DamnSaxon

You know, it never fails to amaze me how two people can look at the same thing and see it totally, irreconcilably differently. Gib, somehow, you perceive the BBC as being "totally anti-Israel". I, on the basis of exactly the same evidence, perceive it as an invidious stream of insidious pro-Israeli propaganda, with a regular supply of Israeli spokesmen pumping out - well, whatever it is that Israel wants us all to believe this week. "Death in the Med" was certainly an outstanding programme, though. It was one of the purest pieces of Israeli propagandising I think they've ever produced - someone should get an award for it. Yep, "anti-Israel" it absolutely wasn't. There, at least, we can agree. Frankly, I agree with the excellent Ken O'Keefe: it was a beautiful gift from the BBC, a perfect, object lesson in producing propaganda.

Well, as I've been hacking hardware since the good ol' days when you had to wait thirty seconds for the valves to warm up, I'll chuck in my two pennyworth. GR, the bad news is, if you wanted them powered from the earphone socket as well as getting the sound signal from it, you're on a hiding to nothing. As pointed out above, there just isn't any power there because you don't need much power when the earphone is stuck right in (or over) the ear. PC speakers have a little mains unit in them (usually only about 12V) and a little amplifier chip to up the power to (usually) about a watt or so. This can be louder than you think - most trannie radios are under a watt - but, you do need that external power. USB ones are similar, but use the 5V available on the USB connector for power. The USB spec limits anything plugged in to 0.5 Amps, so again there is a serious power shortage. (5V x 0.5A = 2.5W absolute max; as nothing is 100% efficient that means probably about 1 watt total again.) I have seen little speaker pairs (aimed at laptop users, I think) where one of them had a 9V battery (PP3 size) inside - they work, but you're going to need a steady supply of batteries (or two or three rechargeables to cycle through). Again, not a lot of power, but certainly loud enough to hear - maybe even enough to annoy the neighbours, and definitely so if you turn them up to the point where they start distorting horribly. If you don't need to carry them around, a possible alternative is to plug a cable from the PC / CD / whatever into a spare input ("Aux", or "Tape In") on your main sound system - which will certainly be well loud enough whether you use an earphone socket or a "line out" socket to deliver the signal. My own (strictly non-portable) beige box is plugged into my (strictly non-portable) sound system like this - in fact, both ways, so I can record (on the PC) off CDs, tapes or whatever as well as playing them back. Mind you, that's just me - I long since abandoned all thoughts of portability for the raw pleasure of listening to everything through my 15" semi-pro monitor speakers which just go down and down to the really feelie bass which crawls up the walls. Mmmm ... nice. Basically, then, you will need to use something with its own source of power, as there just isn't the 'oomph' in an earphone socket to shift enough air otherwise. The laws of physics are very unaccommodating, unfortunately - you want louder, you need more power from somewhere.

I'm still here in Grotty Nottingham, watching the rain falling on the trees out the front. I'd much rather be in Shetland, watching the rain falling on the broad Atlantic. Even if there wasn't a tree in sight.

Hi, all. Eh, it's good to be back in circulation again. For my legions of fans (OK, for the few hardy souls who thought "Have we finally got rid of that DamnSaxon fellow, then?"), the news is that my beige box blew up and I've just got round to fixing it - I now have the rare distinction of having had TWO power supplies blow up on me while everything else survived. Fluff and cruft get all PCs in the end. (If you hadn't met "cruft", follow the link - it's scarily accurate.) Right, I'm off for a wander round the forum and get back into the fray. I'll wipe me boots on the way out!

I've just been informed by the Daily Telegraph's "Vote Match" that the BNP are my second best choice (60% match ) behind UKIP (68% ). I know one is supposed to drift towards more right wing policies as one gets older, but it still came as a bit of a shock. Thankfully I have a more "respectable" option in the LibDems (59%). At least they agree with me about the Labour and Conservative parties (both down on a very optimistic 34%), neither of which has anything to say to me, and either of which will IMO be a disaster. So, here comes disaster.

Watch out for your sheep: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7555431/Unexplained-sheep-attacks-caused-by-aliens-in-UFOs-farmers-claim.html

I'd say disclose it, and let 'em know that you're used to working round it if anyone mentions it later, e.g. in an interview. In scientific work it might make a difference (for instance, if you're working near a naked flame and smell ether - run!) so hiding it could count against you in such a case. If it's 'known about' then it's up to the lab organisers to work round it. Play safe. My brother-in-law used to have anosmia. He undersealed his van with the most pungent mixture of old stuff imaginable, so anyone accepting a lift with him would sit there with their eyes watering while he was blissfully unaware of it - just thought he'd invented the world's best underseal.

A remarkably cool Chinese magician called Liu Qian. First couple of tricks could be sleight of hand, but the last couple still have me wondering.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwVy_2eOfsE&feature=player_embedded (Yes, the soundtrack is in Chinese.) (***Mod Edit - Please try and use the Youtube tags when posting Youtube vids. Thanks. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/whatever[/youtube]***)

www.smartstill.com/

Nobody's mentioned the late Michael Crichton. In 2003, in his talk "Aliens Cause Global Warming" ... There's an awful lot of fraudulent "science" around these days. Given that "secondary smoking" is a made-up problem, guess which way I voted. Oh - and Ghostrider - I am already not allowed to smoke in my own home (Nott'm council) if a council worker is coming round to do something, because for the duration, it's not my home, it's his workplace. The nitpicking micromanagement has already gone further than you thought. The lunatics have long since taken over the asylum.

Trouble is, of course, that everybody else funds themselves with those ghastly advertisements. Dunno about TV, but I really appreciate being able to listen to the electric wireless without some eejit blathering on at me to buy some tat I don't want every few minutes - that's the main thing which puts me right off commercial radio. If the Beeb is going to be "public service", maybe it should be funded somehow from general taxation, although then of course you'd get "oh, they're just a PR machine for the government", unless editorial independence could be written in. It might be possible if they "slimmed down" a bit (or a lot), stopped paying telephone numbers to their managers and "celebrities", and just got on with "informing, educating and entertaining" Ã la Reith. Or, make the entertainment side subscription and the public service free - perhaps on (e.g.) Channel 4 as well as the Beeb. And Reith, lest we forget, promised the Gov during the General Strike in 1926 that "the BBC poses no threat to power" ... then or now, I'd say. He knew who his paymasters were, whatever the theory said.

AT, that argument is the ancient fallacy of "affirming the consequent": 1: Human GHG -> warming 2: There is warming Therefore 3: The warming is caused by human GHG The argument does not prove that all, or even most of, any warming is caused by human GHG. I don't deny 1 or 2, but they do not prove 3 - there might be any number of other causes. For a start, we know that there are astrophysical causes - f'rinstance, Piers Corbyn, who absolutely dismisses all AGW arguments, predicted all the cold weather we've seen in December, January and February, practically to the day, last July, while the Met Office, working from their belief in AGW, were promising us a "mild winter" as late as the end of November. As the Good Book says (Matthew, 7:20), "By their fruits shall ye know them". What we need is the proof that human GHG are causing all, or most of, the observed warming - in fact, to the threatening extent we're all supposed to worry about ... and that - the unspoken assumption behind all AGW arguments - is remarkably absent, at least from the interweb pages I've seen. Re the "Spectrum of Greenhouse Radiation" graph, you left out the caption, which includes the words "Greenhouse effect from water vapor is filtered out" - great, let's just disregard the main GHG. At least some evidence for increased radiation at longer wavelengths is in Golovko and Kondranin's paper "Anomalous Global Redistribution of the Earth Radiation Budget Components" (2004? - Couldn't find an accurate date or a link for it, I'm afraid, it's sitting among hundreds of other files in my "Politics\AGW" subdirectory. It should be findable from its name. (quote from the beginning of the abstract - the curious punctuation is theirs.) Fig. 3 in their paper shows the anomaly they found over 1985 - 2003; the longwave anomaly over that period increases from about -5% to +5%, the shortwave anomaly decreases from about +3% to -3%. So, the radiation at CO2 wavelengths (as you have noted) has decreased (about -6%); the radiation at longer wavelengths (as I have noted) has increased (about +10%). Q.e.d. And actually, I'm entirely in agreement with this, re. the icecaps but could be said of the whole AGW scenario: Yes, let's wait and see. No apocalypse -> no need to worry; apocalypse -> er, maybe we should. Too much of the AGW movement seems to be based on that word we keep coming across - forcing.

My usual reply to them (© me, years ago): "I don't waste my time watching TV - I have much more interesting ways of wasting my time" It's true, too.

Well, it's a better link than last time, although scanning through the page and trying to check the papers referenced proved very frustrating, as most of them only link to rather uninformative abstracts (very difficult to criticise it if you can't read it), and Evans 2006, which looked interesting, turned out to be a "404 Not Found". (That's not a problem unique to that page, of course, it's a continuing bane of my attempts to use the interweb to research practically anything.) A quick response to the summary at the top of the page, though: Yes, we know that CO2 is (apparently) rising (apparently, as I mentioned above, because we don't know to what extent the diffusion of CO2 into ice after formation smooths the levels detected thousands of years later). We know that humanity is chucking far too much of it into the atmosphere, though most of that is due to insane business practices, the untaxed, colossal quantities from aircraft, etc., not so much due to us ordinary folk. Whether most of the increase is "due to human activity" remains moot. I note that they don't dwell on the fact that the satellite measurements also show that more energy is escaping to space at longer IR wavelengths, which only indicates that the spectral characteristic of the outgoing radiation has changed a bit, the overall radiation apparently increasing slightly. OK, so the marginal increase in CO2 absorbs a little more "here" in the spectrum, but it doesn't appear to stop the energy escaping "there" instead. A nice graph from Murphy 2009, pity Murphy 2009 is another "404". OK, the oceans, at least, may be absorbing some extra energy, although I'd be interested to know how the land is managing to do the same given the noticeable (and widely reported worldwide) cooler weather in recent years. (Please. don't refer me to that recently announced tosh about 2009 being the second warmest year on record; I've already pointed out that (a) the records only go back to when the Earth had just started warming up after the LIA, and ( the source of that claim is no longer a trusted source.) I suppose that, if you assume that human-generated CO2 causes the claimed warming, it does. But nothing on that page proves that assumption, and that's the "missing link" we want. Without it, all we have is a correlation, at best.

Any satellite 'evidence' is only measurements of the warming - not proof that manmade GHGs are causing it. As for the Mail's sensationalisation of what the BBC reported, let's agree on this: That's "Yes, there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995", which was the thrust of the Mail thing, and my point. The thing to bear in mind here is that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. So, starting with what seems now to be a given fact (a rare enough thing in this debate!) - why should we believe that our GHG emissions are causing catastrophe? You (and other AGW fans) keep quoting that "40% increase" - but what we're talking about is an increase from 0.028% of the atmosphere to 0.038%, figures which don't sound nearly as scary. There's also the point, of course, that we do know that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere continues to diffuse into the ice for years after the ice forms, so that the amount we're measuring in it now already represents a value which is smoothed out to some extent - AFAIK we don't know for how long the atmospheric gas continues to alter the percentage of dissolved gas. (Any figure for that?) For all we (I) know, 0.038% over a "mere" decade or so might be almost completely undetectable in the ice cores in a few thousand years time. The situation is further complicated by the fact that ice melts and runs off from time to time, and is replaced by different ice, it's not a simple linear process on short timescales, like having a CO2 meter feeding a datalogger. Oh, and of course we know that increases in CO2 lag increases in temperature by 800 years or so, which means they are very unlikely to cause them. Could today's CO2 increase be no more than that cycle responding to the Mediaeval Climate Optimum? Yes, I know about Milankovitch cycles (careful, you're admitting here that astrophysics does have an effect on the climate! ) and IMO a much greater effect than variations in the concentration of a trace gas in the atmosphere. BTW, not sure where you get that figure of "not due for 15000 years or so" - all the stuff I've seen pans out closer to "The colder periods, called glacials or Ice Ages, have usually lasted for 80,000 to 100,000 years, whilst the intervening warmer intervals have been much shorter, lasting about 10,000 years. The last Ice Age or glacial period on Earth ended roughly 14,000 years ago." - which is what makes me say that the next one is a bit overdue - about 4000 years overdue, on these figures, but definitely overdue. Those "Skeptical Science" graphs. I note with despair that they claim that "(the graphs) examine the climate response to various CO2 emission scenarios". NO, THEY DON'T! They represent the response of computer models of the climate to various input conditions. We also know that the models are unvalidated, and that they're based on the assumption that manmade emissions are a major climate driver, and that they're at best a linear model attempting to model a known chaotic reality. Remember John von Neumann's famous observation: How many free parameters do these climatic "models" use? - I'm sure I've seen the figure 19 somewhere. I dispute absolutely that there is any likelihood of a 6 degree increase in the next century, just as I dispute that elephants can fly. Yes, climates change. Yes, the human race (a) pollutes without a second thought, ( breeds like rabbits, © is running out of fresh water, (d) has (stupidly) handed over its food supply to big business which has reduced the number of strains we eat to a handful of "profitable" ones - one "adapted" bug, or a few years' bad harvest, and we have a major, major problem and probably a very nasty world war. We need to deal with all those problems irrespective of any change in the climate, which is inevitable anyhow, one way or t'tother. The most sensible approach to making humanity climate-change-proof must deal with all these problems and more. But until I see proof that our filth causes runaway climate change, I'm simply not going to take anybody's word for it. That would be a denial of the scientific method I respect. My mate reckons his £100 is quite safe. The harder I look, the more I'm inclined to agree with him.

Agreed, mogling, this is a disturbing case. For a start, arresting Green before he'd done anything for a "breach of the peace" makes the whole thing look precisely like an attempt by authority to cover something up - just the opposite of what's needed. The police should be investigating the allegations he made, and those accused should keep out of circulation until it's proved one way or the other - although it's always difficult in this sort of thing because "mud sticks" anyway whatever the truth. If Robert Green is libelling people, first prove it, then arrest him for that and let justice prevail. Very disturbing indeed.

^^^ ... unless, of course, doomsday does turn up ...

Nope, they pay for it, and no counselling necessary. So who cares "whether they'd be able to hold down a job"? (They're self-employed, actually.) It's under control. And shetlandpeat, I have dihydrocodeine on prescription, because it's a darned effective painkiller - beats the pants off ibuprofen. I take it only when necessary, maybe a couple of times a week, and don't take enough to turn my brain into Blu-tack when I do. The rest of the time I stick to ibuprofen, which just about keeps me moving on less painful days. It's all under control, no problem for me, or you, whatever *some* people might do with it. As I say, use, not abuse.

Squirrel banned from riding rollercoaster This sort of thing used to make a day out memorable. Nowadays there seems to be some box-ticking Health and Safety cretin round every corner, banning it.

I'll go along with that. Strictly unofficially (it being illegal ... ) I used to "come across" their radio frequencies now and then before it all went onto Tetra, and when you hear them going from "domestic" to ghastly RTA to some mad woman who'd got out of the ambulance when it stopped on a bridge ... and thrown herself off the bridge ... it makes you wonder how they can sleep at nights. Kudos to them, I say, dunno how they stand it.

This topic (or problem, if you insist) doesn't go away, does it? Broadly, I'm with Fjool - there is use, and there is abuse, irrespective of which chemical you're talking about. A French family will think nothing of having a few glasses of wine with every meal, including the kids: Use. There is no problem. A lot of Brits (not only Scots!) go out of an evening specifically to get tanked up, probably end up brawling: Abuse. A fellow I've known for years still sees one of his old University mates every Christmas for a "Christmas Trip" (LSD): Use. One or two I knew years ago took so many hallucinogenics they ended up (in one case literally) wandering about talking to trees: Abuse. I know one or two people who are registered H addicts, who feed their habit while still holding down jobs, or who just enjoy a bit of coke or E or whatever when they're out having a good time: Use. But as fleabee has said, there are also those who end up incapable of leading a normal life and thieving from other people, etc, to pay for too much of a habit: Abuse. When I was young and felt immortal, I found that, if things started getting rough, I could always pull myself up and ask "hang on, who's in charge round here, me or the drug?" - and make darn sure it was me. If you can make sure it's you, then you don't cause problems for yourself or for society, but once you lose control, you, and society, are going to end up with a problem. And as long as drug use is something "special" and "forbidden" and not talked about in polite society, there are going to be the casualties who cause the problems. Get it out in the open, make it something more like the French approach to alcohol use so that people grow up learning to keep themselves in control of their pleasures, and the problems, for the individual and for society, will meet their boojum, and "softly and silently vanish away". BTW ... snow ... that's a heck of a good name for this thread ...

Eh? I thought the whole "mankind's emissions are causing global warming" argument was based on the notion that, er, mankind's emissions are causing global warming. It doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for proof that it is, indeed, our emissions that are causing the warming, under the circs. (And, as mentioned, it's not actually my £100 that's on offer, although I agree with my mate that it would be nice, not to say essential to accepting the AGW position, to see a proper proof of that particular article of faith.) 'Twas also a wee bit surprising to come across Prof. Jones himself saying that there has been no global warming since 1995 yesterday. (Ohh, I hate having to quote the Mail ... ... it's nearly as uncomfortable-making as finding oneself in the same camp as Margaret Thatcher's science adviser ... ... but there you go.) ... None since 1995? Well, I'd have to agree with you there, then. Re water vapour feedback, I would deny absolutely that the weight of evidence points to it being a positive feedback agent - or at least, if it is, there is something much stronger acting as a negative feedback. My evidence for saying that is simply that, were the overall feedback positive, the climate system would have banged itself up to maximum (or down to minimum) long since, simply because that's what positive feedback does to a system. It either drives the output to one or the other extreme, or it makes the system oscillate. (I may not be a climate whiz, but in years of professional and amateur experience with electronics I have had the dubious "pleasure" of becoming pretty familiar with feedback.) There's presumably some positive feedback working over a timescale of about 100,000 years, of course, as the Earth does oscillate between ice age and interglacial at roughly that rate, but if that's the positive feedback we're talking about then it's about to plunge us into the next ice age, which is somewhat overdue anyhow ... now that is something worth worrying about, given the fragile nature of our life-support systems and the size of the Earth's human population. As for Solanki, his claim that the Sun is in an unusually active state for the last 60 years isn't incompatible with the lack of its variation (about that hot state) over the last 30 years whilst the Earth warms up - if it's unusually hot, then you'd expect the Earth to warm up, as the rest of the solar system seems to have been doing also. Why only the latter 30 years warming but not the previous 30? - The effect of the decadal ocean cycles, perhaps? And I can't accept anyone just saying baldly that the (alleged) increase is "caused" by human greenhouse effect without some proof that human greenhouse effect is causing the warming - which is exactly the proof we're looking for. I don't care who says, however emphatically, that it's happening - where's the proof Oh, and I see in the Reg today that the IPCC has got it wrong about hurricanes, too. Come on man, admit it, the whole AGW thing's falling apart at the seams! Which isn't to say that the Earth / life as we know it / whatever isn't going to fall apart at the seams, of course, just that I still see no reason at all to attribute it to the human race's filthy ways.

I can never decide whether >> >> The Residents: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction belongs in this category, or is one of the best covers ever ... Still, the single is a nice transparent yellow

Tor? Or is that blocked too?

Absolutely. Well done.