mechtopia
Revealed: The ultimate fate for Dr Who
There has been a lot of talk about how the new Dr Who, played by Matt Smith is the youngest Dr Who ever, the previous record being held by Peter Davidson in the early 1980's. It does seem, however, that the trend has been for the Doctor to get younger. Where will this ultimately lead? I spent 5 minutes googling for the answer, and I didn't find one, so I did my own analysis.
Age by Regeneration
As you can see from the graph below, the Doctor will become a foetus on the 28th incarnation.
Regeneration by year
So when will the 28th Regeneration take place? The graph below shows that this will happen around 2090.
So there you have it: the Doctor will become at foetus around 2090.
Posted at 08:03PM Feb 28, 2010 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
Comic Strips
The comic strips are broken, as I havn't updated the URLs since stripgenerator updated their site. Please bear with me... I will get round to fixing them, the next time I create a comic strip.
Posted at 02:26PM Feb 24, 2010 by ohp in Comic Strips | Comments[0]
The explanation behind the orbs photo
The explanation behind the picture with thousands of "orbs" was that although the environment wasn't dusty, there were thousands of tiny water droplets in the air. Here's the photo taken without the flash:
It was taken a few years back, and was one of those days when the fog was on the verge of forming large water droplets, when you get dew forming on your eyelashes. I took a number of pictures that evening, as it was a unique atmosphere for photography.
Posted at 03:04PM Jan 22, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism | Comments[0]
Is this the most haunted photograph ever?
Some would have us believe that orbs are the manifestations of spirits that appear in photographs. Scientists say that it's caused by the camera flash reflecting off dust particles in the air, but although the picture was taken with the flash gun, this picture was taken outside in an environment that was far from dusty.
So is this the most haunted photo ever, or do you think there's a more sensible explanation? What do you think? I will reveal the answer tomorrow.
Posted at 08:39PM Jan 04, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism | Comments[0]
Fajita seasoning recipe
I like fajitas, but the packets of fajita seasoning have a fair amount of salt in them. I've analysed the contents of packets I've used, and come up with a blend of spices that allows you to substitute the salt content for a salt substitute
I think I'm missing a few things - I can't get powdered lime or lemon, and I haven't included oregano, which is used in some packets, as well as artificial flavours. However, I don't think it lacks much because of those omissions
I've made quite a lot - this recipe makes about 150g, or 30-40 portions of fajita mix. Most fajita seasoning packs have 30 grammes, which are good for 5-8 portions.
- 50g mild chilli powder
- 25g salt substitute
- 15g onion powder or granules
- 15g sugar
- 13g cumin powder
- 12g garlic powder
- 6g cinnamon
- 5g nutmeg
- 5g cayenne
- 4g coriander
Posted at 09:42PM Dec 24, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
What's the big attraction of big name brands?
It's always puzzled me why people are attracted to wearing clothes emblazoned with logos. I've created a T shirt for people like that.
Posted at 03:27PM Dec 09, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
Food advertising: what annoys me.
I thought I'd rant about food advertising. When I watch the TV, some adverts make me seethe with the amount of careful language manipulation that goes on. Quite frankly, I'd rather they tried to entertain me, than mislead me. Here are some of the methods I've seen used to peddle food to the masses.
They tell you what's not it it, when what's in it might be more important.
What do I mean? Well, what's completely natural, has no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives, is 100% sugar free, and forms part of a healthy, balanced diet? Lard, that's what. When you listen to a food advert, whatever they don't mention that could be in the food, that's probably what's in the food. If it's full of fat, it's natural and has no chemical additives. If it's completely artificial, then it's low in calories. Even some of the worst things can be spun to seem good by one measure or another: Product X: now 100% arsenic free!
Distancing yourself from a claim.
Reading this blog post could help prevent death by shark attacks (but it probably won't). Smearing butter on your forehead might help you get a job (but it probably won't) Eating product X could help support your immune system that might help keep your heart healthy (You fill in the gaps).
Pretending to sell to the baby.
Yeees, who is a gullible consumer? coochy coochy coo! This food is full of vitamins, isn't it liddle babby, wabby woo! Putting a baby in shot is license to treat the consumer like an idiot, and hope they'll fill their tummy wum wums with your prodddy woddy wuct.
Random Statement.
Why not round off your advert with a random statement that doesn't follow from anything you've said, but a viewer might confuse with the narrative? Product X. Because you're not a mass murderer.
Statistical jiggery pokery
The trick of reversing the percentage is getting a bit old now. You used to see claims of things being "95% fat free", which is just another way of saying "this product is 5% fat!" but consumers are getting wise. A newer approach with percentages is, in my eyes even less useful to the consumer: the "made with" claim. "Product X is made with 100% chicken" might suggest that the product is all chicken, but the crucial word here is "with" and not "from" - by saying that it's made "with" 100% chicken, all you're saying is that if your food is 30% chicken, 100% of that 30% is chicken. By replacing the 30% statistic with the word "with" you free yourself from the burden of facts.
So what annoys you about food advertising?
Posted at 04:42PM Dec 04, 2009 by ohp in Skepticism | Comments[0]
Referrer Spam: what do you do?
Back in the early noughties, web traffic was increasing to the point where you had to create summaries of the traffic for analysis. Enter the web stats package.
One thing I noticed at the time was that many web stats packages published their referrers, and that many of the people had (often unintentionally) made their stats public.
Google had become the biggest web search engine on the planet, and this posed some ideas. What if you searched for web stats pages on google, then created a link to that page. you would instantly register a link back to your own site. In fact, why bother with a link? What if you just faked the referrer? you could push your link to the top of their referral chart very quickly with an automated script, and google would register another link to your site, increasing the pagerank.
No matter how appealing the idea, google was already by then battling against underhand techniques, and although at the time I was sure I was the first person to think of the idea (something which, in hindsight is ridiculous) I figured that any new underhand techniques would be factored in to the indexing algorithm, and would come back to bite you on the rear.
I'd forgotten completely about my underhand scheme until the 8th of this month, when I examined my logs to find that I was the victim of this technique; every 50 minutes a host was requesting the root document from my web server, with a referring url that on inspection, did not contain a link to my site. I considered my options. Do I:
- Ignore it?
- Block the IP address on the firewall?
- Install a comprehensive web threat management layer to filter out such requests?
- Put an exclusion rule for that referrer in the module that generates the referrers?
- Write a snotty email to the admin contact for the whois entry on the source IP, and cc in the admin contact for the referrer domain?
- Create a rewrite rule that directs requests from that specific IP to a range of large downloads, in an effort to swamp their broadband connection, or crash the script?
- Create a script that spams their domain with a referrer of wwww.stopspammingmysite.com?
What would you do? answers on a postcard please. Next week I'll tell you what I did, and what happened.
Posted at 11:44PM Nov 18, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
What if a medium recieved very specific information from the other side?
Well, it just wouldn't work would it...
Posted at 06:43PM Nov 08, 2009 by ohp in Comic Strips | Comments[1]
I have a confession to make...
It's true. I've tried to hide it all of these years, but the truth will out: I was a competitor on Robot wars.
Sporting a terrible goatee beard, I presented a robot that was eliminated in the first round.
Posted at 11:15PM Nov 06, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
The dowse-o-matic 1000
Recent visitors to my blog may have read the post about the busk-o-matic 3000. buoyed with enthusiasm for constructing computer controlled mechanical devices, I have been pondering the creation of a dowsing device.
The aim is to allow people to test their dowsing skill in an automated fashion. My preliminary thoughts are to have a pair of reservoirs linked by a pair of tubes. A computer will randomly select one of of two solenoids that will allow water to flow from the upper to lower reservoir via one of two paths, and the dowser will press a button to indicate which of the two tubes contain the flowing water.
This process will be repeated until a statistically significant number of tests have been performed.
I don't for one moment think that this apparatus will fulfill every dowsers requirements for a test... I see it more as a fun device to make scientific testing more accesible to the masses.
So.... what do you think? Do you have any suggestions?
Posted at 11:40AM Nov 02, 2009 by ohp in Projects | Comments[0]
Mundane conspiracies
It strikes me that only large, newsworthy events tend to be subjected to the scrutiny of conspiracy theorists. How would they react to everyday pictures?
Posted at 04:28PM Oct 30, 2009 by ohp in Comic Strips | Comments[0]
Dr Perry Orford: Futurologist
A few years back, I created a blog for a ficticious futurologist. At the time there seemed to be a trend for people to make fantastical claims about the future that didn't stand up to scrutiny, and I felt that they were ripe for parody. It was very low key at the time, and I only really promoted it amongst my friends.
If you read the last blog post, made a few years back, you'll notice that Dr Orford predicted the widespread use of augmented reality :-)
You can read up on Mr Orford's blog herePosted at 12:03PM Oct 29, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]
DLP: The end of the rainbow?
It's generally acknowledged that DLP projectors have the edge over LCD in many respects, with great colour reproduction, great contrast ratios and the ability to project 3D movies with shutter glasses, but there's one thing I believe that is preventing many DLP projectors from winning all the awards, and that is the colour wheel.
The colour wheel is a way of processing all of the colour information with a single light path (LCD projectors, for example, need to create a separate beam of light for each colour, then recombine them) by spinning a coloured wheel - this projects each colour rapidly in sequence.
Having one path means you only need one DLP chip, and this lowers costs, but it has two side effects: The first is the sound of the colour wheel : LCD projectors have been engineered to produce virtually no noise in use, but DLP projectors have two sources of noise to get rid of - both the fan, and the colour wheel. The second issue is one that affects me personally, and that's the rainbow effect. Despite the fact that the colour may be switching hundreds of times a second, this is still slow enough for many people to detect rainbows as their eyes flit around their scene. This is not only annoying, it gives me a headache after around 15 minutes of viewing.
Even if you don't suffer from this yourself, it might affect one of your friends.
Three chip DLP projectors use a chip for each colour, combining the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they're still very expensive. Only when this happens might it might usher in the end of the LCD projector.
Posted at 01:56PM Oct 26, 2009 by ohp in General | Comments[0]