Member postings for Calum Galleitch

There is a lady on Twitter, a freelance journalist, who rejoices in the name of Ms Hedges-Stocks - alas, she has yet to join the financial pages.

SMEE is an organisation based in London, with premises in London. Although they do have a national membership, they are not a national organisation. They are to be applauded for offering something that not many organisations can or are willing to offer.

Mmm, I'm not sure I implied anything like that! Yes, thieves will take their chance, whatever the motivation, but as long as you aren't the most obviously vulnerable target on the street, there's only so much that's worth doing, and there's only so much that adds real protection.

While key safes clearly have their vulnerabilities, the simple fact is that the point of locks is to keep honest people honest. The bad guy will not study lockpicking techniques or compile a list of easily forced keysafes: he will bang on the door and shout "parcel!"

It's important to remember that media stories are in the media because they are rare and unusual: things that happen routinely don't make good copy. The truth is that by and large people in care aren't worth stealing from - burglary in general barely pays these days, and someone who needs regular care is unlikely to have a load of laptops, iPads, or phones lying around.

Install the keysafe somewhere out of sight, make sure it's installed properly and change the combination every six months or so (the biggest risk comes from people who have legitimate access).

The photograph in question is a stock image, meaning it has nothing to do with the article; a harassed subeditor typed in "car door cyclist" to a stock image library and selected the first image that came up. Since so few of us pay for our journalism nowadays, these things are hardly a surprise.

As for looking in a mirror, I am surprised and concerned that so many posters have forgotten or never learned what a blind spot is.

An awful lot of the issues discussed are down to the simple fact that much television is now being made very cheaply. For most of broadcasting's history, the equipment was simple but high quality and maintained and used by highly trained engineers and operators who were given the time and resources to get the best from it.

Nowadays, a spotty youth can operate a black box and get adequate results. Once a programme is made, all these adequate results are mixed together by another underpaid spotty youth with too much to do and not enough time, with inadequate supervision, and the result is broadcast, mumbles and all.

Of course progress has done great things: the BBC offers many more services than they did, and I don't think many of us would want to return to the days of two, three, or four television channels.

They certainly look like it, but I am still a bit sceptical - how many other circular slide rules of any function have this type of design? It's quite a lot of effort to go to to stamp and deburr twenty holes on a disc that could have been flat and turned with a finger. Rotary telephone dials required a positive stop and a bit of effort to turn, so the through hole design made sense.

Probably worth saying, since it's been mentioned again - I'm quite sure this has nothing to do with music in any way; none of the numbers bear any resemblance to acoustic physics.

The thing that puzzles me still is the holes in the two dials. The holes in the inner dial are clearly a detent, but the ring of larger holes doesn't seem a sensible way of making a dial that would just be rotated about as in a circular slide rule. So was something inserted in those holes, or was something visible through the holes?

Sector 1: 1/15 - 1/240 = 1/16, as does 1/12-1/48

So why the plus sign? Since some of the fractions given are improper, I think the point is to take an input from a process, which may arrive as an uncancelled fraction (say 6/8) and use that as an input to this device.

Since the plus and minus signs appear to be reversed, perhaps the purpose of this device is to generate some sort of correction.

Whatever it is, it seems to be a fundamentally mathematical process, based around sixteenths.

Lastly: there seems to be a sort of symmetrical correspondance, sectors 2 and 14, sectors 3 and 13, and sectors 12 and 4. But it doesn't continue, at least obviously. Why are sectors 7, 11, and 15-18 blank? Why is there no sector 19?

I don't think it is to do with Troy weights: one Troy pound is 12 Troy ounces, made of 20 pennyweights, consisting of 24 grains.

The CE website in its current incarnation is really struggling. It doesn't work at all on Firefox (for me at least) and only grudgingly on Chrome. I wouldn't attempt to order from it as it stands - if I needed something only they carry I'd ring them for it!

For what it's worth, my powerline network here runs well from my office through the rather dodgy domestic wiring, through the domestic meter, into the main spike and back out through the three phase meter for the farm, down yet more dodgy three phase wiring that splits out somewhere I haven't even been able to find, and finally into my workshop. I'm lucky I guess that the domestic supply is on the same leg as the one split from the three phase on the other side. Anyway, point being it's a fair old distance and doesn't seem to struggle at all.

That's a rather different meaning of sparse - from the statistician's point of view, our Antikythera problem here has an abundance of data, we just don't like the answer. Sparse is more like (to continue the car insurance analogy) knowing age for some, gender for others, make of models for some, and not having a full set of factors for most of your datapoint.

One of the problems with statistics in general is that it's a very new subject (Akaike himself died only in 2009) and beyond the basics, it gets fearsomely mathematical very quickly. Moreover, in many domains it's a skill that is called on infrequently. I have a fairly solid grounding in conventional and Bayesian statistics, but I'm still hesitant to weigh in on this problem.

Akaike, not Akaite. AIC is for selecting between different statistical models where there are many different possible factors that a particular model may use. For example, a model that assesses your risk of crashing a car (for insurance purposes, say...) could use your age, gender, hair colour, location, car type, engine size, and so on and so on and so on. However, the more factors you use, the more your model is just a complicated representation of your original data. AIC is used when you have a selection of similar models and want to select between them.

I wonder if it might be worth calling one of the workshop clearance guys and ask if they could handle it for you - doubt it would be cheap but then I doubt it'll be cheap however you do it, tbh.

The GPS material Jason mentioned handles very like ivory, but lacks the crosshatching effect of real ivory. There is a rather cheaper material called Arvorin, which is made of resin and available in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It's a bit brittle so needs to be worked with care but does have a more realistic (though clearly not real) effect. White delrin can be baked in an oven and with a little care will scorch to a nice cream tone that can be polished. There is also the Guitar Parts stuff, which now includes Elforyn - they're pretty expensive but very nice and some of their grades are uncannily realistic.

Bone requires a lot of processing to degrease it, and if you don't do it properly it looks fine and then starts sweating fat a few days later.

You can still get actual mammoth ivory, although it's much more expensive and not particularly great quality these days. And if you search popular trading sites for "natural material", you can often find old and ugly bits of sculpture and carving that the world would not miss if they were recycled.

Satellite is ideal for broadcast, but less so for internet. My day job involves talking to a webcam all day, and it would be intolerable routed over satellite: you can't do much about the speed of light.

The photo and drawing linked on this page show pretty clearly how a forked detent works in principle:

http://homews.co.uk/page541.html

You can apply the same logic to your plate.

Not at all - I have a little app on my phone that reproduces a complete slide rule, with my own choice of scales on it (Infinirule, it's called, for the curious). I even use it every once in a while.

Two wee points about heatshrink: one, it only shrinks to about 50% of its size, so it needs to be carefully sized for the part. Second, over time it will lose the inherent tension it has when shrunk, and can slip if it's not mechanically secure.

I'd give the silicon tube serious consideration - it's easy to find in various sizes and colours and should be ideal, I would think.

In the context of hobby engineering, the question "why" is not a valid one.