Things you don't need to know...

The shortest scheduled airflight: 2.8 km/2 minutes from Westray to Papa Westray.


Next departure is tomorrow (13.03.13) at 10:01 according to www.loganair.co.uk.

Pibbur who considers going to New Zealand or Australia next summer which of course is winter.
 
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I didn't realise there was a difference up in Norway between winter and summer!! :)
 
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It's the opposite of Australia where it's barbecue season all year.

Pibbur who assumes it's barbecue season all year in Australia.
 
I didn't realise there was a difference up in Norway between winter and summer!! :)
Silly Aussie! Everyone knows there's only 3 feet of snow on the ground during their summer.

It's not wildly varied like Australia, where some areas are shoulder-deep in kangaroos and snakes and other areas are shoulder-deep in kangaroos and snakes and spiders. :p
 
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You forgot the areas which are neck deep!! :p
 
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Silly Aussie! Everyone knows there's only 3 feet of snow on the ground during their summer.

It's not wildly varied like Australia, where some areas are shoulder-deep in kangaroos and snakes and other areas are shoulder-deep in kangaroos and snakes and spiders. :p

You forgot crocs. Desert crocs which no doubt exists down there where even the most inconceivable animals flood the area. Hunted by daring people on TV.

pibbur who is reminded of Elmer Fudd and wabbit seasons.
 
Yes, but crocs never get much more than ankle deep!! :)
 
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Yes, but crocs never get much more than ankle deep!! :)

Depends on how long you stay among them. First they take the ankles, then the they take the knees. Then the thighs. Finally you're up (or rather down) to your neck, although you probably won't notice.

pibbur who actually is not impressed by Skippy. He or she (didn't bother to look it up), like Lassie and that noisy dolphin, only appears to be intelligent and cunning because she (eventually he did bother) is surrounded by morons. Like when her family sit around their BBQ, and she comes running and starts being obnoxious, tearing at them, yelling at them, and they wonder if she wants to play (or something like that), but really after 40 episodes or so, they should have learned (like the viewers) that when she acts like that it's because somewhere somone is stuck under a tractor or a car or a sleeping crocodile and urgently needs to get up to pee or sometnhing like that. As I said: morons.
 
Pibbur likes giving things names, and puts some effort into it. He calls himself "pibbur" after part of a name given to him by the Norwegian postal services. He also gives names to devices connected to his network (which btw is "known space").
  • Guernica is his main desktop computer and has a fine art desktop theme.
  • His other desktop computer is "Liar" after the space ship "Lying bastard" from Larry Niven's ringworld books (part of his known space series). Sci-fi theme for that one.
  • His laptop is called "Igor" and has a horror and music theme,
  • Hal is the NAS thingy.
  • PC65665is his work laptop, named after the way his employer insists on naming computers. Pibbur is not particularly happy about that. PC10000000010000001would be acceptable, but you know, computer people -not very familiar with binary.
  • He called his oldest daughter "Kristin" after the wife refused the name "Ane Mia" which is a perfectly legal Norwegian name. She sometimes connects to the network.
  • Same with his youngest, "Marit"

His latest achievement is the iPhone for which he chose the name "Anhima" after the bird Anhima cornuta aka the Horned Screamer. The name is fitting, especially since he's chosen "Carful with that Axe, Eugene" as the ringtone.

Then there is the iPad. Pibbur is a linux and windows guy, so an apple computer is very alien for him. He therefore got its name from the domain of living things most different from the domain he belongs to, the Archaea (the other two domains are the bacteriae and the Eucaryotes). The archaea are distinctly different from the other two. Among the archaea is the Haloquadratum genus, and this is why he chose the name "Haloquadra" for the pad. Now, "padde" is the Norwegian word for "toad", but selecting a name based on that, would be too obvious, and would definitely earn him -10 points on QI.

Pibbur who calls the wife "Berit", mostly because she tends to answer to that name. When he wants to talk to her.
 
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Love the ring tone ! Mine is "Things that dont exist" as I am not sure who is real on my phone.

I thought for strangest beast for the apple device you would have chosen something from australia? Maybe the Ornithorhynchus anatinus or the Diprotodon?
 
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Nah, being a domain of their own, with significant differences in their biochemistry, the archaea are more "alien" than australian mammal wannabes. Could have found an ozzie archaea species, perhaps. But the shape of the haloqadratum cells made the choice easy.

Pibbur who after watching one particular episode of QI doesn't want to carry a koala.
 
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Fanny Murray, a mistress of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, once reputedly ate a £20 note between two slices of bread. Allegedly, but probably not true, the earl invented the sandwich in order to eat while gambling. It IS true, however, that the word "sandwich" derives from him. Sandwich is a small town in SE England.

William Arnott, founder of Arnott's Biscuits Holdings, first took up gold mining for a living but quit when he could not find any gold. Seem like a sensible thing to do. On a side note, there is a saying that when you're you looking for something, you always find it at the last place you're looking. And the alternative to that is .....

The big bud mite is so tiny that it can be transported by wind, rain or flying insects. No googles for the small bud mite, but pibbur apologises for this very obvious pun, likely to place him after Alan Davies on QI.

In 2012, a three-day World Congress of Religions conference was organized by the Institute of World Religions to commemorate the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda. Datta?

Marathon runner Yuki Kawauchi shaved his head as an apology to his fans after a poor performance at the Tokyo Marathon meant he missed the London Olympics. Ouch!!!

Arnold of Nijmegen's stained glass windows (pictured) in Tournai Cathedral show Queen Fredegund's plot to have her husband's rival assassinated.

Haloquadratum walsbyi was discovered in 1980 in the Gavish Sabkha, a coastal brine pool on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

Pibbur who likes watching QI.
 
According to England fans, England beat Germany in "Two World Wars and One World Cup". I'm pretty sure that the latter ranks highest (I'm NOT sure if this is the correct way of saying it in English).

Vajara, founded in 1999, is Tibet's oldest and most famous rock and roll band. Quite Interesting. Here's Tibetan Rap.

The old Stadtfriedhof in Göttingen (chapel not pictured) is the final resting place of eight Nobel Prize winners.

While attempting to culture Haloquadratum walsbyi, researchers isolated Haloarcula quadrata, which has "predominantly square-shaped, somewhat pleomorphic, flat cells", but this organism is genetically quite different to Haloquadratum, belongs to a separate genus, and is not a dominant microbe in salt lakes.

Paramphistomum cervi is a flatworm.

The Holocron is a database of the Star Wars Expanded Universe and Star Wars canon, including its characters, creatures, languages, locations, vehicles, and weapons.

Sarkese ruler William Frederick Collings made his disabled heiress climb cliffs and hunt, and sent her a consolation telegram to say he was sorry her firstborn was a girl. The wikipedia article is Quite Interesting (and funny), I quote a large part of it below. The man was … Eccentric.

"Collings inherited his father's fief on the latter's death in 1882, but none of his father's interest in military. Less than five years after his accession, the Royal Sark Militia, once cherished by his parents, detoriated into what a visiting journalist described as "seven dozen pairs of boots". By 1900, he had neglected it enough for it to completely disappear. ….

The Sarkese admired Collings for his skillfulness in sailing, shooting, and rock climbing and he enjoyed their strong support. However, he was "a violent terror when he had taken drink", according to an islander. The alcoholism caused him to attack the vicar's wife with his stick, write anti*clerical messages on walls, insult the constable, break window panes and ride into private gardens. He once appeared before the Sénéschal for threatening to shoot a journalist.

Collings was devoted to his wife Sophie (née Moffatt), with whom he had two daughters, Sibyl and Doris. As he had no sons, his elder daughter Sibyl was his heir presumptive. He raised her as a boy and, despite her lameness caused by unequal leg length, taught her to shoot, sail, and climb cliffs. Nevertheless, whenever they came into conflict, he called her a "damned virago". He never allowed either Doris or the physically disabled Sibyl to complain of pain or sadness, explaining that "they would be a lot worse off" when they grew old;


The seigneur strongly disapproved of his heiress presumptive's relationship with the painter Dudley Beaumont, considering him a "weakling" because he did not shoot or climb cliffs. When he learned that she had continued seeing him, he threw her out from the seigneurial residence in a nightdress. Despite his attempts to find her the next morning, she went to London and married Beaumont. For the first time since her marriage, Collings contacted her when she had her first child, a daughter named Bridget. Wishing to send a conciliatory telegram, he consoled her for giving birth to a daughter by writing: "Sorry it was a vixen."


Pibbur who can't remember if he has seen an alive flat worm but who once found a 10 cm long round one (Ascaris lumbricoides) in his youngest's diaper. Kept it in a jar for several years, but has since lost it. *cries*
 
Traditional 8 bit color depth offers 256 possible colors, but by trippling that amount you get 24 bit "true color". This equals 256 of red, 256 of green and 256 of blue. 256^3 equals 16,777,216 variations of color. Since the human eye can't distinguish more than ~10 million this means that computers have peaked the color range that humans can see.

But since data is generally stored in packages that can be divided by 2 you often get 32 bit color rather than 24 bit which is a "waste" of 8 bit per unit. In modern computer these 8 bit are often used to store an alpha channel (transparency).

Printers use a reverse coloring process that prints small dots of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. At a distance the colors blur together and appear in a different color. Yellow and Magenta when mixed becomes red. Magenta and Cyan when mixed becomes blue and Cyan and yellow when mixed becomes green.

One key advantage of early Macintosh's using the Macintosh operating system were the color profiles that made it possible to get a very calibrated color output. Colors on the Macintosh monitor should look similar to colors on the Macintosh printer. PC's couldn't provide similar calibration until much later which gave Macintosh an early advantage in desktop publishing.
 
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In releation to this:

In a CT scan, each pixel can have a value ranging from -1000 to 3095 so-called Hounsfield units. Roughly speaking this corresponds to 4096 grey levels. No one can distinguish that many grey levels, of course. In stead when viewing CT scans on screen or print them to film, we concentrate on a smaller range of units (the level and the window), depending on what we want to study. Air is almost pitch black. If we want to study the lungs, we select a window enhancing the darker parts of the image - the lung window. OTOH, if we want to examine the bony parts, we select a window focusing on the lighter parts - the bone window. For best visualisation of soft tissues we go for something between, the soft tissue window. An example can be found here: http://www.netterimages.com/image/61653.htm. (The central very whitish parts are the large blood vessels such as the aorta and the pulmonary artery. The scan is performed using intravenous contrast medium, that's why the vessels shine so brightly).

The CT scan seen here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/SADDLE_PE.JPG is also from the lung, taken just above the heart, using a soft tissue window. Notice that there isn't much detail visible in the lungs itself, and the bones. This is a scan performed to detect pulmonary embolism. The patient is given a small amount of contrast medium intravenously, and the scan is timed so that images are obtained just as contrast enters the pulmonary artery, which is the very bright vessel in the image. The contrast hasn't reached the aorta yet, that's why the two parts of that vessel (the ascending part in the front, the descending part behind) appear darker. In fact, there is a difference between those two parts. The descending vessel is darker, because blood from the heart enters the upwards part first.

Oh, if you notice the dark parts within the pulmonary artery, well, that's the embolus. In other words: a postive find. In this case the embolus affects both the left and the right main branches, completely obliterating some of the smaller ones. A pretty serious condition.

pibbur who misses studying CT scans. In fact he misses all those parts of radiology not involving patients directly.
 
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Australian microbrewery Nail Brewing produced the most expensive beer in the world, using water melted from a block of Antarctic ice. And still it, according to experts, tastes like making love in a canoe.

After having written a poem on the 1625 great plague of London, the poet Abraham Holland died of the plague the following year. The poem goes like this:

"Today we have a plague.
It's causes seems quite vague.
We know it's not a virus.
But sadly that won't help us.
We cannot say for sure.
If we'll ever find a cure.
"

Fortunately, we did find a cure around 300 years later. The plague responds very well to several antibiotics.

American industrialist Bradish Johnson (not pictured) was involved in the "swill milk" scandal, in which organic distillery waste was fed to sick old cows and their milk sold as "farm-fresh".

Raees Mohammad scored 110 not out and took four wickets in Quaid-i-Azam Trophy's final in 1954–55. I'm sure there's something about cricket here, but I haven't tested it.

Haloquadratum are remarkable for their relative abundance in halophilic environments.

Pibbur who thinks "Yersinia" is the most beautifull name of a microorganism. Ever.
 
Now, I really hate to admit this, but having never made love in a canoe (must be a quaint Nowegian custom) could you please give a clearer, or more detailed explanation of your first item? :)
 
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It's Monty Python and it does include some unavoidable profanity. Australian beer is like making love in a canoe because it's f*ng close to water.

EDIT: I was mistaken. It was american beer, not australian. Ref. http://youtu.be/hPFClJGqjBQ

Pibbur who has tried neither australian beer nor the canoe thing.
 
I can certainly agree about the American beer; it's rubbish. Most so called 'exported' Aussie beer is the stuff no-one here would touch, like Fosters. (I'm not even sure you can still buy that swill here.)
 
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