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Monthly Archives for April 2008

You can’t polish a turd; polygamy, abuse and pedophilia.

{I know you are reading this in your hundreds, why not comment? It is anonymous.}

I have not thought a great deal about the recent polygamy thing in Texas which has been in the news a fair bit recently (this is where 52 girls were removed from a ranch in Texas and put into care and foster-homes following allegations of abuse) because this kind of thing goes on over in wacky old America, right?

I have not thought a great deal about it until….. until last night….. last night the number of children went up by one when one of the girls, a 16 year old, gave birth. Apparently she is not the only pregnant child.

I don’t like religion at the best of times but when it is when it is used as an excuse for the in inexcusable it really gets to me; bombings, terrorism, war, murder repression, oppression….. child abuse.

In the UK we have an expression (I don’t know if it is used in the US) which says that “you can’t polish a turd” and it means “shit is shit no matter how you try to hide what it is”.

Well, for a moment I think these polygamist folks almost managed it with me, they have gone on a big PR offensive and, to tell you the truth, I was not paying that much attention in the first place.

They have tried to take polygamy and dress it up as “religion” and “freedom” when what it really is about is a few older men surrounding themselves with small armies of poorly educated, brainwashed, compliant women; don’t be fooled by their weasel-words, it is not “religion” or “freedom”, it is abuse.

And in this particular case, and numerous others, “religion” and “freedom” is really about being allowed to “marry” and have sex with young girls. It is a cynical attempt at dressing up paedophilia as something virtuous and somehow acceptable.

But you cant polish a turd.

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http://the-discourses.blogspot.com/2008/05/texas-surpreme-court-endorses.html

Written on 30 April 2008 by Jon under Miscellaneous, Myths & poor logic with No Comments

Badger Cull

People go to prison in the UK for disturbing Badgers, but the British Government is allowed to kill them in order to control bovine TB, even when there is no evidence to suggest it will do any good and some to suggest it will be counterproductive.

This makes no sense whatsoever, but it in nevertheless true.

The Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir David King, suggests a cull of badgers in England should be undertaken in order to control bovine TB in cattle.

This advice goes against the conclusions of the Government appointed Independent Scientific Group on cattle TB, published in June, after a ten-year study. Apparently, when they culled badgers in Irish Republic bovine TB went up and in Northern Ireland, where there was no cull, bovine TB went down.

As I said before, the Government’s appointed independent scientists took ten years to conclude that there is no scientific evidence to support a cull. And yet the Welsh Assembly has decided to carry out a cull, click the link below and sign the petition to stop them coming to the same ludicrous conclusion in England.

http://www.backoffbadgers.org.uk/

And there is a ton of additional information, on the RSPCA site no less.

Written on 11 April 2008 by Jon under Bad Science, Myths & poor logic with No Comments

San Francisco - April 2008

This will be my final month in San Francisco for a while as my three months is up and I have work to go back to in the UK in May and June. Not so much going on this month either, I am feeling time running out on my Solar Two module as its exam and coursework deadline are both approaching fast. Also the biodiesel-book’s deadline is coming up frighteningly soon too.

Spent first week of the month doing what feels like nothing but book writing and study. Went all the way out to Berkeley University to see a man at RAEL about possibility of doing an thesis project there but he turned out to be a massive waste of my time, which was very disappointing and a wasted day.

First weekend of the month was nice, got embarrassingly drunk on the Friday night and had to send myself home early in the evening which was a stupid thing to do, but it happens sometimes when one am not watching how strong that really nice beer is. Saturday was almost a hangover day but was rescued by the idea of using our bus passes to ride the bus all the way to the San Francisco zoo, we did not get there until about 4pm, but had a good hour-and-a-half to assess that this is a fairly crappy zoo. It has one or two good exhibits, a handful of OK ones and a whole load of very sad ones, most notably the bear display of which I am pleased to say did not have any bears in them. After that was a bracing walk along Ocean Beach with sand stinging our faces and a bus ride to 16th & Velencia where we found a great Vietnamese restaurant. Sunday was another late start but a fantastic day, less windy and more sunny, we cycled from home all the way to Ocean Beach again via Haight Street and the length of Golden Gate Park.

Flew to San Diego with Virgin America (strange, i seem to be developing an affiliation with an airline) for the weekend of the 12th (missing Adam Freeland in SF, but you can’t do everything and it was Amanda’s birthday weekend).

We were immediately unimpressed with the city so instead we got the cheapest rental we could find and spent two days in the desert instead.

Visited Salvation Mountain Joshua Tree National Park Twenty Nine Palms 29 Palms Inn , thousands of wind turbines near Palm Springs which boasts a 40% gay population and an average age to match its average temperature, 88.

Back to SF on the 6am flight on Monday morning, by Monday evening we were at the “Nobel’s for the environment” awards at the SF Oprah House, the Goldman Prize, a star studded, no expense spared, international award ceremony, and then reception (free food and booze then) at the City Hall.

Back to SF for more book. Loads of writing to do now.

Following weekend was Monkey’s birthday, went to the Horses on Sunday and the Tonga Room on Tuesday. They are terrible, that lot.

Final weekend in SF was a gorgeous one which I spent inside writing the book. Did manage to get out to a club one night, the DNA Lounge to go to Bootie which is something of the home of the mashup; kinda double your money, music wise; cleverest mashup of the night, 99 Red Balloons with 99 Problems. . A good snapshot of San Francisco too, lots of people watching to be done, cool clubbers and podium-dancing gay boys and trannies, bit of a meat-market but lots of people having a lots of fun too.

Last few days in th city will be spent inside writing and revising Solar 2 then off to the UK for paid work and family and university things.

Written on 07 April 2008 by Jon under Trips with No Comments

Run your car on water; nonsence!

Loads of websites offer to teach you the secret of how to run your engine on water, mostly for a fee. For example Water4Gas.com say, on there enormously long and infomercial-like web page, you can halve your mileage and boost your performance by running your car on water. Sound like bullshit to you?

This “technology” is not to be confused with hydrogen powered cars or hydrogen fuel cells, this is a form of the water-powered-car myth; see the links at bottom of this article.

The theory

The theory goes something like this; electricity from the engine’s battery is used to separate the water into its components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are then burnt in your engine, sometimes along with the fuel it was running on in the first place but also displacing some of it, so you use less fuel and get better mileage.

Thermodynamics

Even if it did work, and it does not, the thing is it takes a lot more energy to separate the oxygen and hydrogen than there is energy available in it, and the energy is coming from your engine which means it is coming from your fuel, so you use more energy creating your miracle fuel than there is available to gain from it.

To put it another way, if the device operated as claimed the combustion cycle would start and end in the same state (starting with water and ending with water) while extracting usable energy, thereby violating the first law of thermodynamics, a perpetual motion machine.

Stanley Meyer

It all comes from a guy called Stanley Meyer who’s invention in the 1990s was claimed to use high frequency pulses of electricity to separate the water into its component parts. His claims about his Water Fuel Cell and the car that it powered were found to be fraudulent by an Ohio court in 1996, there is no evidence that any of these devices operate as claimed, and he was forced to refund his investors.

Here is another example of this nonsense, www.waterforfuel.com (this guy even has an eBay shop selling this rubbish).

If you still want to try it:

If you still want to try it then don’t pay for the information, it is all freely available on line here: waterpoweredcar.com/stan.html.

Firther reading:

Although all Wikipedia entries, and therefore of dubious reliability, these happen to all be of excellent quality and well cited:

Water fuelled car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fuelled_car

Hydrogen powered vehicles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_car