Yeah, (somewhat) surprisingly GBP is getting hammered too. Not sure if this is a good thing in that we will be able to export more, or a reflection that the markets have no faith in our current situation (i.e. pro-cyclical spending cuts).

On top of all that, it seems increasingly likely that the Fed will have to step in to reduce the liquidity pressure on financials and industry in the US. That should be bad for us too as the USD becomes relatively cheaper and hurts our exports/ causes price inflation in commodities and energy.

Looks pretty exciting at the minute on the markets. EURUSD is dropping like a stone, euro financials are plummeting, CDS are blowing up everywhere….

I reckon we have a 50% chance of a Lehman style disruptive event in the next week due to the ugly interface of Greek and EU real-politik.

No experience of either of these, but broken scaphoids seem to crop up pretty regularly, and the chronic knee injuries seem pretty prevalent on here too: particularly in the old man/ SPD combo.

Yeah, I’ve had a rejection before that was longer than the paper I submitted, not good. On the other hand, I resubmitted it to a different journal 6 months later and it went through without corrections.

Peer review is probably the least bad option, but it’s pretty bad. I know this from both the reviews I’ve received and the reviews I’ve performed…

Have fun with the thesis: I found it was the entire PhD in miniature. Initial optimism at finally writing up fades to a grinding demoralising slog, punctuated by minor victories and defeats. After you get really depressed you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, this optimism is then also crushed as you realise that a complete draft is nowhere near a complete thesis. After correcting and rewriting, you really start to feel close to the end. Unfortunately, the worst part is right at the end as you spend weeks doing typesetting, proofreading, making sure that you meet all the BS regulations that your uni undoubtably has.

When you finish, make sure you have a bit of a break…

HTH, Dr Choron.

I have to say that this kind of stuff is like looking at pictures of other peoples kids for me: pointless and tedious. If you edit it down more and have a bit more of the “action” in there, it could be good though.

As a side point though, what’s the soundtrack? Sounds like Camera Obscura with american accents.

Cheers for the tips guys, might have to give these a go (currently have 2 bikes and ~10 different sets of grips, only a couple of which have been used on more than a dozen rides due to numb fingers and sore palms).

How do you guys attach them? Compressed air, meths or window cleaner?

Love this one, makes me feel like I’m coming home:

Nothing like a good hardware shop…

Looking at the blowout in repsol and Argentine CDS today this could be brutal. Combine this with the recent selloff in Spanish bonds over the last week and the implications on the oil and gas and we may see a significant slide on the markets.

I would love to know how ugly the derivative counterparty risk looks, but as everything is done OTC we have no idea. While I don’t think this will be the straw that breaks the camels back, this makes things tangibly worse. We are also getting closer to a point where the Spanish government will have to explicitly state their – thus far – implicit guarantee of their banks liabilities. If this happens, Spanish sovereign debt goes from 70 to 160 percent of gdp, and Spain starts to look a lot like Greece.

Reckon this could be a very important event, huge amounts of Repsol are held by spanish banks which are already massively leveraged. Assuming that Repsol is told to f-off by Kirchner, Spanish banks would have to mark down their Repsol assets massively, which would almost certainly put one or two of them into insolvency.

Cue panic, flight to safety, further insolvencies and EU/IMF bailout of Spain.

Pretty much all “consumer” services that are advertised as being over fibre are FTTC. Assuming that the cabinet to house distance is the same (it may well not be), Virgin “should” be able to offer higher speeds as they use coax cable, which should offer lower loss.

Best way to find out is to ask your neighbours what service they have and what speeds they get. Proper fibre to the home is eye-wateringly expensive: hyperoptic might be able to hook you up if you’re willing to pay a fortune for the connection, although their pricing (per month) is very reasonable.

Things start to get really crazy if you need dedicated bandwidth: I heard recently that a dedicated 100Mb/s connection (in Canada) is $10k per month.

My top tip is to ignore the town centre. Head down to Valencia street in the Mission district and check out Valencia Cyclery (Valencia & 22nd) and Freewheel Cycles (Valencia & 20th).

Then head to Beretta for a decent meal, followed by coffee at either Four Barrels (bit further north) or Ritual (near to Valencia Cyclery).

Easily my favourite part of SF: bylaws mean that all of the shops are small independent affairs, while the hipsters are friendly and the coffee is good.

Just checked, it seems that the alternating glasses idea is more efficient if the ratio of upper to lower diameter of the glasses is greater than about 1.15 (2/sqrt(3)). Otherwise, the triangular lattice is more efficient.

Depends on the angle of the taper for the glass: alternating means you can have a more efficient square lattice, whereas all the same way up means that you can go for an asymptotically more efficient (as the taper goes to zero) triangular lattice.

I’ll get my coat…

Kronolog is available from one of the German retailers: easily found on Google shopping.

My new one has the smaller bolts, I think they’re there to stop idiots like me overtorquing them.

You bought a new headset???

I just asked nicely, and got a good response. As for the use of the word awesome, it’s relative to your other experiences of customer service (and hoe much you like volcanos).

Edit: I cracked the body, not the faceplate. I asked if I could buy a new body and they replaced the whole thing FOC.

how the hell does 35 have 4 factors? 5*7=…?

Okay, I simply have to chip in here.

I work in a field which is vaguely related to the Singularity Institute, (ML type stuff, not cognition), and certainly the Singularity Institute appears to be above board judging from the website.

However, given the number of (very) smart people at this place, why do they need to employ someone to plot a few graphs? The one in the link is about 2 minutes of work for someone who knows what they’re doing, it would take more time to sort out the pay than do the work!

Also, why are you advertising this position on a bike forum?

bizarre…

Get down to Brick Lane market on sunday morning, good chance the scum will be fencing it there…

inspiring stuff: just made rhubarb fool with fresh all-butter shortbreads…

mmmmmmmmmm

Wonder how many electronic engineers there are here with some of the guff that’s being spouted.

Cables do make a difference, whether a £1k cable is a significant (or any) improvement over a £40 cable is another matter.

Also, the cable part of the transmission line is only one element, just as important are the connectors. For real quality you need impedance balanced termination. AFAIK Linn are the only major consumer hifi company that make this kind of stuff and they are correspondingly expensive.

In my lab we use cables that are as short as possible and terminated with 50 ohm connectors, some of these can be >£1k for a 10cm semi-rigid. Sometimes, you get what you pay for…

+1 for Cowon. Great sound quality without any of the ridiculous grief that you get from apple.

Two more cups of this coffee and a double macchiato from here[/url]. Feeling quite immortal now, although increasingly psychedelic.

When the crash comes it’ll be quite spectacular.

Also, I’m not quite the hypersquirrel type, more along the lines of the crack fox:

Quick update: no flocks of pigeons yet, but shaving in the shower with this much caffeine in you is a dangerous affair.

Awesome shock but incredibly sensitive to setup: 1/4 turn too much HSC and it feels like a bag of spanners, 1/4 turn not enough and it feels like the damper’s full of treacle. Having said that, Malcolm set mine up well enough that i’ve barely had to touch it.

Hmm, have quite a “heroic” caffeine tolerance, but hadn’t considered the possibility of several hours of shitting.

Still, too late now (although work might be interesting).

This will run for a thousand posts easy…

Also, can’t quite believe that I’m the first person to suggest this: but emsz, have you considered

Thats not an ugly bike THIS[/i] is an ugly bike:

Really something to behold…

These guys are swimming against the tide: one day soon they will all be replaced by robots.

Thank god i’m getting out of london to avoid the sports day.

Need to route the rear brake cable inside the frame to prevent crushing against the seat stay in a crash. Also, you seem to have jazzed yourself over the sheer beauty of it…

Nice bike.

Ti spring stuff is quite interesting, is the “increased frequency response” talked about the results of lower density (i.e. increased natural frequency) or is the response flatter over a wider range of frequencies?

Also, what is the difference in natural frequencies for steel and Ti? Although this stuff sounds good it’s difficult to know if this should be noticeable without some numbers.

All filth (although Hollands slightly less filthy). Waterfields FTW

Python, Python, Python…

…unless you want to do something cool with gadgets (which people seem to be suggesting). In which case I would recommend you learn VHDL, Verilog and Tcl. Or if you want to do something complicated quickly (that will run slowly) then Matlab (which is not really a language).

HTH

Balls, new pump time?

Goodridge FTW (sintered)

Lancia Fulvia

Easily my favourite car name: sounds like being propositioned by an Italian…

For chrome or firefox, have a look at a plugin called “modify headers” or “modheaders”. Enables all kinds of browser trickery to hide your location.

My thoughts are that the weight and complexity to benefit ratio isn’t quite there for push-bikes, and might not be there for motos either.

It’s often a more effective solution to put your time and effort into making an already relatively mature technology fit the application better (linear push-rod dampers in telescopic forks), rather than scrapping the whole system and generating entirely new sets of problems (stiffness, damping characteristics, unsprung weight etc) for a possibly marginal gain (better wheel path).

In a way, this is analogous to the single pivot vs multi-link question: by putting design effort into damper technology, stiffness and weight, single pivot bikes remain competitive despite their ‘obvious’ flaws. Linkage forks are the same but more-so IMO.