I want two of these.

For the Grandchildren.

Pub smoking poll.

Just a quick poll.

Be truthfull. (Actually you can tick whatever floats your boat).

If Pubs had a smoking room, would you visit them more often?
	Most certainly
	Maybe
	No
	I hate smokers so I would boycott the pub.
	Drink is evil. I would never cross the doorstep of a pub
	No. I prefer to get pissed at home.
	Undecided
	Refuse to vote on this poll as I'm like that.
pollcode.com free polls

Drug smuggling Lite

Much has been made in the MSM today of two girls caught drug smuggling in Peru.

Two British girls locked up in Peruvian jail have not eaten for seven days and are said to be terrified and hysterical after they were arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle £1.5million of cocaine out of the country.

Michaella McCollum Connolly, 20, and Melissa Reid, 19, are being held in maximum security cells following claims the pair may have been working for a South American cartel.

However this is the tip of a very large iceberg.

A few years back whilst on patrol on counter drug ops in the Caribbean we received intelligence that their was a fishing vessel that was a prime suspect due to the course it was heading. After shadowing it from a point astern, over the horizon, we were ordered to close and board it at first light in the morning.

Morning came and we pounced. Actually No! On demanding full power from the diesel electric power system a Thyristor decided to blow, leaving us almost dead in the water. Well there’s also tomorrow.

Tomorrow came and things actually went to plan. After working up to full speed we launched our Lynx helicopter with orders to tell the fishing boat to heave to. (Nautical term for STOP). Of course the fishing vessel stopped. You would too, if you saw a grey chopper  circling you and pointing a Mk 48 mini gun in your general direction.

Anyway I digress.

On catching up with the fishing vessel our boarding team discovered quite a haul of cocaine in 1Kg packets. How many you ask? 3,200 Kg in all. Approximately 1 billion dollars at todays estimated street value.

We boarded another two vessels in a two month period in which forensics also estimated that they had carried large quantities similar to our bust.

So when the MSM crow about a mere 11 Kg, then they’re being distracted from the big picture.

DOH.

Love it or hate it?

 

It would seem that the Neo-puritans have even less of a sense of humour than I thought.

A TV advert in which a spoof rescue team saves "stricken" jars of Marmite from homes where they have been neglected has prompted 278 complaints.

Some 250 complaints were received by the Advertising Standards Authority in just 24 hours, following the advert's debut on Monday evening.

Those who objected found the advert "offensive" and "in poor taste", said a spokesman for the ASA.

FFS can’t you see it’s a spoof.

Comments include the like of this.

"This ad shows no regard for all those involved with animal welfair [sic] and I personaly [sic] will no longer eat Marmite till this ad is pulled," wrote one.

Hah.

And from a main suspect.

The RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) said it understood that "animal lovers are concerned on our behalf".

Bollocks. I’m an animal lover and even I can see the advert as a light-hearted parody.

Wankers.

Women drivers?

Why the Neo Puritans are killers.

Just been reading an article on conservative home written by an MSP, Brian Monteith. In the article he takes the Government of today to task about their zealous continuation of labour’s anti-smoking campaign.

For example:

Whatever one thinks of Europe and its hunger for more and more regulations, this latest assault on the buying and selling of a legal product in Britain is entirely self-inflicted by our own government. Who would have expected a Conservative-led government to take Labour’s public health regulations that restricted the availability or consumption of tobacco and the campaigns that demonised smokers – and seek to make them even more punitive?

The Conservative Party had originally suggested that, if elected to government, it would not follow through with the removal from sight of cigarettes and other tobacco products that Labour had planned to introduce before its defeat in 2010.  With an eye on protecting the fragile incomes of small shopkeepers vital to local neighbourhoods, such a costly and invasive policy did not appear in the election manifesto or Coalition Agreement. And yet the Coalition succumbed to the tobacco control lobby, and soon carried on with the policy regardless.

Just goes to show that politicians of all colours couldn’t give a flying fuck about the voters who elected them. All they see is a bandwagon that has to be boarded.

However this is not the reason for the headline. That is caused by one of the comments underneath the post from Anna.

I'm close on seventy years old. In all that time the only health problems I've ever had were associated with sporadic attempts to abandon the dreaded death sticks. Mostly I realised for myself that I'd done it long enough and did the sensible thing. On the last occasion, at the anguished pleading of my then teenage daugher, I lasted five years. By the end of those five years I'd developed virulent psoriasis from stress, was three stone overweight, at severe risk of developing the type 2 diabetes inherent in my family and on such strong prescription anti-depressants that they themselves were sending me insane. Eventually the daughter who'd begged me to give it up begged me to take it up again. I did, thirteen years ago. 20-a-day later I'd ditched the anti-depressants, the psoriasis cleared up and I needed no more expensive NHS treatment. I rapidly returned to a healthy weight with no prospect of diabetes and I've never had a day's ill-health since.

Says it all really.

Don’t talk about the voltage.

Yesterday I wrote a pretty awful post about why I didn’t consider the government’s decision to encourage owners of diesel generators to prop up the National grid, in times of power shortage.

I spent most of that post banging on about frequency and load sharing. I should have added another factor  I think it’s a laughable idea.

Voltage.

In our houses in the UK the standard voltage used is 230V. This is a very low voltage in the great scheme of things but it is reasonably safe. If you touch an exposed wire it will make you remember it but unlikely to come to harm from it.

Not so the National Grid. This has sections that transmit at 400 kV (400,000 V). The simple reasoning is the formula taught in basic science classes. E=IR, where E is the voltage, I is current, and R is resistance. Even the best conductors in normal use today have their limitations. It would be infeasible to try and transfer electrical energy at household voltage. The cables would have to be huge in diameter. Therefore the high voltages.

Now in the  Hospital, public building, brothel, etc, it is not realistic to generate at those sort of voltages as there is only a very short transmission distance. Therefore it is most likely that they will generate at 440V(I’m going with my own experience here) for heavy power usage such as industrial heating systems and pumps. For general use it will be transformed down to 230V.

In short you have two totally incompatible voltages which you have to tie together with transformers and their losses, to make a back feed situation work.

Can it work? you tell me.

*Bought more candles*

I may post about the death and destruction that could be wrought.

Power bollocks

I was just reading Christopher Booker’s  article this morning in the Telegraph this morning.

We could soon be paying billions for this wind back-up

In it he explains the Bizarre thinking that to stop the lights going out the government is going to use all the backup diesel generators that exist in hospitals and other places that need to have an emergency supply of electricity.

The answer National Grid has come up with, only made possible by the latest computer technology and “cloud software”, is to hook up thousands of diesel generators, remotely controlled by the grid, to provide almost instantly available back-up for when the wind drops.

Personally speaking as an engineer that has spent most of his working life working with diesel generators, I think it is a disaster waiting to happen.

I don’t see how it could work.

1. All types of generators have a different “Characteristic”. Steam turbine generators, gas turbine generators, and diesel generators all respond differently to changes in load. All these generators have to supply power within a narrow frequency band either side of the grid frequency of 50 Hz. Usually within a maximum of + or - 3 Hz. How is your local hospital’s 1 Mw diesel set going to respond to the response of  a 2 Gw gas turbine. The danger is that unless the load sharing is precise (involving electronic governors these days), you could end up with a gas turbine actually “motoring” a diesel generator. In other words the DG is being driven electrically against it’s will. NOT A GOOD THING. It usually ends up with large lumps of diesel engine deciding to spread it’s self into it’s component parts. (I know. I walked past such a generator 5 seconds before it did it.). That’s your hospital fucked in the middle of winter when the wind turbines are not working.

2. All emergency generators are just that. They are arranged that if the mains power fails they are an autonomous entity.Just there to  supply the Hospital, public building, brothel, etc. Usually they are arranged that if the main supply circuit breaker drops out due to mains failure, the standby diesel generator will start and then close it’s emergency breaker onto the needed system.. QED. For safety reasons, the mains supply breaker and the emergency supply breaker are interlocked so that neither can be closed simultaneously. I’d love to know how they are going to load share between their patients and the grid?

3. As above. Does the hospital, if the rules change on electrical safety, save it’s patients or sell it’s Kws to the grid?

I feel that this is a cynical ploy by a government that has lost the plot on energy production to try and calm the average citizen, that the lights will remain on.

I have candles.

Did you know?

Today is……….

International Beer Day.

Apparently.