They don't like it up 'em

While Stoat is busy polishing his Green credentials with a series of mildly snarky posts about climate porn, I hope I am not the one who is hugely amused by the outrage expressed over an Honourable Member having his collar felt by Plod (in the form of a posse of Counter-Terrorism Officers).

For some time now, random members of the public have been harassed, arrested and had their lives generally turned upside down by said Plod, under the guise of various ill-thought-out draconian laws that have been rushed through Parliament in recent years. And this was brushed under the carpet, or considered an acceptable price to pay to Defend our Freedoms, or some such pious nonsense.

It would of course have been even better had the victim this time been a member of zaNU-Labour rather than what passes for an Opposition these days. But both sides of the House are equally culpable for the legislation IMO - both are so desperate to be seen "doing something" that they troop obediently into the lobby even when the "something" they are voting for equates to locking up innocent people. So I don't see this as the Govt knobbling the Opposition so much as the Houses of Parliament unleashing a police state on all of us and getting caught up in it themselves.

I only wish I had a vote so I could abstain.

Barking

An odd story has taken top billing in the news here recently.

It started off with a couple of gruesome murders and another stabbing, considered to be related:

In separate but possibly related knife attacks, a former top health ministry bureaucrat and his wife were found stabbed to death in their Saitama home while the wife of another retired health ministry bureaucrat was seriously wounded in Tokyo, police said Tuesday.

All sorts of speculation ensued about terrorism or perhaps someone who is disgruntled over the pensions problems (the national pension scheme is in chaos partly because of the difficulty of reading kanji, and this is health ministry business). The police had no useful leads other than to suggest that the shoe sole of the suspect was an evil dangerous foreign Chinese invader. But most stuff here comes from China, especially if it's labelled as Japanese.

Then a few days later some guy handed himself in and claimed responsibility, saying his motivation is....

...his pet dog was put down 34 years ago, because it barked.

It wasn't even euthanased by the health ministry!

There are plenty of conspiracy theories based on a couple of embarassing flubs by the police: they announced the stabber was left-handed but this man is right handed, and the bloodied knife he presented also does not match the type they had expected. But with a confession and DNA match that is hardly going to matter.

Woof!

Eco-genius invents the dehumidifier

Surely I can't be the only one to have realised that this new machine that can magic water out of thin air is little more than a humble dehumidifier, the like of which has been around for....well I don't have a clue actually but it is hardly a new invention. They are very common in Japan (either as a function of an air-con or as a stand-alone unit) where the summers are extremely humid. I wouldn't fancy drinking what comes out of the back end, mind you, but that only requires a bit of sterilising and filtering.

As for the cost of the resulting water, at $0.30 per litre...I do not know how that compares to existing dehumidifiers but it makes a nonsense of the breathless claims that this gadget could make a useful contribution to water production. The claim of paying for itself in a couple of years is clearly absurd and refers only to an alternative of living off bottled water - and who does that?

Desalination plants can generate water at about a thousandth of the price (random google).

The 2000W challenge

the energy use each of us must stick to if we’re to keep the planet hospitable: precisely 2,000 watts.

Well I just looked at our fuel bills. The max monthly electricity bill I can find is 440kWh (December) and the min is 142 in May (neither heating nor air-con). The summer air-con peak is about 300 and the monthly ave is comfortably below this but I will round it up a little to 10kWh per day - this is for two people and covers the vast majority of our domestic fuel use since gas is just for hot water and cooking.

The cited article (which has some silliness like conflating max rated power with actual energy usage) says that domestic energy, food, and travel make up roughly 1/3 of the total each. So by that reckoning we are using about 1/3 of the suggested max for domestic energy. Our Japanese diet is certainly lower in energy demand than a typical Western diet, being rather low in meat (and calories!). We even cycle to work most days and don't own a car. But we probably make up for it with ~2 long-haul air trips per year...

I didn't think there could be any family silver left by now

Officials are drawing up plans for a sale of government assets including the Met Office, the Ordnance Survey and thousands of acres of Forestry Commission land.

Hmm...I wonder if I should put in a bid for the Hadley Centre...

Pinder v Fox

Russ Pinder's case against Fox Racing Shox (MTB fork manufacturer) is finally underway in the High Court. There are two brief articles about it here and here, and lots of ill-informed argumentation on the STW forum as usual, despite the best attempts of the proprietors to shut down any discussion (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It is interesting to see that 5 years after I worked out what was going on and wrote it all down in simple terms, people still seem to feel the need to make up uninformed nonsense (although I'm sure all climate scientists will be familiar with such behaviour). As I mentioned recently, this stuff is not rocket science, it is just the way that bolted joints work (or rather, how they fail if over-stressed) and has been basic engineering knowledge for decades.

I don't know the details of their case, but for the background to the incident that underlies it you can look here and here. It seems like there should be a verdict early next week. I hope they have done their homework and wish them all the best.

It's deja vu all over again

As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said (I'm sure he can't be the only one).

This caught my attention in the news yesterday:

Passengers at risk from track design flaw

A design flaw found in thousands of places on the country’s rail network is putting passengers at risk of a catastrophic derailment similar to the Potters Bar and Grayrigg disasters, according to a secret analysis by rail safety inspectors.
[...]
It says that the joint “may not withstand normally encountered forces imposed by the operating railway, resulting in the potential for loose fasteners and consequent changes to the configuration of the points leading to further points degradation and subsequent train derailment”.
[...]
A source close to the investigation said: “We should not just be relying on track workers to spot loose bolts in time. We need to stop the bolts from coming loose. This is about making sure that the points are fail-safe.”

Sound familiar? Of course, it's exactly the same process that I uncovered with quick-release failures on disk brake-equipped bicycles - an underspecified bolted fastener working loose due to an applied load that exceeds the capacity of the design.

Here is the full report on the Grayrigg crash. A few excerpts:

The fasteners in the third permanent way stretcher bar joint failed by unwinding. This occurs when the applied load exceeds the clamping force on the joint. The RAIB has concluded that, in this case, such loadings were a result of the passage of trains.
[...]
The RAIB has concluded that the design of the joint between the permanent way stretcher bar bracket and the switch rail at 2B points, and of other similarly configured points, was such that it could have been subjected to forces beyond its design capability and therefore the points system had significant reliance on regular inspection and maintenance to maintain safe operations.
[...]
The RAIB concludes that this incomplete understanding of the performance of S&C with non-adjustable stretcher bars, and the relationships between its design, usage, loadings, inspection and maintenance, led Network Rail to consider that the risk associated with the design was low and was being adequately controlled. This also resulted in an absence of clear and properly briefed standards for the setting up and adjustment of S&C.

[S&C - switches and crossings, a generic term for various railway track junctions]

There is lots more to wade though for anyone who is interested. But there is hardly any need. It is hardly rocket science - it took me literally seconds to find out what I needed to know via Google and this web site, once I guessed at what was going on back in 2003 (in relation to disk brakes). It is worrying to think that there are supposedly qualified engineers out there who don't know this stuff like the back of their hands...

Bath

I know it's been some time since I blogged anything. I'm a bit bored of it, to be honest. But last weekend we had a bath, so I thought I would share a picture or two. We do have a bath at home, but it doesn't look (or smell) like this open-air sulphurous pit at Azohara Onsen:


Actually we had several baths in the three days we were up in the mountains - that was the most spectacularly sited one though, high up in the Kurobe Gorge 5h walk from the nearest access (a little narrow-gauge rattling train). The autumn leaves were perhaps just a little short of their peak colour, but the mountain huts are about to close for the winter (in fact one of them will be completely dismantled to avoid snow damage) so we thought we had better take advantage of the good weather while it lasted.


It was pretty spectacular but a little difficult to photograph with the high contrast. And in a month or two we'll get to enjoy a second dose of the autumn colors down here in Kamakura...

f*ing BIZWALK!

Why oh why oh why???

Another from the department of "you couldn't make it up"

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Saturday formally announced his intention to retire from politics and said he will not run in the next House of Representatives election.

Koizumi, 66, also named his second son and secretary, 27-year-old Shinjiro Koizumi, as his heir apparent to the Kanagawa No. 11 district.

Koizumi did acknowledge criticism about giving his political base to his son, saying, ‘‘I too was criticized for being a third-generation politician. However, no-one will be able to accuse my son of such a short pedigree.’’

Shinjiro is now 33rd in line to the throne Prime Minister's Office and his inauguration is scheduled for early 2045.

[Editor's note: not all of the above is strictly true. Scarily, most of it is.]