Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
Why not? I'm not suggesting we readopt it but I don't see why it's "insane".
Here's a similar scale for Celsius:
0, icy 100, dead
And for Kelvin:
0, dead 100, dead
Why not indeed? It’s just a little out of character – you are normally the neophile’s neophile. I expected you to have the same attitude to rationality over human whimsicality in scales of measurement that you do for sub-national geographical units and (whispers) format of monetary exchange.
Personally, I don’t find Fahrenheit at all intuitive but that is only because I am not, and never have been tuned into it – while I still think of distance in imperial units I’ve never really thought of anything in terms of Fahrenheit. I know what 0 C feels like and I know what 20 c feels like, but I’d only know what 32 F feels like by translating it first into what I instinctively understand i.e. centigrade/Celsius (never really known the difference).
But there is certainly no reason why one is better than the other. My inner pedant bridles when I hear people talk about centigrade as a metric unit, because of course its as arbitrarily designated as Fahrenheit. But this – and the concept of Kelvin – is difficult to make people understand (though surely they have done this at school? Evidently they have forgotten).
It’s fun when someone conforms to the stereotype you have of them, and even more so when they fail to do so. This falls into the latter category!
I'm not a neophile at all. I love old buildings, ancient cities and creaking medieval pubs. I loathe most New World cities and found New Zealand the dullest place to tour due to its boring (non)architecture and utilitarian obsession.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
Has he finally had enough, shilling for the cashless society?
If Labour makes progress on planning, building homes or immigration, they will be re-elected.
I think the odds the Tories are back in within five years is vanishingly small.
We have an electorate that veers massively. Very little residual party loyalty. It's who has the zeitgeist - impossible to know how the fickle bastards will go in four years and seven months time.
The parties veer massively as well, I have voted for LDs, Labour, Tories and Greens but my views haven't really changed much. I could have voted for Camerons Tories or Starmers Labour but would actively vote against the current Tory iteration or Corbyn's Labour. Not particularly agreeing with (or more importantly believing in) any of the main parties I am often voting against the worst rather than for the best.
So party support is very volatile in the last couple of decades but so is party identity.
A family that cannot afford its bills lives in poverty. Build them a home that costs almost nothing to heat and that same family will prioritise things that matter to us all.
(When mum doesn’t have second and third jobs to cover costs, one of the first things that gets help using the extra available time is children doing their homework.)
It is shocking that this has to be said in 2024 but poor quality housing blights lives.
EPC A and B are standards that must be met in new housing and older homes being brought into the local authority fold.
But that is to miss the point.
Let us say, for convenience of argument and round numbers, that adding £50k of insulation to a new build reduces the gas bill from £1k/year to zero. Let us also assume the probable lifespan of the house is 50 years (generous, looking at the build quality of the average new build). At the end of the 50 years, the savings on gas have just covered the cost of the insulation.
By the time you consider the cost of borrowing the £50k upfront, it's cheaper just to pay the gas bill.
Your point is partly about who pays the gas bill - but in the scenario above, it would be cheaper for whoever is paying for the build to give the occupants £1k a year for 50 years to pay the gas bill than fit the insulation.
If we actually wanted to fix the housing market, what we need is loads of really cheap houses.
A few years ago, I stayed on a holiday site at an old army base on the Isle of Wight. There were rows of single story, terraced breezeblock chalets, all the same: a double bedroom, single bedroom, living room with a kitchen at the back, bathroom. I bet you could throw them up for £50k each. Not ideal as family accommodation - but for singles in grotty HMOs, what an improvement. I would have bought one as the first step on the housing ladder. Why aren't we building stuff like this like it's going out of fashion? Building regs and planning. So instead we have a housing crisis,which is completely nuts.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
Why not? I'm not suggesting we readopt it but I don't see why it's "insane".
Here's a similar scale for Celsius:
0, icy 100, dead
And for Kelvin:
0, dead 100, dead
Why not indeed? It’s just a little out of character – you are normally the neophile’s neophile. I expected you to have the same attitude to rationality over human whimsicality in scales of measurement that you do for sub-national geographical units and (whispers) format of monetary exchange.
Personally, I don’t find Fahrenheit at all intuitive but that is only because I am not, and never have been tuned into it – while I still think of distance in imperial units I’ve never really thought of anything in terms of Fahrenheit. I know what 0 C feels like and I know what 20 c feels like, but I’d only know what 32 F feels like by translating it first into what I instinctively understand i.e. centigrade/Celsius (never really known the difference).
But there is certainly no reason why one is better than the other. My inner pedant bridles when I hear people talk about centigrade as a metric unit, because of course its as arbitrarily designated as Fahrenheit. But this – and the concept of Kelvin – is difficult to make people understand (though surely they have done this at school? Evidently they have forgotten).
It’s fun when someone conforms to the stereotype you have of them, and even more so when they fail to do so. This falls into the latter category!
Apparently 0 Fahrenheit was the coldest temperature possible with salt and ice, and 100 was meant to be human body temperature (it is actually 98.4).
My dad's thumbnail for F:C was
50F ~ 10C 60F ~ 15C 70F ~ 20C
Back then in the UK we did not have to worry about >20C.
Given that the multiplier is 5:9 it works well enough.
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
I now suspect the cash hatred is due to residual anger over decimalisation
Not at all. Cash is utterly pointless. As the extremely weak arguments proposed on here for it prove.
It is a monumental waste of time and resources. If people want to persist with it, up to them, I wouldn't ban it.
But it is a bizarrely anachronistic, wasteful and time-consuming way of transacting money (and has to be converted back into proper digital money in any case).
They did not, apparently, find it useless in America after the hurricane.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
I now suspect the cash hatred is due to residual anger over decimalisation
Not at all. Cash is utterly pointless. As the extremely weak arguments proposed on here for it prove.
It is a monumental waste of time and resources. If people want to persist with it, up to them, I wouldn't ban it.
But it is a bizarrely anachronistic, wasteful and time-consuming way of transacting money (and has to be converted back into proper digital money in any case).
They did not, apparently, find it useless in America after the hurricane.
I'll remember that next time we have a hurricane in the UK.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
Why not? I'm not suggesting we readopt it but I don't see why it's "insane".
Here's a similar scale for Celsius:
0, icy 100, dead
And for Kelvin:
0, dead 100, dead
Why not indeed? It’s just a little out of character – you are normally the neophile’s neophile. I expected you to have the same attitude to rationality over human whimsicality in scales of measurement that you do for sub-national geographical units and (whispers) format of monetary exchange.
Personally, I don’t find Fahrenheit at all intuitive but that is only because I am not, and never have been tuned into it – while I still think of distance in imperial units I’ve never really thought of anything in terms of Fahrenheit. I know what 0 C feels like and I know what 20 c feels like, but I’d only know what 32 F feels like by translating it first into what I instinctively understand i.e. centigrade/Celsius (never really known the difference).
But there is certainly no reason why one is better than the other. My inner pedant bridles when I hear people talk about centigrade as a metric unit, because of course its as arbitrarily designated as Fahrenheit. But this – and the concept of Kelvin – is difficult to make people understand (though surely they have done this at school? Evidently they have forgotten).
It’s fun when someone conforms to the stereotype you have of them, and even more so when they fail to do so. This falls into the latter category!
Apparently 0 Fahrenheit was the coldest temperature possible with salt and ice, and 100 was meant to be human body temperature (it is actually 98.4).
My dad's thumbnail for F:C was
50F ~ 10C 60F ~ 15C 70F ~ 20C
Back then in the UK we did not have to worry about >20C.
Given that the multiplier is 5:9 it works well enough.
On topic, I don't think polling at 100 days post this GE can be directly compared with previous elections, not least because some of the comparisons are with incumbents.
Having a July election followed by a long summer break then a month off for conferences means that little has really happened apart from a few photo-opportunities with foreign leaders. It's only now we are really starting to see what a Starmer government will be like.
Starmer's plan for GE 2029 looks to be on delivery, very much the "are you better off now than 4 years ago?" approach. It might work, if Labour does deliver on waiting lists, housing, immigration control, criminal justice etc.
To look at the counterfactual: if Sunak had held out for an October election rather than gone in July, would we now be looking at a very different election result? I think not. The drop in the popularity of Labour is down to being in government but not yet doing anything positive.
Talking of which, another bit of "can't confirm until the Spending Review, but here's a bit of ankle" story...
An “HS2-light” railway line between Birmingham and Manchester would be built under plans being considered by ministers.
In a rethink of Rishi Sunak’s decision to entirely scrap the high-speed line beyond Birmingham, senior government figures are looking at a proposal which they believe can be delivered much more cheaply than the original scheme.
Better politics than leaving a blank space for opponents to fill, and another bit of accepting reality.
I think one of the problems with HS2 is it being over engineered, so unessecarily expensive. A slightly less high speed brings the costs down, and also makes intermediate stations possible that could be new towns with excellent communication links.
"A slightly less high speed brings the costs down"
Not by much AIUI - unless you go sub 100MPH.
Dropping to 125mph saves a lot. For a country of our size, that's more than fast enough.
AIUI it does not. And have you any idea how stupid it would be to build a HSL with a 125MPH max speed? The original plans for the WCML upgrade 25 years ago was a 140MPH max speed.
The stupid idea was building a capacity upgrade as a high speed line.
There's a very strong law of diminishing returns as you increase speed. Allowing for plausible acceleration curves, 125mph still gets you London-Manchester in about 1 3/4 hrs, 150mph only saves you about 15 minutes, 200mph only saves you about 30mins.
The costs as you go faster are significant - e.g. HS2 requires concrete slab track rather than conventional sleepers. Tunnel bores have to be *much* larger to deal with the turbulence from two trains passing at higher speeds. And to cap it all off, because you have to maintain clear stopping distances between trains, capacity in terms of trains per hour if anything probably drops.
"HS2 requires concrete slab track"
As my link above shows, it does not 'require' slab track. They decided to use it for HS2, and it seems it was a fairly close decision.
The thing is, many of your points are true for HSLs in other countries, and they apparently manage to build them much cheaper than we do - though direct comparisons are difficult.
A quick skim of that seems to suggest that in 2015 Atkins were told to go and do an analysis of a reduced running speed option, and came back £13bn cheaper than the projected £40bn, i.e. about a 30% saving, for adding 15-20 mins to London - Manchester journey times.
I think that makes my argument rather than detracts from it.
Offset by massively reduced benefits iirc
Not really. It might have been completed far sooner. There's no benefit in cancelling it, as happened, obviously.
The whole thing has been a shitshow from start to (not)finish.
This gives a flavour. (And incidentally confirms my often repeated assertion that Brexit was a needless distraction.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98486dzxnzo ...Andrew Bruce joined the company in 2015. His job was to buy all the land and property for phase one of the project. He says that in his first week he was given two sets of figures. According to Mr Bruce, one set was to be used to show the government in presentations. He says these showed HS2 was on track to purchase the land on time and on budget. He says he was also given a second set of figures which showed there was no way HS2 could buy all the land and properties needed while keeping to that budget. And he says his own work subsequently found even higher estimates for land and property costs. He says that HS2 Ltd was not being honest about the likely costs even though HS2 Ltd was being paid for by the taxpayer and spending public money. HS2 disputes this. It says these allegations have been put under intense scrutiny by the National Audit Office which found nothing untoward. Andrew Bruce doesn’t accept the conclusions that HS2 draws from the NAO findings. He believes there should be further investigation..
...You might have thought a megaproject costing billions would be a political priority. However, in 2017, Brexit was dominating the agenda and if an outsider had the impression that MPs were distracted when they voted through the country’s biggest infrastructure project, they’d be right. Philip Hammond told me: “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but HS2 was not the main issue of the moment. The government was teetering on the brink, trying to deal with the daily hourly pressures of the Brexit negotiation. Long-term projects were perhaps not seen as quite as immediately urgent.”..
One person claims; the NAO and HS2 disputes.
As or bringing Brexit into it... that seems rather odd.
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
I'll happily swap my original 'insane' for 'irrational'
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Good cappuccino, pleasant pear tart thing, nice ham roll. £17. Not great but not entirely budget busting?
I have £73 left
Jeez it really is gonna be kebabs
Where in Geneva is your AirBnB? Have a look in the supermarkets at their lunch options - they used to do relatively reasonable veal escalope in ciabatta with salad and a sauce and find sandwiches like that for those who lunched at their desks.
Otherwise find the restaurants with plat du jour as used to be v good value with a glass of drinkable wine thrown in.
Also dotted around are the supermarkets’ canteens as a relatively cheap option. Finally you get little rotisserie chicken vans parked up so grab yourself a chicken for tonight at the Airbnb - they were weirdly cheaper cooked and prepped than uncooked from a supermarket.
Forgot to add - there are a lot of charity kitchens in Geneva for free food - the religious of all stripes provide soup kitchens etc so give it a google and add a v different experience.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
How do the cognerati see the Tory leadership elections developing over the next day?
Is Kemi done?
(The underlying q is that I have a small lay on Kemi. Is it time to kill it?)
I have no idea to be honest. There's obviously going be all sorts of vote lending and arm twisting and promises of jobs and so on, so who can possibly know from the outside.
On topic, I don't think polling at 100 days post this GE can be directly compared with previous elections, not least because some of the comparisons are with incumbents.
Having a July election followed by a long summer break then a month off for conferences means that little has really happened apart from a few photo-opportunities with foreign leaders. It's only now we are really starting to see what a Starmer government will be like.
Starmer's plan for GE 2029 looks to be on delivery, very much the "are you better off now than 4 years ago?" approach. It might work, if Labour does deliver on waiting lists, housing, immigration control, criminal justice etc.
To look at the counterfactual: if Sunak had held out for an October election rather than gone in July, would we now be looking at a very different election result? I think not. The drop in the popularity of Labour is down to being in government but not yet doing anything positive.
Talking of which, another bit of "can't confirm until the Spending Review, but here's a bit of ankle" story...
An “HS2-light” railway line between Birmingham and Manchester would be built under plans being considered by ministers.
In a rethink of Rishi Sunak’s decision to entirely scrap the high-speed line beyond Birmingham, senior government figures are looking at a proposal which they believe can be delivered much more cheaply than the original scheme.
Better politics than leaving a blank space for opponents to fill, and another bit of accepting reality.
I think one of the problems with HS2 is it being over engineered, so unessecarily expensive. A slightly less high speed brings the costs down, and also makes intermediate stations possible that could be new towns with excellent communication links.
"A slightly less high speed brings the costs down"
Not by much AIUI - unless you go sub 100MPH.
Dropping to 125mph saves a lot. For a country of our size, that's more than fast enough.
AIUI it does not. And have you any idea how stupid it would be to build a HSL with a 125MPH max speed? The original plans for the WCML upgrade 25 years ago was a 140MPH max speed.
The stupid idea was building a capacity upgrade as a high speed line.
There's a very strong law of diminishing returns as you increase speed. Allowing for plausible acceleration curves, 125mph still gets you London-Manchester in about 1 3/4 hrs, 150mph only saves you about 15 minutes, 200mph only saves you about 30mins.
The costs as you go faster are significant - e.g. HS2 requires concrete slab track rather than conventional sleepers. Tunnel bores have to be *much* larger to deal with the turbulence from two trains passing at higher speeds. And to cap it all off, because you have to maintain clear stopping distances between trains, capacity in terms of trains per hour if anything probably drops.
"HS2 requires concrete slab track"
As my link above shows, it does not 'require' slab track. They decided to use it for HS2, and it seems it was a fairly close decision.
The thing is, many of your points are true for HSLs in other countries, and they apparently manage to build them much cheaper than we do - though direct comparisons are difficult.
A quick skim of that seems to suggest that in 2015 Atkins were told to go and do an analysis of a reduced running speed option, and came back £13bn cheaper than the projected £40bn, i.e. about a 30% saving, for adding 15-20 mins to London - Manchester journey times.
I think that makes my argument rather than detracts from it.
Offset by massively reduced benefits iirc
Not really. It might have been completed far sooner. There's no benefit in cancelling it, as happened, obviously.
The whole thing has been a shitshow from start to (not)finish.
This gives a flavour. (And incidentally confirms my often repeated assertion that Brexit was a needless distraction.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98486dzxnzo ...Andrew Bruce joined the company in 2015. His job was to buy all the land and property for phase one of the project. He says that in his first week he was given two sets of figures. According to Mr Bruce, one set was to be used to show the government in presentations. He says these showed HS2 was on track to purchase the land on time and on budget. He says he was also given a second set of figures which showed there was no way HS2 could buy all the land and properties needed while keeping to that budget. And he says his own work subsequently found even higher estimates for land and property costs. He says that HS2 Ltd was not being honest about the likely costs even though HS2 Ltd was being paid for by the taxpayer and spending public money. HS2 disputes this. It says these allegations have been put under intense scrutiny by the National Audit Office which found nothing untoward. Andrew Bruce doesn’t accept the conclusions that HS2 draws from the NAO findings. He believes there should be further investigation..
...You might have thought a megaproject costing billions would be a political priority. However, in 2017, Brexit was dominating the agenda and if an outsider had the impression that MPs were distracted when they voted through the country’s biggest infrastructure project, they’d be right. Philip Hammond told me: “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but HS2 was not the main issue of the moment. The government was teetering on the brink, trying to deal with the daily hourly pressures of the Brexit negotiation. Long-term projects were perhaps not seen as quite as immediately urgent.”..
One person claims; the NAO and HS2 disputes.
As or bringing Brexit into it... that seems rather odd.
Though that one person was right. The reason that HS2 has been such a fiasco is that the costs escalated wildly beyond the original.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
I now suspect the cash hatred is due to residual anger over decimalisation
Not at all. Cash is utterly pointless. As the extremely weak arguments proposed on here for it prove.
It is a monumental waste of time and resources. If people want to persist with it, up to them, I wouldn't ban it.
But it is a bizarrely anachronistic, wasteful and time-consuming way of transacting money (and has to be converted back into proper digital money in any case).
They did not, apparently, find it useless in America after the hurricane.
I'll remember that next time we have a hurricane in the UK.
I'm sure it's still possible to pay by phone or watch even in those circs. I'd accept a recent iPhone in good condition as payment up to a few hundred quid at least and an Apple watch up to £100 or so, probably
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
The question is which was used to measure the other first, the chain or the cricket pitch?
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
On topic, I don't think polling at 100 days post this GE can be directly compared with previous elections, not least because some of the comparisons are with incumbents.
Having a July election followed by a long summer break then a month off for conferences means that little has really happened apart from a few photo-opportunities with foreign leaders. It's only now we are really starting to see what a Starmer government will be like.
Starmer's plan for GE 2029 looks to be on delivery, very much the "are you better off now than 4 years ago?" approach. It might work, if Labour does deliver on waiting lists, housing, immigration control, criminal justice etc.
To look at the counterfactual: if Sunak had held out for an October election rather than gone in July, would we now be looking at a very different election result? I think not. The drop in the popularity of Labour is down to being in government but not yet doing anything positive.
Talking of which, another bit of "can't confirm until the Spending Review, but here's a bit of ankle" story...
An “HS2-light” railway line between Birmingham and Manchester would be built under plans being considered by ministers.
In a rethink of Rishi Sunak’s decision to entirely scrap the high-speed line beyond Birmingham, senior government figures are looking at a proposal which they believe can be delivered much more cheaply than the original scheme.
Better politics than leaving a blank space for opponents to fill, and another bit of accepting reality.
I think one of the problems with HS2 is it being over engineered, so unessecarily expensive. A slightly less high speed brings the costs down, and also makes intermediate stations possible that could be new towns with excellent communication links.
"A slightly less high speed brings the costs down"
Not by much AIUI - unless you go sub 100MPH.
Dropping to 125mph saves a lot. For a country of our size, that's more than fast enough.
AIUI it does not. And have you any idea how stupid it would be to build a HSL with a 125MPH max speed? The original plans for the WCML upgrade 25 years ago was a 140MPH max speed.
The stupid idea was building a capacity upgrade as a high speed line.
There's a very strong law of diminishing returns as you increase speed. Allowing for plausible acceleration curves, 125mph still gets you London-Manchester in about 1 3/4 hrs, 150mph only saves you about 15 minutes, 200mph only saves you about 30mins.
The costs as you go faster are significant - e.g. HS2 requires concrete slab track rather than conventional sleepers. Tunnel bores have to be *much* larger to deal with the turbulence from two trains passing at higher speeds. And to cap it all off, because you have to maintain clear stopping distances between trains, capacity in terms of trains per hour if anything probably drops.
"HS2 requires concrete slab track"
As my link above shows, it does not 'require' slab track. They decided to use it for HS2, and it seems it was a fairly close decision.
The thing is, many of your points are true for HSLs in other countries, and they apparently manage to build them much cheaper than we do - though direct comparisons are difficult.
A quick skim of that seems to suggest that in 2015 Atkins were told to go and do an analysis of a reduced running speed option, and came back £13bn cheaper than the projected £40bn, i.e. about a 30% saving, for adding 15-20 mins to London - Manchester journey times.
I think that makes my argument rather than detracts from it.
Offset by massively reduced benefits iirc
Not really. It might have been completed far sooner. There's no benefit in cancelling it, as happened, obviously.
The whole thing has been a shitshow from start to (not)finish.
This gives a flavour. (And incidentally confirms my often repeated assertion that Brexit was a needless distraction.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98486dzxnzo ...Andrew Bruce joined the company in 2015. His job was to buy all the land and property for phase one of the project. He says that in his first week he was given two sets of figures. According to Mr Bruce, one set was to be used to show the government in presentations. He says these showed HS2 was on track to purchase the land on time and on budget. He says he was also given a second set of figures which showed there was no way HS2 could buy all the land and properties needed while keeping to that budget. And he says his own work subsequently found even higher estimates for land and property costs. He says that HS2 Ltd was not being honest about the likely costs even though HS2 Ltd was being paid for by the taxpayer and spending public money. HS2 disputes this. It says these allegations have been put under intense scrutiny by the National Audit Office which found nothing untoward. Andrew Bruce doesn’t accept the conclusions that HS2 draws from the NAO findings. He believes there should be further investigation..
...You might have thought a megaproject costing billions would be a political priority. However, in 2017, Brexit was dominating the agenda and if an outsider had the impression that MPs were distracted when they voted through the country’s biggest infrastructure project, they’d be right. Philip Hammond told me: “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but HS2 was not the main issue of the moment. The government was teetering on the brink, trying to deal with the daily hourly pressures of the Brexit negotiation. Long-term projects were perhaps not seen as quite as immediately urgent.”..
One person claims; the NAO and HS2 disputes.
As or bringing Brexit into it... that seems rather odd.
Does it ?
A misconceived scheme for a necessary project created a large public backlash, and resultant delay. A new government then took its eye off the ball for the best part of a decade over a much bigger, and economically irrelevant project. It then cancelled the first project just before losing office.
And now we're trying to salvage something from the mess.
And if you think it's only one person claiming it was a shitshow, then I've got a hyperloop alternative to sell you.
On topic, I don't think polling at 100 days post this GE can be directly compared with previous elections, not least because some of the comparisons are with incumbents.
Having a July election followed by a long summer break then a month off for conferences means that little has really happened apart from a few photo-opportunities with foreign leaders. It's only now we are really starting to see what a Starmer government will be like.
Starmer's plan for GE 2029 looks to be on delivery, very much the "are you better off now than 4 years ago?" approach. It might work, if Labour does deliver on waiting lists, housing, immigration control, criminal justice etc.
To look at the counterfactual: if Sunak had held out for an October election rather than gone in July, would we now be looking at a very different election result? I think not. The drop in the popularity of Labour is down to being in government but not yet doing anything positive.
Talking of which, another bit of "can't confirm until the Spending Review, but here's a bit of ankle" story...
An “HS2-light” railway line between Birmingham and Manchester would be built under plans being considered by ministers.
In a rethink of Rishi Sunak’s decision to entirely scrap the high-speed line beyond Birmingham, senior government figures are looking at a proposal which they believe can be delivered much more cheaply than the original scheme.
Better politics than leaving a blank space for opponents to fill, and another bit of accepting reality.
I think one of the problems with HS2 is it being over engineered, so unessecarily expensive. A slightly less high speed brings the costs down, and also makes intermediate stations possible that could be new towns with excellent communication links.
"A slightly less high speed brings the costs down"
Not by much AIUI - unless you go sub 100MPH.
Dropping to 125mph saves a lot. For a country of our size, that's more than fast enough.
AIUI it does not. And have you any idea how stupid it would be to build a HSL with a 125MPH max speed? The original plans for the WCML upgrade 25 years ago was a 140MPH max speed.
The stupid idea was building a capacity upgrade as a high speed line.
There's a very strong law of diminishing returns as you increase speed. Allowing for plausible acceleration curves, 125mph still gets you London-Manchester in about 1 3/4 hrs, 150mph only saves you about 15 minutes, 200mph only saves you about 30mins.
The costs as you go faster are significant - e.g. HS2 requires concrete slab track rather than conventional sleepers. Tunnel bores have to be *much* larger to deal with the turbulence from two trains passing at higher speeds. And to cap it all off, because you have to maintain clear stopping distances between trains, capacity in terms of trains per hour if anything probably drops.
"HS2 requires concrete slab track"
As my link above shows, it does not 'require' slab track. They decided to use it for HS2, and it seems it was a fairly close decision.
The thing is, many of your points are true for HSLs in other countries, and they apparently manage to build them much cheaper than we do - though direct comparisons are difficult.
A quick skim of that seems to suggest that in 2015 Atkins were told to go and do an analysis of a reduced running speed option, and came back £13bn cheaper than the projected £40bn, i.e. about a 30% saving, for adding 15-20 mins to London - Manchester journey times.
I think that makes my argument rather than detracts from it.
Offset by massively reduced benefits iirc
Not really. It might have been completed far sooner. There's no benefit in cancelling it, as happened, obviously.
The whole thing has been a shitshow from start to (not)finish.
This gives a flavour. (And incidentally confirms my often repeated assertion that Brexit was a needless distraction.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98486dzxnzo ...Andrew Bruce joined the company in 2015. His job was to buy all the land and property for phase one of the project. He says that in his first week he was given two sets of figures. According to Mr Bruce, one set was to be used to show the government in presentations. He says these showed HS2 was on track to purchase the land on time and on budget. He says he was also given a second set of figures which showed there was no way HS2 could buy all the land and properties needed while keeping to that budget. And he says his own work subsequently found even higher estimates for land and property costs. He says that HS2 Ltd was not being honest about the likely costs even though HS2 Ltd was being paid for by the taxpayer and spending public money. HS2 disputes this. It says these allegations have been put under intense scrutiny by the National Audit Office which found nothing untoward. Andrew Bruce doesn’t accept the conclusions that HS2 draws from the NAO findings. He believes there should be further investigation..
...You might have thought a megaproject costing billions would be a political priority. However, in 2017, Brexit was dominating the agenda and if an outsider had the impression that MPs were distracted when they voted through the country’s biggest infrastructure project, they’d be right. Philip Hammond told me: “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but HS2 was not the main issue of the moment. The government was teetering on the brink, trying to deal with the daily hourly pressures of the Brexit negotiation. Long-term projects were perhaps not seen as quite as immediately urgent.”..
One person claims; the NAO and HS2 disputes.
As or bringing Brexit into it... that seems rather odd.
Though that one person was right. The reason that HS2 has been such a fiasco is that the costs escalated wildly beyond the original.
Was he right? As for the costs: see the post I wrote below about the way the finances for the project was done. IMV much of the problem lies with that.
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
I'll happily swap my original 'insane' for 'irrational'
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
I really ought to have added this note. ..."Sal Armoniac" was an impure form of ammonium chloride. The French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715) discussed it in his book Cours de Chymie (A Course of Chemistry, 1675), describing where it occurs naturally and how it can be prepared artificially. It occurs naturally in the deserts of northern Africa, where it forms from puddles of animal urine. It can be prepared artificially by boiling 5 parts of urine, 1 part of sea salt, and ½ part of chimney soot until the mixture has dried. The mixture is then heated in a sublimation pot until it sublimates; the sublimated crystals are sal Armoniac...
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
I now suspect the cash hatred is due to residual anger over decimalisation
Not at all. Cash is utterly pointless. As the extremely weak arguments proposed on here for it prove.
It is a monumental waste of time and resources. If people want to persist with it, up to them, I wouldn't ban it.
But it is a bizarrely anachronistic, wasteful and time-consuming way of transacting money (and has to be converted back into proper digital money in any case).
They did not, apparently, find it useless in America after the hurricane.
I'll remember that next time we have a hurricane in the UK.
That's like you (hypothetically) complaining about people who might try and spend the Salvadorean dollar in the UK. Hurricanes are tropical storms by definition.
However, there are plenty of storms which began as hurricanes, and (on a separate analytical basis) plenty of hurricane strength winds (as officially defined: over 73 mph IIRC).
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
And thus the intellectual wing of the Tory party sketches out a worldview on which to base its manifesto for a return to power.
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
I'll happily swap my original 'insane' for 'irrational'
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
I really ought to have added this note. ..."Sal Armoniac" was an impure form of ammonium chloride. The French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715) discussed it in his book Cours de Chymie (A Course of Chemistry, 1675), describing where it occurs naturally and how it can be prepared artificially. It occurs naturally in the deserts of northern Africa, where it forms from puddles of animal urine. It can be prepared artificially by boiling 5 parts of urine, 1 part of sea salt, and ½ part of chimney soot until the mixture has dried. The mixture is then heated in a sublimation pot until it sublimates; the sublimated crystals are sal Armoniac...
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Whoever made the decision it sees a sensible one unless you think negative headlines over the London leg of the biggest music tour in world history would have been good news for the UK.
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
Do we need to set up a charity appeal for you? Get Lenny Henry and Sir Bob to organise some big event? Run ads on day time telly, a donation of just £5 will stop poor Leon from having to resort to eating the local pets....
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
Do we need to set up a charity appeal for you? Get Lenny Henry and Sir Bob to organise some big event? Run ads on day time telly, a donation of just £5 will stop poor Leon from having to resort to eating the local pets....
Speaking of charming anachronism, PB engineers probably know (I didn't) that the electrostatic motor, invented by Benjamin Franklin, and largely useless for a couple of centuries, has been making a comeback in recent years.
Multilayer microhydraulic actuators with speed and force configurations https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-021-00240-7#MOESM1 Electrostatic motors have traditionally required high voltage and provided low torque, leaving them with a vanishingly small portion of the motor application space. The lack of robust electrostatic motors is of particular concern in microsystems because inductive motors do not scale well to small dimensions. Often, microsystem designers have to choose from a host of imperfect actuation solutions, leading to high voltage requirements or low efficiency and thus straining the power budget of the entire system. In this work, we describe a scalable three-dimensional actuator technology that is based on the stacking of thin microhydraulic layers. This technology offers an actuation solution at 50 volts, with high force, high efficiency, fine stepping precision, layering, low abrasion, and resistance to pull-in instability. Actuator layers can also be stacked in different configurations trading off speed for force, and the actuator improves quadratically in power density when its internal dimensions are scaled-down...
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
I think you need to try the 2:5 diet, starting now.
Why do you need fluff in your coffee? What's wrong with coffee?
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
Do we need to set up a charity appeal for you? Get Lenny Henry and Sir Bob to organise some big event? Run ads on day time telly, a donation of just £5 will stop poor Leon from having to resort to eating the local pets....
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
I'll happily swap my original 'insane' for 'irrational'
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
I really ought to have added this note. ..."Sal Armoniac" was an impure form of ammonium chloride. The French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715) discussed it in his book Cours de Chymie (A Course of Chemistry, 1675), describing where it occurs naturally and how it can be prepared artificially. It occurs naturally in the deserts of northern Africa, where it forms from puddles of animal urine. It can be prepared artificially by boiling 5 parts of urine, 1 part of sea salt, and ½ part of chimney soot until the mixture has dried. The mixture is then heated in a sublimation pot until it sublimates; the sublimated crystals are sal Armoniac...
Ah. I retract my earlier offer to modify 'insane' to 'irrational'
The fix is in Bobby J's gonna have the momentum The fix is in Can't wait to see how it upsets them
No chance this time we'll be postally pipped We've loaded the scales, the media equipped We're swapping the dud for the bland And the TERF and the dim 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in The odds that I got were delicious The fix is in That Bobby is cocky and vicious
The redoubtable beast has had Tommy T's votes He'll buy him a place in the sun and some boats And the vino de Vici will flow like a river in spring Now the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in Blackman's pronouncement is candid The fix is in Yes, our punches have finally landed
The ensuing disasters will leave us entranced We'll paint over murals; we'll drink and we'll dance 'Til the end of our days 'Cause it ain't left to chance that he'll win 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
On the bright side, you’re missing the BBC4 screening of Threads tonight. Only the fourth terrestrial screening ever I read..
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
In this case, the perception only exists because someone has made up a story about Khan putting pressure on the police.
It's like making a rumour up about someone at school and shouting "no smoke without fire!".
But that's why you don't accept gifts. Sky News were arguing that it was all okay because the gifts were made before the decision was taken. But, logically, that falls down because if it had been the other way around, Sky would have argued it was all okay because the decision was taken before the gifts were made.
Not a fan of Kay Burley, but Nandy got done good a proper this morning:
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Whoever made the decision it sees a sensible one unless you think negative headlines over the London leg of the biggest music tour in world history would have been good news for the UK.
Her singing here boosted the UK economy by £1bn and led to a load of happy people. She is a known target for terrorists. It would have been simply idiotic not to give her VVIP treatment at taxpayers expense.
The story of the Fahrenheit scale is quite charming, perhaps because of its utter irrationality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History ...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
I'll happily swap my original 'insane' for 'irrational'
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
I really ought to have added this note. ..."Sal Armoniac" was an impure form of ammonium chloride. The French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715) discussed it in his book Cours de Chymie (A Course of Chemistry, 1675), describing where it occurs naturally and how it can be prepared artificially. It occurs naturally in the deserts of northern Africa, where it forms from puddles of animal urine. It can be prepared artificially by boiling 5 parts of urine, 1 part of sea salt, and ½ part of chimney soot until the mixture has dried. The mixture is then heated in a sublimation pot until it sublimates; the sublimated crystals are sal Armoniac...
Ah. I retract my earlier offer to modify 'insane' to 'irrational'
TBF, the early attempts to create reproducible systems were necessarily bootstrap affairs, and had to resort to the techniques then available.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
The UK train network is still measured in miles and chains (apart from HS1 I think) so it is not an archaic usage.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
The UK train network is still measured in miles and chains (apart from HS1 I think) so it is not an archaic usage.
HS1 is shown in miles and chains on real times trains:
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
Are you permitted to supplement your budget with earned funds? A little busking perhaps, or mime?
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
In this case, the perception only exists because someone has made up a story about Khan putting pressure on the police.
It's like making a rumour up about someone at school and shouting "no smoke without fire!".
But that's why you don't accept gifts. Sky News were arguing that it was all okay because the gifts were made before the decision was taken. But, logically, that falls down because if it had been the other way around, Sky would have argued it was all okay because the decision was taken before the gifts were made.
Not a fan of Kay Burley, but Nandy got done good a proper this morning:
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
The UK train network is still measured in miles and chains (apart from HS1 I think) so it is not an archaic usage.
It's effectively a radial coordinate system radiating outward from certain zero points such as London termini, where the polar angle [omega] is effectively treated as fixed for each line and the only variable coordinate is r. . Bridges are defined by their location but also their distance, as I understand it.
British computer scientist Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "revolutionary" work on proteins, the building blocks of life.
A family that cannot afford its bills lives in poverty. Build them a home that costs almost nothing to heat and that same family will prioritise things that matter to us all.
(When mum doesn’t have second and third jobs to cover costs, one of the first things that gets help using the extra available time is children doing their homework.)
It is shocking that this has to be said in 2024 but poor quality housing blights lives.
EPC A and B are standards that must be met in new housing and older homes being brought into the local authority fold.
But that is to miss the point.
Let us say, for convenience of argument and round numbers, that adding £50k of insulation to a new build reduces the gas bill from £1k/year to zero. Let us also assume the probable lifespan of the house is 50 years (generous, looking at the build quality of the average new build). At the end of the 50 years, the savings on gas have just covered the cost of the insulation.
By the time you consider the cost of borrowing the £50k upfront, it's cheaper just to pay the gas bill.
Your point is partly about who pays the gas bill - but in the scenario above, it would be cheaper for whoever is paying for the build to give the occupants £1k a year for 50 years to pay the gas bill than fit the insulation.
If we actually wanted to fix the housing market, what we need is loads of really cheap houses.
A few years ago, I stayed on a holiday site at an old army base on the Isle of Wight. There were rows of single story, terraced breezeblock chalets, all the same: a double bedroom, single bedroom, living room with a kitchen at the back, bathroom. I bet you could throw them up for £50k each. Not ideal as family accommodation - but for singles in grotty HMOs, what an improvement. I would have bought one as the first step on the housing ladder. Why aren't we building stuff like this like it's going out of fashion? Building regs and planning. So instead we have a housing crisis,which is completely nuts.
The problem with alehouse quantity surveyors is they pluck nonsense numbers out of their backside.
Passivhaus construction costs are roughly 10% more than traditional, but it does depend on development and scale. So nowhere near £50k and the more you build the better you get at it. Arguably the quality of build is higher as well.
The biggest issue is land and the cost.
Rather than single story terraced breezeblock chalets (have you though why so few bungalows are built these days), cheap would be modular buildings, that might look like this;
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
British computer scientist Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "revolutionary" work on proteins, the building blocks of life.
At least it involved chemistry. I was half expecting them to give it to Michel Roux Jr for a very good dinner he provided to the AGM of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1995.
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Jesus. What moronic trivial froth.
Change the bloody record, releasing the pearls from your grasp as you do so.
You seem to have a problem with anything you may think compromises the government, and then throw in your childish response about someone clutching pearls, or cash is nonsense, or 172 seat majority, or something else all of which are so predictable
You cannot close down newstories you do not like no matter how much you huff and puff
This is a story about the Renters Rights Bill, and the desire to limit upfront payments to 5 week's rent on tenancies. That will limit, for example, abilities for tenants to access tenancies which are to start later (lots of complicated issues around the interim and reasons). And will undermine the flexibility available to some prospective tenants.
As an LL I support most of the proposed measures as being rational moves that will further reduce unacceptable behaviour towards tenants, based on evidence.
The support by the Housing Minister for limiting up front payments for a tenancy to 5 weeks is concerning.
It reminds me of the pratfall in Parliament last time round when deposits were restricted to 5 weeks max, from 8 weeks. The former Shelter Senior staffer at Shelter who was Shadow Housing Minister Sarah Jones, argued both that "'this needs to be reduced because landlords will exploit the 8 weeks', and 'it can be reduced because landlords don't use it' - in the same debate.
What that actually did was make pet tenancies far more complex to manage because at least two of the traditional measures - a higher deposit to cover damage, or a term for T to do or pay for a professional clean at the end - became criminal offences. The only option left was a higher rent.
But organisations such as Shelter and Generation Rent are anti-landlord rather than pro-tenant, and it shows. It also shows in their focus on Private Sector vs the Social - on a number of metrics around eg satisfaction the PRS has been ahead for many years.
This measure will make selection of tenants even more small-c conservative and careful, since assurance measures applicable after the start have essentially all been banned.
It will blow back on local Councils, who routinely expect LLs to be a social policeman, whilst any effective measures to do such have been removed.
(I'll perhaps FPT this, later.)
I did some viewings yesterday on flats in London. 3 out of 4 were landlords selling up and tenants being evicted. 2 out of the 3 properties were perfect rental properties - IE low maintenance low rise purpose built blocks, being managed by an active freeholder. The last estate agent had been in the game 25 years and said that investors are rapidly exiting the market. If they stay in the market then they will need to be incentivised by rents going up - so the net effect of all this will probably be a reduction in quality rental properties and significant rent inflation. In the longer term it will mean a shift to professional landlords, build to rent, HMO's etc but it will take years for this sector to compensate for the reduction in private rented sector properties. Obviously there is another category of the private rented sector that will be unaffected by all this, the part that doesn't follow the regulations at all. Despite the lobbying there is a strange lack of action in this respect. The laws are difficult to enforce and the bodies that have to do it (ie Council's) are unable to direct resources in to this as the costs cannot be easily recovered.
It is quite surprising that Labour have jumped on to this policy as I think the beneficiaries of it are first time buyers (ie classic tory voters) and the losers will be renters.
It's not surprising at all. Badly-thought through social interventions that backfire and damage those they are designed to help while causing lots of unintended side effects aren't so much a failing of Starmer's (and Gove's) brand of interventionist, statist managerialism as its defining characteristic.
And our housing market is particularly littered with such.
The biggest problem in my view (also picking up @Sandpit's other point) is just that there has been no coherant strategy in housing policy for over a decade most famously characterised by the rapid turnover of housing and planning ministers in the latter years of the last government.
On that particular, the strategy point is correct.
On the rolodex of Housing Ministers, it's not just the end of the last Government. Those turned over because the last Tory Government turned over PMs like Bojo turned over mistresses.
We had 16 Housing Ministers between 2010 and 2024 under Tory-led regimes.
And 10 under Labour between 1997 and 2010.
Which is still shit, although only about half as shit.
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Jesus. What moronic trivial froth.
Change the bloody record, releasing the pearls from your grasp as you do so.
You seem to have a problem with anything you may think compromises the government, and then throw in your childish response about someone clutching pearls, or cash is nonsense, or 172 seat majority, or something else all of which are so predictable
You cannot close down newstories you do not like no matter how much you huff and puff
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Ignoring the political side of it, which feeds into the story that’s been running for weeks, it’s potentially a legal issue given that a certain Mr Sussex is currently suing the Home Office over his wanting blue lights wherever he goes. I mean, if they give a pop singer blue lights…
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, and 8 furlongs in a mile. That makes 1760 yards in a mile. Easy!
Interestingly, I was wondering vaguely about chains this morning, as a result of this article, which described, with charming archaism, Altnabreac as being ‘133 miles and 76 chains down the line from Inverness’ (who wouldn’t want to live in a world where things are so described?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
The UK train network is still measured in miles and chains (apart from HS1 I think) so it is not an archaic usage.
HS1 is shown in miles and chains on real times trains:
London Underground is in km. Ongar is the 0 point.
It might be the Cambrian implementation of ETCS which is in km. I think that the east coast digital programme for ETCS is in miles and chains from what I have read in Modern Railways.
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Jesus. What moronic trivial froth.
Change the bloody record, releasing the pearls from your grasp as you do so.
You seem to have a problem with anything you may think compromises the government, and then throw in your childish response about someone clutching pearls, or cash is nonsense, or 172 seat majority, or something else all of which are so predictable
You cannot close down newstories you do not like no matter how much you huff and puff
So this is how the poor live. It’s an incredible insight into that other world, which so few of us know. Now I’ve been immersed in that world for over 2 hours, and - I think it’s changed me
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
How much will that be?
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Fucksake I’ve been fiercely budgeting for what seems like hours. Indeed it is hours. Nearly 3 hours now - of grinding poverty, no let up, no hope, no promise of betterment, and just a nice tartellete aux fruits, etc, for breakfast until I got my free tram to the lakeside for a stroll in the sun, and now I stare at the jet d’eau and think about a glass of wine
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
£73 for what, three days? You're practically a millionaire compared to the fiver a day I lived on in my student days.
A quick google tells me that there are 49 free museums in Geneva you could visit, including the Patek Phillipe museum, the international museum of the Red Cross, the Mamco Geneve (a centre for modern art) and Tavel House, a local history museum that charts the city's progress from the middle ages to the late 1800s. Free travel to and from them all so that's your day's entertainment done.
Another quick google tells me that Aldi in Switzerland will do you a bottle of wine for a fiver, so two of those a day for three days and you can be nicely sozzled from now until you get your flight. Pick up some nice crusty bread and some cheese while you're there and you won't starve, either.
Still really really bored? Endless shitposting on PB is free, as are numerous ebooks, chess apps etc you can download to your phone while you while away the day drinking your cheap Aldi wine.
The fix is in Bobby J's gonna have the momentum The fix is in Can't wait to see how it upsets them
No chance this time we'll be postally pipped We've loaded the scales, the media equipped We're swapping the dud for the bland And the TERF and the dim 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in The odds that I got were delicious The fix is in That Bobby is cocky and vicious
The redoubtable beast has had Tommy T's votes He'll buy him a place in the sun and some boats And the vino de Vici will flow like a river in spring Now the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in Blackman's pronouncement is candid The fix is in Yes, our punches have finally landed
The ensuing disasters will leave us entranced We'll paint over murals; we'll drink and we'll dance 'Til the end of our days 'Cause it ain't left to chance that he'll win 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
No fix is possible against a candidate who has the wholehearted support of only one third of the MPs. No-one who doesn't have that level of real from the MPs support should be allowed near the leadership.
The membership would be deranged to support any candidate the MPs don't truly want. Which won't stop it happening of course.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
What I have concluded is that the imperial system devised a new unit of measurement for every application. So we have the fother, which is the weight of lead that a single man can carry. If you know that your church roof requires 20 fothers of head for the roof, then you know you need to go up and down 20 times with a load of lead to roof it. Simple. This means that for most applications which existed long ago enough, there's a perfect imperial unit for working with. Ounces are perfect for baking, miles for walking, feet for room sizes, etc.
Unfortunately, at some point they stopped adding new units to the imperial system, and so there aren't handy imperial units for rocketry, or electric car batteries.
There’s Brook with his century as well, two 100s and two 50s from the five batsmen used so far.
So what do we think about this match? In my mind it’s looking a certain draw, unless one or both captains play games with a declaration to try and force the result. The question is will they dare roll the dice and risk losing?
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Whoever made the decision it sees a sensible one unless you think negative headlines over the London leg of the biggest music tour in world history would have been good news for the UK.
Her singing here boosted the UK economy by £1bn and led to a load of happy people. She is a known target for terrorists. It would have been simply idiotic not to give her VVIP treatment at taxpayers expense.
Must try harder. Much harder.
Indeed, and there is the small issue Swiftmania if required to unescorted.
Of things to be concerned about, this ranks infinity +1 down the list.
There’s Brook with his century as well, two 100s and two 50s from the five batsmen used so far.
So what do we think about this match? In my mind it’s looking a certain draw, unless one or both captains play games with a declaration to try and force the result. The question is will they dare roll the dice and risk losing?
If overs were bowled at the correct rate it'd be more likely to produce a result England should be at 121 overs by the end of today (90 overs * 3 less 2 overs for the innings break less Pak 149 overs) yet they've started the third session of the day 70 overs in. Early on tommorow an entire session will have been lost due to both sides slow over rate. The match may well have needed that session to force a result in the final analysis. It's mad that a game with so much spin it is so far behind where it should be.
Mr. Eagles, perhaps Klopp will interview Verstappen when he wins the title?
Last month I bought a brand new TV (83 inches, not overcompensating), I will cry and hurl bricks at the TV if Klopp says nice things about the Dutch shunt.
Only 83", didn't fancy one of those 100" jobbies.....
I’ll get the 100 inch one when 8K becomes standard.
Why do we still do TVs in inches?* I had to do the conversion: 2.1-2.5m
Fine for films and sport, but what happens when you watch the news? I don't think I could have dealt with Boris Johnson or Liz Truss at that size in my living room
*Or at least, let's move to feet and inches. I know I'm 184cm tall which is just over 6ft, but for inches I'd have to do the maths - no one when asked how tall they are says 72 inches!
The ONLY thing I use feet for is height of humans.
Many will be unsurprised that I am no enthusiast for the newfangled, and still measure large distances in yards or miles and small distances in inches. (I was born post-imperial and was taught in metric, but imperial measurements are just so much more satisfying to say.) But I have little use for the curiously superfluous measure of feet, aside from height of humans. Ditto stone and weight of humans.
We're in a weird mix, aren't we?
I know my height in feet and m. Only know my mass in kg. Only know my waist in inches. I run in km, but I cycle and drive in miles. I cook in g and ml, but drink in pints.
The one imperial measure I really can't be dealing with is Fahrenheit, the scale for which is just insane
Insane in what way?
Under 0, don’t go outside. Over 100, don’t go outside.
0-10 raw 11-20 bitter 21-30 cold 31-40 chilly 41-50 temperate 51-60 mild 61-70 pleasant 71-80 warm 81-90 hot 91-100 oppressive
Anabobazina defending the Fahrenheit system. Post of the day - never thought I'd see the like!
I now suspect the cash hatred is due to residual anger over decimalisation
Not at all. Cash is utterly pointless. As the extremely weak arguments proposed on here for it prove.
It is a monumental waste of time and resources. If people want to persist with it, up to them, I wouldn't ban it.
But it is a bizarrely anachronistic, wasteful and time-consuming way of transacting money (and has to be converted back into proper digital money in any case).
They did not, apparently, find it useless in America after the hurricane.
I'll remember that next time we have a hurricane in the UK.
I'm sure it's still possible to pay by phone or watch even in those circs. I'd accept a recent iPhone in good condition as payment up to a few hundred quid at least and an Apple watch up to £100 or so, probably
Along with no electricity and no drinkable water, Asheville had no broadband or mobile coverage for a few days after the hurricane and flooding struck.
The fix is in Bobby J's gonna have the momentum The fix is in Can't wait to see how it upsets them
No chance this time we'll be postally pipped We've loaded the scales, the media equipped We're swapping the dud for the bland And the TERF and the dim 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in The odds that I got were delicious The fix is in That Bobby is cocky and vicious
The redoubtable beast has had Tommy T's votes He'll buy him a place in the sun and some boats And the vino de Vici will flow like a river in spring Now the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in Blackman's pronouncement is candid The fix is in Yes, our punches have finally landed
The ensuing disasters will leave us entranced We'll paint over murals; we'll drink and we'll dance 'Til the end of our days 'Cause it ain't left to chance that he'll win 'Cause the fix, the fix is in
No fix is possible against a candidate who has the wholehearted support of only one third of the MPs. No-one who doesn't have that level of real from the MPs support should be allowed near the leadership.
The membership would be deranged to support any candidate the MPs don't truly want. Which won't stop it happening of course.
Harry Brook has scored 576 runs in Pakistan. Only one visiting player has scored more than 1000 runs in Pakistan. That is Sunil Gavaskar with 1001 runs.
There’s Brook with his century as well, two 100s and two 50s from the five batsmen used so far.
So what do we think about this match? In my mind it’s looking a certain draw, unless one or both captains play games with a declaration to try and force the result. The question is will they dare roll the dice and risk losing?
If overs were bowled at the correct rate it'd be more likely to produce a result England should be at 121 overs by the end of today (90 overs * 3 less 2 overs for the innings break less Pak 149 overs) yet they've started the third session of the day 70 overs in. Early on tommorow an entire session will have been lost due to both sides slow over rate. The match may well have needed that session to force a result in the final analysis.
Apparently Pakistan have just taken the new ball. Half-way through an over!
Harry Brook has scored 576 runs in Pakistan. Only one visiting player has scored more than 1000 runs in Pakistan. That is Sunil Gavaskar with 1001 runs.
Harry Brook has scored 576 runs in Pakistan. Only one visiting player has scored more than 1000 runs in Pakistan. That is Sunil Gavaskar with 1001 runs.
Betting news: Jenrick's out with the washing but more to the point, on the Big One, the Only One, the most important election there has ever ever been, SPIN have put up the EC supremacy spreads!
You can buy Harris @ 5. I'm doing it. It's just a matter of for how much and should I have it in addition to my betfair position or instead of it. Hmmm.
Metropolitan Police deny they were put under pressure to give Taylor Swift a blue light convoy at taxpayers expenses by Khan and Cooper
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
Jesus. What moronic trivial froth.
Change the bloody record, releasing the pearls from your grasp as you do so.
You seem to have a problem with anything you may think compromises the government, and then throw in your childish response about someone clutching pearls, or cash is nonsense, or 172 seat majority, or something else all of which are so predictable
You cannot close down newstories you do not like no matter how much you huff and puff
Change the record.
Good advice - you should take it
The greater puzzle is why senior politicians are so desperate to see a Taylor Swift concert. Are we governed by 12 year old girls?
Comments
How do the cognerati see the Tory leadership elections developing over the next day?
Is Kemi done?
(The underlying q is that I have a small lay on Kemi. Is it time to kill it?)
I just know that cash is pointless, is all.
So party support is very volatile in the last couple of decades but so is party identity.
Let us say, for convenience of argument and round numbers, that adding £50k of insulation to a new build reduces the gas bill from £1k/year to zero.
Let us also assume the probable lifespan of the house is 50 years (generous, looking at the build quality of the average new build).
At the end of the 50 years, the savings on gas have just covered the cost of the insulation.
By the time you consider the cost of borrowing the £50k upfront, it's cheaper just to pay the gas bill.
Your point is partly about who pays the gas bill - but in the scenario above, it would be cheaper for whoever is paying for the build to give the occupants £1k a year for 50 years to pay the gas bill than fit the insulation.
If we actually wanted to fix the housing market, what we need is loads of really cheap houses.
A few years ago, I stayed on a holiday site at an old army base on the Isle of Wight. There were rows of single story, terraced breezeblock chalets, all the same: a double bedroom, single bedroom, living room with a kitchen at the back, bathroom.
I bet you could throw them up for £50k each. Not ideal as family accommodation - but for singles in grotty HMOs, what an improvement. I would have bought one as the first step on the housing ladder.
Why aren't we building stuff like this like it's going out of fashion? Building regs and planning. So instead we have a housing crisis,which is completely nuts.
Well apart from the Mollari/G’kar prematurely scene.
50F ~ 10C
60F ~ 15C
70F ~ 20C
Back then in the UK we did not have to worry about >20C.
Given that the multiplier is 5:9 it works well enough.
I may have a creme de menthe frappe overlooking Lac Leman to contemplate what I’ve learned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History
...Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci or even sea salt".This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature. A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
Fahrenheit soon after observed that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. The use of the freezing and boiling points of water as thermometer fixed reference points became popular following the work of Anders Celsius, and these fixed points were adopted by a committee of the Royal Society led by Henry Cavendish in 1776–77. Under this system, the Fahrenheit scale is redefined slightly so that the freezing point of water was exactly 32 °F, and the boiling point was exactly 212 °F, or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 °F (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale).
In the present-day Fahrenheit scale, 0 °F no longer corresponds to the eutectic temperature of ammonium chloride brine as described above. Instead, that eutectic is at approximately 4 °F on the final Fahrenheit scale...
ETA: Also liked the bit on spelling Fahrenheit - I got a red line under my first attempt!
As or bringing Brexit into it... that seems rather odd.
But yes, those were the stories I was thinking of.
You have £73 left I think you said.
That is roughly what a single person on unemployment benefit or basic ESA has for a week!
Otherwise find the restaurants with plat du jour as used to be v good value with a glass of drinkable wine thrown in.
Also dotted around are the supermarkets’ canteens as a relatively cheap option. Finally you get little rotisserie chicken vans parked up so grab yourself a chicken for tonight at the Airbnb - they were weirdly cheaper cooked and prepped than uncooked from a supermarket.
Forgot to add - there are a lot of charity kitchens in Geneva for free food - the religious of all stripes provide soup kitchens etc so give it a google and add a v different experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altnabreac_railway_station
I also enjoyed learning that “The reason for the station's construction is a mystery. At the time of construction it was 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest settlement and 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest road. The only source of traffic at the station, Lochdhu Lodge, approximately 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, was not built until 1895 and the Altnabreac School was not built until 1930.”
I am very glad to be in the final two
Burley- you are not in the final two
Err I meant I was second !!!!
Replace the ball boys and girls with robots too, and then it’s only the umpire on whom they can take out their unwanted aggression.
Apparently they both received Taylor Swift gifted tickets and here lies the problem in perception, fairly or not
This is it. This is reality for 80% of the world. Utter paupery and a life without comfort. At least I can now say I’ve seen it and done it
A misconceived scheme for a necessary project created a large public backlash, and resultant delay. A new government then took its eye off the ball for the best part of a decade over a much bigger, and economically irrelevant project.
It then cancelled the first project just before losing office.
And now we're trying to salvage something from the mess.
And if you think it's only one person claiming it was a shitshow, then I've got a hyperloop alternative to sell you.
..."Sal Armoniac" was an impure form of ammonium chloride. The French chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715) discussed it in his book Cours de Chymie (A Course of Chemistry, 1675), describing where it occurs naturally and how it can be prepared artificially. It occurs naturally in the deserts of northern Africa, where it forms from puddles of animal urine. It can be prepared artificially by boiling 5 parts of urine, 1 part of sea salt, and ½ part of chimney soot until the mixture has dried. The mixture is then heated in a sublimation pot until it sublimates; the sublimated crystals are sal Armoniac...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2024/10/09/joe-root-childhood-net-practice-yorkshire-kevin-sharp/
However, there are plenty of storms which began as hurricanes, and (on a separate analytical basis) plenty of hurricane strength winds (as officially defined: over 73 mph IIRC).
It's like making a rumour up about someone at school and shouting "no smoke without fire!".
Multilayer microhydraulic actuators with speed and force configurations
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-021-00240-7#MOESM1
Electrostatic motors have traditionally required high voltage and provided low torque, leaving them with a vanishingly small portion of the motor application space. The lack of robust electrostatic motors is of particular concern in microsystems because inductive motors do not scale well to small dimensions. Often, microsystem designers have to choose from a host of imperfect actuation solutions, leading to high voltage requirements or low efficiency and thus straining the power budget of the entire system. In this work, we describe a scalable three-dimensional actuator technology that is based on the stacking of thin microhydraulic layers. This technology offers an actuation solution at 50 volts, with high force, high efficiency, fine stepping precision, layering, low abrasion, and resistance to pull-in instability. Actuator layers can also be stacked in different configurations trading off speed for force, and the actuator improves quadratically in power density when its internal dimensions are scaled-down...
Change the bloody record, releasing the pearls from your grasp as you do so.
Why do you need fluff in your coffee? What's wrong with coffee?
Bobby J's gonna have the momentum
The fix is in
Can't wait to see how it upsets them
No chance this time we'll be postally pipped
We've loaded the scales, the media equipped
We're swapping the dud for the bland
And the TERF and the dim
'Cause the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in
The odds that I got were delicious
The fix is in
That Bobby is cocky and vicious
The redoubtable beast has had Tommy T's votes
He'll buy him a place in the sun and some boats
And the vino de Vici will flow like a river in spring
Now the fix, the fix is in
The fix is in
Blackman's pronouncement is candid
The fix is in
Yes, our punches have finally landed
The ensuing disasters will leave us entranced
We'll paint over murals; we'll drink and we'll dance
'Til the end of our days
'Cause it ain't left to chance that he'll win
'Cause the fix, the fix is in
Not a fan of Kay Burley, but Nandy got done good a proper this morning:
https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1843939759644967263
Must try harder. Much harder.
Like an Enlightenment era MacGuyver.
Which it still effectively is.
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:P94402/2024-10-09/detailed
London Underground is in km. Ongar is the 0 point.
For balance I detest underlings calling pols I vaguely like ‘boss’. The gaffer is totally cringe though.
https://x.com/ofsymbols/status/1843921836838662347?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
https://www.radardepoche.com/menu
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrm0p2mxvyo
Passivhaus construction costs are roughly 10% more than traditional, but it does depend on development and scale.
So nowhere near £50k and the more you build the better you get at it. Arguably the quality of build is higher as well.
The biggest issue is land and the cost.
Rather than single story terraced breezeblock chalets (have you though why so few bungalows are built these days), cheap would be modular buildings, that might look like this;
https://www.wirralwaters.co.uk/projects/redbridge-quay/
One of the advantages of HMO's is they tend to be located where work is / public transport.
Old army bases on IoW or cheap houses in Jaywick ain't much use.
You cannot close down newstories you do not like no matter how much you huff and puff
On the rolodex of Housing Ministers, it's not just the end of the last Government. Those turned over because the last Tory Government turned over PMs like Bojo turned over mistresses.
We had 16 Housing Ministers between 2010 and 2024 under Tory-led regimes.
And 10 under Labour between 1997 and 2010.
Which is still shit, although only about half as shit.
A quick google tells me that there are 49 free museums in Geneva you could visit, including the Patek Phillipe museum, the international museum of the Red Cross, the Mamco Geneve (a centre for modern art) and Tavel House, a local history museum that charts the city's progress from the middle ages to the late 1800s. Free travel to and from them all so that's your day's entertainment done.
Another quick google tells me that Aldi in Switzerland will do you a bottle of wine for a fiver, so two of those a day for three days and you can be nicely sozzled from now until you get your flight. Pick up some nice crusty bread and some cheese while you're there and you won't starve, either.
Still really really bored? Endless shitposting on PB is free, as are numerous ebooks, chess apps etc you can download to your phone while you while away the day drinking your cheap Aldi wine.
The membership would be deranged to support any candidate the MPs don't truly want. Which won't stop it happening of course.
So what do we think about this match? In my mind it’s looking a certain draw, unless one or both captains play games with a declaration to try and force the result. The question is will they dare roll the dice and risk losing?
Of things to be concerned about, this ranks infinity +1 down the list.
It's mad that a game with so much spin it is so far behind where it should be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roke_Manor_Research
A friend worked there for a few years after university - lots of interesting work apparently.
Harry Brook is 25.
https://x.com/yas_wisden/status/1843970103186280794
“Harry Brook now has more Test hundreds in Pakistan than Imran Khan”.
You can buy Harris @ 5. I'm doing it. It's just a matter of for how much and should I have it in addition to my betfair position or instead of it. Hmmm.