Another adventure awaits... · 10:20pm Aug 30th, 2017
My original plan was that I would spend the last few days of my US trip catching up with some writing. I reasoned correctly that by that point I would have been exhausted by all the travelling, museum visiting, tasty food eating, and standing in awe of the eclipse, and would be happy to stay in a hotel room with my drafts. Unfortunately two things got in the way of this plan: First, I lost my UK/US power adapter so I couldn’t charge my laptop. Secondly, I got some sort of food poisoning or other bug and spent twenty-four hours vomiting up everything I swallowed, then another two days feeling rather rough.
Anyway, I am now back in the UK and well again, but I didn’t get any writing done. So I missed my schedule for writing a Particle Gadgeteering post each week, and I still have an unfinished draft for a mathematical pony fic to work on. (It involves an infinite sequence of Pinkie Pies - I’m having a bit of trouble with the ending). And I have lots of ideas for more random blog posts.
But this is going to have to wait a bit, because I’ve been back at work this week, and next, I planned a cycling trip with my brother along the C2C route - traversing Britain from sea-to-sea. This is a small island and it’s the narrowest bit of it, but it will still take a few days, with lots of hills along the way. And quite a few good pubs - which means more delays.
At some point I will sort out my notes and photos from my US trip and write something about the exotic foreign land of America. For now here are some pictures I took earlier in the summer from about 25 miles away at the Wayland’s Smithy Neolithic tomb:
Adventure Awaits! (and it's impatient, so get to it)
C2C accross which bit? Theres Hadriens Wall and Trans Pennine routes that I can think of.
Almost always get ill, its in the air, never mind the food and water that causes change in gut biome, thats why the three days.
For the power stuff, thats confusing, given switch mode supplies all rectify the incoming anyway, which is why PC supplies do 85 to 240 volt in. Laptop bricks shouldnt be that much difference, and all you needed was a city with a laptop store for a US brick at worst?
Intresting thing about infinitely long lines. They are circles, and if you write an infinitely long polynomial down in recursive form, the infinite term is zero, thereby making all subsequent terms zero, but this means the sequence is actually one term less than infinite long, but still a complete circle.
Blame Quantum.
Sounds like a good time at least. Enjoy your adventure!
I knew it! Entering America turns you outsiders into ponies!
Food poisoning is a horrible adventure in and of itself
I'm glad you made it back safely!
This tomb looks epic! Is this fully accessible to the public? How big is it? Are there still bones in there?
And Daring Do fits so well in this place, consider this drawn as a fanart one day!
You need a special adapter for this?! o.o
Are the sockets shaped differently in the US than they are in Europe?
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We are taking the Whitehaven - Sunderland route http://www.c2c-guide.co.uk/
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Everything looks a bit more epic if you put Daring Do in front of it. Wayland's Smithy is a public site. There's not actually much to see beyond the enticing entrance. There were some bones dug up some years ago. I don't know if they were reburied on the site or not.
Yes power adapters are a bane of international travellers. Different in Europe from the US, and different again in the UK, because we have to do things our way just to be awkward. And the voltage is 110V in America and 230V in Europe. Most simple gadgets can take both, but not all devices can. Many American visitors to Europe have managed to burn out their computer power supplies this way.
Glad you're feeling better! I hope the eclipse was worth it. I got to see it, but not totality.
As for the infinite Pinkie Pies story, clearly there's going to be some point at which all of them are going to have to move to the next house over. (Even more) chaos ensues.
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It was definitely worth it. Partial eclipses are a fun science thing. Total eclipses are a fun science thing AND an awe inspiring beautiful natural phenomenon. See if you can get to totality for 2024.
You got the basic idea of the story. The problem is how to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion with a finite word count.
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How about Twilight realizes that she needs to get rid of all the extra Pinkie Pies while keeping the original? The problem she quickly runs into is that any method of Pinkie Pie removal that takes greater than zero time will require infinite time to finish. So instead she turns that to her advantage: she asks all of the Pinkie Pies except for the real one to gather in an alternate dimension and then to re-sort themselves so they can go into their rooms in a different order. Since most efficient sorting algorithms typically finish in time O(n log n), and even a best-case sorting scenario requires O(n), the Pinkies will disappear from Equestria for an infinite time before finishing.
I hope that your story does not have genocide.
It would be nice if ISO would come up with a standard for power-plugs/sockets, phases, and voltages. I am not sure about the power-plugs/sockets, but 480 Volts @ 400 Hertz in 3-phase sounds good to me but 400 Hertz does not transmit well and 480 Volts causes problems with single phase, so 60 Hertz with 240 Volts will have to do. A child-protective shutter like the English use along with the space-efficiency of the Swiß sounds nice:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/SEV_1011_Typ_23_Steckdose.jpg
A powerbar of the Swiß design could support 3x devices, assuming that having that many devices does not overload the powerbar. That is single-phase, but we could come out with a compact standard for 3-phase power-plugs/sockets too. Perhaps, we should dust of the IEC_60906-1 for single-phase with modifications so that 3 of them can cluster together like the Swiß plugs/sockets.