Wife says I'm not allowed one. Plan B is engaged.

Both are right. It's purposefully ambiguous. He is definitely using the thumb measure as he is holding his hand thumb out, pointing at the explosion. If you give a thumbs up you draw your hand sideways, to give the thumbs up in profile: that's not what he is doing. However, the image is presented at about 45 degrees, so from the viewers angle the gesture is almost side on, looking to US like a thumbs up.

He is also holding one eye closed, which you must do to line something in the close foreground (thumb) with something in the distance (explosion) but it is also made to look like a cheeky wink because of the smile on his face.

It's cleverly done, and is too well balanced not to be purposeful

And HOW FOGGY IS IT TODAY? I need more discussion about the fog.

I don't understand. Does fog not happen much over there* or something? Is it the Autumn version of Snowmageddon?

*England.

I don't understand. Does fog not happen much over there* or something? Is it the Autumn version of Snowmageddon?

*England.

Not this much fog, no: https://twitter.com/sarahjwells/status/ ... 32384?s=09

As evidenced by all the cancelled flights at Gatwick yeaterday, which is (obviously) not normal.

Our island is too big. And fog doesn't like to pay tax, so it goes to the IOM.

http://retroresolution.com/2015/10/26/3d-monster-maze-sinclair-zx81-review/

"Review" of 3D Monster Maze (ZX81)

Does anyone know of a website that will find the optimum route between a number of waypoints.

Does anyone know of a website that will find the optimum route between a number of waypoints.

Is it round Britain rally time again?

http://findthebestroute.com

Trying to work out if it's possible to get a photo of all 14 surviving UK Vulcan bombers in 24 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulc ... on_display

Could you not just put the first 10 waypoints into Google Maps, then do a second route for the other 4, and overlay them in Photoshop or something?

Helicopter

An excellent plan, with just two minor drawbacks.

I remember watching some documentary a while back about algorithms and this type of problem was given as an example of one which is surprisingly difficult to solve. The Travelling Salesman Problem or something they called it.

It is tricky to find the most optimum solution, so many things try stuff at random and dispose of any that are not as good as the best so far until they hit n cycles and call a winner. At least, that is how I would design it.

You don't do it at random, you try every possibility until you can't get any further in less steps that you could on a previous run.

I've had to do it a few times when making games - it's the same problem for finding the most optimum route across a game board.

The traveling salesman problem is easy to state, and — in theory at least — it can be easily solved by checking every round-trip route to find the shortest one. The trouble with this brute force approach is that as the number of cities grows, the corresponding number of round-trips to check quickly outstrips the capabilities of the fastest computers. With 10 cities, there are more than 300,000 different round-trips. With 15 cities, the number of possibilities balloons to more than 87 billion.

1) he doesn't have a helicopter and
2) he doesn't have a helicopter.

Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.

You don't do it at random, you try every possibility until you can't get any further in less steps that you could on a previous run.

I've had to do it a few times when making games - it's the same problem for finding the most optimum route across a game board.

I literally have a PhD in this. Good luck solving the travelling salesman -- of any NP-complete problem -- via brute force for non-trivial problem sizes.

That's Dijkstra's algorithm. It can only between two points, it can't consider routes (a key part of the TSP.) It runs in polynomial time, so can't scale to large problems. And it's naively greedy, so on some networks will always fail to find the best solution.

Presumably if you are trying to program this, you can discount a load of combinations right at the start, as it's never going to be quickest to go from London to Scotland, then back to Southend, etc

That's Dijkstra's algorithm. It can only between two points, it can't consider routes (a key part of the TSP.) It runs in polynomial time, so can't scale to large problems. And it's naively greedy, so on some networks will always fail to find the best solution.

According to Cormen et al, Dijkstra's algorithm runs in O((E + V) log V) and so actually scales pretty well.

I've never heard mention that it could fail.