Watching her

We went to dinner at our son's house last night. He has a son and a daughter. The daughter is what used to be called a handful. But not in a disgusting way, she is very clever, sometimes irresistibly naughty and sometime as sweet as … well good.

Like this:



She drifts out to one extreme or another but finds it difficult to get back, she gets stuck in naughty quite often and needs a quiet talk to get her back to good, then again she demonstrates a sudden clever remark or skill or knowledge. Last night she showed a wonderful spanish accent, she has been doing spanish at school. I don't know whether is is mimicry or genuine mental switch to the language, but it sounded very clever to me.

And then another day I loaded a Mandarin Chinese learning program on my iPad and she got going writing the Chinese characters and the English words. She sure has a way with languages.

Climate change - ACTION

It is now without doubt that climate change is underway, and will continue unless we stop (yes stop) using more CO2 producing fossil fuels! They have to be left in the ground - whereas the industry is spending £600B yr trying to extract more… and the capital of these companies makes up a lot of the investments in your pension fund…



The recent IPCC report uses four scenarios they call RCPs. (RCP2.6, 4.5, 6.0 & 8.5). These are named according to the "forcing" scenarios, i.e. how much of the agents that cause warming actually come about. The positive forcing agents are CO2 emissions, CH4 (methane) emissions, Halo-carbons and NO2; of which CO2 is the biggest, closely followed by CH4. Overall the total radiative forcing upwards has gone like this by 1950, 1980 & 2011:



So things are going from bad to worse, quickly. Putting it another way these are the contributors:



Here's what is happening:

1 Arctic sea ice melting, adding to sea level rise



2 Increase in CO2 due to fossil fuel emissions:



3 Land and ocean surface temperature rise as a result of forcing



4 Ocean CO2 & pH fall, killing off all sea life from corals to fish:



5 Sea level change due to thermal expansion and ice melting (poles and glaciers):



6 Heating of the oceans - much more energy is stored in oceans than in the air, so it is much more important to look at sea heat content than air temperature (the 2C story…). This is hell of a lot of Joules of energy:



7 Finally here are the main effects depending on the RCP scenarios:



YOU HAVE GOT TO BELIEVE THIS STUFF. WE NEED TO ACT, OR DROWN, OR STARVE, OR START BLOODY WARS, or…

This is all a very slow process, but it is going on. We can expect by 2100 - warmer days (certainty), hot days (certainty), heat waves (very likely), heavy rain (very likely), droughts (likely), cyclones (likely) and high sea levels (London and New york under water? Likely).

A question / Syria

I have just one question about getting involved in the internal war in Syria.

WHAT IS IN IT FOR US?

My conclusion is, nothing.

WE must stop being moralistic and tub thumping. Our job is not to rule the world (maybe it's a colonial hangover, but all the same…).

So lets stop being coerced by the USA into foolish military actions, we must insist on a political solution among the people of the Middle East themselves. It's called self-determination.

Leave them to it. If they want to shoot themselves, gas themselves or whatever. Just be smug and glad it doesn't happen here - any more. We have grown out of it.

Tim! Get a grip

The expected announcement of new iPhone models by Apple, has been completely ruined by leaks.

Many of which are probably true and show the exact models that will be announced.

We have seen both internal electronics, screen shots - probably inevitable since beta versions of iOS7 have been widely circulated to help iron out bugs by developers - and worst of all finished products that the public are supposed to be surprised by.

After all that is the centre of Apple marketing, is it not? To bring a new surprise to the market!



In past times Apple has always kept very tight secrets about new developments, but somehow Tim Cook seems to have lost control, or is not exerting enough control, over manufacturers and their employees who have photographed many of the secret developments, both internal circuits, cases and finished products.

Enough to completely ruin the anticipation of the event.

Come on Tim. Get a grip! Get cross!

This IS pollution!

Whatever people may say, the criss cross tracks of planes IS pollution. It pollutes my air space, prevents the sun shining and spoils my enjoyment of a summer's day.

Why are we constructing a society like this?

A couple of issues are:

Housing in the UK

We are desperately short of houses, and a lot of the stock we have is poor, energy wasteful and decrepit.

But houses are not being built.

Current government proposes to increase house building by relaxing the rules, and at the same time as pushing a “localism” agenda for communities to manage their own environment, has legalised land grabs by speculating developers.

Two aspects of this which are the most damaging are

- Councils receive from central government money for every new house built, effectively this amount is a bonus of the council tax value of the next 6 years. This encourages them to freely give planning permissions t to the most housing they can get away with, with little or no consultation with communities that elect them.

- Planning policy says quite clearly that permission cannot be refused if the development is “sustainable”. The definition of sustainability is wide open to abuse, and developers are very good at filling gaps by “mitigation” arguments. Thus councils can not refuse approvals, or developers will go to law and sue them to reverse decisions - at tax payer’s cost.

The result of all this is that councils are giving more and more approvals, but houses are not being built, because land assets are inflated (as developers buy land cheap and get planning permissions which increases the value), This looks good on the developers balance sheet, but means that they cannot build houses at a cost (= land + house build cost + council costs for serves + profit) that people can afford.

Government initiatives to tempt people into taking unaffordable loans (75% from banks and 20% short term from government) are a false stimulus. They still cannot afford the repayments, even if the government part is interest free, and they will get into uncontrolled debt.

So planning approvals are given, without community support or consultation, land assets go up, and NO houses get built.

HS2

HS2 proposals beggar a big question about what kind of society we want to build. The sums are so great (£50bn / 25M tax payers = £2000 each) that one can truly question the advantages of transporting thousands of people at very high cost between city centres and gaining just 1/2 hour to do so.

The way our society is organised today is increasing and increasing “run about”, more and more people are travelling to work, traveling to meet each other, traveling... yet 90% of businesses in UK have less than 10 employees.

To serve communities and those 90% of small businesses we have to find a way to cut traveling and invest to grow locally.

That is what we need to spend £50bn on:

- Housing and business planning

- Business premises and tax reductions

- Local transport infrastructure

- Communications, or broadband to give “virtual office” capability across the UK.

- Electric, autonomous delivery vans, and other automated infrastructure

- More beautiful places to live

Politics and government

We have to accept the state of humanity. Just chose how do we want to live with it? Living in UK is very different to living in the Sahara or in Syria.

We have to accept that the a lot of humanity is, in western eyes, in-humane in many ways. Not to accept this, and leave people to evolve by themselves, has created social upheavals, law making, wars etc etc as those, you could almost call them “do gooders” push to construct a society in which ”decent” people can live.

And even here in UK we have inverted politics. Today politicians do not consult with the people they represent, then take these views to parliament, but conversely they make up policies, publish manifestos, ask for a vote then pass laws, dictating back to the public what should happen. And in many cases law making outside the very manifesto they were elected on, with no community input, except from lobby groups. And even these are coming under attack.

Finding components for my SSTV receiver

I am building a simple SSTV receiver for reception on 14230 kHz, this is based on the RSGB Centenary Receiver for PSK31 published in Sept Radcom magazine. My circuit diagram is in a previous post.

I have managed to get most of the components - resistors, coils, capacitors, ICs - from Spectrum Communications. But had difficulty finding a source for the 14230kHz crystals. Now I have made a contact through ICM-Crystals with Chris Emmerson who is able to source them from China, at a cost of 20GBP for 6. Compare that to quotes in the EU & UK of 120-160GBP!!

Let's see how delivery goes...

In the mean time, here's the board with most components mounted:



I have left off two resistors that were connected from the LM386 inputs to ground because this IC has internal bias resistors and they are unnecessary. I have also substituted the input MOSFET for a BF245A, and lowered the load resistor to 1K to maintain the drain at 4-4.5V with zero source resistor.