The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tom Womack:

I've not managed to find an impressive youth hostel in Amsterdam. Once you filter out the party places, the ones miles outside the city and the ones devoted to the smoking of fragrant herbs, the only one I found remaining was the "Shelter Jordan" Christian hostel (www.shelter.nl). It was sufficiently comfortable and reasonably quiet, but it is Christian enough that I ended up feeling vaguely compelled to bible study on the Sunday morning.

Small powers don't have particularly good photoreconnaisance, but medium-sized companies do; have a look at the footprints of the imagery on www.digitalglobe.com when you zoom in on South Ossetia.

I was tempted at least to ring Digital Globe and ask for a quote on 1.2-metre imagery of Gori tomorrow; I'm not a photointerpreter, but if I link to a high-resolution picture of Gori I suspect I would find a photointerpreter crawling out of the woodwork. It may be under shutter control; Digital Globe is an American company, but annoying the people who launch your satellites is rarely a sound business decision.

#112 ... but what's the spam *doing* given that the given URL is 'link'?

This is very strange. In some sense it's clear spam, it's the same meaningless text on four posts, but the link goes to a gallery presenting vaguely-Art-Nouveau drawings - lots of long flowing hair and flowery backgrounds, a slight sense of clip-art - by Ukrainian artists, of a sort I wouldn't have been entirely shocked to see linked to from the sidebar.

Tom Womack @ 210: "But that fifty-dollar versus fifty-cent thing means they're almost by definition used in niche applications."

How big of a time gap does that money gap translate into? Like, how
many years back do you have to go before an ASIC chip with the same
capabilities as your modern $50 FPGA also cost fifty dollars? Are we
talking a year, or a decade?

At least a decade. You can implement a 40MHz RISC processor with a
cache in a Spartan3 FPGA - something like the MIPS R3000 in an original
Sony Playstation, which came out in 1994, but without the weird
external processors that the Playstation has.

The Spartan3 was released in about 2004, and Xilinx has subsequently
focussed on more capable and *much* more expensive chips, with really
elaborate high-speed network interfaces since one of their markets is
the builders of really big network routers.

There are a couple of math problems which I thought would fit nicely
in FPGAs, but the problem turns out to be that an FPGA capable of
holding a memory controller and a 64-bit multiplier, on a board which
can talk to the outside world, costs a good deal more than the
cheapest-available quad-core PC, and that PC has a vastly better memory
controller and four incredibly much faster multipliers.

FPGAs are very nifty, but I don't think there are very many problems to which they're the right answer.

They gain their flexibility by using something like twenty times as
many transistors as a custom solution which can simply lay down wires
does, so they're unavoidably expensive: fifty dollars for a chip that
does what a custom chip you could get ten million of from TSMC for five
million dollars would do.

You've still got all the soldering problems that are unavoidable
from putting eight hundred connectors on the bottom of something the
size of a quarter - it's a black art to get the chip onto a board
without destroying chip and board alike, a blacker art still to remove
it - so you'll be in big trouble replacing the FPGA in your
sewing-machine whose FPGA broke with the one from your TV whose screen
broke.

(Though there is a little hope. I have been to malls in Thailand
filled with little booths containing quite elaborate surface-mount
rework kit, where you can bring in your broken mobile phone and have it
repaired. It's a couple of thousands of dollars of equipment and quite
a lot of training, and I think probably a bad sign for Thailand that
they don't have higher-margin work for electronics assemblers - I
assume that the people in the booths worked on electronics assembly
lines and then left to work more for themselves)

You can't stick everything on the FPGA - you still often need
external memory, you still usually need external analogue devices to
for-example turn the digital signals from your MP3 decoder into
something that can drive headphones.

FPGAs have cropped up in some kinds of consumer goods - the earlier
LCD TVs used them, because it meant that they could use any kind of LCD
panel available on the surplus market and program the video controller
to drive it. They're ubiquitous in prototypes, they're ubiquitous in
Weird Custom Military Things of which only a thousand will ever be made.

But that fifty-dollar versus fifty-cent thing means they're almost by definition used in niche applications.

The hand-cranked torch sounds a nice idea; on the other hand, the
hand-cranked torch I've actually used was really not much good for what
we were trying to do, namely finding small telescope parts dropped in
mud on a dark night.

It doesn't shine uniformly for very long, and the fading light is
very distracting; you can't hold it usably still while cranking, and
the wobbly light is unusably distracting.

Born in 1977; first news event I can remember is the nuclear cruise missiles arriving at Greenham Common, which would be November 1983.

I hid under my parents' bed.

Then, for some reason, the unexpected lack of civil war in the Phillippines after the election in 1986, then Chernobyl.

'Are we programmed to fear predators from birth?'

Somebody did the experiment, using inbred lab mice ('Swiss mice' are generic lab mice, rather than ones specially imported from Zurich) whose ancestors back for several generations had lived in cages in laboratories, and introducing them to an anaesthetised rat.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0P-3V8KBBF-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3f882c9153a867599e03f760399d9a00

The mice fled upon contact with the rat, but not upon its distant approach.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/11/scientists-create-fearless-mouse/

is a second-order (blog writing about a Japanese blog writing about the research) account of the fact that disabling some bits of the olfactory bulb causes mice no longer to flee at the smell of predators.

"Personally I'm a fan of low-speed rail: the overnight sleeper train that trundles gently, at freight-train speeds, overnight from A to B, taking eight hours or more, so that you get a night's sleep and travel at the same time."

Within the Schengen area, sleepers are glorious; you hand over your passport and the bit of paper on which you listed your breakfast selection to the guard at 11pm in Strasbourg, and your passport comes back on the breakfast tray at 9am as you reach the outskirts of Vienna.

Outside the Schengen area, the train stops at 1am, Serbian customs knock on your door, wake you up, check that you look like your passport, check that your passport has a validly-dated entering-Serbia stamp, add a leaving-Serbia stamp, leave. The train stays stopped; at 1:30am Macedonian customs knock on your door, wake you up, check that you look like your passport, ask you something incomprehensible in Macedonian, add an entering-Macedonia stamp, leave. The train continues. At 6:30am the train stops, Macedonian customs knock on your door, wake you up, check that you look like your passport, check that your passport has a validly-dated entering-Macedonia stamp, add a leaving-Macedonia stamp, leave. At 7am the train stops and everyone has to get out; all the Serbians and Macedonians hand their passports to Greek customs, have their visas inspected, and then line up in a roll-call to get the passports back, while the EUians get to have a chocolate bar and a cup of coffee. At 8am you get back into the train, and it rolls into Thessalonika main station at about eleven.

"Britain is too densely populated for such things" turns out to mean 'we can put in London-Birmingham-{pick one of Manchester and Liverpool}, but the inhabitants of Stoke-on-Trent, Northampton, and {pick the other of Manchester and Liverpool} will derive little benefit from it' - between megacities there are cities which are still large and full of voters, but in which it's not practical to have a TGV decelerate gradually from 200mph, stop, let people off, let people on, and accelerate gradually to 200mph again.

London-Leicester-Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh infuriating the inhabitants of Sheffield, Middlesbrough and Nottingham is I think the other conceivable TGV line in the UK.


Discussions of TGV in Britain often suggest that the money would be better spent on reasonable-speed cross-country lines - Norwich-Cambridge-Luton-Oxford-Bristol or EasternPorts-Bedford-Coventry-Birmingham, both of which are presently via London.

Yeago: 'look what they're going to do to me' is not a particularly appealing argument to attempt to push.

I put the vowels back in and read your comment on boingboing, and I think the person you're quoting is probably right about Cory's fiction writing; a lot of it is self-indulgent, and plays to a very particular crowd who are in some sense easy fish to catch.

But pointing people uninvited at privately-published bad reviews of their work is in no sense civil, and here and boingboing are some of the few blogs whose moderation aims at civility.

If you want a vigorous but mostly civil argument in this sort of direction, wander over to Charlie Stross's blog at www.antipope.org and read "New York City Math Teacher"'s contributions to the comment thread on the most recent post.

#6: I've tried straining Copious Lemonade with a tea-strainer, it's frustrating because the holes clog very quickly with the pulp and there's not enough area of sieve to get a reasonable amount of lemonade through between washings. I think you need a finer-mesh normal-sized sieve, though where one of those comes from I know not.

The microplane zester is very precisely the point of culinary extravagence up to which I will not go; I know they're lovely implements, a housemate had one, but I will not pay $35 for a grater.

#47: what do you mean by 'pre-modern times'? The first reference to 'run amok' in English was 1672, who borrowed it from the Malaysians; Captain Cook wrote in 1772

"To run amock is to get drunk with opium... to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage."

which sounds very familiar. I don't think that peninsular Malaysia in 1750 was particularly a modern society.

This strikes me as a field where mechanisation would be both interesting and socially useful, though I admit I'm the kind of person who, on visiting a marble-carving workshop in India, leaves thanking Athena (and thinking maybe it should be Ganesha) for the invention of the CNC mill so humans don't have to do that any more in properly-capitalised societies.

Inkjet onto plastic injection-molded into the shape of the front of the painting? I suppose milling a block of die steel into the inverse of Starry Night would be an interesting software exercise.

I hate to interrupt the festivities, but there appears to be another Wierd Quoting Problem.

On reading comment 109 of http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008461.html
I wanted to find other comments that Charles Dodgson had written.

But, instead of the

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/commentlist-oneauthor.php?author=Patrick%20Nielsen%20Hayden&email=pnh@panix.com -shaped link that most authors have, his VAB link went to http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/commentlist-oneauthor.php?author=

because the quotes in his monicker had not been HTML-quoted when making the link.

<a href="http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/commentlist-oneauthor.php?author="Charles Dodgson"&email=charles.dodgson@gmail.com">(view all by)</a>

.

I fear that one more prone to mischief than I, by claiming to be mister "><blink> , might be able to cause some trouble to your page.

And a Happy New Year to you all!

EDS have a policy to request removal of their third commercial (building airplanes in flight) from youtube, but it's downloadable as

http://content.jengajam.com/eds_plane.mpg

www.duncans.tv has quite a lot of these, with a focus on New Zealand, though the writing's rather uncritical.

Dave Bell #97: Disney's Aladdin? 1992, and I admit it's gifted with such less-than-obviously-cultural-precise lines as

'try your best to stay calm,
buck up your Sunday salaam'

The setting is, I think, explicitly Baghdad and fairly clearly at its height of power at the height of the Caliphate.

I met him but twice, but I'll miss him.

May he rest in peace.

I've just come into London from Krakow; when I checked Easyjet's Web site in the morning they were saying everything was running normally, but at the airport we were told that hand luggage was forbidden on flights to UK, US, Canada and Israel; which given what I'd read about the plot makes rather more sense than forbidding it only on flights out. This makes Charlie Stross's Cunning Plan work less well.

My DSLR, in a standard chunky SLR neck-case, survived the hold without trouble, and I met an interesting character in the check-in line with whom I could chat on the plane rather than finishing Hunter of Worlds, so it could have been a good deal worse.

I think the most disconcerting part was the man at passport check at Luton standing in front of a crowd of passengers carrying an SA80 rifle, but I'd been to visit Auschwitz the previous day and this leaves one with a more visceral distaste for crowds and machine-guns taken together.

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