Tag: penguin

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UK Scenes

So, along with getting the new PC was the general concept that I would have a machine capable of running X-Plane which has ridiculous graphics simulation algorithms. I’m sure there could be flight simulators that run quicker and also look better but because of the physics engine employed by X-Plane it is the most accurate in terms of aircraft movement through the air. It used to be that to run X-Plane I had to turn off any clouds. These seem to really mess with the frame rate and the bottleneck occurs on the bus between the CPU RAM. I had spent a lot of time reading about finely tuning the software to give the best compromise between frame rate and looks. The new PC doesn’t really seem to have any problems and I just turn everything up to 11.

Browsing for a slightly better looking Great Britain I found, I don’t remember how, a website offering sexy GB scenery. I had to pay for it but it did look good. I was concerned about splashing out without being able to test the software but the company had a Demo area around Southampton. Orbx have a selection of payware airports along with GB scenery. I downloaded the Demo area and flew from Southampton Airport over Portsmouth and Gosport. The fact that I could see aircraft carriers in the harbour along with HMS Victory and the forts in the Solent meant I was smitten. The whole area looked great. So, I took the plunge and bought some scenery of GB. I had some cash stashed away from the sale of my old graphics card and those proceeds went to these views.

I have not been disappointed. There is now 367GB of GB scenery on the hard drive and while load times feel like forever, X-Plane is terrible at some things, the whole of the island of Great Britain looks spectacular. I’ve flown from Manston to Lydd to Southend to Heathrow. I’ve also covered Cornwall along with the Lake District. Next steps will be Wales and Scotland, specifically the Mach Loop and Lock Ness. Below is a gallery of some sights so far. After flying for a little while I turned some clouds on just to make it look more realistic. I know I’ve got the frame rate showing up in the top left corner and you might think that 30fps isn’t that great. Trust me, I would have had around 2fps using the old PC and these settings. I’m not really into bragging rights about fps and anything more that 50 seems iffy, not worth it? Happy to be proved wrong on that. Also, below, are a couple of pictures of the F-35B using the old scenery. Hopefully you can see the difference.

  • T-7A Plymouth and Kingsand
    T-7A Plymouth and Kingsand
  • T-7A Plymouth and Rame Peninsula
    T-7A Plymouth and Rame Peninsula
  • T-7A Falmouth
    T-7A Falmouth
  • T-7A St Michael's Mount
    T-7A St Michael’s Mount
  • T-7A RNAS Culdrose
    T-7A RNAS Culdrose
  • F-35B Old Scenery
    F-35B Old Scenery
  • F-35 Old Scenery
    F-35 Old Scenery
  • T-7A Devon
    T-7A Devon
  • F-7A looking mighty fine
    F-7A looking mighty fine
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The Rig

As I was falling asleep last night I’m pretty sure I was drafting a communication for this site. It was going to be short but worth it. A suitable piece of content that would mean I keep publishing things here. But I forgot what it was. I could have me-mailed a message but I don’t like looking at my phone once I’m upstairs and so I hoped I would remember it. I didn’t. My hope failed.

So, instead, here’s another picture of my PC. I hadn’t realised I’d put something here a short while ago but here it is in flight simulator mode.

The Rig
The Rig

I’ve already been criticised for the PC LED colours not matching the rest of the unit, I can change them, I just like the red, it makes it look angry. Also, the keyboard has lights which I’m not convinced are worth it but I smile whenever I look at them whirling around. I could match that too but I don’t care.

On the desk is a Pooley’s Flight Guide to every UK airport which makes taxiing around quite a lot easier. It’s open at Southend EGMC and I’ve been flying a T-7A Red Hawk around over Kent and shooting shit. I’m using the F-7 version because it’s got bang stuff added to it. The plane was made by AOA Simulations and is the third piece of hardware I’ve got from them. I have a F-35B, the CV-22 and this F-7 T-7A. I like their kit. I also like my Grumman Goose but that’s mostly because I’m still in love with Tales Of the Gold Monkey.

F-7A parked at Lydd
F-7A parked at Lydd
T-7A Taxi
T-7A Taxi
Grumman Goose in the Lake District
Grumman Goose in the Lake District
MV-22B on a misty day in the Lakes
MV-22B on a misty day in the Lakes

It looks like I need to take some pictures of the F-35B and so I will get on that soon. Look out here for more pictures of these lovely planes. I might try and find some extra special spots around the world to bomb also.

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For Health

A while back I gave up my Spotify subscription. My reasons were partly that I just kept listening to the same songs over and over and I also thought the payment that the artist receives was paltry. At that time I decided I would buy albums of artists I liked and own the music. I think this is the morally correct thing to do. There are a number of artists I really listen a lot to and they don’t make masses of money. I’m not talking about mega-bands like Metallica or Maiden, I’m talking here about bands I regularly play in 500 seat theatres. I say theatres but they are more the loveliest dives in London.

I saw the band/singer/artist Leaether Strip at M’era Luna a few years ago and I loved it. I thought he was great. Such a nice chap with excellent music. His husband was playing the keyboards for him and it was clear there was such love between the two of them. Now, I’m not really a “meet your heroes” type of person. I’ve heard enough stories about famous people being, well, people and assholes so I’m happy to leave the artists alone and let them get on and I’ll enjoy what they do. Some music I don’t listen to anymore because of the behaviour of the artist – LostProphets.

The reason for this communication is I bought an album by Leaether Strip and I know I like the music but I also know that the money helps the two men get on with their lives and especially to support Kurt as he’s been ill for a while and has had a kidney transplant. I get music I know I will like and they get a little bit of help for their lives. Seems a fair saw to me. I’m very happy for you to use the link in this paragraph to go and buy stuff also.

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Megaliths

This area of Kent in which I reside has some decent human history going on. When mostly forested the island of Great Britain [it amuses me immensely that this place is named after a part of France, must make those racists really angry, especially singing Rule Britannia] had many locals doing their thing and trying to survive. Once people died they were buried in long barrows. These constructions had large stones, megaliths, placed at their entrances. There are a number of these in the Medway area and yesterday I used my exercise to go and complete my total of the East Medway Megaliths. These beasts were placed around 5000 years and and that is pretty darn impressive as far as I am concerned.

Kits Coty

In the past I’ve seen the coffin stone and I’ve also seen Kits Coty before as it’s on a running route I take. Here’s the view from Kits Coty, the weather was lovely but I am concerned that it’s been too warm for too long and the upcoming catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change is accelerating:

Kent from Kits Coty
Kent from Kits Coty

I’ve just discovered Scheduled Monuments which is a list of important stuff as agreed by the Secretary Of State for that stuff. There’s a lovely interactive map on the Historic England website. You can also download a PDF version of the map and it is gorgeous. So, Kits Coty is scheduled monument 1012939 and according to that website:

This example has a particularly well-preserved burial chamber and is also of high archaeological potential due to the survival of the remains of the burial mound and the flanking ditches. The burial chamber having been taken into guardianship, the monument is also of high amenity value.

Historic England

Little Kits Coty

Just down the Downs is a collection of stones called Little Kits Coty or the “countless stones”. I think I’ve written about them before but they are still just as pretty and nestled in a corner of a field. There is no path to them so you have to take on the traffic!

Countless Stones
Countless Stones

These boulders are also a scheduled monument as recognised by the Secretary Of State. These are number 1013673 and part of their description reads:

The atypical example of Little Kit’s Coty House represents an unusual variant of this class of monument but nevertheless forms part of the group of Neolithic burial monuments known as the Medway Megaliths. Being held in Guardianship, the monument is of high amenity value.

Historic England

The White Horse Stone

A small distance away is the White Horse Stone. It’s a single megalith but not quite as mega as the others in this area. According to Wikipedia there were other constructions here but they were destroyed in the 19th century.

White Horse Stone
White Horse Stone

This is monument number 1005181 and according to Historic England, again:

The White Horse Stone is a good example of its type, which survives well. The area immediately surrounding the stone is likely to contain archaeological and environmental information relating to the stone and the landscape in which it was erected.

Historic England

I would encourage you to look over the Historic England website as the maps, provided by OS, are absolutely gorgeous and the information there is pretty good. It also has listed buildings on the site and these are indicated on the map with little triangles.

Roman Villa, Eccles

Just south-west of my house lie buried remains of a Roman villa. It was in position from 65CE through to around 400CE which is pretty impressive. While it lies under farmland now it was excavated in the 1960s and it was quite an impressive size. Given how close it is to the site of the Battle Of Medway along with ease of access to the river and lying not far from where the Romans invaded it would have had prominent visitors and been of some importance. It is scheduled monument 1011770 and there are details if you follow that link. Wikipedia has improved over the last few years and there’s quite a bit of information there along with links to the original papers.

The walking route that is safest to travel from Little Kits Coty to the White Horse Stone involves using and underpass to get to the other side of the A229 Bluebell Hill dual carriage way. This underpass is quite pretty in shape and looks exactly like the launch tubes from Battlestar Galactica [imo].

Battlestar Galactica Launch Tube
Battlestar Galactica Launch Tube
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Testing

Along with my investigation of the SARS-COV 2 Virus and how it infects humans I also need to understand how the current detection tests work. Let’s get a few things straight first though. The current [early May] testing regime in the UK is pathetic and nowhere near enough to be able to track where this virus is going. Also, let’s be clear about this, Covid-19 is not a mild cold or flu. Some people won’t suffer very much with it but others are dying. I read a tweet from a 30-ish year old person saying that it felt like they couldn’t breathe for three days. I don’t want to experience that.

There are two main types of test that can be done for the virus. At the moment, in the UK these are done when you first show symptoms. That way, if you have CV-19 you can isolate and if you haven’t then you can go about your business. This is a method for reducing the transmission of this killer disease.

The first test detects the virus itself. This can be done by taking material from easy to reach places on the human body. For this test to work you need to have been infected for a few days already and for the virus to multiply in your body to get to the nose or throat. As the infection continues this test becomes less effective because the virus stays largely in the lungs and reduces elsewhere. As this virus is RNA only and the test can only detect DNA there is some chemistry magic to be done first to convert the RNA and then all DNA in the sample is copied. Finally more chemistry is done to detect the DNA version of the RNA of the virus. This can take two hours to two days. All it tests if whether you have the virus in your nose or throat at that time. It doesn’t mean you are clear. There can be errors.

The second type of test detects the body’s response to the infection. It detects the cells in our blood that fight the virus. By definition this test needs to be done once the infection is being fought. There are two main types of antibody that can be detected and the amounts of those in the blood vary over time. I found this lovely graphic on Wikipedia:

It’s quite hard in these times to find decent correct information on the web about what is going on. I’ve been avoiding newspapers and other traditional media and mainly sticking with podcasts where the presenter / interviewee is qualified or Wikipedia. The World Health Organisation website is brilliant too and has the level of detail I wanted.

My next communication might be about the UK Govt response to this crisis. But I’m not sure I’m willing to enter that pit of desperation yet.

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Pass It On

I decided last night it would be sensible to see what facts I can find out about this coronavirus that is spreading around the world. There are rumours of a relaxing of the lockdown and so finally I should learn what I can about the disease. Trying to find reliable sources might be tricky but I’ll spend around an hour and see what I can get.

Transmission Type

Data from published epidemiology and virologic studies provide evidence that COVID-19 is primarily transmitted from symptomatic people to others who are in close contact through respiratory droplets, by direct contact with infected persons, or by contact with contaminated objects and surfaces.

Incubation Period

It would appear that from first contact with the virus it takes a median of 5.1 days for symptoms to show. This means 50% of people will have symptoms before or by five days after infection and the other 50% after 5.1 days. Most people will show symptoms within the first 11 days of transmission. By most I mean around 97%.

Contagiousness

During the incubation period, also known as the “presymptomatic” period, some infected persons can be contagious. Therefore, transmission from a pre-symptomatic case can occur before symptom onset. It is possible that people infected with COVID-19 could transmit the virus before significant symptoms develop. It is important to recognise that pre-symptomatic transmission still requires the virus to be spread via infectious droplets or through touching contaminated surfaces.

A Harvard document has “reports” of people being infectious two days before symptoms start. This is not good and a reason for social distancing. LINK.

Asymptomatic Transmission

An asymptomatic laboratory-confirmed case is a person infected with COVID-19 who does not develop symptoms. Asymptomatic transmission refers to transmission of the virus from a person, who does not develop symptoms. There are few reports of laboratory confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission. This does not exclude the possibility that it may occur. Asymptomatic cases have been reported as part of contact tracing efforts in some countries.

Testing

My current understanding is that testing for Covid-19 requires there to be virus in saliva and or snot. This means that you are likely to be showing symptoms as the virus has replicated enough in your body to affect your mucus membranes. So, if you get a test and it is negative there are some issues. Firstly, false negatives are possible and so the test might say NO but actually you have the disease. Also, you might not have enough of the virus yet so still have the disease but test negative. A positive test is more likely correct although there will be a false positive rate, this is likely much lower than the false-negative rate.

This is quite interesting because one of my standard lessons to Year 11 and also the sixth form is about this exact thing. Is a medical test good enough for use with the public looking at type 1 and type 2 errors.

Source Of Information

All of this information came from World Health Organisation reports from their excellent pages covering this disease.

I feel a little happier now that I have a good source for these facts and feel more confident that I know what I’m talking about. For me one of the saddest aspects of this is the fact that the WHO have to have a page dedicated to myths that are circulating the internet and discussions because largely people can be stupid. It doesn’t help that the US President is a fucking lying racist sexist moron and other leaders around the world are also stupid [Brazil and UK, also many more].

When this is over I hope there’s a bonfire of those leaders who did nothing for the two or three weeks when it was clear that Italy was fucked. It seemed obvious to me at that moment that we needed to shut the country down to save lives. It was ridiculous that I was expected to work in an environment of around 1500 people many of whom had returned from skiing holidays or similar. I just don’t think the leaders of many countries understand the following:

  • Exponential growth
  • Six degrees of separation
  • Combinatorics
  • Vectors of disease transmission
  • How to be nice and do the best you can for humanity

LLAP.

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Purge Problems – Fixed

Recently I had to fix this site as some malicious code had appeared in the file structure and, although the site looked OK to me I know it was sending some observers off to obscure sites. So, having had this happen once before about four years ago I had a good sense of what needed to be done and also what the dodgy php files looked like.

So, I set off to purge the website of anything that looked a little dodgy. Then using what remained and back ups from before I was able to rebuild the site and get it running as it was, minus one communication that was titled “Well” but while I probably moaned about CV-19 and said some stuff that I’m doing I don’t know what it was about. I had a look at the WayBack machine but it hadn’t crawled my site that recently.

It also turned out that I deleted an index file of one of my old websites in the purge. I guess it was easy to do. The problem was that now I didn’t have a copy of that file and I couldn’t even remember what style it was or what it looked like. I had moved away from FTP back ups and more to using some backup plugin to my site. This was a mistake. I had thought that this page might be lost forever and then I remembered the WayBack machine.

My first search was for the page on this site. Nothing was retrieved and then I remembered that the Internet Archive might have got a snapshot of my original site. It had! With some tweaking of the HTML code I was able to recreate the index page and now this site runs 99.99% the same as it did before I got fucked over. I’ve also been trying to think of all the domains I have owned in the past and I think this list is about all of them:

  • iparish.org.uk
  • ianparish.me.uk
  • iparish.plus.com [not really owned by me as it was a sub-domain]
  • whatuseismaths.com
  • fooyah.net/wordpress

I think that’s it. I’ll chuck in another if I think I’ve missed one. I’m struggling to know how I used to edit my webpages because I don’t recall having a computer before around 2001 but maybe I did. Internet access was poor then anyway. I do know that when I worked at my second school in about 1998 I had a site that was up and running.

My OldSites are listed on this page.

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Set Up

I spent part of yesterday setting up the final parts of the new PC. I’m very happy with the result. The new things are the PC itself and some peripherals like the keyboard, mouse and mat. Because the mousemat thing was too big for the old desk I bought a new desk for the PC. I was stuck with the sizes that the desk could be because of the tiny size of my dining room which is where it all lives. I guess I could have put the system somewhere else but I wanted this position for the easy access to a wired LAN.

Terrible Picture Of New PC
Terrible Picture Of New PC

I guess apart from tidying up cables I am done. It was very satisfying to wire in the whole system in its home for the next few years.

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Green

Yesterday while out for my allowance of daily exercise I noticed how lovely and green everywhere was looking. The sun and warmth over the last month – not a good thing by the way – has really helped the flora develop. Every path I walked on seemed lush and vert. Here’s a photograph I took while at one of the river Medway inlets, the old brickworks wharf.

Gorgeous and Green
Gorgeous and Green

Here’s a very nondescript satellite view of where the photograph was taken.

Medway Inlet
Medway Inlet
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Clouds

It’s a funny old thing that when flying in X-Plane you wish for clouds but they kill your frame rate because it’s X-Plane. Then when you finally put clouds in or real time weather you end up with not being able to see anything most of the time because – clouds. You have to take off in cloud or fly through cloud and then not see anything for a while. Once above clouds the world looks pretty much the same wherever you are.

Weather X-Plane
Weather X-Plane

Look at this picture. It’s gorgeous but the world looks faded because it’s not that often you get the wonderful clear days where you can see for miles.

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