Author: Four-eyed English Genius

It looks like the Aussies are getting the British disease. All Quantas flights are cancelled due to a major strike. It could be Britain!! At least they waited for Liz and Phil the Bubble to leave! 🙂

Any comments from Aussie posters?

Update.

The airline has not been directly closed by a major strike. Qantas will lock out those taking industrial action on Monday and have closed down the airline as of now. None the less, the comparison with obstinate British unions remains.

I missed this bit of sad news earlier in the week. Dennis Ritchie is dead.

This may not mean much to hoi polloi but to us techno nerds, this guy was probably more important than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and quite a few others. Continue reading “Dennis Ritchie R.I.P.”

Anyone can play with radio controlled planes. Try these for size! BTW, I have no connection with the company.

Given so much irrelevant garbage is presented in the form of pie charts in Powerpoint Slide Shows, here is the one that is REALLY relevant. Continue reading “The best sort of pie chart”

It is sad to see the demise of Steve Jobs. He was the driving and innovative force behind Apple. His ideas have basically shaped the digital world for the last 15 years, and the computing world before that.
Continue reading “Steve Jobs R.I.P.”

To use the age-old cliché “You could not make it up”, it turns out that some windfarm owners were paid for NOT producing electricty when the wind was very strong the other day, at the tail end of Hurricane Katia.

It turns out that too much would be produced and it would overload the National Grid! All new windfarms should be disallowed unless those proposing them can prove that the machines will produce energy whenever the wind blows AND that energy can be stored for later use. This can be done with electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen, or pumping water uphill as at Electric Mountain. Llanberis.

Time to form the Don Quixote Society!

It appears that the Danish have banned Marmite, along with lots of other foodstuffs, on the grounds that they are fortified. I bet they do not ban sherry or port!

What is the world coming too!

(And no, I do not make a habit of reading the Grauniad. This was sent to me by a friend)

….although I expect is costs a bob or two to replace the batteries!

Toyota’s TMG EV P001, with an 100% electric powertrain and Jochen Krumbach at the wheel, has just set a new lap record of 7 minutes 47.794 seconds – that’s quicker than a 380 bhp Porsche 911 Carerra S.

Prior to the 29 August record run, TMG’s ambition had been to become the first electric vehicle to break the eight-minute barrier and this was achieved comfortably on a day when the notoriously changeable Nürburgring weather stayed fine, although track temperatures were relatively low.

Using two electric motors, the TMG electric powertrain has a top speed of 163 mph, which combined with 800Nm of torque enabled the TMG EV P001 to achieve impressive speeds on the challenging Nordschleife track.

The TMG EV P001 is based on a Radical chassis which was then modified by TMG and the new lap record was completed on road-legal tyres, using the complete Nordschleife track. Lap times were verified by independent observers.