Re: My solution...
@Shades: Nice work. I hope you got the job.
1321 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Although there may be a few articles which aren't so good without the pictures, in general the site seems much improved when they are blocked. Thanks to ABP it's possible to read the home page without too much effort. I'd imagine most people visit the Reg to read and hopefully learn something useful rather than to gawp.
@vagabondo: I'd wondered why I was getting unsolicited calls on a new mobile phone when I'd only given the number to half a dozen close friends and to the NHS so they could send appointment reminders. I had assumed that their reminder texts would be generated locally from the JR hospital's recently installed booking system, but if this has been outsourced it could well explain the unwanted calls.
Pint for holding out for what 'public service' is about.
I've got a hundred quid that says the average temperature based on a 'reasonable bucket' will be higher in the next twenty years than it was in the last twenty. If you can get Lewis to match this, with the pot going into a tracker fund or similar, winner takes all, then I'm on.
Come to think about it, if the 'deniers' will offer longer odds than evens then it might be possible to crowd fund climate prevention measures this way. The wager package might be a nice present to leave to one's grandchildren. I wonder what the tax position is?
There doesn't seem to be any mention of efforts to mitigate after-effects. I can't help but wonder that, albeit conducted in a reasonable environment, programmes such as this might be rather upsetting for the participants; and adverse effects could appear quite a while after the tests. Perhaps follow-up studies in five and ten years time will shed light on this aspect.
There's a fairly clear argument favour of smaller grid-powered base stations both in reduced energy costs and overall improved reliability. However Yuyi Mao and co. appear to have entirely overlooked the aspects of capital, environmental and service costs of their rather extravagant hardware proposal.
I'm not sure that the Blair/Blunkett/Straw approach was that much better. Neither is your vote likely to change anything.
What it it needs is active democracy: for enough people to be regularly contacting their MP, and others, to point out that surveillance by gauleiters does not engender morality.
What exactly? I've opted out (twice) because I can't see how having a centralised copy of information will improve efficiency or accountability. Duplication does, however, seem likely to introduce errors; and the single massive store makes loss/theft of data a near certainty.
The new streetlights that are being installed in many cities are certainly bluish. The research here and in another paper I noticed seems to show that only a little short wavelength light can have a significant effect. Is there likely to be enough stray light from streetlights to cause the sort of problems mentioned? Should we be asking for warm white in addition to the energy saving dimming between midnight and five a.m.?
Perhaps the authorities could take note of the findings of Professor Nutt, and the committee members who resigned when he was sacked. To decriminalise recreational drugs would free up a great deal of police time and reduce the volume of clutter on law enforcement radar. Also with fewer doors being kicked in to no real advantage there might over time be an improvement in public co-operation.
http://drugscience.org.uk/
Wasn't there a problem with the power supply a few years ago? As I dimly recall, there was a component like a smoothing capacitor in the common feed and it was this that failed. The power supply went down and the UPS came up and was connected to a short; or something along those lines. Everything worked perfectly apart from an unlikely fault that no one had foreseen.
Aside from that, according to research published in the BMJ in 2005, "There is an association between childhood leukaemia and proximity of home address at birth to high voltage power lines..." Why this should be is not yet entirely clear.
http://www.bmj.com/content/330/7503/1290?linkType=FULL&journalCode=bmj&resid=330/7503/1290
"... seek research funding ..."
Research has already been done, e.g. 'A 50-Hz electromagnetic field impairs sleep' in the Journal of Sleep Research. There also seems to have been quite a bit of interest in modulation of melatonin production by static or low-frequency electrical fields.
e.g. http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/8098713
It will be interesting to see whether the new style of street lighting using LEDs affects sleep patterns and whether scare stories develop like those about mobile 'phones.
Here's a recent paper from PLoS Genetics describing experiments which show that EM fields do have an effect on living tissue. This involves the intriguingly named blue-light sensitive photoreceptor cryptochrome.
Genetic Analysis of Circadian Responses to Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields in Drosophila melanogaster
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1004804
The introduction provides a good overview of EMF sensing by flies.
"A comprehensive, 21-year analysis of the fastest-melting region of Antarctica has found that the melt rate of glaciers there has tripled during the last decade." - from a study by UCI and NASA glaciologists.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141202183313.htm
Where the internet differs from other areas of life is that it's relatively easy to be anonymous. In the playground there's a possibility that at least some of the others who see bullying may point out that it's not a particularly nice thing to do. On the 'net this peer pressure is largely absent.
It's not easy to find solution, but it might make the world a little better if some of the less desirable aspects of human nature could be moderated.
The Environment Agency already monitors river levels at each lock plus a few other locations. In most places in Oxford the local water level tracks very closely with this, following within an hour or two because the water flows quite easily through the gravel layers that underlie the flood plain.
Details of water levels have been available on the 'net for a couple of years; a commendable effort, even though the graphical data is perhaps not in the most convenient form and reliability may leave a little to be desired
e.g. http://apps.environment-agency.gov.uk/river-and-sea-levels/136497.aspx?stationId=7072
What would be really useful is if the Environment Agency were also to make available sluice settings and the estimated flow rates both through and around locks. With this and with data for recent raindfall and near-term forecasts in the appropriate catchment areas it would be possible to predict likely levels quite accurately. Already an 'educated guess' for the next day or two can be made simply by looking at the upstream river levels and their changes.
Unfortunately the Environment agency seems to hold onto details of data such as actual flow rates as if this were a national secret in wartime. Perhaps as well as having a few Mr Mannerings in their midst, with vital roles is the so-called bronze, silver and gold control centres which are set up to handle the crisis and control civilian populations during floods, they are also concerned that people may be a bit upset when management decisions are made which have the effect of flooding one area rather than another.
The C, O and N most likely came from fusion in stars; the H seems to be quite widely distributed. Organic molecules are likely to form quite readily in space; and clearly enough arrived on the young Earth for life to start.
But panspermia, the idea that rather than arising spontaneously on Earth life came from space, carried by bacteria or spores of somesuch, seems to me to be an unnecessary and unsupported complication. The notion of life being carried to Earth on a comet seems to me to be nothing more than a techno-recast of a sky Daddy myth. Even worse, the idea that evolution proceeds as a result of directed panspermia is nothing more than a big boy's wet-dream.
To say that life exists throughout the universe and therefore it exists on Earth doesn't do anything much to explain how it comes about in the first place, or how it starts up on a sterile planet. Neither does it help appreciation of the more subtle details of how living things differ from non-living organic chemicals.