I’m thinking this is 17p out of every £1, but still, where does the rest of the money go if only 17% goes towards what I would consider everything needed to actually run the sodding train.

Thanks Northern Rail.

Wanted laptop computer or desktop computer, any old pictures. hi does anybody Have a old laptop or desktop pc they no longer use as i am in need of one does not matter if the laptop screen is broken cause i Have a html lead and a vga lead so could connect to my tv and my walls look a bit bear so could do with some old pictures to put up if any one has any lying around please thanks CW2

Anyone have any idea what a html lead is? The mind boggles…

They have since corrected the mistake, but I am one of those people who tends to take screenshots of things like that, just in case…

Netherlands Win World Cup?

Working with websites all day I can see how this sort of thing can happen. Although I would say that CBSNews needs to give its users a little more training

This bit of news was, in fact, how I learned who had won the 2010 world cup. I didn’t watch the final, or indeed, any of the matches during the contest.

• Turned 30.
• Changed jobs.
• My son started school.
• Visited Windermere on a family holiday.
• Started writing #! code.

Whatever you are doing in 2010 I wish you happiness and prosperity.

So I have deleted the Twitter posts and some of the older posts that I don’t like too much.

What I might do is to rarely update this blog and create a front page that links through to my social media profiles and other sites. I may even change the site over to Drupal, which I have been doing a lot of work with recently and quite like how it’s put together.

To answer this we need to look at how substances are diluted in homeopathy. If we take a typical homeopathy cure for insomnia, which happens to be pure caffeine, we would start off by diluting this into 100ml of water.

We would then take 1ml of this solution and dilute it into another 100ml of water.

Dilute 1ml of original solution in 100ml of water

This is the same as diluting the original solution in 10,000 ml of water.

Take 1ml from first solution and dilute it into 100ml of water.

The process is called serial dilution and is normally used when diluting solutions of chemicals or even bacterial cells. When diluting bacteria we would start off with billions of bacterial cells in a solution and dilute them serially in 10ml of water 3 or 4 times to achieve a solution of liquid with a countable level of bacteria. This solution is then spread across an agar plate and incubated. The resulting growth of bacterial colonies can then be counted and the original concentration can be worked out.

In order to achieve a dilution factor of 30C you would transfer 1ml of solution into 100ml of water 30 times. To work out the actual amount of water needed to directly dilute the original substance we need to multiply the volume of water by the amount of times we dilute. Because we are increasing the dilution factor of the original solution by 100 each time we dilute we must multiply the initial solution by 100, 30 times, which is also 100 to the power of 30. Working this out gives us a very, very large number.

100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 = 100³⁰

This works out to the following number

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ml

This can also be written as 1×10⁶⁰ ml, or a 1 with 60 zeros behind, which is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres or 1×10³⁰ litres.

To work out how big this is we need to convert it into cubic meters, there are 1,000 litres per cubic meter so this sum is quite easy.

1×10³⁰ litres / 1,000 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 m³ or 1×10²³ m³.

This is clearly a very large number, and because humans have trouble understanding just how big numbers are we need to put this figure into some sort of context. There are 9,460,536,207,068,016 meters in a light year so this roughly works out at a cube of water 10,570,225 light years across. Since our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years across we could fit it into the cube over 100 times.

We can take this a step further by looking at how long it would take to drink this amount of water. Assuming that a dose is 10ml we can work out how long it would take to consume the whole thing. Let’s say that we have 6 billion people, and we give that population 2 billion doses of the solution every second.

1×10⁶⁰ ml / 10ml pre dose = 1×10⁵⁹ doses

At 2 billion doses per second and 6 billion people we would be administering 1.2×10^{19 doses per second.}

Time required = number of doses / number of doses per second
Time required = 1×10⁵⁹/1.2×10¹⁹ = 8.33×10³⁹ seconds

1 year is about 3.1557×10⁷ seconds so this works out at:

8.33×10³⁹/3.1557×10⁷ = 2.64×10³² years or 260 million trillion trillion years.

The universe is only 13 billion years old, so if we assume that 25% of this mixture must be consumed before a single atom of the original solution is contained in a dose (which it probably wouldn’t). This is still 6.6×10³¹ years or 66 million trillion trillion years.

Amazingly, even if you take the dilution factor down to 13C this is still the same as a single drop of the original solution in all the water on earth. I find it astonishing that anyone could even slightly entertain this as being feasible. Talk about crap based medicine! If you think that homeopathy works then I have one question for you. Would you take a homeopathic contraceptive? Try it and let me know about the results.

If you are wondering how to test homeopathy then go and buy a homeopathic solution of 30C of caffiene (the cure for insomnia) and take about 600 times the stated dose. I absolutely assure that the only effect it will have is to make you want to go to the toilet, lots. Of course homeopathic remedies are also available in sugar form and I don’t advise you swallowing over 6kg of sugar as it will probably make you ill. Note that it won’t be the homeopathic remedy making you ill, just the volume of sugar.

If you want to check this for yourself and are wondering how to divide 1×10⁶⁰ by 1,000 without breaking your calculator did you know you can use Google to do maths? You will need to type the number in long hand (as in 1 followed by 60 zeros), but it will work.

After some research on the internet (Google is my best friend) I found that this was due to blowing a fuse.  This happens when you try to use your windscreen washer when it is frozen. If this happens to you then don’t worry, you can just swap the fuse and you will be fine.

Skoda Fabia Fuse Panel

Skoda Fabia Fuse Panel Ledgend

The fuse box on the Fabia is located behind the driver side door on the main dashboard panel, next to the stearing wheel. To open it just find the little notch in the bottom half, pop your key in there and twist it.  The whole thing should come off, but it is a little tricky.

To get things working again just replace fuse 21 with a 10 amp fuse.  If you don’t have a fuse handy you can swap the broken one (make sure it is broken) with fuse 32, which controls the back windscreen wiper.  This will mean that you can drive to your local fuse shop and pick up a fuse even if it is raining.

To get the fuse panel cover back on just put in the panel by lining up the three hooks on the straight edge and push it towards the front of the car.  Once you have it nearly in place you can either hit it in with your fist or just close the door on it.

To stop this fuse blowing you need to make sure that your washer fluid is not frozen before you use it.  You can always increase the concentration of the fluid to prevent this from hapening during the winter.

[Update: Images taken from Fuse Panel Layout fabia-vrs.com. If you have any Fabia problems then take a look, it's a good site with lots of information.]