mistermack

All the indicators point to the UK government favouring heat pumps over gas boilers for political rather than economic reasons. They don't trust Russia, or Belarus or Ukraine to keep the gas flowing, and likewise an independent Scotland. Also, they see heat pumps as a vote winner with the save-the-planet crowd. Purely on economic grounds, air source heat pumps don't really cut it, for most of the UK consumers. People who install the heat pumps often have to massively improve the insulation of their property, otherwise they will be cold in cold weather. Then, when they get it installed, they mistakenly give the credit for supposedly improved bills to the heat pump, rather than the money spent on insulation. If people just did the insulation, and stuck with a gas boiler or got a new efficient one, they would instantly see an improvement in their bills. What the government are doing is taking money from taxpayers, giving it to heat-pump buyers, and hoping to buy votes with it. Ground source heat pumps, in off-the-gas-grid areas, might make economic sense in the long term, but air source ones just don't cut it without massive economic redistribution via taxes and grants. In any case, where will all the electricity come from, to run it all? All the cars, all the buses and all the vans and trucks will need juice off the grid. If you add all the heating for all the buildings, you will need a heck of a lot of power generation. And you need it 24/7, not just when the wind blows, or the sun is shining. The way it's going, I would be investing in a lot more nuclear, and a lot more onshore wind in the UK. Forget the protesters. I like wind towers myself, and the moaners will soon shut up once they are used to them. Who likes electricity pylons? But we got used to them years ago, and now people hardly notice them.

I have nothing against helping the poor. I do doubt if it would have much effect on crime statistics in this country in the short or medium term. I would help the poor by providing them with a better health service, and higher wages and free travel to work and massively better education in the poorest areas.

Are you joking? What's the difference between the death penalty and compulsory euthanasia? In any case, the biggest objection to the death penalty for me is the chance of killing an innocent person, and that chance grows enormously, when sexual offences are included. Since so many convictions involve consent, which is notoriously hard to prove, and so easy for a jury to get wrong, because a good liar is often much more convincing than a nervous shifty looking truth-teller.

Maybe you are blind to it, but there IS a huge rehab industry in the UK. But it doesn't work. Some poeple, like myself, use drugs when they are young and just grow out of it. I've never been rehabbed but I never use drugs and hardly ever use alcohol. But i was a big drinker and regular user in my youth. I believe that most of the successes claimed by the rehab industry are people just like me, who just grow away from over use. As far as your "evidence" goes, posting a load of links is not posting evidence. And most of it is links to papers by psychologists etc. People hugely biased pushing their own agenda. Who on the lucrative rehab industry is going to admit that it's all a waste of time and money? When their clients are constantly telling them how well they are doing just to advance their own parole chances. It's not like the rehab industry comes free. Every penny spent on parole officers, psychiatrists and psychologists and lawyers could be spent instead on the health service, helping people who genuinely benefit from that spending.

And yet you make all sorts of claims about the effectiveness of reform programs, without posting a scrap of evidence. Which is repeated by other do-gooders all the time. Always without evidence, except anecdotes that are highly suspect. My own anecdotes from my own life on the other hand, can be dismissed. He wouldn't tell me if he did. But I wouldn't put it past him. I do know that he had somebody badly beaten and put in hospital, as revenge for himself being beaten up and robbed in a home invasion. A nice crowd. You are making the ludicrous assumption that the offence that they were convicted of is the only one they committed. In real life, convictions only represent a tiny proportion of an offenders crimes. If someone gets convicted it indicates that they regard the law as nothing more than an inconvenience. Or that they have a serious drug habit that needs to be financed. Or both. And either way, they are FAR more likely to turn homicidal than the rest of us. Here's an interesting pdf : https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/whogoestoprison.pdf and it contains this paragraph : " Prolific criminals dominate the prison population 70% of custodial sentences are imposed on those with at least seven previous convictions or cautions, and 50% are imposed on those with at least 15 previous convictions or cautions. Any large reductions in the prison population would therefore mean far fewer prolific criminals going to prison." These are people who have been "rehabilitated" and "reformed" over and over again, and have a fortune spent on the process. I think that money would be better spent on hospitals and education, where we know that it does actually do some good.

I consider being 71 as at least a moderate risk bracket, whatever my weight. The best incentive, for me to keep my weight down, is the danger of diabetes and strokes. Dying is bad enough, but living in misery is even worse.

There's a program on TV tonight, called "released to kill" in the UK. In the trailer, they offered the statistic that one in five murders in the UK are carried out by people recently released from prison. They didn't offer a figure for the number carried out by people recently on probation, or people recently on another kind of non-custodial sentence like community service. But you can bet that it's of a similar nature. I know quite a few criminals, one lifelong friend who died recently was one of the biggest dealers in stolen goods in the area. He never did any prison time, even though he took part in the theft of an artic trailer full of expensive TVs, and was caught selling a very valuable stolen painting. He did his "community service" happily, he enjoyed it, he was the sociable type. And he never stopped dealing stolen goods for a second. He was addicted to it. And he was a very rich man when he died. Most of the other criminals just accept punishment when they get caught, and don't really fear it. They just laugh at the attempts at reforming them. They just tell the people in authority what they want to hear, and they are very good at doing that. My friend would have been chalked up as a success. He never got caught again. But he never stopped his criminal activities till he got too sick, at the very end. What stops me from being a criminal? Fear of getting caught. People like me wouldn't need the attempts to reform them. Just getting caught once would be once too much. Others just really don't give a toss. On TV last night, was an edition of "murder by the sea", which examined the case of Philip Manning. He was a vicious wife abuser, who got only four years for a truly vicious attempt to murder his wife. He only served just over two years, and when he got out, within a couple of months, he went to her house on Christmas eve, stabbed her new parner, and killed the ex-wife with a sawn-off shotgun. The only reason he waited two months was that it took him that long to get his hands on a gun. He must have convinced the parole board that he was truly reformed, otherwise why would they let out an attempted murderer out after only half of the paltry four year sentence? But of course, the parole boards can pass the buck, they act on the advice of the psychologist or psychiatrist, and they in turn are untouchable. If he had done the desultry four years he was given, his ex-wife would have had at least two more years of life. Maybe more, if the scumbag had died in jail.

The BMI might be of minor use to doctors, to bring up the subject that you need to lose weight. But I think that my own system, of comparing my weight to my fittest ever weight, is all I need to know. Of course, a doctor or trainer has no way of knowing what you weighed, when you were at your best-ever fitness. And of course also, some people have never been fit, so can't really compare. At peak fitness I was 157 lbs, when I was 21. Now I'm 71, I'd settle for about 170. (or be over the moon with 170 in reality)😀

I don't believe that attempts to "reform" prisoners are worth the time and effort and money. The evidence for success is purely anecdotal, and produced by the people who have a vested interest in the prisoner reform program. It's like osteopathy or chiropractic. You try various techniques, and claim credit for the "sucesses" and take no blame for the failures. And of course, just like aches and pains, criminal behaviour goes away of it's own accord with a lot of people, as they grow older, and wiser, and tire of prison life. In other words, there is a whole industry of experts, treating offenders, who are probably achieving nothing at all. The worst offenders never reform, and go on to offend over and over. If they get better at crime, and stop getting caught, they can actually be claimed as a success story by the reformers and probation service. If you scrapped the entire body of parole, probation, psychologists and psychiatrists, and simply enforced the sentences passed by the courts, I'm betting that the overall effect would be zero, or improved crime figures.

What I've read is rather different. The BMI as a risk guage is far less reliable than the waist measurement. That's from memory, I can't provide a linkwithout searching, but I've seen it stated in many different articles. It might have been waist/height ratio, or something like that, but it was in medical articles.

It's particularly interesting, if the chicks were males. The extract seems to indicate that, so the chicks were not simple clones. It has some logic to it, in survival terms, for a species that has been rare for a very long time. Individuals that can't reproduce without a successful mating are less likely to pass on their genes, in the long term, than those that can produce viable young in this manner. The element of competition becomes secondary under conditions of scarcity of a mate. Just producing any kind of fertile sucessor before you die would be an advantage to your genes, and give them some chance of being passed on. So Condors could have evolved this tendency through being rare, over millenia, and it shows up now, even though a mate is available.

And they seem to be getting younger too.

The replies really indicate how off the BMI index can be. If you are Mr or Ms average, of european ancestry, it's probably spot on. It's accepted that Asian ancestry means lighter weights for the same height on average. Don't know how that works. The figure I've added shows crudely what I'm getting at, about leg proportions.

The best I can come up with, is to have many many mirrors, packed together as layers, comprising the craft. Each time a mirror gets out of range of an effective exchange of photons with the main craft, it jettisons another mirror layer and starts again from zero range. Then, when you are half way to the destination, you start jettisoning the mirrors in the opposite direction, the way you are going, and you turn the craft around so that the solar sail is facing away from the sun, at the current mirror. Obviously, a lot depends on how accurate you can make the reflected beam over long distances.

That's the six billion dollar question. However, the same problem applies to ordinary solar sails, and also conventionally powered craft. A device like this won't add to the problem, but possibly be part of the solution. If you can get decent acceleration without using carried fuel, then the fuel that you saved could be carried to slow the craft on arrival. One thing about slowing a craft with rockets is that it would get more effective as the fuel was burned off. The stored fuel would be dropping, and you could ditch fuel tanks as they emptied. The whole thing would be the usual compromise, trading one thing off against another. Unless somebody comes up with a new way of slowing. If it's possible to get a gravitational assist from a massive body, it should be possible to use it in reverse to get some slowing effect. Maybe a planet with a moon could be "slingshotted" repeatedly till the speed dropped to a useable level.

I suspected that the loss for one reflection would be very low, as there is no noticable red shift when you look in a mirror. Of course, that means that solar sails that work on a single reflection are only using a tiny fraction of the available energy in each photon, so if you can get the light to reflect thousands of times you have a great potential for multiplying the effectiveness, so the estimate of 1,000 times by Meyer et al is probably a reasonable guess. The losses initially would be to heat, but as the sail and mirror got farther apart, you would start to lose photons due to inaccuracy of the aiming of the beam, and eventually it would stop working. What sort of distance you could send a usably tight beam over, I have no idea. But in any case, you would initially at least get a hugely increased thrust, to start the sail on it's way. With the speed of light being so high, each photon would give up it's available energy very quickly. The Meyer article that I linked is just a summary, I just noticed, the full article has to be paid for. But the summary makes it clear that it's exactly the same idea.

Just found the same idea has already been put forward. They make some big claims for it, claiming it could be up to 1,000 times more effective. https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~mwguthrie/p.solarsails.pdf https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3807?journalCode=jsr

Yes, this ship seems more of an advertising gimmick than a real commercial investment. It's used to carry wind farm turbines and you have to say it's an eye-catcher, so it will generate plenty of attention. But as a practical commercial venture, they haven't taken off. You need a side-wind for best thrust, so the ship will need to tack, from side to side to sail into the wind, which will add to time lost and diesel used. Also, when you do tack, you have to stop the rotors, and drive them in the reverse direction, otherwise they will give a backwards thrust. Interestingly, the original marine diesel generators rated at 3.5 MW had to be changed for 6.6 MW ones, due to "technical difficulties" after 3 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1

Those rotors are not driven by the wind. They are driven by the exhaust gases of nine giant marine diesel generators, via a steam turbine. They are not vertical axis wind turbines by any stretch of the imagination. What they do is provide a forward thrust, like a sailing ship. Nothing wrong with that but it's not really relevant to wind turbine generators.

Who's got an agenda? I would love to see a useful new idea and give it the thumbs up. But you have to call it as you see it. Apart from the problems of efficiency, this doesn't really have anything new that the proponent could patent. Even mounting them in a row has been tried, according to one of your posts. Small scale wind generation doesn't seem to attract small scale investment so far. Even though there are lots of small-scale solar installations. (possibly influenced by the grants that were available). I only know of two small scale units that I've seen on my travels. One was a very small HAWT in a back yard, which was there for a few years, but has disappeared, and the other was mounted on a narrowboat, which seemed to be a good idea. However, for a small turbine, it does make a heck of a noise when the wind blows. Maybe because small units give intrinsically low torque, they have to spin very fast to give a useful output.

I'm assuming that a photon must experience some amount of red shift, when it bounces back off a solar sail or mirror, to account for the energy that it's adding to them. I wonder if there are any figures for the amount or proportion of energy that it loses with each reflection? If it's tiny, then the scope for enhancing it with a mirror like this would be quite high.

That sounds like it's worth exploring. It would probably help but not keep up, if the system did actually greatly enhance the propulsion, because the first mirror would only be hit once by the photons. It might be more efficient in practice, to use that extra material on making the solar sail bigger or the reflecting mirror bigger, if they were getting a really significant gain in propulsion from the system. I was thinking that you could add mass to the mirror unit with Moon rock, once the Moon was colonised. It won't be costly to lift off heavy objects from the Moon, once it's colonised. The more massive the mirror, the less it would be propelled away from the craft. It might even be possible to use a mirror on the Moon, although it would be complicated because of it's orbit. Maybe two or three mirrors on the Moon would do the trick though. Or, if the mirror was getting too distant, you could arrange for a slingshot orbit around the various planets to force them closer together again.

I'm wondering if it would be theoretically possible to give a huge boost to the solar sail principle, by using tuned mirrors? Imagine the craft with the solar sail, reflecting the Sun's photons back towards the Sun, and being propelled as a result. What if you positioned a massive object, with a mirror, directly opposite your required direction of travel. The mirror is tuned to reflect the light accurately back at the solar sail. And the solar sail reflects it back to the mirror. And the light ends up going back and forth until its lost almost all of it's energy. So instead of using the light just once, it's used possibly thousands of times, and instead of extracting a small amount of energy from each photon, you are getting nearly all of it. The only drawback would be that you would be sending the mirror and it's massive ballast in the opposite direction, eventually losing it, unless you can figure out a use for it. I realise the practicalities would not be simple, but would it work in principle?

I've known for years that the BMI charts are miles out for me. There are various adjustments for "heavy build", "race" etc. But I haven't seen the one that should apply to me. My build is quite Neanderthal. Long body, short legs. And it's the ratio of legs to height that I'm posting about. I'm 5ft 6in in height. (1.68m approx). I used to have a friend who was 6ft 3in (1.91m approx). Sitting down we were the same height. But standing he was 9 inches taller. His extra height was all leg, which weighs a lot less than body, but the BMI only goes on overall height. I would expect his ideal weight to be a bit more than mine to reflect the extra leg length, but the BMI just assumes that everyone has the same leg/height ratio. My ideal weight, according to a BMI chart, is 135 lbs. His was 170 lbs. In actual life, we were both about equally fit back then, and he was about 10 to 15lbs more than me, not the 35lbs that the BMI chart suggests. When I was the fittest of my entire life, at age 21, after six months roaming the US and Canda on foot and by thumb, I remember I weighed about 157 lbs. I really was super fit at the time, but according to the BMI chart, I was classed as overweight even then. (and 22lbs over my "ideal"). So the BMI chart is quite a long way out for someone with my body/leg ratio. My way of adjusting is simply to look up the ideal height for 157lbs, my fittest ever weight, and it's six foot. So now, if I want to know how I'm doing, I look up my weight for a six foot man, and that gives me what I think is a realistic corrected BMI for my build. ( It still tells me I need to lose some though ) So for people like me, BMI is overstating the situation, but for my long-legged friend, it would actually be understating the degree of overweight. It would probably be fairly easy to work out a mathematical correction to be applied, taking the leg - height ratio into account. Easy for a mathematician but not for me. 😟

Sounds like they did a good job on you. 😄 Anyway, little children are coerced, because they don't get given a choice. They might not understand that they are being coerced, but they are. Religious people don't tell their kids that they can take it or leave it. Very few anyway. And this is the main problem I have with parents indoctrinating their kids. Even if they have doubts themselves, the parents still tell their kids the god stuff as if it is a fact. Jesus did this. God sent the Angel Gabriel to speak to Mohammed. etc etc. On top of abusing the young minds, they're not even being honest, and admitting their own doubts.