Personal flying machines will be a reality, home computer and electric car pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair has said.
He told BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme that soon it would be “economically and technically possible” to create flying cars for individuals.
Sir Clive is best-known for the Spectrum computer and his failed electric car effort, the C5.
“I’m sure it will happen and I am sure it will change the world dramatically,” he predicted.
Despite his pioneering work in the field of computers, Sir Clive told BBC Radio 4 he was not an internet user.
“I don’t use it myself directly,” he said, explaining that as an inventor he tried to avoid “mechanical and technical things around me so they don’t blur the mind”.
A study by Swiss researchers has generated a startling statistic – you are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than on any other day of the year. But why should that be?
This is not a joke. The study was carried out by legitimate scientists who analysed data from 2.5 million deaths in Switzerland between 1969 and 2008.
There are a number of hypotheses which may explain the finding.
Perhaps some people close to death “hang on” until their birthday, to reach another milestone? Or perhaps a significant number of people take greater risks on their birthdays, like
driving home from their own parties drunk?
But Professor David Spiegelhalter, a statistician from Cambridge University, says the Swiss data does not support the “hanging on” theory.
“They don’t find any dip before so there’s no holding on,” he says, “and they don’t find any blip after, so there’s no jumping the gun. It’s purely a birthday effect.”
The Swiss data, he says, suggests “something on your birthday kills you”.
The Sentinelese (also called the Sentineli or North Sentinel Islanders) are the indigenous people of North
Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands of India. One of the Andamanese people, they resist contact with the outside world. They are one of the uncontacted peoples, although like all of today’s so-called uncontacted people they have a history of limited contact.
Comparative map showing the distribution of Andamanese tribes in the Andaman Islands – early
1800s versus in 2004. Notably:
(a) Rapid depopulation of the original southeastern Jarawa homeland in the 1789–1793 period
(b) Onge (in blue) and Great Andamanese shrinkage to isolated settlements
(c) Complete Jangil extinction by 1931
(d) Jarawa move to occupy depopulated former west coast homeland of the Great Andamanese, and
(e) Only the Sentinelese zone is somewhat intact
The population is estimated at 40 to 500. In 2001, Census of India officials recorded 21 males and
18 females. This survey was conducted from a distance and may not be accurate for the population which ranges over the 59.67 km2 (14,700 acres) island. The 2011 Census of India recorded 12 males and three females. Any effect from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami is not known, other than the confirmation obtained that they had survived the immediate aftermath.
Author Heinrich Harrer described one man as being 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in) tall and
apparently left handed.
I’ve been playing for a little while now, and here’s my thoughts so far:
I love the open world aspects of the game; I’ve never played anything where there’s been quite so much freedom (especially when you’re just starting out). It’s taken a while to
get used to the areas which are only accessible at certain times of day, though, like some of the shops. Also: the quest-givers who seem to give me the most money seem to want me to
complete missions during the same hours that the shops are open, so I have to choose one or the other – what’s with that?
Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck, but I’ve discovered that if you try enough things, eventually something will work. If you go around picking everything up, it’ll probably be
useful at some point (but be careful because the NPC guards will stop you “stealing” things!), and you can sometimes get great results by using combinations of things (for example, I
tried imbibing a potion of drunkenness and then wearing a traffic cone the other day, and I’m pretty sure it gave me an invisibility buff: no matter how much I sang, everybody ignored
me!). Inventory management is a bit of a pain, but picking up a rucksack has really helped.
Not so impressed with the NPCs. I’ve learned that the best approach to getting information and quests is to talk to everybody, but most of the people I talk to don’t want to say
anything, or just repeat the same few phrases over and over (“Go away,” “Stop bothering me,” etc.). I’ve tried offering things for trade, but most of them aren’t interested in my
traffic cone or my crayons or my rucksack: I’m honestly not sure what most of them are for!
Anyway: I know that some of you must have been down this quest track, too – I’ve seen you wandering around wearing your traffic cones and carrying your rucksacks. So I’ll jump
ahead a bit and save from spoiling it… Here’s where I’m stuck: I’m in the padded room in the hospital, and I can’t get past the boss of the doctors. I tried eating the crayons, to see
if they’d give me strength (one of the NPCs here suggested it), but it doesn’t work. The doctors are a seriously creepy monster, by the way – they keep talking about you having
“delusions” or something – but I’m sure there’s a way to get back to the main quest track. Any tips?
MALAYSIA will not ask Google Earth to blur images of the country’s military facilities to avoid terrorist attacks. Defence Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said doing so would
indirectly pin-point their location anyway.
“The difference in, or lack of, pixelation of images of the military facilities compared to the surrounding areas will make it easy for visual identification.” In his written reply to
Datuk Dr James Dawos Mamit (BN-Mambong), Najib said the images were provided worldwide commercially.
