Posts by Dodgy Geezer 1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007
...Why gov food advice might have been wrong all along...
...have been working on the assumption that government advice of all kinds was wrong for the past 10 years.
In many cases it's just pointless, simplistic and non-applicable. But (and this has been increasingly the case recently) whenever it's advice driven by activists who have hijacked a government department) it's frequently evil....
...in recent years, there has been an explosion of studies on human behaviour using social media as a barometer for all kinds of predictions about the world we live in now.
"Many of these papers are used to inform and justify decisions and investments among the public and in industry and government,"...
It's not only social media. There has been an explosion in fake science everywhere. It turns out to be easy to feed data from any source into a spreadsheet, and then fiddle with the statistical tools until you get a nice full-colour chart showing you what you want to see.
Activists everywhere are doing this, and then claiming that: "Science says that..." you should do what I say.
If only the educational system had taught people:
1 - to understand maths
2 - to be properly skeptical
But, alas, it's too late now. We have bred a generation of gullible morons and put them in charge of us. Our foreign policy and energy infrastructure are two illustrations of the result. Look for many more appalling similar messes in the future...
...A Home Office mouthpiece ignored our questions and instead sent us a press release full of the dodgy stats, along with the statement: “We won't be adding anything further.”...
A question addressed to your friendly local MP should get the HO to disgorge...
...At this point it's important to note that firearm certificate (FAC) and shotgun certificate (SGC) fees do not offer shooters anything other than the ability to purchase a firearm or a shotgun, unlike angling licenses where the fee revenue goes towards maintaining rivers and so on. ...
Tell me about it. I used to fly radio controlled model aircraft back in the days when you needed a license for them. We were told that the cost of the license went to ensure an allocation of radio spectrum so that our aircraft were safe from interference. Then along came Citizens Band, and the government just sat there and did nothing. They kept taking the license money, though...
... Workers should be made fully aware of the consequences to their personal data should the company decide to carry out a forensic examination of the device or perform a remote wipe, Honan adds. Guidelines to avoid shoulder surfing and eavesdropping should be handed to employees,...
Er... It's MY device. That MEANS that the company can't fiddle with it or tell me how to use it.
Quite how you do security in that situation beats me - this proponent seems to think that the way you do it is by giving your device to the company. Why can't someone point out that they're trying to square the circle?
...Some cloud locker services are suspected of actively colluding with pirates and creaming off revenue from advertising, copyright cops once told us. ...
I'm sure that they are also suspected of hosting paedophile links, terrorist plans and climate-change denier plots. And any other smear the 'copyright cops' can think up. Perhaps they'll bring back Communism?
..this theory suffers from the way humans consider new ideas.
It was a theory pushed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1970s, and at that time it was laughed at, and therefore defined as nutty by the scientific establishment. Consequently, it should not be taken seriously by anyone, and limited or no research should be done on it. Certainly not until both the early proponents die, and Wickramasinghe is still alive.
Once he is dead, it will be ok to research it again, and, if it turns out to be true, there will be no need for any embarrassing apology.
Quite a lot of scientific advances involve waiting for the original proposer to die so that no one has to say "Dear me, how stupid we were then...". Wegener's Continental Drift Theory comes to mind.
Just thought I'd mention it...
...I often wonder why it is that people bother publishing “research” papers that are obviously incorrect. Is it that they're getting paid to spout bollocks?..
No, it's simpler than that.
It's that people WANT to read that kind of thing, and they will pay money to do so. The newspapers do not exist to be a public service - they exist to make a profit. Bad news sells. Research papers which come to some fiddly technical balanced conclusion don't sell.
That's why we're effectively fed a load of lies. Because we like it...
...Vodafone had indeed wrongfully disclosed more data than the police had asked for, but concluded the telco had not done so on purpose...
Last time I looked, UK law didn't allow for 'an accident' to be an adequate defence against a breach of the law.
Vodaphone cocked up. Therefore Vodaphone data protection procedures were inadequate, or were not properly enforced. Therefore they are in breach of the Data Protection Act, and a fine is in order.
That's what happens to everyone else. The fine needn't be large, if it was a true accident and they co-operated. But a fine it should be. Otherwise, what a precedent!
...some fool repeated the received wisdom that the population will start to fall after reaching 9,000 million around 2050. Not going to happen. ..
"Some fool" was repeating the consensus opinion of the world's population specialists, who have been commissioned to do multiple studies into this area.
Perhaps you could tell us the basis for your rejection of all this work? Perhaps all the scientists are conspiring because they have been bribed by Big Oil?
I think it's worse - I think it shows the classic view that the Arts graduates have of Engineering, and the Sciences generally.
The Barbie books are meant to show Barbie being successful. The people who wrote this obviously thought that they WERE showing Barbie as successful. They just didn't have the first clue about what a 'Computer Engineer' did.
And, being Arts types, they didn't feel the need to find out. They just decided it was something to do with computer games, and involved talking to geeks. So that's what they wrote.
You or I would have had a plot involving the school not being able to allocate classrooms or trace equipment, and Barbie putting together a database application to sort this out - testing and documenting the same. I really don't think that Arts students connect that sort of thing with computers at all. They just think that services 'happen'...
...Re: ...for the nth time....
Building them and getting them to only explode in the direction you want them to is indeed engineering.
But getting them to fly to where you want them to is science.
Building them and getting them to fly ANYWHERE is engineering.
Deciding where to fly them and why is science.
...into the idea that Philae has gathered the data it was supposed to gather.
This is not true, as a glance at the Mission Aims statement will show you. Philae was meant to touch down on the surface, and then send back data AS THE COMET STARTED OUTGASSING on its way to perihelion. That would be next summer.
The initial data set is fine, and it's a great achievement to have placed the craft on the surface of a comet. But, because they were relying on solar power, and because of the poor landing, Philae will probably not be able to fulfill its primary mission.
Just thought I'd mention this...
...it doesn't make sense to extrapolate, on the basis of 3 (three) disasters, that the nuclear is safe Build 1000 TIMES that many nuclear power-stations we already have on this planet - and see how many disasters happen...
So, you are saying that we don't have enough stations to make a proper prediction, and we should build more to get one - but we mustn't build more because we don't have a proper prediction...?
...if you advocate lowering safety standards (... common sense tells me that when you lower safety standards, you increase...of something going wrong,...
If your safety standards are currently at sensible minimums, lowering them will cause more accidents. If your safety standards are currently at stupidly high maximums, lowering them will cause few problems.
But the British/American governing classes, so fatally committed to renewables, often seem willing to listen to Google even if they won't listen to anyone else.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), I believe, rather than H. L. Mencken...
The calculations behind this are NOT NEW. Some engineers have been saying this for 10 years or more. They have been ignored, sidelined and sacked if they kept saying it.
The only thing that's changed here is that society is slowly stopping vilifying people who raise these objections. This whole extraordinary popular delusion has cost humanity many billions - trillions before it will be finished, and has set back human progress by about 30 years.
..The unexpected success caught me by surprise.....
I suggest that you look at the mission aims. The idea was to put a lander on the surface of the comet TO FILM THE OUTGASSING PROCESS AS IT PASSES PERIHELION.
We have got a lander onto the surface, but it won't be able to do its main job come perihelion next year. I count that as a failure.
...that getting data back from the lander means the mission was a success.
A glance at the mission statement will show you that the idea was to examine a comet as it passed perihelion and started out-gassing, from two positions - orbit and on the surface. Now, because of the bounce into shade, we effectively only have one observation position. Perihelion was when the most interesting science would have been done...
The lander is in a poor photo position. It's also in a poor solar power position, which has resulted in it being closed down fro lack of power. It might come back as the sun gets nearer, though intense cold can damage electronics and batteries. An RTG would have kept it warm, and at least enabled gas sampling experiments to continue up to perihelion in the middle of next year.
ESA are putting a brave face on it, but the mission has been dealt a heavy blow. It's interesting to note that they didn't use an RTG because Pu-238 is pretty rare now that the US stopped making it in the 1980s. ESA are actually commissioning research into making RTGs out of Americium, so that will improve matters.
The big lesson, though, it that it's hard to land on an object with very little gravitational force to help. No doubt that lesson will be applied to later missions...
...Just tell UKIP's backers that it's an energy containment field for "Europeness" and they'll pay for the whole thing....
Actually, the same excuse would also guarantee large sums of funding from the European Commission. Their view of Europe is one where outside trade is rigorously excluded unless it follows their rules.
It could also be a method of stopping any dissatisfied country, like the UK, leaving....
...you find that this is simply a comparison of flight times for bees and opening times of orchids.
ALL other suggestions are just that; suggestions. So there is an assumption that once a male bee copulates with a female bee he is shagged out and uninterested in an alluring orchid. I don't know whether that's true or not.
There also seems to be an assumption that early and frequent copulation will have no impact on bee numbers. I would have thought it would raise them considerably, to the benefit of the orchid.
There is no information about courtship ritual given at all. All animals undertake this - it allows the female to select an appropriate male. I would have thought that rejected bees would definitely be 'round the orchid' no matter what the timings...
All in all, a classic example of mentioning climate change to get a pretty mediocre paper published...
"...The Earth is in turmoil, all the crops are dying of blight and everyone is doomed, so admittedly, it’s not a particularly cheery premise...
Ah. So we need to set up a decent sized hydroponics facility in orbit, then? That would seem to be the obvious activity. Where do black holes come into that?
...for the first time wind power generated more than nuclear, about 20% if I recall correctly..
Er, yes. The Grid is forced by law to take as much energy as the wind farms can put out. So, when demand is very low and the wind is high, all other generators have to turn their power down and wind gets to produce a high percentage of the total. For a few hours. When we don't necessarily need it....
..and the brighter business people should be working on making storage solutions..
Not me! I'm working on producing Unicorn Dust to make the world a nicer fluffier place...
You betray your authoritarian attitudes when you suggest that people 'ought to' be making something beyond the current state of technology so that your dreams can be achieved.
...unless such front-door access was granted to the Feds then "homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk free, and child exploitation might not be discovered or prosecuted." He also warned terrorists could use social media to "recruit, plan, and execute an attack...
Yeah? Even if I believed that, I'd think it a cheap price to pay to keep the FBI out of my phone...
"...Even if it's lying about everything, it's still going to be the basis for public policy..."
If you are actually happy to leave things there and not complain about using lies as the basis for public policy, then our society will have problems compared to which issues of energy generation will pale into insignificance.
Is it really the case that no one cares about the truth any more? Really, not being ruled by lies is SO fundamental. It underpins EVERYTHING. And you don't care...?
...authorities could get away with filing several of these in that particular bin, if they wanted to. Certainly the one about dragons....
But I WANT to respond to the one about dragons!
At the moment I'm not too sure if I would use the RAF, a staunch man of Laketown with a special arrow, or Pratchett's Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna Ramkin-Vimes....
...It's concerning that such a "looks at what these fools are asking!" piece includes asteroid impacts. They clearly think that is a daft concern. Whereas it's quite a logical worry, though a local council is not the place to raise it...
Actually, it's quite reasonable. It's very sensible to have plans for what would happen in the event of a major natural disaster of any kind happening sufficiently nearby for survivors to be likely to arrive in the area in large numbers. If I were a council I would expect my plans would be:
1 - in the event of being hit by an asteroid: go up in smoke.
2 - in the event of a nearby county/country being hit: prepare lists of useful services and places of refuge, move as many local people out as I could, contact central government and offer the services I had documented.
..by now I have no confidence that ANY research on the scarcity of species is reliable. It all seems to be done by activists with the aim of maintaining grant money.
And, in the unlikely event that the research IS valid, and that something ought to be done about trading in these items, I am also sure that whatever regulations are proposed, they are going to have the opposite effect to that intended.
By far the most common situation is that regulations are set up to enrich someone involved with the regulators...
...and the something is Prof Julian Simon.
Julian Simon pointed out back in the 1970s and 1980s that resources are NOT items like oil and coal.
Oil and coal are RAW MATERIALS. If you take raw materials and multiply by HUMAN INGENUITY you get resources. That is why, for instance, we have composites and plastics nowadays while they did not have these in the 1600s - although they had the raw materials then. They just did not count rock oil and sand as useful raw materials because human ingenuity had not developed them at that time.
In the 1600s they were VERY worried about running out of oak trees. It took a lot of them to make a fighting ship, and Britain depended on its navy. Navy procurement could easily see that, come the middle 1800s, we would have no wood to make ships, and could easily be invaded. And yet, by 1900, we had the biggest navy in the world.
This happened because human ingenuity made a new and better resource out of something that had not been able to be used before. We do this all the time - throughout all recorded history. Various raw materials will run out at various times. But human ingenuity is probably infinite. Meaning that resources will never run out.
Just look at the track record of the Club of Rome, and then look at the track record of human development. Different, aren't they...?
Read Blish if you want detailed accuracy.
He goes into the maths of warp drives with Blackett-Dirac equations , explains sodium carbide poisoning of ice IV under Jupiter-surface conditions using a skeletal formula, and has authentic invocation seals and characters in his black magic scenes....
... As it is a first offence then it is likely that the ICO will not issue a fine to the ICO ....
Nonsense! As the formal body enforcing the DPA, the ICO ought to know better, and be subject to much higher standards than the general public. Indeed, it made exactly this point when fining a financial organisation recently for having a laptop stolen which had unencrypted personal data on it.
I suggest that the ICO fines the ICO a sum equal to its ENTIRE assets. That will show that the DPA is not to be trifled with...
There is NO shortage of water. We have cubic kilometers of it available for each person on the planet.
And, interestingly, there would be NO SHORTAGE of water if we only had a quarter of the water that we do now. Because water is NOT DESTROYED as it is being used. It passes through all of nature, including us, in the hydrological cycle. We simply put our hands in and take what we need.
What there IS a shortage of, however, particularly in SE England, is water storage, purification and distribution facility.As more people live in the SE, we should store and process more water to supply them. But we haven't - in fact, it has been a government decision to provide us with 20% less infrastructure than is ideally needed. Because an EU directive has said that we must use 20% less water.
The Water Companies are really happy about this, of course, because that lets them keep their profits rather than spending them on more reservoirs. So the water flows away when it is rainy, and is no longer in the system when it is dry. But the water still exists. It is a shortage of reservoirs we should be complaining about....
We have already been told that, accordingly to impeccably peer reviewed scientific studies, if you don't believe in catastrophic AGW you are clinically insane, a wife-beater, a paedophile and personally responsible for all the deaths in the Third World since 1960.
From this I surmise that the temperatures are still not going up like they said they would....
Antarctic sea ice has expanded to record levels for April, increasing by more than 110,000sq km a day last month to nine million square kilometres.
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre said the rapid expansion had continued into May and the seasonal cover was now bigger than the record “by a significant margin’’.
“This exceeds the past record for the satellite era by about 320,000sq km, which was set in April 2008,’’ the centre said.
I wonder how that squares with the news that Antarctica is melting...?
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