Reflecting cold

[Lieutenant Scott]

By space I clearly meant away from here! In the middle of nowhere!

Not sure what you mean by the clue about life though - are you suggesting that life increases it be 30C?

[Roger Chapman]

Don't know about that but surely blood would boil at zero pressure almost regardless of temperature.

[Lieutenant Scott]

Probably the old ones. You can test yourself, just see how much hot air is flowing up form the modern ones (there's a reason for that concertina stuff inside). And you can't feel anywhere near as much being radiated. Mind you it might help if they were black, but then you'd need brighter lights,

[Roger Chapman]

Probably, but possibly just finless. The radiator I am sitting next to is a single panel with no fins. Fins make a substantial difference - about 42% greater output according to one site I checked.

[Davey]

It's dark. You can't see it.

[Davey]

Maybe, but it's still annoying.

-- Davey.

[polygonum]

Dark energy...

[Martin Brown]

In the thermal longwave infrared just about anything that isn't a shiny metallic surface is a good approximation to black - even white paint.

ISTR as a rough rule of thumb radiative heat transfer starts to become significant at about 55C with an ambient of 20C. It scales with absolute temperature to the fourth power so takes off rapidly.

[Lieutenant Scott]

I've never seen a finless one, what a strange idea! Even my slimline single panel hall radiator has fins at the back.

[Lieutenant Scott]

Why? It's just stating the factor that you multiply or divide with.

How would you rewrite the following anyway?: "Tom's c*ck was three times longer than Jim's, but Jim's nose was five times smaller than Tom's."

[Lieutenant Scott]

I don't think the glass would think of it that way when it felt the pressure of all that dark matter.

[Lieutenant Scott]

My Physics teacher (who had a Doctorate) disagreed. Stupid woman.

[Davey]

"Tom's c*ck was four times the size of Jim's, but Jim's nose was a fifth of the size of Tom's". If that is what you mean by 'five times smaller', of course.

[dennis]

Now don't be silly tim, I said its a theory.

I said its a theory, where did I say it isn't?

I know, and I was correct about the bits you corrected too.

[Lieutenant Scott]

That's just ridiculous. Why do you find "five times smaller" so difficult to understand? "Five times" is simply quantifying the ratio.

[Roger Chapman]

This house had central heating fitted in about 1975, 3 years before I moved in. No fins on any of the original radiators. I have a catalogue which I think dates to the early 1980s (gas fired CH boilers from £75) with not a single finned rad in sight except for Finrad skirting radiators which was referred to as "this new concept". The section on 'Comfort' ends with: "For these reasons perimeter skirting radiators provide fullest comfort at lower air temperatures then are required by other forms of central heating which have less efficient heat distribution. Even on the coldest days there is no need to set the thermostat in the 70s to feel warm; with perimeter skirting radiators the mid 60's produce that healthy sense of comfort, at a present to breathe air temperatures."

For those to whom Fahrenheit is a foreign language 70F is 21.1C and 65F is 18.3C.

[Huge]

Don't be silly. It's piped away down the wires to the power station, where it's converted into clouds. That's why it's cloudier in the winter when more people have their lights on.

[Tim Streater]

You can't get less than one times smaller - which makes it zero. What you want to say is that Jim's nose is one fifth the size of Tom's. "Five times smaller" is meaningless.

[Ian Jackson]

The process of piping the darkness back to the power station is not 100% efficient. Some residue gets left in the bulb, and can this can usually be seen as a dark film on the inside of the glass. In time, this becomes more and more apparent, and the light progressively becomes dimmer and dimmer. Eventually, the piping mechanism fails completely, causing the bulb to fill up instantly with saturated darkness.

[Davey]

So that's why the government is reducing the feed-back tariff for solar power generation?