolution of this kit isn't like versions of mobile phone OS.  It takes time, and a gigawatt or two of nuke power is a gigawatt or two that can be not-coal power.  Fundamentally I want to see the death of Drax and something clean to feed these leccy cars.  Scale, see.

Given that opinion, what do the great and good think?  Is Hinkley C a smart step -- safer cleaner and all that -- or just another dangerous boondoggle in a chain of boondoggles?  Would a Westinghouse AP-1000 be any better? 

Do I need to get a badger suit?  ;)

(posts about technical sciencey stuff are fly-paper for the Dunning-Kruger effect: citations always needed)

A dashboard without a radio looks like a face that's just lost a tooth. 

I'm getting itchy from being so de-powered since the van went permanently off-road at its MOT last week.  I can't dash off to rescue friends, run a bunch of bikes somewhere, or go to the beach for a swim or a surf or a paddle, or do anything ad hoc.  It's not the doing as much as the capacity to be doing that is vexing me: phantom driver ache.

Bus timetables appear to be lies, which doesn't help even if the main thing I'm missing is a chunk of my usefulness.  Part of me wants to get a heavy bike trailer.

Bah.  Ebay ho!  There must and shall be a new Munkymobile.  Possibly with Misery Machine graphics. 

No tweetbook at work. Bah.

I was going to write up something epic, but Charlotte has beaten me to it so here, clicky and marvel at the derring-do derringly done. 

(update: the result has been corrected since C wrote this)