Bruin Fisher

What a great enterprise.

Until quite recently I was treasuring a Canon electronic typewriter, a daisywheel device with very sophisticated software. It was amazingly fast, precise, had a small two line display and a useful memory, and could do unbelievable things for its day such as draw boxes to outline tables of data - with the corners correctly matching up. Unfortunately it was taking up space and I chucked it out. Haven't yet chucked out my first 'proper' computer though - a BBC Micro model B.

I'm guessing, Nigel, that when you say 'the best of the word processors' you're referring to specialist software that lesser mortals don't have access to. As you say, MS Word in current incarnation doesn't do it, and neither does anything else that I have come across, even the venerable and rather wonderful WordPerfect. Maybe the Wang kit that was briefly popular (and the subject of much schoolboy mirth)?

I too was taught to put two spaces at the end of a sentence, but with the advent of word processors I soon discovered these devices were not capable of working out what to do with the double space when wrapping lines for instance. So I quickly re-learned to type just one space (feeling guilty each time I did it, knowing that I was contravening one of the cardinal layout rules). I'm slightly surprised that software never took the double space on board. Modern word processing software can convert quote marks into opening and closing quotes, can convert double hyphens into an m-dash, can correct spelling as you type, give the first word of a sentence a capital letter, convert three dots into an ellipsis and all sorts of wonderful stuff - but as far as I've found, they don't lengthen the space between sentences, and neither do they keep two typed spaces together when word wrapping unless you laboriously type them as 'non-breaking spaces'. I still think a paragraph looks better with a bit of extra space between sentences.

This is why I love the AD forums - a thread worthy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself.

Great account.

Actually loudspeakers can work at very low frequencies when driven by specially designed amplifiers - but the 'sound' they generate at frequencies below about 20Hz is not heard by humans as sound - it might be 'felt' as a vibration but when you get down to single-digit frequencies the loudspeaker cone is just flapping uselessly - it will be merely moving air around immediately in front of the transducer. I suspect at these frequencies you don't get a sound wave at all because air can't be made to oscillate so slowly.

I wonder if James' story uses the 'sum and difference' effect. If you generate two frequencies of sound, you will be able to detect not two but four oscillations (in addition to harmonics and sub-harmonics, but that's a different matter). For instance if you generate a sound at 1KHz and another at 1.1KHz you will get those two frequencies, also a frequency of 2.1Khz and another of 100Hz. If you re-tuned your second frequency to 1.001Khz you could generate a sound of 1Hz - a frequency much lower than a loudspeaker could actually originate. This principle is used in radio receivers of the superheterodyne design. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/audio/sumdif.html

Wow what a subject (can of worms)... My poor brain struggles a bit, there's plenty to confuse me here. In case I'm not the only one, here is some disambiguation: Gamma waves are neural oscillations in the human brain, not to be confused with gamma rays which are part of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum and extremely high frequency (above 10 Exahertz, or 10 to the power 19 Hertz!) Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, light, X-rays but is of a fundamentally different nature from sound, therefore not directly comparable. EMR travels at the speed of light, sound travels at the speed of sound...

Do not malign your own thoughts, Cole. There's an army of defenders just itching to defend your thoughts against all comers - me being one of them.

Well I agree it would great for the sport and great for the gay community if more sportsmen came out - but I don't think anyone should put pressure on individuals to come out. It's a different issue for each person and they must make their decision for themselves not for anyone else. I personally am in no position to harangue anyone to come out - I'm not out to many people myself, for lots of very good reasons.

Race walking is not a sport I know much about. But Tom Bosworth can walk (not run) 20Km, nearly 12.5miles, in a little over an hour and a quarter. My flabber has seldom been so ghasted.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/34503700

Oops silly me thanks for moving it beloved leader!

I don't remember if I've flagged these boys up here before. https://youtu.be/NI01dr78EYU They are university students and perform (and release videos) in aid of a local charity. They're internationally famous now and have a very busy Youtube channel. If you haven't seen it, check out their outrageous Shakira medley: https://youtu.be/bRWVMPnByzo

you blew it, Bruin.C I did, more's the pity. And my new skimpy running outfit will go to waste.

What I can say is that Microsoft really, really want you to upgrade to Windows 10. In addition to the little nag icon in the systray, computers I administer have started throwing up a large dialog with instructions on how to upgrade. However there's an application that we all use here that is not compatible with Windows 10. If we upgrade we'll have to buy an upgraded version of our app which will cost big money - and slow the rather basic-spec computers down significantly. So we're not upgrading, but it's getting annoying having to bat these nag dialogs away all the time! One machine that doesn't run the obstructive app, I thought I might upgrade it and started the process. The dialog announced that my machine was compatible with Win10, so I started the process, but after rebooting it finished with an error message and left me precisely where I started. Apparently the machine isn't compatible after all. This is why I like Linux...

Every time I read about Tom Daley my heart is in my mouth. It's wonderful, but almost unbelievable, that fame and success has not gone to his head and he is an all-round nice guy. Oh, and a world-beating Olympic diver, too.

Thanks for the link correction, Rutabaga. It won't be a surprise to anyone here that I absolutely love this little sequence by Camy. It inspired me at the time he wrote it to jump on the bandwagon and add my two penn'orth.

He's goood

I'm with Graeme - there must be a story in there. Fascinating account. The 'girls' felt like boys all along and their bodies caught up with their minds at puberty. There's clearly loads left to learn about sex, including stuff we don't yet know about the role of hormones in the womb. One theory has it that the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to turn out gay - and that this might be linked to a surfeit of testosterone in the womb after the previous pregnancies. It's not a useful theory for me because I was a firstborn...

My gaydar seems to work quite well... for identifying lesbians. It's not so good at men, more's the pity.

Hmm, well, that's the configuration I've been running for years. You still need anti-virus software installed in the Windows OS if you will be connecting to the internet from Windows, or sharing files. I use Ubuntu all the time, only switching to Windows to run specific work-related software that only runs under Windows. There is a 'Windows Compatibility Layer' in ubuntu called Wine that enables you to (amazingly) run some Windows software in Linux (it's NOT an emulator, it just provides Windows-like DLLs to give Windows software an environment to function in). Sadly there is one application that I have to use sometimes that is very badly written and defeats all my attempts to get it running under Wine. I'm thinking that the next change I make might be to buy a new machine and install only Ubuntu on it, keeping the old one for only Windows. I'll be interested to hear how you get on with Ubuntu.

Is that a demonic cackle???

Chapter 7 ends with quite a cliffhanger. Drat you, Cole!