Posts by Pompous Git

Re: Satellite Broadband?

Are you from a different planet?

Presumably...

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5028587116

Re: Satellite Broadband?

It's not broadband, though apart from latency may be better than mobile, which is never broadband either.

I get 10 Gb/s on my fixed wireless connection* and 20 Gb/s on my 3G connection. Why is the latter "never broadband either"?

* Except when MS decide I need to be shaped to 256 Mb/s

In fact the lean beef issue is so great for the US they import lean beef from countries like NZ to mix with their excess beef fat for the beef burger industry which is monstrous in the US.

Australia you mean? Shouldn't that be the other way round? It's New Zealanders who emigrate to Australia, rather than vice versa. But you are correct; both countries produce the most excellent beef. I can see some very tasty looking Wagyu X Murray Greys through my study window right now. Yummy! :-)

Re: Spectacular ignorance - Submarines are BOATS not ships

Nuclear strategic submarines are not boats.

And a ship is "a sailing vessel square-rigged on all of three or more masts, having jibs, staysails, and a spanker on the aftermost mast" so nuclear strategic submarines aren't ships either. It's fun learning new things :-)

Sleek, swift, streamlined ship,

shield-clad and shining,

tell to me the tale of your trip

when the limpest of men were your lining

-- Bob Calvert

Re: 'powered by beef fat'

Measuring bullshit - you have the following units:

What's with leaving Australia out of this? Bet you never had a Minister for Communications who claimed "unfettered legal power" over telecommunications regulation, including the ability to request Australian telcos "wear red underpants on their head".

Re: What's the point of living?

It is if you are carrying scissors.

Didn't Clippy say that?

Re: Tasmanian Whisky

Any idea if they're exporting it to the UK?

No idea. Try marketing@larkdistillery.com.au. I don't see Bill very often now that I'm retired otherwise I'd just ask him when we next met at a social gathering. You could also try Sullivans Cove.

http://sullivanscovewhisky.com/

Theirs is supposedly better than Bill Lark's having won World's Best Malt twice now, but I have yet to imbibe both on the same occasion. Truth be told I don't drink much spirits these days* and have enough malt and Armagnac to last us for several years. My regular tipple is chardonnay or sauvignon blanc mostly from the Nelson and Marlborough districts of New Zealand.

Sullivan's Cove: office@tasmaniadistillery.com.au

* Long gone are the days when 14 standard drinks was a good start to the evening rather than a week's supply...

I prefer to be more conventional and just drink my whisky

Me too :-)

http://larkdistillery.com/products/

Bill Lark commenced his whisky business after travelling to Scotland to learn what he needed to know about distilling. These days the Scots hire Bill to go to Scotland to teach them.

Re: Alternate and Traditional Medicine

Another thought that touches back on the quality of products is that if eg glucosamine is accepted as a medicinal treatment, then it needs licensing and suitable distribution as a medicine not flogged from Holland and Barretts as a "supplement" and that moves it into the pharma industry's sphere and it's no longer "alternative medicine".

The problem here is that registering a pharmaceutical is eyewateringly expensive. Thus registering a product that is already generic only benefits your competitors; your costs go up, but theirs don't. Obviously this didn't apply in the past. We have many registered plant extracts in common use: ephedrine (ephedra), digitalis (foxglove), alliicin (garlic), morphine (opium poppy)... There are more than a hundred.

The pharmaceutical industry focusses on identifying the active ingredient in the effective plants, then attempts with varying degrees of success to create a variant that they can patent. A problem here is identifying the active ingredient. Plants contain ever so many chemicals and sometimes the pharmacological effect is very likely due to multiple chemicals.

Then there is the problem of an illegal plant being the only known source of a cure. Cannabis contains two classes of pharmacologically active compounds: cannabinols and cannabinoids. Cannabinols are what creates the stone that hippies (and others) are so fond of. Cannabinoids OTOH are a potent anti-inflammatory and a good friend, a retired anaesthetist, recalls cannabis use in anaesthesia in the UK well into the 1970s.

Recently, cannabis rich in cannabinoids has been discovered to prevent potentially fatal seizures in juveniles that are not controlled by any known registered pharmaceutical. The Tasmanian government has taken the view that sufferers can await the arrival of registered cannabinoids. The police I am happy to report have taken the view that these children do not deserve to suffer, or die and are pointedly ignoring this unauthorised use.

A Canadian business recently approached the Tasmanian government for permission to grow and manufacture cannabinoids, but were refused. The reason for choosing Tasmania is that we already produce a great deal of thebaine (raw ingredient for codeine) and have decades of experience in growing Class A drugs and controlling public access. So it goes...

Re: an herb

pronouncing the h in front of words like herb and hotel is just simple pretension

Worse is the pronunciation of the non-existent letter h in front of aitch. A common Australian habit.

Re: eucalyptus oil for emphysema

very efficacious indeed for the mood of everyone, starting at the back and moving forwards like a slowly drifting blanket of gentle giggling

That reminded me of many a pleasant evening many years ago when Terry Cashion was the head of Tasmania's drug squad. Once a week, he used to convene a meeting to educate them who needed to know about the dangers of marijuana and how to detect its use. This latter was achieved by Terry setting light to a large bowl of dope to familiarise those present with the odour of its burning. One of the participants remarked to me some months after the weekly sessions finished how much they missed them. "We used to enjoy ourselves so much. All that fun and laughter!"

On one particularly memorable evening, Terry spiked a largish lump of hash, ignited it and this was passed around for everyone to sniff. Never one to miss an opportunity, one participant I won't name took a really deep inhalation. The dude next to him said: "Careful, you'll get stoned." The sniffer responded: "I know, I know" and took another deep sniff.

Re: Natural versus synthetic

The conclusion of the paper is that " ingestion of 1000 IU vitamin D2 or vitamin D3 for 11 weeks was effective in raising total serum concentrations of 25(OH)D"

Vitamin D2 250 capsules 1,000 IU each $35.95 [250,000 IU)

Vitamin D3 240 capsules 5,000 IU each $17.15 [1,200,000 IU]

Purchasing D2 might have a bit of an impact on the effectiveness of the contents of my wallet!

Re: Alternate and Traditional Medicine

"why are they suggested by doctors and pharmacists?" = logical fallacy: argument from authority.

Since you obviously wouldn't consider taking the advice of doctors and pharmacists then, who do you take your drug advice from? Enquiring minds...

Re: They may wish to reword and correct the notice...

half the time syrups that give you a buzz if you drink a lot of it also contain a week or two's worth of paracetamol.

I think you will find that the buzz comes from ephedrine, or pseudoephedrine these days.

Re: Alternate and Traditional Medicine

My question re the glucosamine vs ibuprofen example would be "is glucosamine as good as or better than the current recommended treatment?" ie have we moved on from use of ibuprofen for symptom management in that case.

No glucosamine is not "as good as" a NSAID; they are different. I take a daily slow release NSAID (Naproxen) which is a lot easier than taking Ibuprofen four times a day. It also appears to have fewer, or less pronounced side-effects. Unfortunately, it's insufficient for the level of chronic pain I suffer (osteoarthritic).

As I pointed out elsewhere, ~40% of the population benefit from glucosamine. That benefit is less than the benefit from Naproxen, but the results are additive. That is, I am in less pain when taking both than when taking either alone. Ditto for curcumin. Curcumin has an additional benefit in that it inhibits cancer. See:

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancers-in-general/cancer-questions/can-turmeric-prevent-bowel-cancer

Most of the doctors I have been interacting with over the last decade or two refer to the herbals as complementary medicines. That is they are used in conjunction with conventional pharmaceuticals rather than the magic bullet approach favoured until quite recently. In this respect it's not dissimilar to farming where we gave up on magic bullets and looked at using a range of strategies for pest control back in the 1990s.

The magic bullet approach has a severe problem in that while the magic bullet it works it's all sweetness and light. Then suddenly something in the system changes and the magic bullet fails spectacularly. Targeting a problem with multiple strategies means if one fails you are not left high and dry.

Re: They may wish to reword and correct the notice...

if you're unaware a medicine contains morphine in unknown concentrations it's entirely possible to overdose on the stuff by accident.

Worse would be becoming addicted. But then you could always take heroin instead. That's what it was promoted as when first introduce -- a cure for morphine addiction.

Re: Codeine

And labelling laws are NOTHING TO DO with clinical testing! People can very easily OD on herbal remedies.

I said nothing about testing in relation to labelling laws; they are clearly separate issues. The labelling laws are about whether the product you are buying is as described on the label. The D2/D3 contretemps earlier is a good example. In the past you could sell vitamin D and get away with it. You might hope to be purchasing D3, but what is in the bottle is D2. This switcheroo is illegal here. And the very large online pharmacy I purchase my D3 from doesn't have D2 listed for sale.

You insist that people OD on natural remedies as if I claimed they don't. Do you have a reading/comprehension difficulty?

Addressing the testing issue, I would hope that testing of herbal remedies was not done in the same way as prescription meds:

nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs in rheumatoid arthritis Peter C. Gøtzsche, MD,MSc

Abstract

Important design aspects were decreasingly reported in NSAID trials over the years, whereas the quality of statistical analysis improved. In half of the trials, the effect variables in the methods and results sections were not the same, and the interpretation of the erythrocyte sedimentation rate in the reports seemed to depend on whether a significant difference was found.

Statistically significant results appeared in 93 reports (47%). In 73 trials they favored only the new drug, and in 8 only the active control. All 39 trials with a significant difference in side effects favored the new drug. Choice of dose, multiple comparisons, wrong calculation, subgroup and within-groups analyses, wrong sampling units (in 63% of trials for effect variables, in 23% for side effects), change in measurement scale before analysis, baseline difference, and selective reporting of significant results were some of the verified or possible causes for the large proportion of results that favored the new drug.

Doubtful or invalid statements were found in 76% of the conclusions or abstracts. Bias consistently favored the new drug in 81 trials, and the control in only one trial.

It is not obvious how a reliable meta-analysis could be done in these trials.

doi:10.1016/0197-2456(89)90017-2

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0197245689900172

Re: Alternative cough medicine

Patients often don't think about this when taking "natural" remedies, because they're "natural" so they can't possibly be harmful.

That would be wilful withholding of information here in Australia where it's SOP to ask patients what OTC drugs they take, as well as prescription drugs. And they don't just ask you once, it's many, many times as I have discovered since my heart problems arose seven years ago. I now carry several copies of a written list.

Re: Kaolin and Morphine anyone ?

Not surprising really as it turns out I had appendicitis, landed up spending Xmas 1987 in hospital!

Consider yourself lucky. Back in the 70s, a certain Mr Law cut the leg off an appendicitis patient here in Tasmania. Poor bugger woke up minus a leg and still had an intact appendix.

Re: Codeine

The trouble with herbal stuff is that its not regulated in the same way as meds (if at all!) You can go in to Holland and Barret (or other such places) and buy a whole load of herbal (so obviously safe!) crap and you haven't a clue as to what damage it might do you if you take too much or in combination with an other herbal product or med.

Bullshit! In Australia we have strict labelling laws. If the label on the product doesn't correctly describe the package contents, then the manufacturer is liable for prosecution.* In any event, shopping by reputable brand beats shopping on price. If you purchase something that is obviously unlikely to be as described, then tough titty when it fails to perform.

* Presumably similar product labelling laws apply elsewhere. If you don't have such laws where you live, then I feel very sorry for you.

Re: A nice cup of tea

Be aware that butane stays liquid when below zero Celcius, so you either need to have a butane/propane mix (or pure propane), or

use a wood burning cookstove that also acts as a space heater and services your hot water needs. Having your own woodlot helps. And it's cheap. Bosky (Thermo Rossi) make excellent stoves.

Re: Makin Bacon

Because it was the food of gods

I was in Palmerston North recently visiting my daughter and grandchildren. I had breakfast al fresco in a little café opposite the library. Real dry cured bacon and eggs. Food of the gods indeed...

Re: how many cats it takes to make a bottle of catsup,

Are they any good? What do they taste like? Chicken?

They taste remarkably like the dim sims we used to buy in Moonee Ponds (a suburb of Melbourne) back in the 1960s.

Re: Felony wearing of a mask in Public?

the systematic discrimination against Catholics for hundreds of years by Protestant England.

Preceded by hundreds of years of the Irish enslaving Brits and even paying Vikings to capture slaves for them.

Re: Felony wearing of a mask in Public?

I didn't know that a handful of misguided kooks in the US caused all that death and destruction with just a few donations. You Brits sure are easily manipulated!

So you have evidence that the money for arms and munitions came from a "handful of misguided" millionaires rather than many small donations from kooks who enjoyed the idea of Brits being blown apart?

Yes, Brits are very easily manipulated by explosives. Perhaps Merkins aren't. Maybe that needs testing.

Citation please and why weren't the "handful of misguided kooks" arrested under terrorism charges?

Re: And it's not complicated either

Antarctic sea ice reaches new record maximum, the highest area since 1979.

Perhaps it takes a long time for that much else to melt, but it should at least be melting.

Indeed, the ice is melting. But that's less than half the story. Ice also accumulates through precipitation. Antarctica has been accumulating ice for in excess of a million years and I am happy to report that the go-ahead for the "million year core" has been approved, but funding has yet to be allocated.

As well as melting, ice sublimates. That is it passes from the solid phase directly to the vapour phase. The main source of energy for this is sunlight and sunlight it will not surprise you to know is modulated by cloud cover. As was noted in IPCC AR4 "understanding of the physical processes that control the response of boundary-layer clouds and their radiative properties to a change in climate remains very limited."

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-3-2.html

Antarctic ice doesn't just melt from thermal contact with air and water hotter than 0C. It also melts from underneath from contact with both stable crust and magma. And as any fule kno the emission of magma from below the earth's crust is highly variable. How variable these emissions below Antarctic ice are is not known. We can't look directly and we have barely begun investigations in Antarctica.

So, the upshot is, the quantity of interest here, net loss, or gain of ice is subject to a lot of guesswork. Unfortunately, an awful lot of research in Antarctica is "looking for the impact of anthropgenic climate change". That is, working toward a predetermined conclusion and that's a prime characteristic of pseudoscience. Bad news for those of us interested in climate change from a scientific POV.

So when next you are told that climate change is just a matter of simple high school physics, hang onto your wallet. Whoever's saying that is either a fool or a con artist.

Re: Lies, Damned Lies; and statistics

By virtue of the fact that releases of Co2 displace water vapour

Well, that's a new one for me! Citation, please.

As to the amount of CO2 we could generate, that would be limited by the amount of fossil carbon available and the willingness to convert it to CO2. There's at least 350 years' worth of coal that could reasonably used as fuel by recent estimates. Burning all of that coal in a few weeks would in all likelihood be just enough to double the CO2 level in the atmosphere. The CO2 level would of course then commence to fall as it was taken up by the biosphere. I somehow doubt that this scenario will play out. I know some of our politicians are crazy enough to do such a thing, but then they also have a very poor grasp of the logistics that would be involved.

Re: As I remember it one or two rent-

It was not one or two science journalists. It was EVERY Major publication, and mostly they referred back to peer reviewed journals. At the very least they were quoting leading scientific authorities in the field.

Nigel Calder, editor of New Scientist, made a TV show for the Beeb and wrote a book called The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice. Calder wrote in 1974:

They* tell us that the ice age could in principle start next summer... the odds shorten to something like 10-1 against. If even roughly correct, that is a very high risk indeed for an event that could easily kill two thousand million people by starvation and delete a dozen countries from the map.

Rather foolishly I lent my copy to a warmist who subsequently burnt it. [sigh]

* Climatologists

Arctic ice "melt"

You mean the man who headlined the 4th lowest arctic summer ice minimum as '31st highest on record'?

Ah yes, the warmists' poster child. I do love the way you bring up a cooling event as if it was a warming event. There's this very interesting organisation called NASA whose pronouncements I will paraphrase. Over the period of record, the Arctic ice cap has disintegrated 8 times; that is, around once every four years over 30 years. The breakups were caused by windstorms that blew the ice out of the Arctic Ocean. Note that this is not melting due to a change in temperature.

Ice is an excellent insulator so heat in the Arctic Ocean waters normally is confined to melting just a little of the undersurface of the ice. When the ice is removed, the water is free to radiate heat skyward. Most of this radiation is lost to space. Some of it is absorbed by CO2 molecules and somewhat less than 50% of this is reradiated back to the ocean. Nevertheless, the breakup of Arctic ice allows Earth to lose more heat than it does when the ice remains intact.

Re: Rate of change

How do you calculate rates of change, then?

I'm not the only one then... I was just about to throw out my slide rule and calculators!

Re: Rate of change

I suspect you are still not getting it. You don't calculate rate of change - which is what we were talking about - just by picking two end points and differencing them.

Now my plex is really perped! Fifty odd years ago it was. Is this a new New Maths? Definitely calls for a citation.

Re: @ TheOtherHobbes @Douglas Lowe It's true!

It seems that you are blissfully unaware that scientists have been wrong many, many times.

Mostly wrong. If they were right we'd still be discussing phlogiston, transplanting monkey glands, sterilising the mental defectives, performing skin graft experiments using four year old Jewish children (no anaesthetic required)....

Re: Rate of change

And why oh why are sceptics so uptight about 'forcing people to pay more for their energy' over any other form of taxation or spending.

Probably more important to look at the impact of green energy policy on the third world. The burning of forests and peat soils to replace jungle with palm oil plantations in Indonesia for example. The palm oil is needed to meet the mandated biofuel requirements of the EU. This results in:

1. Reduced habitat for orangutans

2. The Asian brown cloud that distresses asthmatics as far away as Singapore

3. Creates between 16 and 30 times as much CO2 as it saves.

Way to go...

Re: Rate of change

CET is a fantastic dataset. It is a fair proxy, given that it's one data point on a big globe.

Actually it's rather more than a single data point. Armagh and Uccle are single data points. The recent warming is most definitely not higher than it has been in the recent past. See previous post on 50 year changes.

When considering geological rates of change then recent rates pale into insignificance. The 8,200 event for example resulted in a ~3C* change in ~15 years, or at least that's what I learnt at university. I believe that the 8,200 year event has now been pinned down to a single year. Haven't had the opportunity to verify as yet.

Greenland ice cores. Antarctic ice cores show ~2C.

Re: Hottest temperature ever

Oh, pretty please! What's next, citing FauxScienceSlayer?

That's somewhat below your usual standard of comment GrumpenKraut. care to explain why the messenger is more important than the message? Anthony Watts seems hardly in a position to have changed the NOAA's numbers, or am I missing something?

Re: Hottest temperature ever

then all numbers are imaginary. Which is really failed maths.

You rather seem to miss the point that the numbers are the NOAA's numbers, not Anthony Watts'. I agree that it's failed maths.

Re: The last time it was this hot..

Yes, the "hottest ever" claim is being made here in Tasmania. The winter was the coldest in 60 years. How hot's that? There wasn't a single hippo to be seen anywhere!

Re: Rate of change

The latter is clearly about multi-year trends not about how much change there is in a single year. In fact it is usual when looking at trends to smooth over a number of years to remove short term noise.

Your wish is my command:

Largest 50 year temperature changes

1. 1733 2.55 C

2. 1747 2.19 C

3. 1928 2.15 C

4. 1743 2.14 C

5. 1737 2.09 C

6. 1831 2.08 C

7. 1789 2.07 C

8. 1834 1.93 C

9. 1863 1.92 C

10. 1865 1.82 C

Please note several things. Yes, this is numerology, but it's in response to numerological claims that temperatures are increasing more rapidly recently than in the past. Clearly that's untrue.

Using the entire span of the CET is not cherrypicking. It's the longest multi-station record on the planet. There are only two other comparable length records, Armagh and Uccle. Both are single station records. Both give similar results to CET and using either would no doubt raise the accusation that I was avoiding the CET multi-station record.

I gave Hubert Lamb's caveats about using the CET as a proxy for global temperature trends. Live with it.

Given lamb's caveats, the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores also show similar results and are widely used as proxy for global temperature even though they are clearly restricted to the width of the ice core. The CET stations are much further apart than that.