From over here, this had me chuckling:
Category: Articles
Waterstones, Chelmsford
We popped into Chelmsford yesterday, mainly so Caroline could renew her driving licence (nearest post office with the facility to take her photo too) and, as is usual before these trips, I first printed up some of my bookmarks. I then went to Waterstones and offered to sign my books there. They were fine with that as usual and I went through about the 10 – 15 copies on the shelf. Meanwhile I was passing a greedy eye over a big fat Vernor Vinge tome, but on closer inspection discovered it to be a repackaging of Fire Upon the Deep & Deepness in the Sky, so gave it a miss. However, while browsing I did see some stuff I wanted to try. In the end I left Waterstones with the lot below:
Update:
Nope, I screwed up. The Vernor Vinge one isn’t a repackaging – I must have misread on the quick glance inside I had. I’ll be buying a copy shortly.
Get those Tobacco Seeds in.
The future of The Departure is closer than you think. Take for example this little wheeze (excuse the pun) suggested by Simon Chapman in that hotbed of totalitarianism, Australia. Now, maybe you don’t agree with smoking, but remember that where the anti-smokers lead the anti-alcohol, fat, sugar (name your poison) brigade follow:
Under the proposal, a license would give the smoker a right to a limited quota of tobacco supply, say 10 cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day and so on. There is a fee payable to government to give the consumer the right to use tobacco. The more tobacco the license holder pre‑commits to smoke, the higher the license fee involved.
Under the licensing plan consumers would be asked to pass a test, ‘not dissimilar to a driving test’ Chapman stated, to qualify for a right to receive a license to legally purchase tobacco.
Based on the questionable notion that smokers lack an awareness of at least three decades of heavily publicised research about health problems that smoking causes, the government would see itself fit to decide for the smoker the amount of cigarettes he or she is allowed to smoke.
Read this guys additional comments below as well. Coming your way soon: a licence to fart.
Last Kazani
Linear no Threshold Hypothesis
With junk science, it is easy to scare people. There are many things that are bad for us that are present at low levels in the environment — for example, mercury, lead, radiation, or tobacco smoke. The junk science approach to trace toxins is to claim that if a high level of the bad thing would cause X people to get sick, then a level 10,000 times smaller must cause 1/10,000 as many people to get sick. Given 300 million people in the country, this math can give you thousands of people getting sick from low levels of mercury, lead, radiation, or secondhand tobacco smoke. This approach is known as the linear no threshold hypothesis.
So considering this approach, don’t you think this toxic substance should be banned or controlled?
Gotta love Fusion
This looks promising (check comments).
They are over halfway through this funded (about $8 million) project. This part is just one step towards commercial fusion and if successful could justify a $200 million follow up to develop a full commercial scale system.
As one commenter notes:
In earlier statements it was explained that WB-8 was only going to be produced if WB7/7.1 were successful — i.e. validated WB-6 results. I think we can assume that happened. WB-8 is to determine scaling. This means a lot of testing to provide a lot of conclusive data for peer review. The fact that the research is ongoing, means they’ve hit no serious snags – the contract would end if they did. This is a very very positive report, do not listen to the naysayers.
We Ain't Looking Hard Enough!
Here’s a little bit over at The Register related to the Fermi Paradox:
The problem, according to boffins Jacob Haqq-Misra and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu of Penn State uni, is that it’s entirely possible that our Solar System is littered with ancient alien space probes and we simply haven’t found them yet. Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu have investigated this mathematically.
Of course it might also be the case that we have no idea what they might look like. Maybe they wrap them up in a big black rock the size of an aircraft carrier…
Hal, the new Robotsuit
Too Close for Comfort
Bloody hell. I caught this out of the corner of my eye on a recent news report but didn’t follow up on it. So, from The Register:
A vast, inky black sphere approximately the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier is plunging through the void of space towards planet Earth, though NASA rather panickily insists that it will definitely not smash into our planet with devastating force.
“The asteroid safely will safely fly past our planet slightly closer than the moon’s orbit on Nov 8”, says a NASA statement issued yesterday (our emphasis), perhaps indicating a certain level of flap at the space agency’s press office.
Now excuse me ‘slightly closer than the moon’s orbit’! In astronomical terms that’s what called too fucking close for comfort. No wonder there’s a bit of buttock clenching going on, and that’ll increase if someone’s calculations are a bit off. Of course, if this ‘blacker than charcoal object’ were to slightly alter its course and fall into orbit around Earth I suspect there’ll be a bit of pants filling too.
For Frack's Sake
On (I think) April 2nd last year this happened:
While we sat in the sunshine sipping cold beers the earth shrugged, grumbled then continued shaking. Some people ran out into the street – one Greek woman all hysterical and crossing herself and doubtless praying to the god who chucks tsunamis about. We remained seated, since we weren’t anywhere anything was going to fall on us, and watched the street lamps whipping about like reeds and nearby trees thrashing. I’ve experienced quakes here before but never seen that.
As far as I recollect this was an earthquake of 6.3 on the Richter scale. On April 1st and May 27th fracking in Lancashire caused, respectively quakes of 2.3 and 1.4, and immediately the media and green hairshirts were shouting for a moratorium on this country accessing an energy supply that might just drag us out of the pit (in fact, do a search of ‘fracking’ and yu get pages and pages of hysteria). So let’s take a look at the Richter scale:
Here is the simplest explanation of it:
A logarithmic scale used to express the total amount of energy released by an earthquake. Its values typically fall between 0 and 9, with each increase of 1 representing a 10-fold increase in energy.
So, the earthquake I experienced in Crete was roughly 10,000 times stronger than the strongest one caused by fracking. In fact, as you can see from the graph the lowest one is in the region of ‘not felt’ and the highest one is ‘minor’.
Now go read Counting Cats and the comments. This one I find particularly illuminating;
A butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico will cause small seismic tremors in Lancashire. Even the lefty dolts at wikipedia know that earthquakes under 2.0 occur “continuously” and those of 2.0-2.9 are ‘Generally not felt, but recorded.’ with 1.3 million of them per year.
Let’s do some maths. A 2.0 quake has 63 MJ of energy, a 2.5 one has 360 MJ. Gasoline contains about 35 MJ/L. Every time some lefty jerk drives to a demo and burns 2 litres of gas he releases as much energy as a 2.0 quake. For a 2.5 quake the dolt has to drive for a couple of hours. Big deal.
Devil’s Kitchen also has something to say…
Update
Here’s a link to an interesting report passed onto me. If this sort of stuff is of interest to you then read it carefully and consider the words ‘correlation is not causation’, or even, ‘which came first the chicken or the egg?’ Remember too that one of the big criticisms of the alarmist film ‘Gaslands’ was that people had methane in their water supply before any fracking.