Simon Bradshaw

I was in our local WH Smiths the other day and saw that they had a load of Star Wars kits in, including Revell's kit of the Snowspeeder from The Empire Strikes Back. It was only £6, and I wanted to have a simple kit to practice some painting and weathering techniques on. Well, I had a free weekend for the first time in ages, and during a recent sort-out I'd gathered together all the left-over decals from other kits I'd done. An idea started to form itself...

Snowspeeder GR.1 of 9 Squadron, RAF







It's a very easy kit to put together, and ends up about 10cm long. It says on the box it's 1:52 scale; that's hardly a common scale for model kits, and I suspect someone's just divided the size of the full-size filming prop by the size of the model. That being said, from the size of the two crew this is more like 1:72, and I suspect that the filming prop probably wasn't 'full size' or in proportion.

Pedantic nit-pickers will note that the serial is from the early 1960s (it's from a Gnat kit) and the RAF markings are of a style not used on front-line aircraft since the early 1980s. I suggest that given the subject matter we can all suspend our disbelief a little...

Finally, here she is zipping her way through the Welsh valleys on a low-level sortie:

I was at a model show the other week where one of the dealers had a whole boxful of mini-kits based on the Minions from Despicable Me. I thought it might be nice to show attimes_bracing that I'm not stuck making models of planes, so I had a root around for one she might find amusing.

Well, she enjoyed Dredd, so...



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He's about 6cm tall, and I went as close as I could to the comic colour scheme.

Yes, the badge does say BANANA.

This is inspired, but is giving me flashbacks to the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow and Reductio Ad Absurdum's production of Dune, or The Sand of Music...



Bonus points for the end-title parody complete with appropriate filk of a completely different Toto song!

In a friends-locked post of mine purplecthulhu commented on a report about a US court ordering the parties to resolve a trivial dispute via Rock-Paper-Scissors by suggesting that the variant with Lizard and Spock be used. I responded by suggesting that the higher the court the more complex the game should be, and proposed Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock-Starfish-Unicorn-Shotglass-Segway for the Supreme Court.

Now cuboid_ursinoid wants that as a T-Shirt. So I suppose we need some rules.

It turns out that N-option generalised Rock-Paper-Scissors works so long as:

- There is an odd number of options.
- Each options beats exactly half the other options and is beaten by the other half of them.

So, trivially, in classic RPS, Rock is beaten (wrapped) by paper and beats (breaks) scissors, and so on. RPS-5 adds two new options:

Spock vaporises Rock and breaks Scissors but is poisoned by Lizard and disproven by Paper.
Lizard eats Paper and poisons Spock but is crushed by Rock and decapitated by Scissors.

Thus RPS-5 has another 7 interactions (we've just listed Spock/Lizard twice) to add to the three in classic RPS for a total of 10.

We thus need more interactions. Indeed, since for RPS-N, there are N(N-1)/2 interactions, for RPS-9 we need 36 interactions of which we already know 10, so we need 26 more! Remember, each new option must defeat half the others and be defeated by the other half of them.

I can think of a few:

Spock rides Segway
Spock dissects Starfish
Shotglass inebriates Spock
Unicorn impales Spock
Rock trips Segway
Starfish grips Rock
Rock smashes Shotglass
Unicorn kicks Rock

...but we need more. So, fire away!

Back to civil work and I'm doing some research in relation to music contracts. One of the relevant cases is John Wadlow v Henry Samuel (performing as Seal), a 2006 case about alleged unfairness in Seal's original recording contract. As I often do I looked up legal articles discussing the case, and found one in Entertainment Law Review by one Matt McKenzie. Reading through it, I got to the final few sentences (my emphasis added):

...any rights of action that Seal had from the original agreement were never going to survive. Previously the position had been a little hazy but the fact that Seal had independent advice in relation to the settlement agreement proved a killer point.

[Slow clap] Oh well done, Mr McKenzie. Well done.

I know it's nearly 20 years since I graduated with a degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, and over the intervening years I've progressed through systems engineer to project engineer to technology lawyer. But I still laughed out loud at today's xkcd.

It was the 'may use an actual sandal instead' that completely cracked me up.