If you enjoy reading the musings of a grumpy old man on these pages then you could send me money. Cash is fine as is a bank transfer or a cheque, but the last option would mean I either have to post the cheque to the bank or go there myself and who visits banks these days?
If you are in the market for some cryptocurrency then you can buy some Electroneum and send it to me using the wallet address below:
Wallet Address
I am 80% confident that cryptocurrencies are bad. It’s a bubble and also bad for the environment because of all the electricity used to maintain the block-chain. Anyway, before society comes crashing down you can send me some Etn coins.
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!
