Nuclear submarine collision what are the chances?

"A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision in the middle of the Atlantic, it was reported.

The crash between HMS Vanguard and French submarine Le Triomphant, which was also carrying nuclear warheads, is believed to have occurred on February 3 or 4, The Sun claimed."

A nuclear submarine seems to be about 140 meters with a radius of 12. So that's a volume of about 63360 cubic meters.

The Atlantic ocean is 354,700,000 cubic kilometers. There are 1 000 000 000 cubic metres is a cubic kilometer. Of course subs can only dive to about 400 metres. So say they stay in the top 300 meters then the volume might be more like 106.4 million km squared * 300 meters=30 million cubic km. More likely they avoid the top 20 meters where ships might hit them, so their range is estimated to be 20-2320 meters deep.

This is assuming a submarine is a cylinder which it isn't.
How many nuclear submarines are there? There seems to be about 50 in the world. Navies will keep their own submarines separate. But that still means there are in the Atlantic maybe 25 submarines that the French or UK subs could run into. This does reduce the number of subs the Russians Or Americans can hit significantly though. They have a top speed of about 40 km per hour. So I assume they are wandering around at 20kph. So assuming all the worlds submarines are in the Atlantic ocean at the same time how often would you expect one to hit another if they were traveling round at random?

facebook relationship forensics

Has anyone noticed the modern skill of divining your friends relationship status based on social networking clues? You feel a bit CSI trawling through tweets to divine if someones missus is just not going to the pub or has been red carded.

This requires powers of divination that would shame an extispicist. It would also shame the animal whose entrails he was reading if it didnt have bigger problems at the time.

Why isn't there a word for thinking today is a different day? If you could go "oh the game is on tonight Ive been daisy all day" rather then having to go into an explanation of how you think its Friday not Thursday etc.

Mind reading maths horse advances scientific method

Clever Hans was a horse. He was a horse who did maths. People held up a card with a arithmetic puzzle to him and he would clop out the correct answer. Now this is a clever trick but the really odd bit is what happened when a guy called Pfungst figured out how he did it.

Pfungst realised that when the person posing the question did not know the answer the maths horse was suddenly thicker then pig shit. When the questioner expected another clop they leaned slightly forward. When the horse had clopped out the right answer they leaned back in amazement.

From this Pfungst realised that in experiments you give off subtle clues that can be picked up and influence the experiment. This was called the "clever hans effect" and is the reason we carry out experiments where the researcher does not know the "correct" answer. This double blinding was an important advance in the scientific method. The lack of double blind is a mistake a lot of paranormal and alternative health experiments make.

Still though Mind reading maths horse, that is just a random collection of words. What non equine advances to the scientific methods have been made? Was the first journal editor was a wiley aristocratic unidexterous fox? Peer review was originally carried out by psychic chemistry goats?

And while were on weird shit, did you know bees can recognise faces? I would have thought the chief advantage of being a social insect was being immune from embarrassment. Now there going to be all "Oh whats your name, I remember I met you by the gladioli yesterday". Forget shitting sugary water maybe we should use bees as bouncers. Giant swarms of bomber jacketed fuckwits baring entry to the pubs of Dublin.

Sex, science and profits: Kealey

This book asks whether governments should fund science. It starts with a review of the history of technological advancement. This section is like a cross between an economic history of the western world and guns germs and steal. The books title seems to be tying to trade in on the popularity of Guns and Germs which might cause people to dismiss it as pop history and miss its important arguments about current science funding.

The second section is an analyse of the industrial revolution and shows how its discoveries stemmed not from government funded pure scientists providing insights that were then used by industrialists but from tradesmen making gradual improvements to the machines they used every day. These new machines then provided evidence for the theoreticians to build up scientific theories from.

The third section looks at how contemporary science is done and examines if government funding of science increases or decreases the rate of progress (and economic growth). It includes a convincing chapter on why patents serve to harm the public.

This is an entertaining well crafted book that lays out a compelling argument for free market (rather than state subsidised) science. The book seems to have been widely ignored outside libertarian circles where he is preaching to the converted.

One thing the book does not explore is the use of other methods to incentivize science. The use of betting markets and prizes are two ways that are probably underused.

Cheer up things could be worse

Chicken Licken has nothing on the news these days. Everyone is talking about "perfect storms of bad economic data" and "the worst possible recession imaginable", stuff like that. This recession is bad(pdf), much worse then most people currently believe. It is at the point where those hoarding gold are overly optimistic, they should be hoarding rice.

However you have to be really lacking in imagination to think that a complete collapse of the banking system hyperinflation of fiat currency and abandonment of all social services provisions are the worst economic event you can imagine.

Here are a collection of things that are much worse.

These sorts of inevitable disasters come round anywhere from every 100 years to 50,000 years or so
1. A Flu pandemic which killed 5% of world population.
2. Canary island volcano falling into the Atlantic.
3. Yellowstone volcano exploding
4. Rapid onset new ice age

Not inevitable but fairly likely
1. Thermonuclear war.
2. Intelligent robots that try kill us all (surely this is overdue at this point)
3. Bioterrorism of some mix of aids, smallpox, anthrax and athletes foot.

So cheer up on a geological scale this is minor. Yellowstone could explode then you’d really have problems.

Bound for Whorey

I'm so angry I could drop kick a nun.



Woodie Guthrie the raving communist hater of corporations is advertising Audi cars? Are they going to have this machine kills fascists emblazoned on the side?



And whats with the papercraft? a nice biodegradable car that is put together with loving care? The sort of thing that wont mow down people and leave them clinging to the bloody stumps that used to join to their feet?

At least Woody had the decency to die before they tried to dance around in his skin in some bizarre puppet person desecration. Iggy pop on the other hand has some sort of alien inside him that makes him advertise car insurance

Enough by John Naish

We have too much food, information, stuff, and the constant quest for more is costing us our physical and mental and even planetary well being.

The good of this book is that it is correct and entertaining. The bad is

1. This bit of the brain lights up which means.... Something like this is said every few paragraphs which as the author himself points out "is like standing outside a football ground, trying to interpret the action in the game by listening to the roars of the crowd". Brain scanning is not that accurate and basing your argument on extremely scant data like this is unwise.

2. In the stone age we did X so now we do X to much in the modern world. Evolutionary just so stories. These pop up in popular culture all the time and become accepted knowledge without any evidence. We don't really know how we lived in the stone age. Looking at Bonobo society early man may have been vastly different to how we imagine it today. So the old cliche (not from the book)
Men are better at maths because they had to have spatial abilities to chase antelope. Except when you look at it that's not the reason. People thinking men are better at maths seems to be most of the cause of them being better.

This book is full of these non falsifiable fairy tales which again is not a good foundation for an argument

3. No index

4. We cannot have more stuff unless we consume more. This is taken as an axiom but it is wrong. Ephemeralization is the process where people use technological advances to continuously do more with less.

The book is right that we need to be satisfied with enough and serves as a good motivator as to how to do this personally.

Similar but better books are Collapse by Jared Diamond on what causes societies to fail and Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller on how we can provide the needs of society and move away from over consumption.

Christmas Quiz

Name the film.

1. Onq Fnagn
2. Oenmvy
3. Qvr uneq
4. Terzyvaf
5. Genqvat Cynprf
6. Zhccrgf Puevfgznf Pneby
7. Ervaqrre Tnzrf
8. Vgf n jbaqreshy Yvsr
9. Fpebbtrq
10. Avtugzner Orsber Puevfgznf

World Vision

How do you improve the vision of poor people? Poor as in uneducated less then a dollar a day third world poor. Joshua Silver has invented adjustable glasses to cheaply do this. There are other ideas donating old glasses for example.

The rand experiment showed that one of the few useful free health care provisions are free glasses. Granted that was of fairly rich people who could buy glasses if they really needed them but it still shows a benefit.

See if you can figure out what the picture is used for?

Bonnie the whistling orangutan

Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan whistles. Now that is not a weird as a French person showering or an interesting Canadian but it is still important news. From my extensive knowledge of computer games and films I knew simians could kidnap damsels then either throw barrels or climb skyscrapers but whistling?



Bonnie being able to whistle is important because it shows these apes have control over their vocalisations and their sounds can be voluntary.
This means that voluntary vocal abilities are not purely a human ability. Bonnie learned to whistle by copying her zoo keeper rather then through being taught explicitly. This means orangutans have far more vocal abilities than previously believed and so humans vocal language skills are shared at least in part with other species.

Which leads to many questions, Should we upgrade the rights we give Orangutans? Or more likely should we downgrade the rights of wolf-whistling builders? Could we have have zoos with exhibits of brick layers who strut and preen occasionally shouting mating calls at passers bye? That does not sound much different to many building sites I have seen.

Now the comparison of human and orangutan may not be fair. I can't whistle and I'm significantly worse at hanging out of trees. On the positive side I'm nearly as house trained so I am not overly worried about getting replaced just yet.

The revelation comes from a paper published in December in Primates, an international journal of primatology. The Christmas edition of Primates is out? And I missed it? That is the one with the free 2009 calender. I hear the miss April Gibbon is a babe.

If they can whistle what else can the do? After whistling a full Christmas carol album can't be far behind. A simian soundtrack to the festive season is imminent.
How annoyed is Jane Goodall going to be when she finds out about this? She probably has her chimps working on a a full barbershop album right now.

All the articles on this keep pointing out she is 30? Bonnie is still on the market and pointing out shes a trigenarian and getting on a bit cannot help her in the dating stakes.

Great Ape Trust scientist Dr. Serge Wich said "This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans," Did you know animals had accents? Do Hillbilly mountain monkeys get looked down on by the urbane city slicker zoo ones?

Not only that but the orangutans are teaching each other how to whistle. Indah was a roommate of Bonnie and she learned to whistle from Bonnie. Unfortunately Indah died before they could record a Christmas duet single. They can teach other this stuff? If one ever figures out how to lay bricks builders are in trouble.

Cost of the Bailout

The bailout seems to have cost somewhere between 4 and 8 trillion dollars.

In todays money (inflation adjusted) world war two cost the US around 5 trillion. according to here, here, here and here.

Whose Flag?

Name the country

1. Oenmvy
2. Nyonavn
3. Terrpr
4. Wnznvpn
5. Ivrganz
6. Phon
7. Ehffvn
8. Svaynaq
9. Ghexrl
10. Flevn

Name that Country

Match the outline of a country to its name.

1. Cbynaq
2. Fhqna
3. Vena
4. Pebngvn
5. Svaynaq
6. Zrkvpb
7. Flevn
8. Zbebppb
9. Fbznyvn
10. Puvyr

Poodle Quiz

Poodles are Satan's Idea of a good pet. But what happens when a proper animal spawns itself with these furballs of hate. All these animals are the unholy union of a poodle and a proper dog. Match the picture of a poodle hybrid to the others side of the crossbreed.

Label these dogs whose very existence mocks god.

1. Qbkvrcbb (Qnpufuhaq)
2. Vevfu qbbqyr (Vevfu Frggre)
3. Fpuabbqyr (Fpuanhmre)
4. Furrcnqbbqyr (Byq Ratyvfu Furrcqbt)
5. Tbyqraqbbqyr (Tbyqra Ergevrire)
6. Ynoenqbbqyr (Ynoenqbe Ergevrire)
7. Fcevatreqbbqyr (Ratyvfu Fcevatre Fcnavry)
8. QbbqyrznaCvafpure (Qborezna Cvafpure)

Lets all become drug dealers

1.

A RECORD haul of cocaine worth more than €500m was dramatically seized off the south-west coast yesterday in a sweeping international 'sting' operation.

2.

TD warns vaccine cut will result in 80 deaths
calculating the cost of the programme was half the €14m claimed by the Government — €7m

Does anyone else think 1 could solve 2? Why not let the government sell cocaine to people? You don't hear of pharmacists shooting each other.
But we cannot profit from drug dealers? We already do through CAB (criminal assets bureau).
But what about the lives that would be lost? Id rather coked up assholes died at their own hand than condemn women to a preventable death.

We are now short of cash. That is the reason prohibition ended.

Puzzle

A bunch of my friends were trying to find a route round this graph at the weekend. Yeah it was a crazy party.

A quick search showed the problem was one of finding the Eulerian path. And that the puzzle had no solution

"Eulerian path is a path in a graph which visits each edge exactly once. Similarly, an Eulerian circuit is an Eulerian path which starts and ends on the same vertex"

If there is to be an Eulerian path for a given graph the graph must have lesser than three nodes with odd number of edges."

Code to check for these paths is found here

The code to test this puzzle is
print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2,3,3,4], 2:[1,1,3,4,4], 3:[1,1,2,4,4], 4:[1,2,2,3,3]})
print "test run to make sure code works "
print eulerPath({ 1:[2,2], 2:[1,1]})

Name The Film

1. Npr va gur Ubyr
2. Vaqvnan Wbarf: Envqref bs gur ybfg nex
3. Gur Ubyr
4. Gur Tbbavrf
5. Gur Qrfprag
6. Gur Pnir
7. Gur Pber
8. Ynolevagu
9. Svtug Pyho
10.PyvssUnatre

use this to unobscure

Harrison Ford Quiz Round

Name the film Harrison is looking mildly perturbed in.


1. Nve Sbepr bar
2. Ncbpnylcfr Abj
3. Jung yvrf orarngu
4. Oynqr ehaare
5. Gur shtvgvir
6. Fgne Jnef
7. Vaqvnan Wbarf
8. Fnoevan
9. Jbexvat Tvey
10. Fvk qnlf frira avtugf
11. Cngevbg Tnzrf
I accepted any film where the character is played a few times (6,7,11). Use this to unscramble. You can reuse the image for whatever use.

Predicting rain has been banned

Annoyed at the constant bad weather the government today banned the met office predicting rain. Shares in Irish sun holidays and solar power soared on the new “ostrich” rules designed to stop meteorologists talking us into barometric depressions.

In the past weathermen who predicted the weather accurately were rewarded and those who had all the precognition of Icarus on the devils dandruff were shunned. Now with the fantastic rules that ban any depressing weather forecasts nothing but sunny skies will follow.

In a related story “emperors” clothing has released a new line of minimalist clothing. Anyone disparaging this clothes range or suggesting it may be too minimalist will be thrown to the wolves.

I am going to write a film called “A weekend at Bernankes” where the federal reserve chairman has amazing adventures with the bloated corpses or banking institutions. Of course no one dare anyone suggesting he’s engaging in necrophilia.

When you want to know if someone believes what they claim you ask them to bet. If they won’t bet it’s a very good sign they are spoofing you. Some people want to short stocks, where they are betting the market value of the bank will decrease. They have been banned from predicting the price of banks will decrease. When the government bans predicting the future you have to wonder how bad it must be going to be.

Neolithic Mancala

There is a game played in most of the world called Mancala. It is a “count and capture” game that involves moving stones around a board made up of holes. You can see an explanation of various forms of rules of the game here.



Ireland has some of the best preserved ancient tombs and building sin the world. This means we have some of the oldest known versions of games in the world. Boards of a game called “windmill” have been cut into the temple at Kurna, Egypt (~1440 BC). A version of this game called “Nine Man Morris” is still played. Tic Tac Toe can be considered a very basic version of it also. The earliest known depiction of this game is a bronze age cemetery in Ballinderry Ireland.

Boards of nine man morris have also been found in roman age sites.




Irish 5000 years old Mancala boards should look like this. On a flat surface. Two rows of holes, probably six holes (possibly more) long with slightly larger holes at either end. Possibly you would see a few together as mancala is currently a social game and tends to be played in groups.





We tend to view megalithic carvings as having a religious purpose. It is quite possible that megaliths were gathering points and as such social games took place there. So next time your at a megalith have a look for a game board.