biffer

The crowd soundtrack is particularly unconvincing - Hampden would be making angry, pissed off noises watching this.

Fuck me that was awful. Do we really have to sit through another half hour of this shite?

It's probably even earlier than that, when you take into account build time, testing time etc, it's maybe 1973! These missions, and similar ones, were key in driving things like the development of digital cameras.

Yeah, the Voyager 1 completed its primary mission in 1980, Voyager 2 in 1989 (even though Voyager 2 was launched first). But these missions are built with significant redundancy where possible, so all the kit just keeps working, for more than 40 years now. So seeing as they were still going, it made sense to keep using them for opportunistic measurements, like trying to identify at what distance the suns particle emission is balanced by the general particle flow outside our solar system. A lot of these missions go way past their original projected lifetime, for example the Hubble telescope is way past it’s projected lifetime but we might still get another ten years out of it so long as nothing critical fails. My favourites though are the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars. They were originally designed for a 90 day mission starting in January 2004. Opportunity finally lost contact in June 2018, having pootled around on the surface of Mars for 5111 days (Mars days that is, equal to 5498 earth days).

That's an interesting question. It would depend on their ethical stance. There are ongoing discussions on whether, if an AI achieves sentience, we have the right to turn it off. That also drives what we might be able to do with simulations as computing power expands - should we construct self aware 'consciousness' within a computer programme which has free will within the limited constraints of that environment, only to destroy it once we have finished with our own interests? What's the difference between that and creting pseudo humans with limited life spans for other experiments? A similar thing could apply to whoever wrote our code, if it were to be the case that we're just a simulation.

So, you know that whole ‘we’re all living in a computer simulation’ idea? Turns out that the code needed to get quantum computers to work is the same as the corrections needed in the hologram attic theory of space time, where space and time are illusions caused by the corrections which keep quantum dimensions stable. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-space-and-time-could-be-a-quantum-error-correcting-code-20190103/

BBC has West Dunbartonshire over 30 and Glasgow over 20 positive tests per 100,000 population. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53989021

Particularly as he can’t spell Aberdonian.

Rates in Glasgow and West Dunbartonshire are such that if they were foreign countries we’d have them on the quarantine list.

So the positive tests came back Tuesday or Wednesday, is that right? So they were probably in training Monday / Tuesday - how do we know there aren't other infected players who haven't tested positive yet? Have those eight players not interacted with anyone else at the club at all since last Saturday?

Easy way to stop that - clear statement that any team found to be doing that will be relegated.

Saints should be awarded the game. It's the only way to get the players to pay proper attention to the rules about being in a bubble. if they get a smack on the wrist, it'll happen again. But as we all know, the SPFL will bottle it. If it was the other way around, with Saints having broken their bubble, you can be sure they would be clobbered for it. Scottish football in a nutshell. Everything wrong with our game in one incident; overpriviliged players thinking they're all that when they're playing in a pish league, bias towards larger clubs, a player culture that is thirty years out of date and a complaint media that doesn't care because it's not one of the old firm.

These tits need to be made to appreciate they’ve put the whole league at risk of being suspended. Large fines and suspensions are necessary,motherwise you’ll start to get other groups doing it if they just get away with it.

Lots of chat that the red smoke is very typical of a nitrate fertiliser explosion.

Works for some jobs, works for some people. I've been more productive in the past working from home - when I was at RBS I used to get done in 5 hours what would take me 7 in the office. Current job it's hard to tell as I was out of the office on visits, workshops, exhibits, travelling etc and that's all out the window for quite some time. But once we're back in the office I'll probably be doing a couple of days a week from home. Wrt the original question, this will undoubtedly affect the commercial property market - an the residential market will get a knock on effect. Office space requirements will go down by 20-30% I think, and then when you take the additional knock to retail space, town and city centre property markets will collapse. Despite the way it sometimes gets reported, commercial and residential property markets are intrinsically linked (they compete with each other on the supply side for location, materials, labour etc) and I think over the next 5-10 years you'll start to see a lot of office / retail conversions into apartments, which could have a positive effect of getting people living in city centres again. But property prices will stagnate or fall, and given how much of the consumer society is based on a false sense of wealth generated off the back of rising property prices, that will have a significant broader effect on economic outlook and confidence, on top of the more obvious recessionary drivers.

Bob McIntyre just sneaks in to take the final entry spot into this week's WGC St Jude Invitational. Hope he can have a good weekend and show the US PGA that he's a genuine up and coming hot prospect.

I love that one of the authors says “I don’t think this is very likely either” 😂 My personal opinion, at the moment is that life might be very common, but the huge majority of it will be single called, primordial soup style life. On earth, it took a few hundred million years for life to occur, but it then took two and a half billion years to make the step from single celled to multi celled life. When that step happened, the diversity of life forms went crazy. Loads of cycles of dominant life forms, then when something with the potential for intelligence arrived, it only took a few million years, a blink of an eye to get technological. So I suspect the big jump is single to multi cell. If that’s the case, there will be system after system which has primordial oceans, but virtually no advanced civilisations.

Cheers. Been struggling to understand testing numbers, but looks like those numbers are the number of tests carried out rather than number of people tested. Not quite sure how the stats work though - daily briefing numbers seem to quote numbers of people.

Where are those test numbers from?

SRU has formally proposed that the Edinburgh v Glasgow games in August are used as test events for socially distanced crowds. Rugby is apparently way ahead of football wrt this. Mainly because they were already talking to ministers when football was still arguing about reconstruction.

I've got flights booked to Athens in September, but I think I'm going to change them to next year. Should be able to do that for very low cost. Also had a trip with mates to Dublin booked at the end of August. Might just let that one drop tbh. Take the hit for flights, it was only £70 or so.

The key thing is 'A virus 96 per cent identical' 4 percent is a hell of a lot of genetics. We share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees. 4 percent makes it significantly different.

Eddie Mair was a massive loss for the BBC. The way he took Johnson apart when he was standing in for that useless twitter Andrew Marr was a masterclass.

I’ve just had some recent research flagged up to me. One from France, One from the USA, one from Singapore. The USA one is published in Cell, the other two are in pre print so have not been peer reviewed, and all of them are small number studies. So all of these should be viewed with caution, not as a ‘this is fact!’, but as ‘this may be promising we should look further’ research. I’ve never been a biological or medical scientist, my areas of study have been physics, astronomy, environment and economics to a greater or lesser degree in each (although I’ve managed some biotech projects),so its a push of my understanding reading these and any finer details, I will have missed! What they seem to indicate is that there may be a degree of cross ‘immunity’ from previous infection by one of the four endemic human coronaviruses which are usually grouped with the common cold via some kind of T cell mechanism. So this is hopeful, but should be treated with a huge amount of caution. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S009 ... 20)30610-3 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf

Seriously, what point do you think that’s making?