Rob’s Blog

Did you know that in only 4413.662 years time we will run out of National Insurance numbers, assuming that every number is reassigned as soon as the original owner pops their clogs? That works out, roughly, at 13th November 6421. There are a few assumptions to be made here. For example:

• Population growth remains the same as it is at the moment (0.5% per year)
• There isn’t an apocalypse
• There isn’t a massive influx of space aliens requiring NINOs
• The ONS have adjusted their figures to average out over leap years
• There is no air resistance
• The population can be treated as a particle

This just reveals a shocking lack of foresight and logic on the part of the Government.

At this point in time though, the UK would have a population density of 15,240 people per square kilometre. This would only place us third on the world population density rankings, behind Monaco and the Macau Special Administrative Region in China. Furthermore, this would leave each of us with 65.64 square metres of space, assuming we destroyed all services and public buildings, that every square inch of land can be built upon and is inhabitable, and that we did not all start inhabiting balloons or airships in the sky. That space is equal to 2.73 double decker buses, or 0.65 times the surface area of a blue whale. If you chose to cover your precious land in A4 paper, it would take 1052 sheets, just over two reams.

However, having worked all this out, I really don’t need to worry. I’ve got it pencilled in my diary to be dead by the year 6421, making the assumption that we stick with the same calendar we have at the moment, and that the Earth does not pick up speed thereby reducing the length of a year or indeed a day.

Sorry, chemistry coursework has done a rather good job of consuming my time recently. However, hopefully over the holiday I shall have time for more writing.

To tide you (well, Matt) over, here be some random things:

• Don’t worry about what people think; they don’t do it very often.
• Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
• A lone amateur built the Ark. A team of trained professionals built the Titanic.
• There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
• For every action there is an equal and opposite Government initiative.

I know, “usefulness” is something I usually avoid like reality TV. Anyway, here be the first useful thing to approach this website:

SecureRouter.pdf

To make sure the file has been downloaded correctly, check it against one of the following sums:

MD5: e32b6c170e8501d281d307e22fed71d9
SHA1: dcda421a37cb4339d27d71184cdcf0a5297fc0bb
SHA512: a58851355104c59e63945142afd7273f3a9f98f393d4f7f9c5b14e2ca622cbb429f10645e8f3e9d5c4870f6ed3b0704d5491681a4868da0e0e4489c41c332f62

Being a PDF, you should have great trouble trying to print that document from school as the IT department has made yet another cock-up. I suggest creating a queue of people transmitting the contents of the document using semaphore if you intend to read it elsewhere, otherwise you’re just wasting my (admittedly, free) bandwidth.

NASA has just released pictures from their MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) probe. Among them was this one:

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

According to NASA:

The unnamed crater (52 kilometers, or 31 miles, in diameter) in the center of the image displays a telephone-shaped collapse feature on its floor.

Well, that is a very odd-shaped telephone. To me, it looks more like a letter C in a circle: ©. Yes, it would appear that Mercury is under copyright.

One explanation is of course that God has decided to protect His intellectual property. This is certainly something that God might do, just to avoid other people recreating the planets and becoming God in their own right. The only people who would ever recreate the planet would be the Magratheans, but that is another tale entirely. Furthermore, if you were God, would you have chosen to copyright Mercury, out of all of these planets? Mercury is, it must be admitted, fairly boring when compared to Earth. There is no life out there or anything, and it’s a pretty dull colour. Then again, perhaps there is a hidden copyright symbol on Earth, and on each of the other planets.

Another possibility is that NASA sent the probe out there to claim copyright. There are a few issues here. If God designed the planets then NASA would need to wait until after his death, and even then would not be able to copyright it. If the Big Bang is to blame then surely Mercury should be “open source”, having had no designer?

We shall see how this develops. However, to be on the safe side, I’ll make sure I don’t recreate Mercury any time soon.

Happy new year to you all. My clock is still wishing me happy new year, so I guess it isn’t too late yet

“Happy” isn’t the best word though, as the exam season is once again underway. I suppose I am lucky in a way, in that I only have two exams this January: Chemistry and Pure Maths. I’ve also got a University interview going on and I’ve started driving lessons I think my new year’s resolution next year will be to leave myself less to do at the start of the year.

I was going to upload my revision material for my exams, so that anyone else could use it, but that is pointless considering the exams are all changing from September.