OT Motorway speed cameras

[Andrew]

Or less then 25 MPH on parts of the M25 during rush hour :-)

[Fredxx]

I think most of us consider ourselves lucky not to have killed anyone.

Including when travelling travelling at or below the speed limit.

The police have suggested, on occasions, of increasing the motorway speed limit, presumably one reason is to get cars off roads shared with pedestrians.

[ARW]

Actually the main reason I won the "race" was because I used the M40 and the A43 and he used the M25 and M1.

[No Name]

Adam, was this you in either of these? :-))

or

[ARW]

That concrete section on the south side near Chipstead is a bastard at

10MPH. The gaps between the concrete rattle the van.

[ARW]

My geography O level teacher claimed that he once owned the Lands End to John O Groats record.

He also ran the schools chess club and would stick 8 kids in his Ford Capri for away matches and take you to the pub for half a lager on the way home - Two halves if you had won.

[Clive Arthur]

Consider a normally inflated tyre. For every 1 degree of wheel rotation the wheel will move horizontally in proportion to the distance between the ground and the axle. For every complete rotation it will move 360 times that amount.

Now consider a flat tyre where the wheel rim is almost touching the ground. For every 1 degree of wheel rotation the wheel will also move in proportion to the distance between the ground and the axle which is now considerably less, as of course is the distance covered by one complete rotation.

But the tyre perimeter length can't change very much, and the tyre doesn't slip on the rim.

But the tyre does slip on the road. (Tyres must be able to slip or you couldn't turn corners.) Which is why flat tyres wear more quickly than properly inflated tyres and don't give as much grip. The tyre pressure is less so the contact area is bigger, so any particular piece of rubber on the ground has less downward force on it.

[ARW]

Anything scary or dangerous about this as I get up to speed?

[ARW]

And some people want to get run over.

[Tim+]

Nothing scary but you appear to have missed that there?s another empty lane to your left.

Tim

[ARW]

Trust me - there was not a queue of traffic behind me wanting me to pull over so they could overtake.

[Roger Hayter]

There is a sort of puritanical witch-hunt about speeding. Stupidity and aggression are much more dangerous than high speed in appropriate conditions, but more expensive to police. A bit like the moral panics over climate and smoking.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Nope. Just illegal

[The Natural Philosopher]

Inattention due to fatigue or distraction have been the things that most nearly got me.

Speed has never really been a particular issue - it simply lowers the death toll when the accident happens

Climate - I agree. Smoking, no, as a lifelong smoker who has had to stop before it killed me, I think its not a bad idea to demonise it.

But it is overplayed.

[Roger Hayter]

What the three issues have in common is *dishonest* exaggeration[1], and contempt for the masses who are expected to drink up propaganda rather than know facts.

[1] I am not so convinced as you that there is nothing in the climate story, but quite convinced we are fed over-simplification and lies.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think it is more complicated than that. In all cases 99% of people don't know what is even relatively true, and so the dialogue ceases to be rational and becomes emotional

Oh for sure everything we and all the life on the planet does makes a difference to climate. The fuel we burn directly adds, according to a quick calculation, 0.03W/sq m to the planets heating.

But it's dwarfed by other factors completely outside our control. In particular cloud and water movement around the planet is a massive thermostat, and yet in order to make 'global warming' work they have had to turn the feedback from negative to positive.

Global warming makes some very very challenge-able assumptions

- that all long term warming since 1970 or thereabouts is man made. in order to fit this assumption to the science they have had to

- assume all heat loss is from surface radiation below CO2 layer

- assume that the heat will cause more water vapour in the air resulting in greater greenhouse effect from it - about 3-10 times more - than from the CO2 itself. The fact that this would make the climate completely unstable is then seized upon in terms of 'tipping points'.

- assume that cloud doesn't change with all this warming, in particular does not increase to reflect sunlight more ...

Of course they then predict massive increase in rain which implies lots more cloud....

In fact the actual data suggests that at most less than one quarter of a degree of warming since 1970 is down to CO2, if any. The rest is natural. And by the time we have burnt all the fossil fuel worth burning. we will be a cosy degree warmer, which sadly wont take us back to the Holocene Optimum, Roman or Mediaeval warm period sort of temperatures.

At the core of all this is that basic assumption that any and or all warming since 1970 is man made, simply because they don't understand climate enough to assign it to anything else.

Ignoring all the warm periods and the little ice ages we have had in the last 10,000 years, air brushing them out of the climate record, falsifying data from weather stations, and ignoring the fact that cities have grown around them in the last 50 years.

It is simply shameful.

In philosophy there are two schools of thought that vie with each other in varying degrees. One school of thought holds that the world is real, external and objective and is not changed by what you think about it. The world of classical science.

The other holds that the world is all in your mind, or God's mind, and reality is whatever you happen to think it is. This is the world of the religious, the 'Left brainers' the politicians and the advertising agencies.

In social science and politics the world is whatever people can be induced to believe it is. And Climate Change is simply a tool.

They are not interested in whether it has objective truth, only in whether it is a convincing political and commercial narrative.

[Dave Plowman (News]

What the public apparently wants. Think 'oven ready deal' 'Make america great again' . It's what gets the proles to vote for you. They have neither the time or interest in facts. Just want to hear what they believe.

[charles]

or "Ready to eat" on fruit. Often rock hard

[Andrew]

Do all satnavs 'steer' into a corner ?. When you turned left and right at 08:53:30 your camera view changed.

Presumably you were collecting the next apprentice from his lodgings (Askham Grange) ?.

[Andy Burns]

I suspect they're a bit fisheye.