The Simple Logic Of An Engineer or Scientist
Let’s face it we’ve got to generate more electricity in a zero-carbon way. Or should I say capture more energy?
One way to do this is to put photo-voltaic cells everywhere. But they are expensive and in many places can’t be used for aesthetic reasons.
So I was pleased to see in today’s Sunday Times, that a company, called Oxford Photovoltaics, is developing a solar cell that can be built into a window.
My Front Window
The picture shows one of my two front windows, which are actually glazed as many windows are by double-glazed panels that slot into aluminium or plastic frames. So to mount one of these sandwich glass photo voltaic cells could be a simple replacement.
I suspect too, that with a proper control system, the windows could be controlled to let the appropriate amount of sunlight through for lighting and warmth purposes. Most of the energy absorbed would become electricity, which could be fed back into the grid or used in the building.
The great advantage of this system, is that to be ready for it, when it is fully developed, you don’t have to do anything now except to ensure that all new houses, flats and offices are built to accept simple drop-in glazing panels.
This compny may not be the one that succeeds, but one definitely will.
The Twisted Logic of the Far Right
If the tragic events in Norway on Friday show one thing, it is the bizarre twisted logic bordering on paranoia that those on the far right use to justify their behaviour. If reports are to be believed, Anders Behring Breivik, the alleged suspect, was a radical Christian, who held strong anti-Muslim views. He must have believed too, as did Timothy McVeigh, that by attacking Government targets and children and young people that he would start a backlash against the policies he hated. America seems to have carried on as before since the Oklahoma City Bombing and I suspect Norway won’t change tack by a great deal, if at all.
I could have called this post the Twisted Logic of the Far Left or Mad Dictators, as you could include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Assad, Bin Laden, Botha, Galtieri, Ahmadinejad and various others. All seem to have been deserted by any logic that any intelligent person would understand. Most though believe strongly in the death penalty and denying everybody who disagrees with them any human rights.
In some ways, one of the reasons such as Breivik are encouraged is that our free society doesn’t really stop these dictators abusing their own people or in many cases those who have no connection to them.
So do the Breiviks and the McVeighs, who have a personal grievance, see impotent governments, who can’t stop the injustices in the rest of the world and this means they lose their jobs to immigrants, pay excessive taxes and lose some of their precious freedoms, like the right to have firearms.
We currently have more famine in the Horn of Africa and whatever the main problem, the twisted logic of the millitants in the area isn’t helping. But only last week we had a report from Ethiopia about how long term aid and fair commercial trading of coffee, is making the lives of small farmers and their families so much better.
Farewell Bin Hammam
Unlike Amy Winehouse, Mohammed Bin Hammam is still with us, even if FIFA have given him his just desserts. He has just been on Radio 5 and has said that everything he did was in line with FIFA policy. But then they are full of organised corruption. If you can, listen to a replay of the morning sports program with David Davies. I suspect none of the reasoned arguments, I’ve just heard went on at FIFA.
Now that we’ve said good-bye to Bin Hammam, how long can we sustain the farce of giving the World Cup to Qatar?
I wonder what odds I could get, that the Qatar World Cup doesn’t happen! Probably only very short ones, I would think!
Farewell Amy Winehouse
From my bedroom in Cockfosters, I could see Southgate School, which Amy Winehouse would attend many years later.
I can also remember my sister and the other girls at the school coming and going innocently in the road in front of the house.
Now, after a later life of abuse, the obviously talented Amy is gone. How many of the other boys and girls in her year have gone the same way? Probably only a handful, if my feelings are correct. This is based on the fact that most of my late son’s school friends are still here. And some have not been without drink and drug problems.
So when we remember Amy, let’s remember the good things, like her music and her success. And never ever think that her drink and drug problems are something to be admired.
Sadly, it seems that if you’re in the music industry, you attract those criminals, who want to sell you drugs, so they can have a large slice of your money.
More Bad News For Bombardier
Bombardier may think that as they’ve built the new Victoria line trains for London Underground, that getting the orders for the Picadilly and Bakerloo lines will be very much a follow on.
That was until I saw this proposal from Siemens. The trains would offer a bigger capacity, have a through walkway, be quite a bit lighter and use 20 percent less energy. They might even be air-conditioned. Incidentally this looks very much like a proposal I saw on the London Underground web site about seven or eight years ago, proposed by their own engineers.
Incidentally , Bombardier’s new trains for the Victoria line are not cracked up to what they should be, and I know quite a few passengers on the line, who prefer the old trains built in 1967.
So perhaps they lost the Thameslink contract because their proposal wasn’t technically as good as that of Siemens.
You have to remember too that the Thameslink contract was under PFI rules laid down by NuLabor. As the rating agencies reckon that Siemens are a better financial risk than Bombardier, the finance part of the deal was more expensive for Bombardier, so their proposal would have been more expensive. In fact their consortium would have been paying an extra 1.5% a year for financing the deal compared to Bombardier.
From London and Crewe to Dublin By Train and Ferry
Ireland has an economic problem, as is well known. Commentators will argue the various reasons, but something that doesn’t help is that getting from Great Britain to Eire is not as easy as to get from Birmingham to Scotland. There are lots of flights, but they are not convenient or acceptable for everyone who wants to travel.
If you go to Dublin by train and ferry there is one train at 9:10 in the morning from Euston, that gets you to Dublin at 17:15, which is a journey time of eight hours and five minutes. I looked for tomorrow and the fare is only £32 one way. But there is only one service during the day, with another overnight.
So how fast could a service be done if the line was electrified all the way to Holyhead? Crewe from Euston can be done in two hours quite easily and it is only 84 miles from Crewe to Holyhead. The fastest services now take just short of four hours. but the trains are not electric or have the smooth ride of an IC125. The fast ferries take two hours for the crossing, but the larger slower ones take three hours fifteen minutes.
If we assume that Crewe to Holyhead can be done at a similar speed as Liverpool Street to Norwich, it would appear that a time of about one hour ten minutes could be obtained on this part of the route. So this would mean a time from London of three hours ten minutes in a smooth modern electric train. If this could be paired with a fast ferry this could mean a time of under five and a half hours if the sea conditions were good enough.
But this is more than about electrifying the North Wales Coast line, which it would appear that the Welsh Assembly would probably like to do. It is about kick starting the Irish economy. And that of North Wales too!
So surely instead of spending billions of euros propping the Irish up, wouldn’t it be better to spend use of that money to connect Eire to Europe more efficiently. After all, railwise, despite what some might believe, the UK is actually part of Europe.
It would be 84 miles of electrification and perhaps a subsidy to the Holyhead to Dublin ferries to make sure that the fast service was every three hours or so. Surely, that would be a more affordable option, as it would also benefit North Wales, which is not one of the more prosperous parts of the EU.
But it is not just about London to North Wales and on to Dublin. Properly built the line would also connect Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester to North Wales. As an example Liverpool to Holyhead would be under ninety minutes, which is the magic time that makes day trips easy. I also think it would make trips between North and South Wales quicker, but it would probably mean a change at either Chester or Shrewbury.
There are also other issues on the horizon. The major sources of employment on Anglesey, are the nuclear power station at Wylfa and the aluminium smelter. Who knows what will happen in the next few years? But if Holyhead and Anglesey had a first class electrified rail line to the rest of both Wales and the UK, it would help to attract long term jobs. It would of course help tourism and would probably make the University of Bangor even better.
We Can Build Affordable Rail Stations When We Have To!
There are plenty of places on the UK rail network, where it would be advantageous to build new or replace old stations. Around Newmarket and Cambridge there are a lot of places where stations used to be and proposals have been actively pursued at Soham and Cherry Hinton, although the latter is a bit tenuous. Now that the services have been upgraded with newer trains, it would seem logical that improved stations might increase the number of passengers.
The reason these improvements are not carried out is cost.
But have Network Rail created a precedent at Workington North station? Although it had to be built to meet a need created by tragic circumstances, it proved that a working station could be built quickly and affordably. Albeit it only was in use for a year and a supreme example of what could be build with scaffolding.
So should some of the lessons learned be applied elsewhere? Of course they should! Modern Railways are talking this month, about a proposal for a simple rebuilding of Fishguard & Goodwick station to create a transport interchange for the town.
The trains are coming, but there is no station, so they should go for it!
Oops! It was Murder, but it Smelled Phenomenal!
That was a quote from this story from Australia, where a container of expensive wine was dropped.
It all goes to show that their fork-lift truck drivers are like their cricketers!
They drop everything!
You Wouldn’t Want To Mess With Mary
I was alerted to this blog post by The Times this morning.
It’s all sensible advice and we need more Marys to come forward to give the crooks a good kicking.
The Anonymous Widower 