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@25kV I’m fond of this one, from Singapore
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Mike Prior-Jones
@drmikepj@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Glaciologist and electronic engineer at Cardiff University.
Current designer of #cryoegg. UKRI Future Leaders Fellow.
🏳️🌈(he,him)
605 Followers
984 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 13, 2022
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@graste ah, unfond memories of Microsoft SharePoint Workspace (not the same as SharePoint) and Skype for Business (not the same as Skype)
Palletloads of stuff to go to Greenland!
My husband bought me a weather station for my birthday!
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So, when you look at a new technology, think: is it going to be a hovercraft or a helicopter - useful, but niche? That's a decent outcome but not an exciting one. Will it fall by the wayside entirely (like waveguides as an alternative to copper phone lines, rapidly eclipsed by optical fibre)? Or will it genuinely be useful? I would argue that the latter only becomes clear after a few years.
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So yes, when a new technology comes along -the temptation is to say that it'll be wonderful for everything (and those with financial interests in it taking off definitely will). But it'll probably either find a niche or fall by the wayside - it's rare for something completely new to totally eclipse its predecessors at once.
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@OrdRadical@beige.party maybe we have this wrong- perhaps the owls liked the agricultural building so much that they decided to name the building after the owls who lived in it?
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It was the development, in Japan, the UK and France, of technologies to allow trains to run routinely at 100mph+ that led to rail being the dominant medium-distance transport option. (Even TGV, like the UK's ill-fated APT, started off with a gas turbine engine, because before 1973 nobody cared about the price of jet fuel and certainly didn't care about carbon emissions!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Sud-Est
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@jonty last year I bought three shipping containers in Greenland. That was definitely a “now I’m a real polar scientist “ moment
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But that hadn't stopped planners and idealists thinking that helicopters were the future, especially for rich people in a hurry (who are always a great market).
In the UK, British European Airways, a state-owned short-haul airline, tried commissioning a helicopter version of the ubiquitous 50-seater coach for routes like London-Birmingham. This led to the endearingly bonkers Fairey Rotodyne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Rotodyne with its ear-splittingly-loud rotor-tip jets.
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So you can totally imagine people saying "oh, we won't need railways. they're very much last century's technology. All we have to do is wait for helicopters to become quieter and more fuel-efficient!"
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One other example from the gas-turbine age is the hovercraft. I had this Ladybird book as a child (https://www.pennyreads.co.uk/ladybird-books/ladybird-how-it-works-the-hovercraft/ ) and it posited how hovercraft would revolutionise sea travel, how hovertrains like the French Aerotrain and UK's RTV 31 would replace conventional trains, and even how hovercraft technology could replace the forklift and pallet jack in warehouses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracked_Hovercraft
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However, the hovercraft turned into an ultra-niche technolgy: it's good at three things:
- travelling over mudflats at low tide, thus avoiding the need for a long pier at a ferry terminal with a big tidal range (which is why they're still used to serve the Isle of Wight)
- travelling over rivers with lots of rapids in
- landing large amounts of equipment on beaches - i.e. military naval invasions.
Beyond those, it no longer competes. It's a technical niche, not a revolution.
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New York Airways famously carried people from a skyscraper rooftop in Manhattan out to LaGuardia airport.
It was noisy and expensive. They had a a series of fatal accidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways
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But of course, that never really happened. The 1973 oil crisis killed the idea stone dead.
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@tootstorm@eldritch.cafe well, you can always correspond privately to the editor if your concern is plagiarism. Otherwise your review could say “this work is extremely similar to my own thesis (citation) which the authors seem to have overlooked in their review of the existing literature “ and then comment further on the lack of novelty in their approach, if that’s appropriate
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Solar panels are as close to being “sustainable” as is reasonably practicable: the frames are made from aluminium (which is made with electricity), the rest is glass, silicon and copper, all of which are potentially produceable without fossil fuels.
The FT has a lovely article about British food in France (gift link). https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/4a8945a4-00d1-4973-9954-a64ed53f7d75 How British comfort food won over the French
I have fond memories of going to a French student TV festival and making a film which began with an excellent bilingual joke:
Titles appear: “La cuisine anglaise” (French audience laughs heartily)
Brief pause
Subtitle “or how to make a cup of tea” (anyone with high school English laughs even more than the first time)
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@lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social great to see Cornelius Snarlington, Business Deer again... https://amultiverse.com/comic/2010/12/09/the-business-deer/
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@thelastpsion I sold my Psion 5 and replaced it with a Revo, because I wanted something more compact, but in practice I found it was not as good as the 5 as a computer (especially, as you say, the keyboard), and still too bulky to be carried around every day in a pocket. Also the dock was really annoying!
Anyway, nice to see one again.
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This week I have a new laptop (HP) and it worked fine with the Caldigit until I got a low battery warning and realised that for some reason it wasn’t charging from the Caldigit.
Connecting it directly to the monitor via USB-C does work fine though.
I feel like the standards-compliance testing on USB-C gear isn’t rigorous enough - this sort of fussiness shouldn’t happen.
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@bsdphk you score one pedant point! I was referring to millimetre-wavelength waveguide, which the UK’s state-run telecoms company tried out extensively in the 1970s. https://www.jstor.org/stable/74915
Looks superficially similar to WT4.
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@woollypigs even better - turns out they last a lot longer than forecast, so many of the 30-year-old panels that are out there are still doing sterling service and don't need replacing! So yes, at some point they'll be recycled, but they don't need to be yet.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/30-year-old-solar-panels-still-going-strong/4022052.article
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/el/d4el00040d
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Embedded carbon is a thing, but the amount of energy used to make a wind turbine is dwarfed by the amount it produces, and at present the alternative is either burning fossil fuels or nuclear.
Please: the low-carbon energy revolution is here - don’t say it’s not good enough because it involves a bit of steel and concrete!
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@davidjamesweir@mementomori.social do you have Padlet? I mostly use it for sticky-note tasks but it can do whiteboards too. You could also potentially use Zoom or Teams with audio disabled (but nasty!)
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@davidjamesweir@mementomori.social looks like figjam might also work, and is free for educational use
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@pozorvlak credit cards can only be issued to minors if someone else is paying the bill, so credit cards can be used for age verification as long as the cardholder and account holder are shown to be the same person.
With hire cars, it’s because the agency knows it will get paid by the card company if the car is damaged, whereas with a debit card there is a risk that the customer absconds, empties their account, and the bank bounces the card payment.
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@severtz nice idea, but GL has no inter-settlement roads, so its airports are always in use!
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@mattround@crispsandwi.ch it’s the Amazonification of everything - somehow it’s fine to take an established brand and use it to sell cheap crap
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@dtl @ZachWeinersmith It’s the rarity value though: I’ve been to Antarctica four times, including spending the winter there. That makes me unusual, but not astronaut-level unusual. Go to the right university department and you’ll meet other people like me, but astronauts? Yeah, rarer than hen’s teeth.
(Unsurprisingly many Antarctic people, myself included, applied for the job Tim Peake eventually got. Some even got interviewed. But ultimately at the time they wanted a test pilot.)
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Steel and concrete are both more of an issue (steel is made using coal as an ingredient, but can potentially be made with hydrogen instead) and cement requires lots of energy and emits a lot of CO2 during manufacturing.
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I am very much reminded of this Muppets sketch. I am Fozzy. https://youtu.be/32j8M5G1f8o?si=4quIhBtY3UtaWpYd
The Muppet Show. Rowlf and Fozzie - I Got Rhythm (s4 ep20)
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@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space my early career was at the BBC as a broadcast engineer. HD was just starting to appear, and I recall a test shoot at the Glyndeborne Opera where the high resolution and lighting meant that you could see the contact lenses in the star tenor’s eyes!
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Then, one day, we plugged a colleague’s HP laptop into my monitor and once I returned to my laptop again, the video again stopped working.
I had a spare Caldigit USB-C dock lying around and switched to using that, feeding the monitor via HDMI from the dock.