Fruit Machine Chat

okay bear with me on this.

imagine an astronaut gets in radio contact with a little green man and he speaks to the alien then nine of his colleagues also do.
what could they deduce about his appearance if he reports that he has spoken to 14 earthlings?

Well he couldn't count so... was he wearing a burberry cap?

They use a number system based on 6, not decimal ?

harry2 wrote:They use a number system based on 6, not decimal ?

yes, and by extension what can you tell about how he looks?

Three fingers (instead of five) on each hand?

Weyland hits the target, assist by Harry.

Almost current question (from last week):

Why are CDs 74 minutes in length?

so they can fit beethoven's fifth?

Ah, you've clearly read the same article at me.

But nope - not quite.

darn!
i'm away for a few days so it is just as well my short-term memory is buggered.

I thought CDs were around 78 minutes long?

A standard CD has 333,000 sectors. A CD played at 1x reads 75 sectors/second. This gives us (333000/75) seconds of playing time, or (333000/(75*60)) minutes.

So why do I have some old compilation CDs that run up to 78 / 79 minutes?

I believe this is similar to the old cassette tapes, where you could have longer ones if they had 'thinner' tape on the reels. Of course, quality suffers as the tape was not up to standard. You can get CDs that go up to 80 minutes, although I'm not sure if they meet the 'red book' standard, as in, they may be inferior.

As for the answer to the question, me no idea!

74 minutes was the first released standard. However, the stack of blanks on my desk claims to be 80 minutes.

The boy named Sue was almost right - right composer, wrong symphony.