Craig Sawyers

This surely is a fucked up world we're living in. 50 confirmed in Orlando. Jeez. Out of a clear blue sky. Europe is far from immune. The Charie Hebdo killings in Jan (12 dead) and the mass attacks in Nov (130 dead), both in Paris last year, show that. And we're not immune in the UK either - last attack was the London bombings (52 dead), and that was 12 years ago - time's ticking for us too. Let's not forget the Madrid train bombs in 2004 (191 dead), the Mumbia attacks in 2008 (157 dead), in the Phillipines 40 separate terrorist bombings in the last 16 years (720 deaths), and the worst of all 9/11 (2977 dead). All numbers not counting many, many thousands of injured, or terrorist deaths. Absolutely all Islamic extremists, alas - a tiny, tiny minority of right minded Muslims, but boy do these bastards get the lion's share of publicity, may they rot in hell. And pretty much all home grown.

2nd one is better than first. Or maybe I have partially acclimatised....

Where is the Darwin Award when you need it? http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2014-09.html or even the legendary http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.html

Isn't that the TV channel that shows old episodes?

That is whole new levels of insanity. Watched the whole thing, of course.

That is all we have in the UK, except it is 230V (well 240V in reality).

Well it can only be down to a hum loop somewhere, induction through stray magnetic fields from the transformer, or ripple on the DC output from the regulator. Also, are you hearing the 60Hz fundamental, or the second harmonic at 120Hz? What does the mains power look like - ie is it symmetric or asymmetric? Just firing ideas - cause of hum can be a bitch to find. But once you find the cause, it will seem to be blindingly obvious....

Is it mechanical hum from the transformer, or electrical hum that you hear in the headphones?

The Ali quote is a line from the movie. But it is based on an almost identical off the cuff, and unscripted speech to microphone to white students- so much more powerful to see the great man deliver it in his absolute prime. It is 1m52s in.

^This

He was the man who turned heavyweight boxing into a thing of beauty. RIP Ali. I have a life size photo of one of his fists (without gloves) in a sports book. If you put your fist next to it - well it almost looks like a child's fist next to an adult. Also RIP Dave Swarbrick, one of the best traditional folk violinists ever http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36443117 . Saw him with Martin Carthy in a tiny venue in Nettlebed Oxfordshire last Autumn, and had a CD signed by him. He did not look well at all.

For a "first stab" I didn't think it was too awful. But it needs a lot of work to be as polished as the original. Let's see how it goes - the one we saw was filmed in January.

This off-key singing reminded me of the late and exceptionally great Douglas Adams, in Hitchiker's Guide with the company song a flattened fifth out of tune

Total harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion for example - I thought the comment on Fourier Analysis kind of gave it away.

RIP Burt Kwouk. The Pink Panther movies were a must watch back in the day. At least he was a full thirty years older that Sellers (who died aged 55)

Quotes from http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/jan/31/human-hearing-is-highly-nonlinear , originally published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 044301 – Published 23 January 2013. "The information available from Fourier analysis is bound by an uncertainty relation called the Gabor limit. This says that you cannot know the timing of a sound and its frequency – or pitch – beyond a certain degree of accuracy. The more accurate the measurement of the timing of a sound, the less accurate the measurement of its pitch and vice versa." "Oppenheim and Magnasco discovered that the accuracy with which the volunteers determined pitch and timing simultaneously was usually much better, on average, than the Gabor limit. In one case, subjects beat the Gabor limit for the product of frequency and time uncertainty by a factor of 50, clearly implying their brains were using a nonlinear algorithm." In other words, conventional analysis of non-linear distortions in an audio system tell you absolutely nothing about how it sounds, because human hearing beats measurement by a healthy margin.

Isn't this the movie where you wake up in a bath of ice minus a body part?

And here was I thinking a biscuit was a jammy dodger or a chocolate bourbon! Have a great birthday Brent.

Happy birthday!

There are stress points allocated to certain activities. If you reach 10 you are in serious trouble. The top ones are buying and selling a house, death of a close relative, and divorce. Any two at about the same time and pow - your brain explodes.

This is how Guinness used to do it up to 60-odd years ago. The only machine task was trimming the length of the staves first. At the time, Guinness employed 200 coopers (who served an apprenticeship of 7 years) maintaining the stock of 250,000 barrels.

Is it any wonder that Norse mythology is all to do with fire and ice?

Audiophilia 6 - cinephobia 6

Projector in the ceiling and a tiny 6' screen that comes down. With that seating and whacky speaker set up you really want a MUCH bigger screen.

For those with a home cinema