Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Sunday 13 October 2024

How high can you hear planes flying? (They don't generally fly above 41,000 feet anyway)

tl;dr: The exact answer is currently unknown (to me), possibly it is untestable (as aircraft have a flight ceiling so would not normally go above a certain height anyway). Possibly it can be modelled (but not by me!).

41,000 feet = 7.7 miles
18,000 feet = 3.4 miles


A large jet aircraft flying overhead at 41,000 feet is perfectly audible from the ground - but it helps if it's otherwise reasonably quiet outside. Few large jets seem to fly much above 39,000 feet so I'm not sure if this is a common occurrence. I only ever check to see what's flying above me when I hear it so it's technically possible that the sound from a higher-flying large jet wouldn't be able to reach me (and so I wouldn't know that they're there) but I don't think they fly much higher than 41,000 feet as that seems to be their comfortable limit. 

FlightRadar24 and ADS-B Exchange both colour code information about the height of a plane into their live maps. With FR24 the aircraft icons are the same colour but clicking on any shows its previous route and the colour changes (e.g. white is on the ground then it goes yellow as it starts to climb). ADS-B colours the aircraft icon so you can see at a glance if planes are coloured a vibrant pinky purple (those are going over at 45,000 feet). The ones going over at that height are generally the business jet types, much smaller and quieter than the bigger jetliners. 

FlightRadar24 tracking an ATR-72-600 arriving at Heathrow. Zooming out shows the change in colour (darker blue = higher, paler green = lower) throughout its flight from the Isle of Man. All aircraft icons are the same yellow colour.

 
ADS-B Exchange showing the same flight. The colour of the plane's icon indicates that it's travelling at around 3,000 feet and the green in the path trail behind it shows that it was previously higher. The pinkish aircraft near top left heading North was travelling at around 36,000 feet.

If a massive jetliner were able to fly over at 45,000 would I be able to hear it? Or 60,000 feet? (Assuming optimal conditions such as late at night when other ground noise is quieter and fewer other aircraft, air temperature etc). At the moment I don't know but of course it's moot as they just don't seem to fly that high. So 41,000 is the practical limit for aircraft I'm likely to hear.

Some military jets do fly much higher but they don't seem to be doing much of it over London where I am so I can't assess how audible they are.

Not that I've been keeping records or anything... but two aircraft that I've heard at 41,000 were Boeing 747-8R7F Cargolux (on 8 Feb 2024) and an Airbus A330-243 (21 May 2024). A week apart in May 2022 I heard two Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner going over at 39,000 feet and in June that year heard a Boeing 747-4R7F going over at 35,000.

My favourite aircraft to hear have propellers. These usually fly over between 18,000 and 25,000 feet and are very audible for a longer period of time (they're flying more slowly than the massive jets so take longer to pass). I've heard several of my beloved Hercules* C-130s going over up to 25,000 feet and the Airbus A400M Atlas going over at 19,000 feet. Another favourite is the Antonov fleet and I get the An-26B and An-12B going over at 19,000 to 21,000 feet - they are super loud (famously so, go and have a listen on YouTube).

*The Royal Air Force has swapped from Hercules to Airbus A400M Atlas though I don't have the audio acuity to be able to tell which is which by sound (possibly I could if I heard them in quick succession). So no more RAF Hercs going over but USA, Canada, Saudi and other militaries are still using them and so they do regularly appear in our airspace. Hooray!


Friday 27 September 2024

Words and phrases I've had to look up recently, or at least think about

I think everyone, however educated they are, has to look up a word or phrase occasionally as there are many more words in the English language than those we use every day. 

Sometimes I even double-check a word I know well because there's a danger I may be slightly misusing it. I discovered the other day that the phrase "tee hee" is actually read as being a bit sarcastic and dismissive - I would use it as laughing at a groanworthy pun as opposed to "haha" which is something straightforwardly funny. I might not use it like that now, if it will be misread ;)

The things I probably look up most (or ask people what they mean by them) are the three word compound phrases where it's not immediately clear (from the phrase alone) which of the two words go together. 

It might become rapidly clear from the context arriving seconds later of course, but I'd rather have the context first to avoid the cognitive pivot-table* (having your brain flipped about a bit) of wondering what exactly is being discussed.

"Building information modelling"
I know what all of these words mean individually but I'm not involved in the topic (construction) where this is a 'thing' so I arrive at this phrase having to make sense of it having not encountered it before. The word 'building' is both a noun and a verb so at first glance I've no idea if we are building something like software to model information or if we are developing a model to handle information about buildings. In the context it was the second option. It is indeed a thing - BIM (Building Information Modelling) is "a process for creating and managing all of the information on a construction project".

Mathematically...
(Building information) modelling - ✔️
Building (information modelling) -
✖️

"Flattened narrative"
I still don't know what this means despite being fully confident about both of the individual words. I saw the phrase in passing in a screenshot of text so I didn't find it again easily after searching. Googling didn't bring up an obvious 'flattened narrative means X' and the use by others didn't match precisely with what I'd seen (entirely possible that people use the phrase in different contexts). 

My guess was that it referenced a storyline or character arc that was rather 2-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional. But that doesn't really stack up because if you weren't good at writing a story or character your writing might be described as 'flat' but not 'flattened' which suggests a previous degree of height or dimensionality that you or someone has squashed. Who is flattening narratives and why are they being flattened?

I'm one hundred per cent confident that I will understand the concept when it is explained to me, or I can be bothered to drill into a few of the excerpts Google suggested and infer its meaning from the comprehensible input (where you can work out what something means from its context). The problem is that the pointer (the phrase which points to the probably-very-intelligible concept) is currently beyond my immediate, effort-free understanding. I'm being lazy!

Enterprise

A colleague is the Head of Careers & Enterprise at my university. I know that Enterprise can mean an organisation or an undertaking (not to mention Star Trek ships which do the second one) but I'm not sure how it differentiates itself from 'careers' though. E.g. if I was a student making an appointment what information would be forthcoming if I were to say "actually I'm not interested in Careers as such, what do you have in Enterprise?".

My guess is it has something to do with being self-employed where you're not filling in application forms for a job...?

"Compute"

This one really made me laugh. I saw a Government document where they kept using it and I was convinced it must have been written by someone with English as a second language or where there had been a global 'replace all' error that hadn't been picked up in the proofreading. 

Independent Review of the Future of Compute: Final report and recommendations

The verb 'compute' means to do a calculation (or not, as in 'Does Not Compute') but it turned out that in this context it was being used as a noun to refer to computing 'horsepower'. I've been working in a computer science university department for 14 years and had never encountered this usage as a noun. From speaking to a few others it seems to have been around for a while but is reasonably niche. 

From the archives: "feet of clay"

When I was at university aged ~20/21 I had a discussion with my then-boyfriend about what the phrase feet of clay might mean as neither of us was certain and this was 1990 where you couldn't just Google it and we didn't have a phrase dictionary on us, or a bible.

It could mean several things couldn't it, if you don't know how it's used?

I thought it might mean having a degree of solidity, sensibleness and groundedness. Boyfriend thought it might mean "can't run very fast". We came up with a few other options and were both quite surprised to discover that it means "character flaw" as in 'a bit disappointing', in that it references an unfinished or cheaply finished sculpture which looks great when you're looking up at it but when you look down at the feet they've not been properly cast. It comes from the book of Daniel in the bible.

- - - -

*a pivot-table is where you take data in columns and rows and press a button in Excel etc to summarise the data - it is not the same as Paste Special > Transpose where you convert a column to a row or a row to a column, which is a different sort of pivoting.


Wednesday 10 July 2024

Learned a new word today - "compute", yep.

Does not compute

Earlier today I came across this report ...

"Independent review of The Future of Compute: Final report and recommendations,
updated 6 March 2023"

... which had the word compute in the title and in several other places within the document. I skimmed through trying to work out if they meant 'computing' or 'computer(s)' or 'computer science' and couldn't understand what was going on. Surely someone proofreading it would have caught this. 

Bernard... Delaney
I did wonder if the authors had had enough of trying to decide whether to write 'computing' or 'computer science' and elected to simplify things with this new word and wondered if anyone else had noticed.

Taking the web page's link (URL) and pasting it into Twitter's search bar brings up any tweet that's mentioned that page. There were a few tweets but none of them mentioned the fact that the document used the word (to me, a verb) 'compute' as a noun the whole way through. Here are the section titles.

    Glossary of terms
    1. The significance of compute for the UK
    2. The international landscape of compute
    3. The demand for compute in the UK
    4. Meeting the UK’s compute needs
    5. Creating a vibrant compute ecosystem

 

Oh, I see!
To cut a long story short (I read the glossary, and asked people on Twitter) it turns out that the word has been used in this way for some time and refers to something like the computing equivalent of horsepower - the amount of processing resources and computational capacity your high performance computer has to complete a task.

The thing is... I work in the computer science department at Queen Mary University of London and write about computer science in my day job and I have never seen 'compute' used in quite this way before. You'd think it might have come up in the fourteen years I've been working there. 

Anyway I wanted to record this moment as it's not often you're "there" and able to remember exactly when you encounter a completely new word, or in this case a completely novel use of a word you're familiar with. 

It's not just jargon you have to worry about
This is actually a bit of a 'thing' in science communication. Scientists often talk about a 'theory' or about 'proteins' etc and, if talking to non-scientists, need to be aware that their audience might take a different meaning from the one intended. 

To a scientist a 'protein' might be a peptide, enzyme, membrane protein but to a non-scientist it might be egg or meat etc. 

To be honest an unfamiliar word in place of 'compute' would actually have been much less jarring and so I've basically been the 'non-scientist' here, experiencing an example of an everyday word being used in a very specific way. I'm sure it's good for me to be baffled occasionally :)

But for now I'm still at the point where a phrase like "the amount of compute used" just brings me up short and also makes me laugh a little. I expect after a period of time has passed I will adjust to this noun-ing of a verb. 




Wednesday 3 July 2024

Another 'sextortion' Bitcoin scam email - these are sent out randomly, do not pay them anything

Another one of these spam / scam emails in my spam folder in Gmail (see my previous post). 

They are sent out to long lists of email addresses and have nothing to do with you personally. Ignore them, do not send money. I just publish these in case others google some text from the email. I hope they find this (or another scam awareness page) and are reassured that it's nonsense.

I have reported the Bitcoin wallet (1KSb6ZYjXjP5aGyMf6LDfmad5rsC7fV73J) here too: https://www.chainabuse.com/

- - - - -

From: clifford@audumi.lv
Subject: Amount of taxes

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

I'VE GAINED ACCESS TO YOUR DEVICES DUE TO YOUR VISITS TO CERTAIN WEBSITES.
In fact, it was those sites that helped me. One of them contained my special code, which worked. This means that I can see everything happening on your scr and in front of it.

IF YOU DOUBT THIS, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.
I'm not wasting my time on you and will simply post all this information about you on every possible website and social network, and send it to all your contacts.

I've made copies of your most interesting files and also have the contact addresses you use most often. I have your browsing history. I have everything I need. Initially, I was going to delete all the content from your devices and forget about it. But I looked at the sites you regularly visit and changed my mind. I'm talking about sites with all kinds of inappropriate content.

After some time, I had an idea. I took screenshots of the website pages where you spend your time alone. then I captured screenshots of you satisfying yourself using the cam of one of your deviecs. (by the way, I had to wait for you to successfully get in front of the canera lens.) But it was worth it, and it will impress all your acquaintances and regular people on the Internet.

To make a long story short, I'm offering you a DEAL. You transfer the money to me, and I'll delete all this stuff about you, and we will forget about each other.

1194 american dollars in Bitconis is fine with me.
My special wallet: 1KSb6ZYjXjP5aGyMf6LDfmad5rsC7f
V73J

I give you only 44 hours from now to pay .
I've already mentioned what happens if you don't pay, I don't care, it's up to you.
And don't hold a grudge. Everyone has a job to do.

IF I SEE THE CONTENTS OF THIS EMAIL ON GOOGLE (etc.)
I WILL IMMEDIATELY PUBLISH ALL THE DATA COLLECTED,
NOT FORGETTING EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

 

 


 

Friday 21 June 2024

Open air cinema screenings in London, in June (Week 25-26)

Here are the films that are coming to large airy screens in the great outdoors next week. Plenty more where that came from coming up in July and onwards. See the full listings here where you can also find out about films that have subtitles and which are free.

22 JunSatCocoCanary Wharf Film ClubCanada Square ParkCanary Wharf10:30
22 JunSatWreck It RalphVision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke10:30
22 JunSatRatatouilleRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford13:00
22 JunSatMamma Mia!Rooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham13:00
22 JunSatWonkaVision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke13:20
22 JunSatDune Part 2Vision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke16:30
22 JunSatSet It OffRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford16:45
22 JunSatCruel IntentionsRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham16:45
22 JunSatPulp FictionRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:05
22 JunSatIron ClawVision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke20:20
23 JunSunSonic The Hedgehog 2Vision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke10:30
23 JunSunDirty DancingRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford13:00
23 JunSunThe Princess BrideRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham13:00
23 JunSunWonkaVision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke13:40
23 JunSunBohemian RhapsodyRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford16:30
23 JunSunThe BirdcageRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham16:30
23 JunSunDune Part 2Vision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke16:45
23 JunSunAll Of Us StrangersRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham20:00
23 JunSunHow To Lose A Guy in 10 DaysRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:15
23 JunSunIron ClawVision CinemaCator ParkKidbrooke20:25
24 JunMonWonkaRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham18:00
24 JunMonBut I'm A Cheerleader** (headphones + phone needed)Canary Wharf Film ClubCanada Square ParkCanary Wharf19:00
25 JunTue500 Days Of SummerRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford17:30
25 JunTueNotting Hill Rooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham18:00
25 JunTueThe Lego MovieSummer By The City: London Bridge CityScoop Amphitheatre, More LondonLondon Bridge / Tower19:00
25 JunTueGroundhog DayCanary Wharf Film ClubCanada Square ParkCanary Wharf19:00
25 JunTueTrue RomanceRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:15
25 JunTueThe Fall GuyRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham21:20
26 JunWedThe BirdcageRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford17:30
26 JunWedAnyone But YouRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham18:00
26 JunWedThe BeachRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:40
26 JunWedSaltburnRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham21:20
27 JunThuAmelieRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford17:30
27 JunThuBut I'm A CheerleaderRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham18:00
27 JunThuThe WoodRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:45
28 JunFriEternal Sunshine Of The Spotless MindRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford17:30
28 JunFriMamma Mia! Here We Go AgainRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham18:00
28 JunFriBarbieBST Hyde Park / BAParade Ground, East side of Hyde Park, W2 2UHHyde Park19:00
28 JunFriCruel IntentionsRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:30
28 JunFriDirty DancingCatford WeekenderJubilee Grounds: Festival Outdoor StageCatford21:00
29 JunSatHow To Train Your DragonCanary Wharf Film ClubCanada Square ParkCanary Wharf10:30
29 JunSatThe Greatest ShowmanRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford13:30
29 JunSatLittle Miss SunshineRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham16:30
29 JunSatBefore SunriseRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford16:45
29 JunSatAbout TimeRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:00
30 JunSunMigrationRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham13:00
30 JunSun10 Things I Hate About YouRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford13:30
30 JunSunTo Wong Foo: Thanks For Everything! Julie NewmarRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham16:30
30 JunSunSuperbadRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford17:00
30 JunSunWonkaCanary Wharf Film ClubCanada Square ParkCanary Wharf17:00
30 JunSunBeachesRooftop Film ClubBussey BuildingPeckham20:00
30 JunSunInceptionRooftop Film ClubRoof EastStratford20:30