Yesterday I went to Imperial College to see two talk / roadshow things. The first was the Ig Nobel roadshow which lasted about two hours and had talks from the chap who runs the Ig Nobel awards and also from four scientists who had won the prize. The Ig Nobels are awarded for science that:
makes you laugh, then makes you think
It was a lovely couple of hours hearing about the endeavours of scientists from around the world trying to make the world a better place.
Ig Nobel Roadshow
I laughed and smirked and reveled in the atmosphere of nerdery and geekiness. You can watch it below:
After an intermission of a couple of hours there was the London round of BAHFest. The Bad Ad-hoc Hypothesis Festival. I went last year and enjoyed it immensely. I really liked it again this time around. The ideas were delightful and thoroughly entertaining. Watch it now:
Hopefully my calendar will allow me to go next year. Such a delightful event.
As part of my trip around Lincolnshire I spent a few hours outside Coningsby watching the Typhoons. They are pretty loud when taking off although one did set my car alarm off by doing a full-afterburner take off and heading straight up to 15,000 feet.
Eurofighter Typhoon
I also went to the BBMF hangar and looked around the various types they have there. Here’s their Lancaster:
Avro Lancaster PA474
I also saw another Lancaster at ex RAF East Kirkby.
Just Jane – Avro Lancaster
However, the main reason for being a hundred and sixty miles from home was to be relatively close to RAF Marham so I could try and see some Tornados flying before they end their airborne days. I had noticed there was a NOTAM out for Marham on the Friday and so I planned to be there about half an hour before the start of whatever it was. I figured that if it wasn’t the Tornados it would be a Lightning II and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing to see. I still haven’t seen one fly and I could only just make out two in real life over the other side of the airfield.
Sortie – Rolling
I was lucky. There were five Tornados going up and preparing for a final display and fly past later in the month. It was really good to see them taxiing.
Tonka Formation – RAF Marham
After about an hour over the North Sea doing their stuff they headed back to Marham but not before I had seen four F15s fly over and then three KC-135s in formation. They were a sight to see!
So I have two Tornado stories for you. The first was at North Weald airshow in the late 80s. My friend Nick and I had cycled from home and couldn’t afford entry so we just parked our bikes inside one of two fences in line with the end of the runway. We figured we weren’t airside and neither were we next to the road, we were in a kind of no-mans land. A Tornado lined up in front of us and then used full re-heat to take off. The noise and vibration was amazing. It was an awesome sight.
Just A Few Flights Left
My next anecdote involves me being a cadet at RAF Coningsby in 1988. I was allowed to sit in the cockpit of a Tornado ADV and I played with the throttle. I was later told that doing this had dumped some fuel in the engine, but I wasn’t concerned. Later that night I was on the flight line “helping” and the aircraft I had been sitting in refused to start. It looks like I broke it [a little].
Head On – Panavia Tornado
While at Marham the spotters got our own little airshow and it was such a delight. It was a special time to see these aircraft doing what they were meant to do, which is fly, for the last time.
I should add in that while in Cyprus on cadet camp there were Typhoons and Tornados taking off every evening to bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq and I remember watching them leave while we were at the beach bar on Akrotiri. The after burners, the noise and the sight was spectacular. Tornados going to do the job they were designed for.
I’ve been thinking about time. Well, let’s face it I think about lots of things all the time but time is problematic. I was mostly thinking about this at the turn of the year, when 2018 magically turned into 2019 or the start of the nth journey around the sun when starting from an arbitrary point. I mean starting the new year on the day after the shortest day for the northern hemisphere would be more sensible but I guess we could have a war with the southern hemisphere about that.
Midnight is the first moment of the next day. When the clock hits 00:00 that is the start of the next day. The previous day ends at a moment which is the limit of all time before 00:00. Twelve AM is the beginning of that day. Such is the definition.
Now, here’s the problem and it involves language and colloquialisms as is often the case with problems about definitions. Within mathematics there are plenty of words which have specific definitions in the subject and different meanings in casual language, I mean that was designed that way originally to exclude the masses from education.
So, if I said to you I will meet you “at midnight on Thursday” then it is likely that we would be talking about meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday. But, if I said I’d meet you at 12am on Thursday that would probably mean we were still meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday but in reality that time is the boundary between Wednesday and Thursday.
Thinking about this now I think it would be only me having problems with a meeting time of “midnight on Thursday” and in a group discussion I would be the one asking for clarification whereas everyone else would be perfectly happy with the understanding of the meeting time. Oh how I hate language sometimes.
This one is easy pickings really. Almost everything written in the Daily Express is rubbish and it has been amongst the leaders of our “free press” stoking the embers of racism and nationalism over the last few years. But, let’s stick with science:
Express Distress
I took this clip of the Daily Express two days ago. It’s a photo that was shared widely through the press and you’ve probably seen it.
It is a good photograph and quite stunning. Although we can’t see the right hand corner of the iceberg and I couldn’t see any other views of this iceberg so I wonder how rectangular it is and how many people’s brains will fill in another right angle.
I’m more interested in the words that the Express uses.
“Nature can do straight lines” – yep, knew that already. Pretty sure light travels in straight lines (at a basic level). Also, notice that the edges of the ice berg aren’t straight. There are bumps and lumps. So, it’s not straight. It just appears that way.
“Eerily perfect 90-degree angles” – hmm, have they measured that? Perfect 90-degrees is pushing it a bit. I mean they can be close to 90 but “perfect”. Bullshit. In the very NEXT paragraph they say the angles can be “about 90-degrees”. So they dismiss their own claim in the VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH.
“Perfect ice rectangle” – but it’s not perfect. What sort of person writes that word in a news article? We can’t see the rest of it. The picture is at an oblique angle so we can’t measure the sides. I doubt the Express have done anything like that.
So, let’s see what NASA said about their photographs:
“I was actually more interested in capturing the A68 iceberg that we were about to fly over, but I thought this rectangular iceberg was visually interesting and fairly photogenic, so on a lark, I just took a couple photos,” Harbeck said.
The photographer took the photos for a lark! Brilliant.
They aren’t all that rectangular:
In fact pretty much all of them are irregular in shape and so the odd one that looks a little special to human brains isn’t that exciting:
How do you get your kit to Antarctica? In a large plane of course. How do you land large plane? Make an ice runway:
Here are a couple of photographs taken of the glorious colours in the morning skies above Kent.
Not The End Of The World
I know they are sunrise because both of these photos have the camera facing to the East.
Orange Glow
The weather for the last few weeks has not been usual. We are in the middle of October and I’ve only had the heating on for two days and that was me being luxurious.
So, what is happening? It is mid-October and I am writing this while wearing shorts and a t-shirt and the house heating most definitely is not on. For some reason the temperatures in this fair land are rather balmy this weekend.
October Weather
Today is 23 Celsius according to the car and tonight is going to be warm. I’m not sure I like it. I’m looking forward to the cold, although not the heating bills that go with that. Tomorrow there’s rain coming and that doesn’t really fit with my plans so I’ll be back to moaning like everyone else I guess.
I’m curious about the level of abnormality for this current weather.
The speedometer in my car over-reads. The car, named Bora Horza Gobuchul, has been with me for a while and I remember being on a motorway thinking that I’ll settle at 60m.p.h. as I wasn’t in a rush. After a while I was being overtaken by HGVs and that was quite disturbing given they have a 58m.p.h. speed limit. So, I got a speed application downloaded from the iTunes store and tested my speed using the phones GPS signal.
The result, my speed, according to my phone, was 54m.p.h.
That explained a lot. I had never tested the speedo in the Beast, there never really seemed to be a need to do it. So I set about testing the readings my car was giving me and it turns out that my speedometer over-reads my speed by 10%.
So, if the car is indicating 70m.p.h. then I’m really going 63/64 m.p.h.
My understanding is that speedometers are allowed, legally, to over-read the speed but NEVER under-read the speed. Because of this rule that they are NOT permitted to under-read means that a tolerance HAS to be included for under-reading. It would be costly for manufacturers to produce speedometers that are “exact”.
So, a car indicating a speed of 70m.p.h. could be doing anything in the range of 63 to 70 m.p.h.
Having tested this and observed the traffic around me and used various different speed testing apps I have now adjusted my speed accordingly. This effect could also be deliberate to try and make Prius drivers drive a little slower and therefore save fuel. You use approximately twice the fuel to travel at 70 than you would at 50m.p.h.
Now, here’s the rub:
My car has a “computer” as they used to be called and it tells me average speed, m.p.g. etc. Over the summer I reset this to zero while travelling on a clear motorway. I set the car’s cruise control to a steady speed of 77m.p.h. and reset the trip computer. Once the computer had enough data it flashed up my average speed: 70m.p.h! This continued over the next ten miles of travel before I had to slow down.
It appears that the car’s trip computer reads or reports the correct speed.
This confuses me. The trip computer either uses a different source for its data OR it knows the correct speed from the existing source. I don’t understand why either of these would be designed like that. The car has a mechanical device for reading the speed OR it could use the GPS system but why over complicate things?
I’ve written here quite a bit about ADS-B and stuff along with tracking aircraft and multi-lateration. Well, I was looking at the aircraft tracking website 360 Radar this evening and spotted an amusing thing.
Almost A Penis
The route shown on the picture is that taken by an RAF Voyager aircraft over the North Sea. The plane took off from RAF Brize Norton and headed out over the Scottish area of the North Sea. The green area is rain and the purple highlights are RAF airfields along with the blue highlights showing civilian airports. What particularly struck me about this picture was the almost-penis drawn as the second area of activity. I think they should have tried a little harder [but would probably get “moved” assignment].
Let’s put this thing into some perspective by adding recognised Danger Areas in red and refuelling training areas in green.
AAR Ranges
Now we can see that the Voyager has maneuvered beautifully through the danger areas and maintained some lovely flight paths in the AAR areas. The plane is currently at 16,000ft and moving at 330 kts. Pretty standard stuff.
It’s amazing to see that this is practiced and practiced to make sure that when it comes to doing this in a real theatre everyone knows exactly what they are doing and it all goes to plan.
On my recent trip to the Lake District I had breakfast in The Filling Station cafe. It’s a lovely little cafe with nice food and a classic soft rock playlist that could shock you.
Jack and Diane(John C-M)
Jump (Van Halen)
New Sensation (Inxs)
I come from a land down under (Men at work)
Stuck with you (Huey Lewis and the news)
Alive and kicking (simple minds)
Manic Monday (the bangles)
I died in your arms tonight (the cutting crew)
At that point I stopped recording what played. It’s almost the same content as my Hits 4 album from 1986. There is also Now That’s What I Call Music 6. These were my first foray into compilation albums. I expect I recorded them onto tape to listen to on a “walkman”.
So, in the cafe they have a free motorbike magazine and as an ex-biker I perused this rather than spend time staring at the mess and disaster on my phone twitter account. Nothing in the magazine was a particular surprise, it looks as though bike technology has moved on quite a bit since my 2001 Super Blackbird and bikes now seem pretty expensive. They are definitely a middle-class weekend thing. It’s not sensible to have one that is your only form of transport as mine was. Racking up over 12,000 miles a year on a motorbike is expensive in terms of servicing, tyres and depreciation. I digress.
So, in this magazine I spotted an advert for TankChip. It struck me as bullshit almost straight away but I am willing to see what evidence there is. Here’s the advert:
TankChip Bullshit
The advert seems to claim that by adding this device to the petrol tank you get more power, performance and acceleration along with an improvement in economy. Now these are some pretty impressive claims. I mean, a device that is cheap and can be added to any petrol tank and improves most characteristics of your engine? It’s almost as if it worked then manufacturers would be adding it to your tank anyway. It’d be a pretty impressive device. IF IT WORKED.
It doesn’t.
On the web page about the technology involved there are zero specific claims about the tankchip. There are plenty of claims and sciency sounding things but not one single claim about the chip itself. go and read it and see if it actually says anything about the chip. There are no testable claims.
So, here’s what happens. You see this advert, believe it, and purchase a crappy piece of plastic. Then you put it in your tank. From that point onward you are pre-disposed to see an improvement. You have paid money. You expect it to work. It will work, in your observation. What happens in reality is that it doesn’t work.
It’s like buying a nice wine. You look at the bottles and decide which one will taste nice. Then you pay plenty of money for that and, surprise!, it tastes nice. More expensive wines taste better than cheap ones. Expensive TVs look better than cheap ones because you are bought in to them.
So, riding your motorbike you expect results and so, unconsciously, drive a little more restrained but also it’ll feel like you are accelerating at a better rate, your engine will feel smoother, because you expect it to. You end up believing that this tankchip has made a difference when in reality nothing has changed. Expectation is a powerful thing.
Another clue that this is a scam is that they offer a money back guarantee. So, you buy this thing. Two things probably happen. You convince yourself it does work or you decide it doesn’t work but either forget about it or are a bit embarrassed you bought it in the first place. Either way, it’s quite likely you won’t bother to get your money back.
I have emailed the company for some information about the testing they performed and here is the response.
Can send you a some extracts from recent tank.chip customer emails when in the office.
As far as testing documents I’m not sure what you are looking for exactly.
So, I explained what I wanted. Testimonials don’t tell me shit. People’s thoughts are the worst way of collecting data because of all the biases of the human brain! That’s why we have science.
Since adding a tank.chip to my Royal Enfield 500 Bullet, performance wise it is more responsive and most importantly the engine has much less vibration at speed, which can be an annoyance when riding a single cylinder retro machine. I don’t know what or how it does it, but wow it sure does. An excellent product.
Barry H, Lincolnshire
I have purchased a tank chip, it seemed a small price to gamble! I am pleasantly surprised. Touring Wales on my Street Triple R ABS my average mpg has gone from its usual 56-58 mpg (at touring speeds) to 64.4 mpg (readout from the dash). That gives me at least an extra 20 miles from my 3gallon tank. Many thanks for a product that really works.
Clive T-B, Essex
Here’s what I asked for:
I was after a more serious test, such as some dyno testing or third party test of the product. Maybe something by a magazine?
Here’s the response I got back. It is a bank holiday weekend here so I expected to wait a little while:
Fast Bikes were setting up a dyno test but not heard anything.
Quite a few bike dealers and tuners repeat buy so I guess they have tested.
We won’t send out our data just yet for a number of reasons but will put something on line in the coming months.
I’m happy to wait for the details and if they get sent to me I will amend this communication. I doubt that any serious testing of this device will give any information or evidence that it works. If it did, then all manufacturers would already fit it. I did see one thread that it may actually include some lead which used to be added to petrol in the olden days to help with combustion and reduce “pinking”. Then we knew that lead poisoned people and campaigners worked to get it removed from petrol.
This device is very similar to the fuel magnets my father gave me about 13 years ago and they secured my descent into skepticism and you can read about that in this communication from six years ago!
I’m having a short phase of ignoring Twitter on my phone, or rather just ignoring my general account where I follow too many people. Strangely the news hasn’t been getting me down, although it should, but I feel that it’s time to use other things to distract me. Because of this I was looking at Google News and spotted the weather box.
Google News
How cool is it that you can set the temperature to Kelvin? I thought that was a nice touch. It’s something I can explain to people and give them the knowledge of Kelvin as a temperature scale.
Then there’s the BBC and they default to a decent scale of temperature:
BBC
This is clearly that the BBC knows the correct units to use. Finally I give you the Daily Mail:
Daily Fail
You can tell it’s the Daily Mail, partly by the insane length of the headline and the other reason is that they still use Fahrenheit as their measure of temperature. I’ve moaned about this before but the use of antiquated units is why this country CAN’T MOVE ON. It reinforces the idea that old people can have things the way they want. It continues to allow people to refuse to accept change. It is a deliberate attempt to force this country to stay in the past. The Daily Mail knows this. It is bullshit.
Celsius has been in use since 1995 in the UK because of alignment needed with the EU. There are some measurements which are allowed to be in Imperial units still and they are:
the mile, yard, foot and inch for road traffic signs, distance and speed measurement,
the imperial pint for the dispensing of draught beer and cider, and for the sale of milk in returnable containers,
the acre for land registration,
the troy ounce for transaction in precious metals.
These are almost acceptable. The implied cost of changing roads signs and the education to change to kilometres makes that something that is never going to happen. However, the pint, should go. All you have to do is order a large or small. Did you know that if you go to a pub and order a pint of lemonade you aren’t buying a pint? You’re buying the metric equivalent. There isn’t a good reason for this to have not changed but all you need is the image of that far right politician Nigel Farage with his pint to understand that the government was scared of those old people who go down the pub a lot and didn’t want to upset them. Not that the experience would have been any different to anyone visiting a pub.
Now, pubs are closing. They aren’t sustained by the changing use of society. They are losing money. There are campaigns to keep pubs open but these people don’t understand that society is changing. People don’t go down the pub anymore. Closing pubs might be sad but such is life.
A short while ago I wrote about the Maidstone Sports Injury Clinic and Wellbeing, it was advertised at a gym in Maidstone. I explained that most of the stuff offered probably doesn’t work.
Today I look at Therapeutic Massage because I don’t really know what it is.
The Maidstone Wellness thingy has a page on the Massage and it explains what it is:
Therapeutic Body Massage works the soft tissue of the body, where knots, tension and muscle tightness can be found. It is from working into and around these areas that Therapeutic Body Massage can help ease stress and muscular tension.
To me that sounds like a massage. It seems that someone will massage you and you will feel better. I don’t think I have a problem with that unless there are specific medical claims made on the same page.
Guess what? There aren’t any specific medical claims. All the benefits are a bit shit and vague so that we don’t have to worry about them:
Reduction in muscle spasm, pain and tension
Release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers
Promotes relaxation, therefore reducing stress and anxiety
Improves blood circulation
Improves lymphatic drainage
Improves mobility
I guess if you stimulate someone then you create more blood flow and most of these claims are probably not too bad. Whether that does any good I don’t know.
I’ve had a look in PubMed, here are some of the results discussed:
Comparison of blood flow changes with soft tissue mobilization and massage therapy.
Now, my comments. Firstly this was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine so that automatically means it’s bollocks. However, here’s what they found: someone’s calf when rubbed with something warmer than air temperature warms up. The killer line in this study is “a rise in temperature THEORETICALLY indicates increased blood flow”. Amazing!
Therapeutic massage of the neck and shoulders produces changes in peripheral blood flow when assessed with dynamic infrared thermography.
I have the same criticisms for this paper. The journal is bollocks and the whole process is bollocks.
The anatomical study of the major signal points of the court-type Thai traditional massage on legs and their effects on blood flow and skin temperature.
This one is from a different journal, this time the Journal of Integrative Medicine, which is a bollocks journal. Note that in the conclusion they state that the results might not be clinically relevant. Quelle surprise.
This next paper seems more realistic although the abstract is barely abstract it does say that it’s all a bit vague really.
The mechanisms of massage and effects on performance, muscle recovery and injury prevention.
Well, it seems that massage and blood circulation are common claims but there isn’t really anything to it as no-one is able to define what circulation means. This is classic alternative “medicine”. They make deliberately vague claims because those claims aren’t medically recognised terms and therefore don’t need medical evidence.
I reckon that having a massage won’t do you any particular harm. It might even make you feel better and more relaxed. Much like reading a book or having a glass of wine. I doubt there are particular health benefits to having a massage but if it feels good, do it.
Well, with temperatures hitting 33C today it’s time to write some stuff about this. I mean it’s so hot I have adjusted my plans for the day to keep indoors as much as possible. The hot weather is lovely. There, I said it. I can’t remember feeling cold and I am wondering about all my cold weather clothes, but it is nice to finally have a proper summer.
It feels as though the last many years have had summers where the skies have been mostly grey. While it’s been warm, the cloudiness has detracted from the feel of a proper summer and the country has looked dull. This year, the weather has been blue skies and proper clouds. It’s been good. While I was alive in 1976 I don’t remember anything about that summer. I broke my arm and the plaster kept going soft. That is all I know, but I have zero direct memories. Having looked it up on Wikipedia that summer seemed vicious. Worse than the current one in terms of temperatures.
My main problem with this heat is social. People are going to die. There will be a bump in the total deaths because heat kills people. We know the grass is pretty brown at the moment but those human deaths will come. Whether there’ll be a big news thing about it I don’t know.
The biggest problem with this weather is it highlights the problem of anthropogenic global climate change. Humans are causing a massive change in the way the Earth’s weather systems work and it will quite likely cause wars. The current heatwave pretty much covers the entire northern hemisphere. Everywhere is having a massive issue with the heat. The 1976 heatwave was pretty localised. While weather does not equal climate we should be aware that these events seem to be coming far more prevalent than they were. most predictions tell us that the extreme weather events are becoming more common. So while those stupid fuckers in the right wing press keep saying this isn’t as bad as 1947 or 1976 they don’t seem to realise that isolated events are now more common.
In this country the winters are going to become more extreme along with the summers and it doesn’t really look like there’s a massive move to try and counter this. When we study the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere we can see that we are already past the point of no return. There will be utter damage to the climate. Humans have caused this. Humans have also known for about 50 years that we are causing this. There are heavy metal songs from the 1980s going on about climate change FFS.
Eventually these changes are going to cause a massive change to the way of life. Governments around the world should be preparing their populations for this. Everyone needs nudging in the correct direction. There needs to be less individual transport. Flying needs to be reduced. Consumption needs to be reduced. Power consumption needs to be reduced. It all needs to change. Everyone needs to understand that the things they take for granted and assume they are entitled to will be gone. The world needs to change.
I am not an optimist about any of this. I don’t think that any of the political systems currently in use around the world will do anything because of the way they work. I don’t think anyone is properly preparing for this. If I expect the worst then maybe I’ll feel very slightly less bad when the billion displaced people can’t find acceptance in any country once their land disappears below sea level. I mean we can’t even accept those refugees and asylum seekers currently displaced by the shit in the current world.
Hopefully I’ll be dead before the water wars start.
Spent a lovely time yesterday at the beach at Seasalter. It’s just west of Outer-London-Whitstable. The horizon fascinated me because of the things that can be seen.
Whitstable – the view form Seasalter
Now the iPhone panorama feature didn’t leave the horizon quite as wanted but I have made an annotated version for you to explain what can be seen – just.
Seasalter Annotated – click to enlarge, should open in new tab
I suggest you get the full size picture by clicking on the picture above and then refer back to this page.
A
Shellness – A beach, a naturist beach, and some posh houses on the Isle of Sheppey. 3.3 km away. There is a statue here of the Short Brothers, of aircraft fame [note to self – must visit].
B
Shoeburyness and Southend – Towns in Essex across the Thames Estuary. 23.5 km away. Other things of note would be Southend Pier and the Shoeburyness Boom, an anti-submarine device.
C
The Redsands Fort – an Army defence structure in the Thames Estuary, 14.5 km, one of the Maunsell Forts – [note to self – must visit].
The Kentish Flats Offshore Windfarm, 15 km, – a 139 MW wind power generation station, which has produced little energy during this heatwave as winds are too low.
The title of this communication essentially deals with the question of how far you can see to the horizon if you stand on the beach. If you are about 6 foot tall you can see about 5 miles, there’s mathematics to get this.
I went for a swim after work today, it was nice to get out of the heat for a while and get my arms moving. However, I was a little perturbed by one of the posters in the cafe area of the gym. To be honest there are many gym-type posters that are disturbing showing body shapes and types that are not achievable by most. This does seem to be changing over time as the advertising world recognises that people are who they are and don’t really buy into the perfect body. Unless you watch Love Island.
Sports Injuries
So, on first inspection this poster seems pretty good. It’s for a sports injury clinic and that should be a good thing. A special place for all to go to ensure that those niggles get sorted out. But, let’s look a little closer at some of the treatments offered:
Osteopathy – not a fucking thing and doesn’t do anything. Read my previous, controversial, communication.
Sports Massage – could be OK, I don’t really know what it entails.
Therapeutic Massage – again, I’m not sure what this is and I should probably discuss this in a future communication. I’ll look into it. I doubt it’s anything good.
Aromatherapy – massage with nice smells. Doesn’t do anything.
Physiotherapy – probably the only legitimate treatment on this advert. Go see a physiotherapist for those sorts of things. Don’t see woo.
Nutritional Therapy – most likely bollocks. If you want diet advice see a DIETICIAN, they are a proper profession. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist.
Acupuncture – bollocks squared.
Look, the issue with this clinic is not that they offer some legitimate therapies the problem is that they also offer a load of bollocks and so you can’t assume they will be good at any part of their job. It’s the company you keep that defines who you are.
Don’t go here.
I’ve just had a look at the website for this clinic and it is a beauty. I will add it to my communication drafts with the hope that I one day complete writing about it.
When I got back from cadet camp a while ago I noticed, somehow, that my internet connection bandwidth had dropped quite considerably. I think I had to restart the modem/router for some reason and when I logged into it I noticed that it was getting a download bandwidth of only 20Mb/s. Now, I say only, because I was getting 60Mb/s before I went away.
I restarted the hub a few times but this didn’t increase the capacity and I also left it for 24 hours thinking it might pick itself up. It didn’t. So I contacted BT. The low upload bandwidth was noticeable when attempting to upload pictures to the cloud and the download was affect some streaming services, although 20Mb/s was still good enough for most things.
I tried to use an online tracking fault thing the BT have on their website but navigating it was pretty terrible. Eventually I chose to use the online chat. They performed the same tests that the website interface had performed and then they asked me if I wanted to raise a fault.
Yes please.
When I managed to log in to the fault tracker it registered a voice-fault. I found this curious as I had a data fault but because they travel down the same line it was a voice-fault. BT also do mobile and TV and stuff so maybe that’s another reason for their curious naming of the fault. But, I didn’t know that so I phoned BT and said it was a broadband fault. They explained the previous bit to me and then said the engineer [who is really a technician] had found three problems at the exchange and fixed them. I should head home and restart the modem/router.
Which I did and nervously anticipated the result.
Well, that seems a lot better. I checked it using some external speed testers, although it’s bandwidth and not speed.
I’m happy now. I have the broadband service that I pay for. It’s all fixed and the whole process was pretty simple. Well done BT.
Having calculated [or rather tested] that my house uses 2kWh of energy per day when nearly everything is turned off I thought I ought to work out how far that would drive my car.
In this communication I wrote about the energy usage of my car, Bora Horza Gobuchul. I use 50kWh of energy for every 100km I drive, on average.
So, the energy I use to power my house; the fridge, a few clocks and the ADS-B receiver, would drive my car about 4km. That’s not quite enough to get me to work, but it would get me to the nearest supermarket.
A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.
Lake District Air TrafficKent Air Traffic
Of course, this communication could be entitled:
There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports
I recently had my electricity and gas meters upgraded to “smart” meters. They aren’t that smart. All they do is upload my meter reading to the utility company at regular intervals along with this information being displayed on a screen. I look at the screen now and then but I do think that eventually I will turn it off. I know roughly how much I spend each day and it’s not really a surprise.
May Energy kWh
This graph shows the energy use each day with the lower darker bar being electricity and the light blue being gas. I have a gas boiler for water and heating along with a gas hob. The oven is electric. This can be translated into costs [at current market rates]:
May Energy Costs
At the end of May I went away for a while and I normally try to shut-down most of the energy using devices in the house. The physical process can take about 5 minutes walking around the house making sure that everything is shut down in the correct order.
If you look at the last week of May you can see low and consistent energy costs. Although no gas was used in this time period the monetary costs is the standing charge that I pay for the privilege of having a gas supply.
Minimum Running
My daily energy use in a house that is mostly turned off is 2kWh. This accounts for the following items:
Fridge
Microwave clock
Oven clock
Modem / Router
ADS-B aircraft tracker in the loft
Alarm clock
That extension lead orange light
It is taking a while for my head to get around this bizarre and stupid unit the kWh. But here goes:
My house’s power usage at baseline is 83 Watts. A human during the normal day runs at about 100 Watts [as does a 100W incandescent light bulb]. Over the course of the day this ends up being 7.2 MJ. My house needs to consume about the same amount of food as a human to run at its lowest power consumption levels.
Wolfram Alpha has some lovely comparisons for energy usage, so 2 kWh is the same as:
≈ 1.7 × energy released by explosion of one kilogram of TNT ( 1 kilogram of TNT )
≈ 0.57 × average electrical energy required by an Apple iPhone 5 per year (≈ 1.3×10^7 J )
And my favourite is:
Relativistic mass m from E = mc^2: 80 ng (nanograms)
When I next go away it would be interesting to see how low I could get the consumption. To be fair, I could just turn the electricity off at the mains. But the only thing I could still power down is the ADS-B receiver and I like to keep that going because I can log into it from around the world.
This place was heading east early one morning [probably to Frankfurt] and the colour of the sky and the line of the contrails caught my eye. It looked lovely.
Wokka Over Maidstone
Then there was this Chinook. It passed right over my work place and was such a lovely sight and sound. It amazes me just how technologically amazing we are as a species. Now although I know how these things work it does seem like magic at times!
Spitfire
Finally, yesterday this Spitfire flew over my village. I keep trying to remind people that one day they will be gone and we won’t see them flying anymore. It’s a lesson I have learnt from seeing many planes in the 80s at various airshows without really appreciating just how special they all were.
So, I’m feeling grumpy today. Just am. Not sure why. And then I go and stupidly read an article in on the BBC News website about most babies being born at 4am. You can read the article here and I’ll be taking quotations from it.
Four o’clock in the morning is the time most babies are born spontaneously in England, with the majority arriving between 01:00 and 07:00, a study shows.
So, four o’clock is the “average” of 01:00 and 07:00. Is that how they worked this out? I’m not sure. I’m probably not going to read the original paper but it does seem a strange thing to say. Assuming that spontaneous births are reasonably random the actual number arriving at 04:00 would be quite small and the variation could be little.
While planned C-section births tended to happen on weekday mornings, births after induced labours were more likely to occur around midnight.
This makes sense. C-Sections in the morning to then make sure everyone is fine during the time when the medical cover is best. Inductions probably happen at that time because they are started in the morning and it takes that long for the effects to show. These are not surprising figures and make utter sense.
It’s this next bit that turned me into a rage.
Overall, more than 70% of births took place outside regular working hours.
And
The researchers said there could be implications for staffing of midwives and doctors, with only 28% of births taking place between 09:00 and 17:00 on weekdays.
So, an event that is reasonably random is spread throughout the day? About thirty percent of births happen in a time frame covering roughly 30% of the amount of time in a day. THIS IS WHAT WE WOULD EXPECT. The working day covers 1/3 of the 24 hours in a day and the number of births in that time period is about 1/3. This sentence made me swear out loud in our staff common room earlier today, much to the ammusment of my colleagues.
