Science Friction

Our wonderful postal service

I spent Easter weekend in a hotel in Hinckley in Leicestershire. "Where?" I hear you ask. I don't blame you for never having heard of it. The hotel itself is in the middle of nowhere and the town doesn't even have a Marks & Spencer. The Hotel sits beside the A5 which used to be the main road between London and Holyhead so I would imagine it once served as a coaching stop in the days before railways and motorways.

Anyway, this means I was away on Good Friday when the postman tried to deliver a parcel. He very kindly dropped a card through the letterbox telling me this and this afternoon I finally got down to the sorting office to pick it up. It turned out to be a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse from those nice people at Microsoft.

However, I was very disturbed to see that the package had been posted on March 2 2005. There is nothing to indicate which post office it was sent from but I'm assuming it was from Dublin. That's 23 days it took to get from one part of Dublin to another. Well, OK, let's be fair. Let's take out the weekends and St Patrick's Day Holiday. That still leaves 16 working days. And it wasn't cheap. The postage paid was €9.50

Now, I know what you're thinking. Maybe the person sending it didn't stick on enough stamps. Well, there's nothing written on the parcel to indicate there was insufficient postage. And in fact there were no stamps either. Instead, there was an An Post coupon. The kind you get when you hand your parcel to the Post Office clerk to weigh and they then print out the coupon with the correct postage on it.

Time for some privatisation, methinks.

Ireland going all-digital in theaters

Ireland going all-digital in theaters: "

Avica Technology has embarked on a mission to outfit 515 screens throughout Ireland with a digital delivery and presentation system. The system uses a network to distribute the movies in digital format, with an encryption technology developed by Digital Cinema Initiatives. DCI (can we call it that?) is a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. They hope the new distribution and projection technology will reduce operational costs while making Tom Cruise some extra Irish cash. They plan to have all of Ireland outfitted in about a year.

"

(Via Engadget.)

What the...?

There's this television ad for Guinness which has this guy carrying a television followed by a crowd of people. He takes the TV to a scrap yard where the TV is destroyed and then leads the crowd back to his pub 'Pat's Bar' and with a knowing glance at the empty corner where the TV used to be says "Now we have something to talk about."

I'm not a drinking man but I like the ad and it works on many levels. It restates the notion that the Irish pub experience is about meeting people and interacting with them. Far too many pubs are just booze dispensers that blast out sports on big screens and there is no way to have a decent conversation.

I was cheered therefore when I read in this week's Galway Advertiser that for St Patrick's Weekend, The Huntsman Inn in Galway is be renamed Pat's Bar. It's all part of a Guinness promotion. However, I'm not really sure what the point is when the highlight of the weekend is to be the showing of the Ireland-Wales rugby match on a big screen as well as live racing from Cheltenham.

Who came up with that idea?

Dave Allen 1936-2005

Today is Red Nose Day when comedy professionals in the UK band together to raise funds for various good causes in Africa and the UK. However, the merrymaking is dimmed somewhat by the news that Dave Allen has passed away. Born Dave Tynan O'Mahoney in Tallaght got his first break when we won a BBC talent competition in 1959. However, it wasn't until he toured Australia in 1963 that he got his first TV break when Channel 9 offered him a chat show, Tonight With Dave Allen.

The rest, as they say, is history. He had his own shows on ITV and BBC where he won acclaim for his laid-back attitude – he did his stand-up routines while seated – and for pointing out the absurdities of life and religon. It was the latter that got him banned from RTE after he did a sketch featuring a striptease by the Pope.

He retired in 1999 but was apparently considering a new project, which now sadly, we shall not see.

So Goodnight Dave, and may your God go with you.

The motorized ice cream cone

I've heard of labour saving gadgets, but this little device on Engadget has to take the cake. Or rather, the ice cream...

Desperately looking forward to this summer, but that severe case of carpal tunnel’s got those feelers in a bind? No need to worry about dripping that godawfully sticky ice cream all over your sloppy self next time you cruise over to the local scooperie, friend, the motorized ice cream cone’s got you covered. To think of what chumps we’ve been all these years, burning valuable calories manually rotating our ice cream.

Strange & Norrell - Soon to be a major motion picture

I've just finished reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark and it is quite a tour de force. Clark perfectly captures the era through her choice of language and the manners of her characters. Now I learn through Sci-Fi Wire, that New Line Cinema – the same people who bankrolled Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy – are to bring out a movie based on the novel. Christoper Hampton, who won an Oscar for adapting his play Dangerous Liaisons for the big screen, has been hired to adapt the novel. Personally, I think the novel will be difficult to film well. There is just so much that will have to be thrown out to fit it into two hours. Jackson was able to get a way with a trilogy because the Lord of the Rings had been published like that. But Hampton won't have that luxury.

Susanna Clark has indicated that she will be attending Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow and she has also agreed to be guest of Honour at Phoenix Con III in Dublin in March 2006.

Wireless USB killed the Bluetooth star

Could this be the end of Bluetooth? Engadget reports that the Wireless USB Protocol will be finished by the end of this month.

At Intel’s Developer Forum this week, senior fellow Kevin Kahn demonstrated a USB dongle that fits a standard USB 2.0 port and would allow any device with a USB port to send its signals wirelessly. The key advantage of this technology over Bluetooth is ease of use — so many users have been burned by compatibility and setup issues when trying to get Bluetooth devices to talk to each other. For the average consumer, if it isn’t dead easy to set up, it just ain’t gonna fly. With over 200 companies already slated to release wireless USB devices in the coming year, it won’t be long before Bluetooth could very well find itself grounded.

(Via Engadget.)

Twin Mars rovers in instrument mix-up

Not even their creators can tell them apart. It seems that the martian probes Spirity and Opportunity are so much alike that the scientists building them inadvertently swapped instruments. Each probe carries an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer. However, because of the way they are manufactured, the spectrometers are not perfectly identical and had to be calibrated before being launched. However, the spectrometer intended for Spirit was put into Opportunity and vice versa.

The error only came to light when Ralf Gellert of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz who runs the instruments noticed that Opportunity seemed to have found higher concentrations of certain elements in the soil at its Meridiani Planum landing site than Spirit had at the Gusev Crate. But on a windswept Mars the concentrations should have evened out all over the planet.

Gellert published the data but couldn't really explain it until the mix-up was discovered. Raw data beamed back to Earth was processed via filters derived from the pre-launch calibrations. But because of the mix-up the wrong filters were being applied. Fortunately, it is now just a matter of putting the data through the filters again, this time through the correct ones.

Terry Stewart M.A. (Hons)

Congratulations to my father Terry Stewart who at the age of mumblety mumble has earned a first class honours M.A. in History. Who says you slow down as you grow older?