Early Risers.

[Gwiwer]

2 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Followed by a sprig of parsley dropped on it, with the voiceover:

 

"Salad!"

Parsley is for the guinea-pigs.  

 

I'll have the rest!  

 

 

[southern42]

No fancy telescope, just my new pre-owned iPhone through the dining room window.

A bit blurry but here is the Moon and Venus. A few minutes later and they were covered in cloud which is deep purple right across the sky, now the sun has gone down.

Edited May 23, 2023 by southern42

[AndyID]

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

How can you tell when a reporter didn't do well with science subjects at school:

 

This article:

CNN: New York City is sinking due to its million-plus buildings, study says

 

Which includes the following:

What a hodgepodge of units! The final reference is a direct quote so I am obliged to let  4½ pass (rather than 4.5mm).

 

But pounds and kg?  When the perfectly useful tons and tonnes are right there. Of course using tons requires the distinction between US (short) tons and Imperial (long) tons. But surely 762Mt is clearer, even if spelled out as 762 megatonnes / 840 million (US) tons?

 

Who can readily conceive the mass of a fully loaded 747-400? (Given this is NYC, surely garbage trucks or subway trains would be a better comparison if such junk comparisons are to be used?)

 

The reader is left to do the arithmetic on inches in 27 years of sea level rise versus mm per year of subsidence.

 

At the fastest rates of: 30" / 27 years (28mm / year) means sea level rise is >6X the fastest subsidence rate of 4.5mm / year at an annual, combined, relative sea-level rise of <33 mm.

 

The article makes the claim:

Which isn't supported by the data in the article - at least for NYC, which may or may not be in the study - I'm not paying for a subscription to find out.

 

EDIT: The article was filed under the SPACE+SCIENCE banner

 

 

Was this supposed to be "global warming isn't the real problem" piece? What a load of anti-science nonsense. It does reinforce my theory that the Internet isn't making people smarter. It's making them dumber. 🙁

 

[TheQ]

I take it you don't want surf with your turf.

A Victorian period lobster plate.

 

Evening Awl,

The first statement in that article was clever too, the sea level is rising faster because the land is sinking... Err no .. evening if the sea wasn't rising you'd still eventually get your feet wet?

 

Just back from the MRC,

Lots of people reaching headless chicken levels as our show is on Sunday.

Noise level quite high, so I sat in a corner working on stone laying and tried to ignore it all.

 

Left knee playing up again, knee support has been ordered, we'll see if that helps, if I keep on adding neoprene supports everywhere I'll end up looking like the recent batman...

 

My nearly forty year old diesel  Landrover must be one of the greenest vehicles on the planet having long since recouped it's manufacturing carbon costs. So much so from Apr 1st 2025 it will be allowed in the ULEZ at no cost. Still has to pay congestion charge though.

 

 

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. Just finished watching 'Father Brown' on the TV. The murder victim was the local station master who was also a railway modeller who had built a model of the station. The model layout that featured was not a prop but an actual working layout. 

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well I’ve had a busy day today! The weather has been very kind to me today, although a few times it went very dark and I did think it was going to rain. However I have done the following;

 

Fatsia Japonica cut back ✔️

Weeding done ✔️ 

Plants planted in the garden ✔️ 

New plants watered in ✔️ 

Corner sections for the workshop finished ✔️ 

Workshop re-organisation started ✔️ 

 

The Fatsia plant is now just 3ft tall instead of 10ft tall, we can now actually see the garden from the dining room, the leaves from this plant alone filled the wheelbarrow! It’ll soon grow back, but when it gets too big again, I’ll just cut it back, it does seem to do any harm. This is probably probably the 4th time I’ve done this and every time I do, it just grows more stems. It started off as a house plant, but wasn’t doing very well, so I put it outside thinking it was going to die, but it did the exact opposite and thrived, so much so that I planted it out and the rest as they say is history. Consequently, the log pile for bugs is now bigger than ever. 

 

Last autumn, I hard pruned  our pelargonium and stored it in the workshop for the winter. It was give a small amount of water once a week, but up it looked as though it had died, so I put it on the workshop decking a couple of weeks ago and it’s been there ever since. Whilst sat on the bench having my mid-morning muggertea, I noticed some leaves growing on the pelargonium, I think the recent warm weather has done it some good, this is the first time I’ve successfully stored a pelargonium over winter. During my gardening activities I also noticed that 5 fuchsia plants we thought had died during the cold winter, have all survived, which is good news. Sheila is a very happy bunny. 

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[Ozexpatriate]

I needed a quick 'box mart run' - mostly some tortillas but I grabbed some memory foam insoles while I was there.

 

I wandered by the toy department (as one does) and the whole tranche of new LEGO Harry Potter sets were on the shelves despite them not being released until the (Glorious) First of June, so I grabbed a couple of them, including yet-another interpretation of a bright red (rather than crimson) wheeled conveyance, and a very abbreviated model of Goathland Station*.

 

* It's sort of, kind of, based on the original.

 

Interestingly, the till software flagged that they were not for sale - which was a little disappointing and only surprising as far as the efficacy of the software was concerned. It's the first time a box mart has refused to sell me something on their shelves.

 

I imagine the shelf stockers will get a little chat about following the "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL" instructions printed on the crates.

[jjb1970]

4 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

How can you tell when a reporter didn't do well with science subjects at school:

 

This article:

CNN: New York City is sinking due to its million-plus buildings, study says

 

Which includes the following:

What a hodgepodge of units! The final reference is a direct quote so I am obliged to let  4½ pass (rather than 4.5mm).

 

But pounds and kg?  When the perfectly useful tons and tonnes are right there. Of course using tons requires the distinction between US (short) tons and Imperial (long) tons. But surely 762Mt is clearer, even if spelled out as 762 megatonnes / 840 million (US) tons?

 

Who can readily conceive the mass of a fully loaded 747-400? (Given this is NYC, surely garbage trucks or subway trains would be a better comparison if such junk comparisons are to be used?)

 

The reader is left to do the arithmetic on inches in 27 years of sea level rise versus mm per year of subsidence.

 

At the fastest rates of: 30" / 27 years (28mm / year) means sea level rise is >6X the fastest subsidence rate of 4.5mm / year at an annual, combined, relative sea-level rise of <33 mm.

 

The article makes the claim:

Which isn't supported by the data in the article - at least for NYC, which may or may not be in the study - I'm not paying for a subscription to find out.

 

EDIT: The article was filed under the SPACE+SCIENCE banner

 

I think the core problem is a general decline in journalism. The rise of on-line media and the blogosphere has led to a rush to the bottom by more established news outlets.

 

I work in shipping and remember the old Lloyd's List when it was a broadsheet newspaper, it was the newspaper of record for the industry and very highly respected. Now it's an IHS blog and treated with derision. There was a magazine called Fairplay which was very highly regarded. That closed a few years ago but near the end it was a joke, they laid off their staff writers and replaced them with interns and cheap replacements with quite predictable results. I know one of the environmental correspondents for a national outlet well and she is frank in sharing her opinions of it all and that she just hopes she can get something better.

 

I remember when the journals of professional institutes were serious publications and when they published original research and technical papers. Now most of them look like something I would write.

 

It might not be so bad if it was limited to niche outlets of no real importance, but the main news media is no better. They now rely on being spoonfed by NGOs, unattributed government informants and/or party hacks of whichever political party they are associated with. 

[jjb1970]

On Four n Twenty I must admit we sometimes buy a box, I know they're the equivalent of Ginsters (supermarket pies) but we do miss pies and they're pretty much all that is available🫣 

 

The local curry puffs are excellent but I miss meat pies.

[monkeysarefun]

6 hours ago, PupCam said:

Just my little contribution to saving the world's Lithium resources

Not if WE can help it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by monkeysarefun

[monkeysarefun]

4 hours ago, southern42 said:

No fancy telescope, just my new pre-owned iPhone through the dining room window.

A bit blurry but here is the Moon and Venus. A few minutes later and they were covered in cloud which is deep purple right across the sky, now the sun has gone down.

 

 

 

No that is all wrong. I took the exact same picture last night and you can clearly see Venus is ABOVE the  moon!

 

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

I miss meat pies.

Don't I know it. It's a meat pie desert around here.

 

There's a really great Aussie meat pie food cart in Central Oregon, (run by an expat Aussie, of course). There is also an Aussie meat pie bakery in Portland, and while their sausage rolls are good, there's something not quite 'right' about the pie fillings - they are too dry.

 

Fish and chips is quite common as pub grub - some better than others. "Frying Scotsman" (a food cart in the western Portland suburbs) is very good.

[monkeysarefun]

11 hours ago, The White Rabbit said:

I did have a snap of an aussie's ideal salad

 

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

I think the core problem is a general decline in journalism.

Yes. The internet, bringing an expectation that news should be 'free', has destroyed print journalism and overall standards have declined.

 

Per this analysis:

The number of Americans per journalist was 4,490 in 1990. In 2019 that had dropped to 14,251. That's about a 70% decline in potential coverage. (Yes, productivity is improved in that time, but so much is recycled or parroted instead of feet-on-the-street investigative journalism.)

 

There are other factors like massive M&A activity creating mega media companies owning local television stations, but I won't go there in the interest of avoiding politics.

 

EDIT: Though I think the piece I referenced is as much an indictment on basic science education as journalistic professionalism.

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by Ozexpatriate

[Ozexpatriate]

48 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Not if WE can help it!

There's a lot more lithium out there now that people are looking for it - some very productive sources in the US too.

[Gwiwer]

3 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

 

 

No that is all wrong. I took the exact same picture last night and you can clearly see Venus is ABOVE the  moon!

 

Perhaps Venus orbits the moon 

[zarniwhoop]

once again, I'm reading ERs at a time when I could be an ER, but yet again it's a lie - hoping to go to bed soon, and perhaps sleep.

 

Not looking for sympathy, but it has been a weird week - the usual p155ed off by my freestyle libre2 sensor - I seem to have developed a dextrose addiction since I started using it, often accompanied by overcompensating (usually with biscuits - digestives or oaties) to shut the damned alarm up when it goes again. Last night (Mon-Tue) I don't think I slept at all. Got up for a bit, hacked on trying to cut down my texlive install, went back to bed, still did not sleep, took insulin for my expected breakfast, waited until blood sugar readings were sensible - by which time I was really tired, but couldn't go to bed for fear of hypo - then ate and slept. Again, until late afternoon, but I don't think I dreamed. And spells of pain around my scar as well as the usual more common pains and spasms. Don't want sympathy for this, the alternative would be not being at all mobile.

 

Got up, got blood sugar semi-sorted, eventually got out to Tess'Co for the food I needed. At least it was still light and my road was not blocked by the 3-way traffic lights (next week might be interesting - the top of the hill will be closed for 3 days from start of June, no idea why, probably some scheme from the green council we have just booted out.

 

Back to my PCs (main one died last week, haven't dared to try to read the manual yet to see if it can diagnose the colour of the LED, but at least I've got my low-powered intel skylake booting again (seems the cable from the DVD drive had fallen off and that stopped it finding the system on the disk!) and now building a new system.

 

Back to my texlive install - just found out why the modern variant of (vertical) japanese typesetting was failing, still getting nowhere with the old-style variant failing. But at least my patching the source for the luatex vulnerability turns out to have worked now that the proof of concept is available. I've got to take the good points when I can get them ;-)

 

/me swears - still need to update the Security Advisory now the details are public. It can wait.

 

I just finished wathcing my recording of Tuesday's Giro d'Italia - congratulations to G (the welshman) in going back into the maglia rosa.

 

Anyway - in the past few days I've slept a lot, and dreamed a lot  - back to dreaming I was riding my bike (a Bianchi SLX, the one I was riding when I was knocked off) and talking to a clubmate - odd, I haven't dreamed about riding a bike for a year or two. The usual oddness - riding local roads, except they went to places they don't actually go. In another dream I was walking through Worthing from where I used to work (and walking ok, without my sticks - usually in dreams I'm aware that I have "mobility issues") except after I woke up I realised the Worthing in the dream was a place I've dreamed before, but nothing like the real Worthing. Oh, and as I walked back there was a car towing some 2ft gauge trucks onto a track at an industrial estate, and after that I got to the Welsh Highland Railway's Porthmadog terminus (didn't actually look like the real one that I remember, and rather more steam trains). I guess the point of this post is that dreams are weird, aren't they ?

 

Condolences and sympathy to those who need it, stay safe.

[iL Dottore]

14 hours ago, polybear said:

 

Bottom shelf - middle shelf - top shelf....

Wasted, this Bear....should've been a Chef....

Captain Cynical notes that the Bear is now suffering from delusions of adequacy…

 

Time for the purple pills, he reckons.

[iL Dottore]

9 hours ago, Sidecar Racer said:

 

 

 

 

Nope!

But there’s too much tomato.

[iL Dottore]

8 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

Was this supposed to be "global warming isn't the real problem" piece? What a load of anti-science nonsense. It does reinforce my theory that the Internet isn't making people smarter. It's making them dumber. 🙁

 

(My emphasis).

 

I’m afraid you may be right, Andy.

 

It’s frightening to consider that the internet was created and built by very smart and very clever people but is now being taken over* by the sort of people who - pre-internet - would write to newspapers/their MP in green crayon on lined paper, wander the streets swigging meths and screaming obscenities or would create tiny splinter groups of like minded fervently extreme loonies.

 

Thanks to the Internet the crazies have now found each other…

 

* has been???

[iL Dottore]

5 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

On Four n Twenty I must admit we sometimes buy a box, I know they're the equivalent of Ginsters (supermarket pies) but we do miss pies and they're pretty much all that is available🫣 

 

The local curry puffs are excellent but I miss meat pies.

Now I may be treading on very thin ice with this jjb1970, but in the absence of decent pies - have you considered baking your own? (I won’t suggest that you ask Mrs jjb1970 to “get baking” - some things are perhaps too dangerous for a mere mortal man 😀)

 

Anyway, hilarity aside, some pies are very easy to make as the pastry is also easy to make - the 3 easiest being hot water crust pastry, suet pastry and shortcrust pastry. I would imagine lard (for the first pastry type) would be fairly easy to get in Singapore; suet might be a bit more difficult, but a good butcher should be able to source it for you, even if you have to do your own suet prep (suet is nothing more than the fat from around a beef kidney that has been cleaned and grated [commercial suet is also dusted with flour to stop it from clumping together] - where you have beef you should also be able to get suet). Shortcrust pastry is also a doddle, all you need is extremely cold butter (or a mixture of butter and lard), flour, baking powder and a food processor.

 

Once you have sorted out the pastry, then a whole world of tasty pies await!

[polybear]

10 hours ago, southern42 said:

A bit blurry but here is the Moon and Venus. 

 

 

Which is which?

🤣

(At this point Puppers gives up all hope......)

 

8 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I needed a quick 'box mart run' - mostly some tortillas but I grabbed some memory foam insoles while I was there.

 

I wandered by the toy department (as one does) and the whole tranche of new LEGO Harry Potter sets were on the shelves despite them not being released until the (Glorious) First of June, so I grabbed a couple of them, including yet-another interpretation of a bright red (rather than crimson) wheeled conveyance, and a very abbreviated model of Goathland Station*.

 

* It's sort of, kind of, based on the original.

 

Interestingly, the till software flagged that they were not for sale - which was a little disappointing and only surprising as far as the efficacy of the software was concerned. It's the first time a box mart has refused to sell me something on their shelves.

 

I imagine the shelf stockers will get a little chat about following the "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL" instructions printed on the crates.

 

I wonder if the security barriers would be triggered if you walked out without paying for them....

Incidentally, does Lego cost obscene amounts as it does in the UK?  It's a pile of plastic, after all.

 

Bear here....

Let's see now - oh yes, danglin'.....

After that (and din dins) I may well get around to finally attacking the Pyracanthus at the bottom of the garden - the Green Bin needs jumping in first though to make a bit more room; the green bin men arrive tomorrow and Bear's out to get his money's worth.

BG

[TheQ]

Mooring Awl,

3.5 hours plus 2.5 hours sleep long awake in the middle.

 

Ben I'd like to go out Collie, has been taken for patrol, blue welkin, medium dew, light breeze.

 

Our regional paper long since got rid of its reporters, they just depend on people phoning in stories, and the editors phoning places nearby to any incident to get misinformation.

 

Plans today,

Unload the Landrover, which I meant to do yesterday.

Visit the MRC I left some paperwork behind,

Post said paperwork,

Visit bank again.

Fig tree area again...