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Cell phone quality has been so low for so long and people have become accustom to dropped calls "Are you there"s, etc that there is no need to apologize or say you did something wrong. Cell phone quality and its acceptance have become such a norm that my company is thinking of going to VOIP for its telephone including 911.

This is weird. I don't think I've ever had a dropped call that wasn't because the train went into a tunnel or something. Even many tunnels (or roads in valleys etc) are OK now, there'll be a tiny directional antenna at the end (picture).

I've never had a dropped call while standing still.

Even landlines have their issues with heavy use. Special holidays and whatnot give those "We're sorry all circuits are busy, please try again later".

The only time I've heard anything of like that is after the 7/7/2005 attacks in London. Priority was given to pre-registered numbers (police, doctors etc. register their numbers). However, I only read that that was what happened, I didn't have any problem making calls myself.

If there's good competition between mobile networks then it's in their interest to stick up a mast near a remote university. Many people at that university will switch to that network, if it's the only option.

There's 2G coverage almost everywhere, but not necessarily on all networks.

If you do live in an area with no coverage you could get something like this, which claims to give you 2G and 3G signal in your home using your broadband connection. It's a shame that's only for Vodafone (UK), as everyone would benefit if the networks cooperated on this.

There are also temporary GSM towers at major (remote) events (music festivals, races etc).

Yes, I remember that push... so much of a push to get managed code in the userspace that they had to gag Richard Grimes threatening to remove his MVP status.

Just goes to show how much at Microsoft is about marketing, and how little is technical excellence.

Myself I am developing HornetsEye which is a Ruby-extension for doing computer vision.
The problem with supporting various types is that you end up with a lot of possible combinations when doing computations. I.e. say if you want to support arrays of 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit integers (signed and unsigned) as well as 32-bit and 64-bit floating point, you have 10 ** 2 possible combinations of types when element-wise adding two arrays.
If speed is not an issue however, you could just use Ruby's dynamic typing. Ruby's integer classes use dynamic typing in their computations in order to avoid numeric overflow:

( 10 ** 2 ).class
# Fixnum
( 10 ** 10 ).class
# Bignum

Also you can seamlessly combine rational numbers, big numbers, complex numbers, and matrices in a seamless way which is really neat:

require 'mathn'
2/4
# 1/2
( Complex::I / 2 ) ** 3
# Complex(0, -1/8)
1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3
# Complex(1/2, 1/3)
( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 5
# Complex(-199/2592, 61/3888)
( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 24
# Complex(584824319281/4738381338321616896, 161741277005/32905425960566784)
a = Matrix[ [ 2 / 3, 3 / 4 ], [ 4 / 5, 5 / 6 ] ]
# Matrix[[2/3, 3/4], [4/5, 5/6]]
b = a.inv
# Matrix[[-75/4, 135/8], [18, -15]]
a * b
# Matrix[[1, 0], [0, 1]]

ORLY?
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/spell/mini.html

w8loss.exe shipped with various Borland products. I know it came with BC++3.1 (which I upgraded to from Turbo C 1.0) and Delphi. If you have either of those, you should have a copy.

A few years after I bought Delphi 1.0 ($500) Borland allowed it to be released as a cover disk as part of an effort to generate buzz for a later version.

Delphi 1.0 was on a cover CD for the December 1997 issue of the UK magazine PCW, with upgrade offers; Delphi 2.0 was on a cover CD for the May 1999 issue of the UK magazine PCW, with upgrade offers; Delphi 3.0 was remaindered by Inprise UK in September 1998; I have used it. both for GUI and console mode programs; Delphi 7.0 was current; as was a version for LINUX.

It *might* also be sitting in a kylix distribution (oh, the pain).

Actually, your comment tells me that you've never used Linux - or at least not recently.

I have all manner of USB disks, webcams, drives, phones, etc. at home and use them all on dual-booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP machines. The biggest problem I have had with USB recently (and strictly speaking it's not a USB issue) is how to get NTFS-formatted external USB disks to mount with proper permissions using the ntfs-3g user space driver.

The reason this problem came about in the first place was because Microsoft don't allow you to format any drive over 32GB with FAT32 in recent Windows versions (even though FAT32 partitions have a size limit of 2TB) and I needed to have USB disks readable/writeable by both OSes.

In the end I found fat32format which does allow me to use FAT32 on big external disks (even PartitionMagic sets an arbitrary 200GB FAT32 partition limit) and ditched NTFS completely.

I suggest you go ahead and try a modern Linux distro with built in daemons like hal and udev running on startup - because with a modular kernel these days, hardware detection is pretty much automatic....

"It's not what you'd call a rich data set"

Too right it isn't. I have nearly as large a range of input devices on my desk* as he bothered to blog about.

For a real test, it would be interesting to see how a court stenography machine or "real" shorthand compares:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8356000/8356176.stm

or even an AgendA or original Microwriter:
http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/bellaire_microwriter_agenda.html

* no, I'm not a very tidy person.

The BBC made a miniseries out of it. Alas, you can only get the first season on DVD (possibly due to negotiation over movie rights).

For a wonderful introduction to peer review, you could do worse than read this:

http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/corres.pdf It is an exchange, carried out over several years, between a man who believes he has solved quantum field theory, and the reviewers who carefully look through his papers when he tries to publish. They come up with good points and ways to improve the paper, but he resubmits and resubmits until he finds somewhere that accepts it. Along the way, he gets increasingly rude and angry, while the reviewers remain polite and engage carefully with him.

My favourite part is that it's published on the guy's personal website, although he really doesn't come out of it well.

Some of the reviewers don't seem too polite:

In spite of its pompous language, this paper is, in fact, less rigorous, from the mathematical point of view, than ordinary perturbation theory which can be found in any good textbook or review article.

No relevant problems of contemporary QFT are considered in this paper. I recommend its rejection.

Anyone who has attempted to get a scientific paper published has run into these guys - rude, opinionated, and lazy reviewers. It's not just cranks who get these responses, either.

For a wonderful introduction to peer review, you could do worse than read this:

http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/corres.pdf
It is an exchange, carried out over several years, between a man who believes he has solved quantum field theory, and the reviewers who carefully look through his papers when he tries to publish. They come up with good points and ways to improve the paper, but he resubmits and resubmits until he finds somewhere that accepts it. Along the way, he gets increasingly rude and angry, while the reviewers remain polite and engage carefully with him.

My favourite part is that it's published on the guy's personal website, although he really doesn't come out of it well.

Or use http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm to format bigger than 32GB on XP and above.

No, 2007 was not the 'steepest drop' in arctic ice cover, it was the 'smallest minimum extent' recorded. The increase and decrease in arctic ice cover follows the seasonal cycle and the rate of the decrease and increase in the seasonal change is similar from year to year. It is the 'minimum' and 'maximum' extent of the ice cover during the year that are of interest as a monitor of climate warming or cooling.

Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would've been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you'd clicked on the "steepest drop" link, you'd notice that the plot's title is "Sea ice area at summer minimum." A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.

The increase in the 'minimum' extent in 2008 and 2009 indicate a cooling trend that cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases since the concentration of those has increased during that time period.

Well, first of all it's not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.

More importantly, please recognize that climate models don't predict monotonic warming. This strawman you're attacking simply doesn't exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what's important.

If you want to claim that cooling somehow validates the models (which it obviously does not)...

The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would've been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would've indicated that the models were flawed.

... you need to explain where a significant amount of planetary heat is being stored since the 'greenhouse gas' theory of planetary warming requires that the amount of heat being radiated from the earth must continuously decrease.

Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, modern dynamical climate models can't account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have no effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to st

If your website is so plain as to look like something from the HTML 3.0 days, well, that's not too good either from the marketing/corporate image point of view... But without having seen the website in question it's hard to tell.

The website is retro, but the company does deal with rather retro technologies. Certainly I've had people say they like it because it is so low tech.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/

That being said I could add some CSS to make it look more modern on browsers that support it.

The NASA Earth Observation site has measurements of the ice coverage at the north pole. While their text speaks of massive ice loss and continuing doom, the actual graph they provide of the data shows that while the minimum ice cover is less than the average of a decade ago, there is actually more minimum ice cover than last year, and last year had more cover than the year before. Why do they not mention this at all ? Maybe the point is to mislead?

Yes, 2008 and 2009 had smaller ice extent minima than 2007. But the point is that climate models had previously predicted larger ice extent minima than were observed in 2007. So the last several years tend to confirm that the previous measurements were due to short-term weather variability rather than a flaw in the climate models.

If they were to publish the proper figures for 1979 to 2000 instead of just a vague average, we could maybe see whether there is a regular fluctuation, instead of guessing that the decline has been constant.

Ask, and you shall receive. No serious scientist is actually "guessing" that the decline has been constant, and no climate model that I'm aware of makes that prediction. Short term variability is expected, but the data shows a clear downward trend over the last 30 years.

So we can ignore data if it suits your argument ? Sea ice is formed from and floats in the sea (duh). Global warming causes the oceans to warm - true or false ? So more sea ice can not mean a warmer ocean can it ?

I read that article, and wondered why the authors missed the crucial part of the story. Yes, 2008 and 2009 had smaller ice extent minima than 2007. But the point is that climate models had previously predicted larger ice extent minima than were observed in 2007. So the last several years tend to confirm that the previous measurements were due to short-term weather variability rather than a flaw in the climate models.

True that. This free tool can format hard disks bigger than 32GB as FAT32, upto 2TB in fact

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

There's also a command line version

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

There a 4GB per file limit, which is a fundamental limit of FAT32. The 32GB per volume limit is just Microsoft's way of encouraging people to use NTFS.

True that. This free tool can format hard disks bigger than 32GB as FAT32, upto 2TB in fact

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

There's also a command line version

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

There a 4GB per file limit, which is a fundamental limit of FAT32. The 32GB per volume limit is just Microsoft's way of encouraging people to use NTFS.

It is a reference to Monty Python's Life of Brian

http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html

Yeah I read it wrong the first time as well. It actually shows growth for the last three years.

More importantly, it shows a trend where recent years have a lower minimum than later years. Remember not to confuse weather with climate like Fieldings is. The long-term trend simply has irrelevant noise due to ENSO events, etc imposed on top of it. As I said before, the real problem scientists face is here

I see the statistics on your web site removed the Maurader Solar Minimum / Little ice age; most CO2 proponents do.

You might be referring to this paragraph: Abrupt climate change is a long-term warming trend imposed on top of natural variations which tend to swing wildly in both directions. If you mean that the temperatures remain inexplicably high after subtracting all those natural variations, you're almost right.

But that reference removed the ENSO events, and figure 2 shows a warming trend even before this subtraction.

Also, contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

If we do not get some cycle 24 sunspots soon, we might be hoping for some global warming. I thought we where on the way but a cycle 23 spot showed up the the sun went quiet now for over a month; not good.

No, solar variability is smaller than greenhouse effects.

Earth cooled a degree last year ...

As I've explained, ENSO events are irrelevant to the long term climate.

Satellite images show arctic ice cap growing the last three years ...

In the same link as above, I referenced this paper titled "Arctic sea ice decline: faster than forecast."

... lack of sunspots is pointing to a scary minimum.

Again in the same link, I explain that this means the Sun is unusually dim, which (if anything) would tend to cool the Earth slightly.

The CO2 increase contributes to less than a than 1/2 of a percent increase in green house gasses ...

As I explain in the fifth paragraph of that article, CO2 has jumped 26% above the highest value it's reached in the last 650,000 years. And this staggering increase occurred in the span of several decades due to human emissions, which is 35x faster than at any point in the last 400,000 years.

... (do not exclude the largest green house gas, water vapor)

As I've explained, water vapor reaches equilibrium in a matter of weeks, so we can't change its concentration except by changing Earth's average temperature. Water vapor is also not present in the top level of the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect is most important. CO2, on the other hand, is well-mixed even to the highest level of the atmosphere, and it stays in the atmosphere for many decades which is why it's so dangerous.

An ion engine strapped to the ISS doesn't need to lift 303t. All it needs to do is provide slightly more acceleration than is needed to overcome the atmospheric drag, and that's pretty small. According to this page, it's 0.133N, while the ion engine on NASA's Deep Space 1 had 0.09 N. Apparently 2 of those space-proven engines would be enough to boost the ISS's orbit.

Make all those 'dead' batteries run little torches:

http://www.emanator.demon.co.uk/bigclive/joule.htm

The port to linux is ready, it is another licence you can compile in yourself: http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/blog/archives/2009-06.html#2009-06-28T12_07_05.txt

Sorry for not being a native english speaker and thanks for the pointer. :-)

You'd be surprised how many native English speakers get it wrong. I'm even surprised how many native English speakers can't even speak properly. (When is Meadow Guild Solid coming out again?)

There's even this homophone list that has questionable entries like "sort, sought", "talk, torque", "tuba, tuber", and "pawn, porn", which to me sound nothing alike. What dialect of English pronounces those pairs of words the same? Certainly not a proper one.

"And when all the programs on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft palates speaking lines by dyslexic writers and filmed by blind cameramen—instead of merely seeming like that—it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile." -- Douglas Adams

... country who may [have] lied in front of the world, twice (the moon,...

The Americans, without doubt, sent men to the moon and returned them. Advocates of that event being hoaxed are usually unbelievably ignorant about all matter of subjects.

This site provides info if you go along with any of the ideas moon landing hoaxers may have:
http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/

require 'hornetseye'
include Hornetseye
a = MultiArray.load_rgb24 'image1.jpg'
b = MultiArray.load_rgb24 'image2.jpg'
output = MEncoderOutput.new 'test.avi', 15
for k in 0..50
    output.write a * ( k / 50.0 ) + b * ( ( 50.0 - k ) / 50.0 )
end

I happen to develop a Ruby library which can be applied to this problem. In this case it generates the 50 transitional frames (640x480) in less than 10 seconds. I tried GIF first, but generating GIF is indeed very slow, since it requires global colour-indexing. So this may be the real performance problem in your example. Even so you should use Ruby ;)

Ah, but you're missing the fun. The whole point is that Slackware is perfect for people who like compiling their own software. It just gives them a world to stand on while they do so.

Yes! I liked doing it so much, I scripted it. :-)

I'll take that into consideration... In the meantime...

http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbabies.htm

Well corrected. But I have to ask, which makes more sense ?
1 cwt = 100 lbs or 1 cwt = 112 lbs ?
Useful and interesting site.

Speaking of Cleese, I thought that Santino the Chimpanzee Builds a Small Arsenal would make a nice sequel to Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying .

I have modified this project to make bike light that uses single 1.5V battery, four white LEDs in the front light and one red LED in the black connected in series. It can work on 1.2V Ni-MH battery too, it is cheap and easy to build. I have used E core transformer form broken mobile phone charger instead of ferrite bead. The next version I'll build will use single Li-Ion cell and will have integrated recharger.

Sometimes you just can't beat configure ; make ; make install.

Free third party tools can format drives upto 2TB

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

Targeted blue lights may correlate with lowered suicide rates:

http://www.physorg.com/news148153021.html

However, streetlights in general have not been proven to prevent any crime:

http://www.delscope.demon.co.uk/information/lightpollution.htm#security

http://amper.ped.muni.cz/light/crime/lp040_1h.html

I've lived with RSI since 1993 - you get used to recognising things that do not help ergonomically. This looks like one of those things.

One of the major problems with RSI is that prolonged activation of muscle groups leads to fatigue. The term for this is static loading.

This is why click and release mouse behaviour (to activate menus, then click again to choose) is better for your health than the alternative method (click and hold, release to choose) because the alternative forces you to hold the mouse button down until you make your choice.

This keyboard idea is doing the same thing.

I suspect healthy people may like this keyboard and those suffering from RSI will dislike it greatly.

Info on RSI and remedial exercises: http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi/rsi_srk.html

Stephen

How does macrolensing/microlensing end up magnifying an area in space? To my caveman-like mind, it seems like it would act more as an attenuating factor, reducing the signal to fuzz.

The macrolensing and microlensing both work in the same way as standard lensing.

do you remember Huyghens Construction showing how a change in the propagation (phase) velocity of a wave in one region compared to another region can lead to the laws of refraction and reflection of waves? And how this was used as evidence that the nature of light was wave-like? Back in the early 18th century it was, IIRC (before the likes of Young demonstrated that interference effects meant that light must have a wave nature rather than a corpuscular nature, and before Einstein won his Nobel for demonstrating that light must have a corpuscular nature rather than a wave nature, and then quantum happened and the sales of headache pills took off)

You don't remember? Your physics teacher wasted those hours splashing around with the ripple tank. Shame on you, wasting his/ her/ it's/ their efforts like that!

Well, given Huyghen's construction and a bounded, more or less spherical region of reduced phase velocity (by whatever means), then you get lensing. Again, those poor neglected physics teachers did try to impart this to you. It's not relevant what the source of the reduced regional phase velocity for light is - it could be the density of gases (cue : hot-air mirage) ; it could be gravitational fields (Eddington's famous demonstration of Special Relativity at the 1920 solar eclipse, or did you sleep through that physics lesson too?); it could be the diligent activity of maliciously trained Maxwellian Daemon (Hi Marijke, if you're listening) running around grabbing photons by the tail and slowing them down that way. The result is the same : slowing across a geometrically limited region brings waves to a focus. Not necessarily a good focus, but a focus nonetheless.

The optical centre of the lenses is nearer to us than it is to the quasars in question. As a matter of simple Euclidian geometry, this means that the image is magnified. That would probably have been in the physics lectures some weeks before the ones about the nature and behaviour of waves.

Of course, I suppose that it's possible that your school hasn't covered these topics yet ; if not, I'd suggest that you ask your parents for permission to get a science tutor, so that you can get up to speed on the basic knowledge necessary for a 14-year-old to get into senior school.

Sorry, this does sound rather catty, doesn't it. But this is fundamental school stuff, which I and possibly you pay good tax money to have inculcated into kids in time for them to go on to learn more complex stuff, like how to make crystal meth and fusion reactors. It's a while since I had to go back through it - hence checking that it was Huyghens' Construction above instead of Young's. But it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes for the brain to bring it back from off-line storage.

Keep in mind: you're talking about a processor which doesn't even have integer multiplication, let alone any floating point operations. And you have only three 8-bit registers to perform these operations in. Executing 1k instructions for even a basic FLOP is not inconceivable here.

Looks like a rip-off of Rowan Atkinson's Welcome to Hell sketch.

And for the video-challenged, "The Devil's Welcoming Speech"

- T

I'd rather use wwwoffle. Haven't used it in years, but last time I did it cached everything, including flash movies, very well.

Why the hell do you need an operating system at all? The only thing needed to count are a few logic gates, i.e. a binary counter. Can't get much simpler than that (well besides pen and paper). Make the logic gates out of latching relays, and you get a nice satisfying 'clunk' feedback when you enter your selection. Add some LED indication for good measures, and keep a few people around who have been given a 20-minute lesson on binary counting to make sure it's counting properly.

Keep it simple, stupid!

FYI: The cargo area is pressurized Heh, was

The commercial editor, Crisp, is excellent for these kinds of tasks. Crisp is a modern offering based on the Brief editor from days of old. This editor has a small following because it is buyware but is very multiplatform, very fast with large files and has a good macro language, keystroke macros etc.. It can track changed lines visually and also has a built in diff but I'm not sure if either can be harnessed through the macro language. Due to its enormous feature-set and the large amount of platforms it supports there are plenty of bugs in Crisp but it is regularly updated and its author is very responsive to bug reports. Also, and importantly, I've never found a bug that's crashed Crisp or lost me work: the core editing engine seems to be very efficient and bug free and most of the bugs lie in the extra functionality that's provided by way of the enormous amount of macros thrown in with it. My advice if you want to buy a copy is to contact Pacemaker software (the UK distributor) and broker a deal. The US has its own distributor (Vital Inc.) but you'll get a much more personal service (and price!) speaking to Pacemaker since the owner is on very good terms with the author of the software. The latest versions of crisp is available directly from the author's website here, unlicensed copies run in trial mode with writing disabled. Having used virtually every editor on the planet and been programming in a variety of languages since the eighties, I can say that no editor is perfect. Crisp has its faults but has overall speed, ease of use, a wonderful macro language and a solid editing engine. It won't do your work for you but this job sounds like countless little "challenges" that I've cut through with crisp in the past. Seb :)

There's always more room for improvement. One could, for example, impose a beneficial energy pattern by the proper attachment of P.W.B. Electret Ring Ties so as to establish a full Stage Five dominant energy pattern within 'space geometry'. One must take great care to apply the same pattern to electrical power interconnects as well as the audio interconnects. A P.W.B Morphic Message Foil can be applied to the Ethernet cable and the listener's forehead to ensure proper synchronization of digital cognisance.

http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/product/product.html

(I only wish this stuff weren't real. I dread being dragged into any conversation with a True Believer audiophile.)

You are correct sir. It is possible however, to memorize a few series of moves to achieve a few stages of completion. Do one side (the top) and the middle row will need the four corner squares to be aligned, as the center squares are fixed-position. To align the middle rows' corner squares you can orient the cube depending on where each piece needs to be moved to and execute a memorized pattern of moves. The bottom row can be solved in a few series of moves than can just be repeated until the desired result is achieved.
http://www.scaredcat.demon.co.uk/rubikscube/the_solution.html
It takes quite a bit more than 18 moves, but only a few minutes. A good time killer waiting for a pot to boil or the five minutes 'till Star Trek comes on.

I tend to prefer Spider Solitaire or Freecell, but do play the standard game every so often. Sad sod that I am, I also keep track of my high scores.
Solitaire, draw one card, standard scoring.
Top 5 scores.
1) 9294 time 81
2) 9007 time 84
3) 8909 time 85
4) 8819 time 86
5) 8814 time 86

For those who prefer minesweeper, there is a variant based on a hexagonal grid called (surprisingly) Hexsweeper. A cell could in fact be surrounded by 6 mines. To save you the trouble of Googling Hexsweeper, here is a page you can get the zip file from. Click. Is is so much more fun than minesweeper.

Watson is overcredited, in part because of sexism and in part because he and Crick made very sure they were credited while others (Franklin, Wilkins) were painted as just assistants.
However, Watson and Crick did figure out some vital stuff. Before they came along, DNA was considered some strange stuff that only had four constituents, so it was considered highly unlikely that it did anything useful. Rosalind Franklin showed that it had a helical structure, and Watson and Crick synthesized that knowledge, along with Pauling's incorrect suggestions that information was encoded in helical structures of collagen.
Crick came to the fundamentally important conclusion that the x-ray crystallography indicated an antiparallel double helix, and everything else depended on that realization.
(Many good summaries exist. this one is pretty good.
But Watson did have a central influence on the discovery of what DNA did, as did, to a lesser extent, Franklin, Wilkins, Gosling, and Pauling, any of whom could've figured it out if they'd gotten to work with each other, as Crick and Watson did.

I looked into this a while ago, I have a few CF2 3" disks, and would love to read what I wrote when I was 14.

I found this company that offers conversions @ £5 a disk.

This isn't the only company, but a google will find the others.

Remember that in the Britain of a couple centuries ago, sodomy carried the death sentence.

That's right -- merely being caught acting as an ordinary, nonviolent homosexual got you hanged. (Interested parties may wish to peruse http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/homopho1.htm )

Don't think it couldn't happen again. If that morality pendulum starts swinging, it never stops til it reaches the farthest possible extreme.