Cool for August

Locally the temperature has not risen above 20 Celsius for a number of days. While this is a pleasant respite from the usual heat of the day, from what one can ascertain this run of cool wet weather is far below average for the coming Labour day weekend. Is that volcanic plume still causing problems?

Cooking perfect hard boiled eggs

When your own Mother asks for your advice on a matter, you know you’re getting it right. Especially with a mother as critical as mine. You know the sort of thing; you weigh too much / too little, too tanned / too pale, too severe / too scruffy whatever. Like most sons, there is little about me that my mother cannot and will not find fault with.

When it comes to boiling eggs however, I am the acknowledged expert of the family. Eggs with rich, golden yolks that are just set and treacly but not runny with none of that horrible dark grayish residue on the interface between solidified powdery bright yellow yolk and rubbery white that is the hallmark of the overdone egg from the nightmare days of 1970’s school dinners.

Experiment so far has proven that you can cook up to half a dozen eggs at a time and obtain the desired result and within a small variance produce first class results.

To prepare, select six (or desired number of) relatively fresh extra large eggs. Set these aside to warm to room temperature. Selecting a suitably sized pan, fill to an eggs depth with water, add a large pinch of salt and put on heat until the water boils. Take pan off heat, and using a large spoon carefully deposit the eggs one or two at a time into the near boiling water so that the shells do not crack, bring water back to the boil and set your timer for nine minutes exactly, no more. For large eggs, eight minutes forty five seconds will do, for medium sized eight minutes thirty seconds is an elegant sufficiency. This is a time critical process, and cannot be left to the vagaries of fate, so use the oven timer if need be, not chance it using your watch.

When the timer sounds at the end of nine minutes, take the pan off the heat and flush out the hot water with cold water under the tap until the water in the pan is cool. This is the trick which arrests the cooking process, and prevents the unwanted result of ‘overcooked’ powdery yolks and rubbery whites. When the eggs are cool enough to handle comfortably, remove from water. Crack end of shell and peel, then split in half to eat either hot or cold with condiments or accompaniment of choice.

You see? Men can boil eggs, and do it well.

Ice free North Pole

People are still panicking and saying that the North Pole will be ice free this year, and that this is something to worry about because this is the first time this has happened.

I say not so; SSN-578 (USS Skate) managed it on 17th March 1959. Check the 5th Photograph down.

There is also anecdotal evidence that a Chinese fleet sailed through a largely ice free arctic around 1276CE.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

SOHO back up

Well, looks like I was a bit previous there. The 'CCD bakeout' warnings are gone from the SOHO solar observatory website and there is news on Spaceweather that a new sunspot (cycle 24 at last?) is emerging, although you can't quite see it yet unless you have your own solar observatory.

Vancouver Island is still a bit cloudy this morning, and the forecast promises rain. Oh well, time for breakfast and a trip up to Parksville for one of the charities I work for.

Well whaddaya know?

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test...

HFPS - The Humanitarian

You perceive the world with particular attention to humanity. You focus on what's in front of you (the foreground) and how that fits into the larger picture. You are also particularly drawn towards the shapes around you. Because of the value you place on humanity, you tend to seek out other people and get energized by being around others. You like to deal directly with whatever comes your way without dealing with speculating possibilities or outcomes you can't control. You are in tune with all that is around you and understand your life as part of a larger whole. You prefer a structured environment within which to live and you like things to be predictable.

The Perception Personality Types:

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

Still spotless

Solar activity seems to be taking it's own sweet time getting cycle 24 running. We're getting the odd sunspot, or should I say sunspeck they're so small, but at the moment of writing there's been little activity. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a glitch in the normal run of things. Could be wrong of course, but at least I've got some extra warm clothing for Winter this year.

Of course some pundits are coming out of the woodwork saying that this is the beginning of a new Ice age, but I'm not buying into that. Didn't happen in the 70's, which was the last time there was a panic of this nature. It got cold and wet for a few winters, but not that much.

Sunspot activity is not the only indicator of solar activity, there are coronal holes, flares etc. Regrettably there's been a 'CCD Bakeout' marker on the SOHO solar observatory site since 8th August, indicating that one or several of the onboard sensors are inoperative, so monitoring solar activity minus your own observatory is getting a bit tiresome.

Looking on the bright side, one good thing about all the pundits screaming that we have to 'do something' about the continuing non-event of climate change / global warming is that Winter clothing often gets more heavily discounted because no one believes they'll need it and are so not buying so much. For example, I recently bought a seven hundred dollar leather coat for one hundred and eighty bucks, a good hundred dollar leather hat for fifty five dollars. Insulated hundred and forty dollar Winter boots for sixty dollars. Three hundred bucks (Around a hundred and fifty pounds sterling or two hundred and twenty euro's) including tax has seen me obtain kit which will shrug off sub zero cold with ease. I have a kerosene lamp and gas stove for when snow brings down the power lines like it did last year, so we're prepared for whatever eventuality. Am I worried? Not really.

Vids on alternative environmentalist thinking

Currently looking for funds to allow screening in movie theatres.
Michael Crichton's critique of Environmentalism as a 'religion'.

Philip Stott on how the AGW scaremongering has damaged 'real' environmentalism.

Aha!

The guilty party has been identified. Thanks to an entry on Anthony Watts blog, and largely unreported in the MSM, I now feel I know what is responsible for the unseasonably cool and cloudy weather currently afflicting Vancouver Island and much of North Western America and Western Canada. A volcanic eruption in the Aleutian Islands (Kasatochi, seen here pre eruption) shot a large plume of heavily SO2 laced smoke into the atmosphere 7th / 8th August, and we are seeing the consequences. Although I'd rather not see a re-run of what happened after the Laki event of 1783.

My first thoughts are; With the global temperature already on a slow cooling trend and the PDO shifted into the cooling part of its cycle, we may be in for a bit more chilly weather than we've bargained for. Fortunately I have invested in some warm clothing for the coming Canadian Winter.

My second thoughts are; Well any cooling thus caused should be a godsend for those who are concerned about the effects of a putative (but not actual) warming of Earth's climate. This means a couple of good volcanic eruptions can easily wipe out any effect man might have on the climate in the proverbial five minutes flat. Huzzah! No massive rises in sea levels. Polar Bears get to keep their ice. We don't need to worry about man's relatively minuscule contribution to Earth's CO2 levels. Win-win, right?

Here my cynical third thoughts come into play; The downside of any cooling is lower crop yields, washed out harvests, less food all round. Some people (Quite a lot of them actually) will starve. Yet the Politicians will tax much needed economic activity into the ground 'to stop global warming / climate change', despite there being a complete lack of incontrovertible evidence that mankind has any real long term influence on what the weather does. NB: 'Peer reviews' do not a postulation prove; observable, reproducible evidence of an effect does.

The only 'evidence' of Anthropogenic climate change is deeply suspect because the models are incomplete and any predictions they make have so far been demonstrably highly inaccurate. The basic theory of runaway climate change requires an infinitely thick atmosphere, which Earth does not have. CO2 is only a minor 'greenhouse gas' in comparison with Water vapour, Methane, and a number of other gases. Furthermore, CO2 is not a 'pollutant', it is an essential part of the cycle of life. Without it, we're dead. As will everything else be that relies of aerobic respiration, plants, animals, a lot of bacteria. An extra 75 parts per million is not a bad thing at all. Especially for plant life.

Not that this demonstration of how insignificant an influence mankind has over the climate will make any difference. The 'believers' will still cast those of us who inconveniently point out the real truth of the matter as evil 'deniers' in the pay of some wicked corporate bogeyman, and will continue to do so when there's six feet of snow on the ground and glaciers are grinding inexorably down from the mountains. That's human nature for you. Never let facts get in the way of belief eh?

Note to self; Yellow pages, check for skiing lessons.

Cooler

The current cool weather on this part of Vancouver Island has come as quite a relief after the muggy heat of the past few days. Even the mossies have deemed it too hot to make their usual meal out of me. Dog, with his thick coat, has suffered greatly with the heat, and is going to be sent for shearing this week.

As for other non weather related stuff, I even caught a fish yesterday. Tiny little guy who tried to swallow my lure whole. Notwithstanding, I threw him straight back in the water and he swam off. He will live to bite another day. Barbless lures make it easy to flip unwanted piscine life off your line with little damage. I'm just amazed the little tinker actually managed to get his mouth round the hook.


As for writing, I've resumed work on one of those 'back burner' projects that I've been fiddling with for the past five or six years. It shows promise. Forty thousand words, and the characters feel solid and three dimensional.

Regarding my 'First Flights' MSS, there's been no word at all from any of the enquiries I made. Seems like no one in publishing wants Sci-Fi right now. Not from any relatively new authors anyway. At present I'd settle for a 'thanks but no thanks' or even 'fuck off and die' response, but this silence is absolutely mind numbing.

Not so silent places are the woods. While I was away visiting relatives and chilling, one of the woodland trails has become blocked by fallen trees, and when I say blocked, I mean where three separate tree trunks, all over two feet across, have fallen to form a six foot high blockade. One tree fell and smashed into another, which smashed into another, and all of them fell around the same spot. Must have made a hell of a racket when that lot came down. Just goes to prove the old adage that nothing happens in isolation. Nature follows the rules of causality.

Wonder if my handy neighbour with his chainsaw will clear the way again.

I think I'll go and see this one...

....if of course it gets screened up here. Failing that, a trip to Seattle might be in order.

Buggerit.....

There are much better things to do in life than rail at the stupidity of the world. Fishing is one such thing.

I don't get this....

Maybe I'm just being politically naiive, which is very possible, but over the water in England there seem to be a number of editorials in this vein. My question is; who started shooting at the South Ossetian civilians first? This is a multi choice question:
a) Georgia
b) Russia
(*Correct answer is a)

All the comparisons with the Gleiwitz incident in 1939 ring pretty hollow to me. Just who is trying to whip up a cassus belli here? More to the point, why?

Gnome from home

There are things which amuse me, and this is one of many. A woman in Gloucestershire had one of her garden Gnomes stolen. Three months later, the gnome was returned with a photo album showing the gnome in scenes from around the world and a polite letter to the owner explaining the gnomes absence.

Personally, I can't abide the things. They make gardens look cheap and tacky. Their presence in a garden bespeaks volumes about the occupants. Phrases like "Nice people....but..." come to mind.

However, taking one on a world tour sounds rather more classy, and says a lot about the character of the gnome abductor. For example, our youngest (at 19) still has an ageing and much repaired woollen Teddy Bear which goes everywhere with her and will no doubt be passed on to the next generation. This particular Bear has been all over the world in her suitcase. Canada, USA, Singapore, Dubai, Egypt, Tanzania, Kenya, even Scarborough. People who still carry that sort of thing around seem to be still very much in touch with their 'inner child', which might look slightly odd, but indicates a small silent core strength of character which will serve them well in a crisis. So long as they have an inner babysitter available for when the inner child throws Teddy out of the pram.

Oo-er

There are people who want to shut any debate about the effects that CO2 is or is not having on the climate down. They are right, everyone else is wrong, no one is to talk about this again, ever -OR ELSE!

They ignore certain laws of physics.

They ignore reasoned argument based on known physical laws and in depth physical observations.

Everyone but them is wrong.

To them everyone who doesn't agree with their viewpoint is an evil 'Denier' in the pay of Big Oil and should be silenced. They ignore the 300 million US Dollars made available to the pro AGW camp by Al Gore, who has a great deal to lose should the AGW theory be exposed as the sham it is.

One could be impolite and ask them to "(Expletive deleted) off", but that is not my way. I shall voice my concerns and point out the shortcomings of the opposing arguments in as public a forum as I can. Physics will out. Water on stone.