Like the TARDIS, your time machine has a fault. The fault isn’t a failure of its chameleon circuit, but a quirk in its ability to jump to particular dates. Picture courtesy
aussiegall (Flickr), licensed Creative Commons.
You own a time machine with an unusual property: it can only travel to 29th February. It can jump to any 29th February, anywhere at all, in any year (even back
before we invented the Gregorian Calendar, and far into the future after we’ve stopped using it), but it can only
finish its journey on a 29th of February, in a Gregorian leap year (for this reason, it can only jump to years which are leap years).
One day, you decide to take it for a spin. So you get into your time machine and press the “random” button. Moments later, you have arrived: it is now 29th February in a
random year!
Without knowing what year it is: what is the probability that it is a Monday? (hint: the answer is not1/7 – half of your challenge is to work
out why!).
The second really did just walk into it when he asked Ruth “So which of these two men are you with? Or is it both?” “Yes, both,” she replied, and, in the period of
silence while the comedian was still trying to comprehend what she’d said, added, “We’re polyamorous.”
I was so very proud of her in that moment.
For me, adopting the out and proud approach of the gay community is an important part of “poly activism”: it almost feels like it’s my duty to make sure that people can see
that we’re just another group of people in just another relationship, completely normal except for the fact that there are three of us instead of two. Talking openly and frankly about
this stuff is the only way to normalise it and break the taboo, so I feel like my mini-activism helps all people in nonmonogamous relationships, even if just a little
bit.
I’ve just tried this and it works; thought I’d share my results with you so that any fellow Europeans can give it a go too.
Pre-order the game in your own country (I’m in the UK and bought my copy months and months ago; paid in £)
Pre-load the game (shocked if you haven’t already done this), so Steam says “Pre-load complete; unreleased”
Get yourself a US-based VPN provider. I’m using VyprVPN because I had an account with them already, but if you’re just after an ultra-short subscription for this one thing then you can probably get a better
deal: here’s a starting
point.
In Steam -> Settings -> Download + Cloud, change your “Download region” to one of the US ones. Save, and shut down Steam.
Connect to your VPN.
Open up Steam again: by the combination of (a) the VPN and (b) the download region, Valve will believe that you’re in the USA and activate your game! Hooray!
Play!
I hope you all appreciate the time I spent typing this when I could have been playing Civ 5! See you online!
The British Rail flying saucer, officially known simply as space vehicle, was a proposed spacecraft designed by Charles Osmond
Frederick.
Purpose
The flying saucer originally started as a proposal for a lifting platform. However, the project was revised and edited, and by the time the patent was filed had become a large
passenger craft for interplanetary travel.
Design
The craft was to be powered by nuclear fusion, using laser beams to produce pulses of nuclear energy in a generator in the centre of the craft, at a rate of over 1000 Hz to prevent resonance, which could damage the vehicle. The pulses
of energy would then have been transferred out of a nozzle into a series of radial electrodes running along the
underside of the craft, which would have converted the energy into electricity that would then pass into a ring of powerful electromagnets (the patent describes using superconductors if possible). These magnets would accelerate subatomic particles emitted by the fusion reaction, providing lift and thrust. This general design was used in several fusion rocket studies.
A layer of thick metal running above the fusion reactor would have acted as a shield to protect the passengers above from the radiation emitted from the core of the reactor. The entire vehicle would be piloted in such a way that the acceleration and deceleration of the craft would have simulated gravity in zero gravity conditions.
A patent application was filed by Jensen and Son on behalf of British Rail on 11 December 1970 and granted on 21 March 1973.
The patent lapsed in 1976 due to non-payment of renewal fees.
Media attention
The patent first came to the attention of the media when it was featured in The Guardian on 31
May 1978, in a story by Adrian
Hope of the New Scientist magazine. There was a further mention in The Daily Telegraph on 11 July 1982, during the silly season. The Railway Magazine mentioned it in its May 1996 issue, saying that the passengers would have been “fried”
anyway.
When the patent was rediscovered in 2006, it gained widespread publicity in the British press. A group of nuclear scientists examined the designs and declared them to be unworkable, expensive and very inefficient. Michel van Baal of the European Space Agency claimed “I have had a look at the plans, and they don’t look very serious
to me at all”, adding that many of the technologies used in the craft, such as nuclear fusion and
high temperature superconductors, had not yet been discovered, while Colin Pillinger, the scientist in charge of the Beagle 2 probe, was quoted as saying “If I hadn’t seen the documents I wouldn’t have believed it”.
Last year, I saw at least one other person, proudly wearing their towel. This year? Nothing. I even made sure to take a walk out in the glorious sunshine on my lunch break, and didn’t
find even a single other towel-wearer. What is the world coming to, when you can’t even rely on a student town to follow these fun and important traditions.
More importantly, what will all of these people do if they find themselves without their toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat
spray, wet weather gear, space suit, etc.
I’ve got chests full of diamonds and a huge fortress of solitude in my singleplayer world. I’ve found the End Portal and I’ve got enough eyes to activate it. But why bother? Alone, I
don’t stand a chance against the Ender Dragon anyway: I’m just not that good a player. And it doesn’t matter how much time I spend enachanting all of my stuff, it’s never going to be
good enough.
So there’s no point. I’m sat here, alone, and I’m not achieving anything anymore. Sometimes I just want to delete the world and get it all over with. It’s not like anybody will miss
me.
Suppose I have a pair of 15x zoom telescopes (for example, I separated a pair of 15x zoom binoculars) and laid them end-to-end. Naturally there’d be some loss of field-of-vision when
looking through them both. But would the resulting zoom level be 152 (i.e. 225x)? Or 15*2 (i.e. 30x)? Or something else entirely? Or am I oversimplifying?
