Pseudo green

[Mary Fisher]

'average' - aye, there's the rub. Not all pubs, by definition, are average.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

I think they're ugly and they need counter space, which is very short in our kitchen. And there's something very satisfying about lifting a real kettle and tilting it, it's a ritual. Then there's the taking off the lid and replacing it, very satisfying. If it furs up the lime just scales off, it needs no treatment. There's no thermostat but if it boils dry it comes to no harm, it simply, eventually, glows (it happened once). It doesn't need a power point, there's no trailing lead - I hadn't thought of all these drawbacks before now :-)

Mainly it's that we have ours. Over the years we've had lots of different electric kettles. Every time a 'child' has left home to go to university or whatever s/he has helped him/herself to the latest kettle. After the fifth and last went and left us kettle-less Spouse remembered his Grandma's kettle, which had been on the hearth for many years, and we used it. There's no point in getting rid of it while it works, that would be wasteful.

So does my copper kettle :-)

Not that I often have to boil half a cup, usualy the smallest amount is two cups.

Mary

[Clive George]

"nightjar .uk.com>" I disagree. In my youth, we went out to have a drink, preferably without

I reckon you're wrong on at least half of that : going out to "get bladdered" or equivalent has been going on for ages. IME it didn't lead to violence though. (oh what a sheltered life I lead :-) )

cheers, clive

[Phil L]

You can say that about everything, the word average means, well, average! - an average town centre pub/bar is much the same anywhere in the country and I've visited a lot of town centres on Fri and Sat nights, I've also visited a lot of country pubs and these are (on average) all virtually the same too.

[The Medway Handyman]

The voice of reason Derek! We had a huge cement (and we need cement) quarry near Northfleet for many years until it became uneconomic. Now its called Bluewater. At Cuxton we had another - that's now going to become "a unique housing environment" or something.

[Bob Eager]

I find it difficult to differentiate Bluewater from landfill....!

[AJH]

I think the main driving force was EU regulations that were concerned about methane emissions and leachate from landfill. In this respect I think UK practice was and is ahead of the field.

AJH

[Doki]

Have you not read about that Dutch study on traffic flow and signage? Rip out all the signs, people look where they're going more, you get a higher average speed and people let pedestrians cross.

[Doki]

NIMH and an 8 year warranty IIRC. Still, at 8 years old with dead batteries, who's going to want one?

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

Quite.

China has a policy to urbanise 500,000,000 peasants into cities. These cities are yet to be built; sixty cities larger that London.

No-one, but no-one, seems to have factored this into the CO2 equation. Are they all going to built with UK-style 'efficient' central heating, insulation, compact-flourescent lamps? Somehow one doubts it.

What will be the measureable impact on global warming from the new power-stations opening in China at the rate of one every few days? If the UK's total carbon emissions fell to zero, by how much would that reduce the global warming expected to occur?

Why do we never see these points put forward?

[Huge]

Because the greens agenda is political, not environmental. This is why I refer to them as "melons". They are green on the outside and red in the middle.

[Andy Hall]

... full of water and very little substance....

[Mary Fisher]

Well, we do, frequently. But we can't do anything about it whereas we ARE in control of our own small lives.

Mary

[Ian Stirling]

NiMH with extreme cycle counts do exist - ISS has some that have a designed 40000 cycle life - 6.5 years with one 70% charge/discharge cycle every 90 mins.

If only these were available with the right specs - density, power, ...

Hybrid is silly. An interesting discovery from MIT (IIRC) recently is that alcohol - seperately injected, used together with petrol drastically reduces preignition on lean mixes.

This lets you wind up the turbo pressure to 30-40PSI or so at high RPM, to give good performance when the accellerator is pressed, and high cruise efficiency, as the engine is running near its normally aspirated maximum power in ordinary use. Along with stratified charge injection - which used not to be possible, it works quite well.

I've wondered about a similar idea - though implemented rather differently.

You have a supercharged engine, with the normal fixed displacement supercharger. Onto this, you put a little gearbox.

1* - normally aspirated, supercharger just idling. 2* - 14PSI supercharging. 0.5* - 7PSI undercharging.

The 0.5 times is instead of a throttle. Instead of the engine just dragging the air past a small hole, and completely wasting that energy, it goes into pulling it past the supercharger. This causes the supercharger to work backwards, and add torque to the engine, rather than remove it, considerably boosting efficiency at low power demand, as there is no throttle.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh yes.

And Darwins theories eliminate the terminally stupid.

win win all round I'd say.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Dr Drivel?

[Derek ^]

It was true near us where the lights failed at a crossroads which was more like a scissor crossing, one of the paths involved cars doing a

160 degree turn. After the lights had been out for 4 days a local councillor started campaining for them to be removed permanently the improvement was so great. He failed, of course.

This sort of thing is true in many fields. Sometimes old folks are admitted to hospices and it is found that over the years they have been prescribed 7, 8 or more different medications, some to counteract the side effects of the others.

They get the patient off them all if they can, and the patients condition improves.

DG

[Huge]

*applause*

[Ed Sirett]

Psuedo green is a particular hate of mine. It is a highly developed subtle collusion between some manufacturers and some consumers. Whereby certain products are dubbed 'green' whilst actually being little of no different from 'standard' products. What they do is make people feel better about their purchases and the rest of their life (see below). Whilst the manufacturers sell products at a higher margin.

Firstly I not a politician and so I can say the uncomfortable truths in which there are no votes and no profits

Global Warming is out of the bag. I'm not saying that I don't care I'm just saying, it's already too late. Even if we did everything that we could in terms of the deck chair patterns,some changes are going to happen. When change happens there are usually some 'winners' and a lot of 'losers'. Evenso, however much the climate changes (quite a lot of) people are so adaptable and resourceful some will survive.

The myth is that if we all cut down a little then we can make a lot of change. The facts (IMHO) are that to reverse what as already happened would take a total cessation of most of peoples activity over most of the world and even then there are still likely to be some changes. The only things that is going to stop most of us from trying to lead our lives the way we want to is when a) it's too expensive b) it's no longer possible c) we're dead.

Some green techs are pseudo green. Some green techs might save their manufacturing energy over their lifetime but are so expensive that they can't be pay for themselves. Some green techs could pay for themselves but are trapped in a chicken and egg situation where if more were made they'd be cheaper and more would be sold (e.g. Solar thermal systems).

Nevertheless most genuinely green things are also one or more of the following: Inconvenient Uncomfortable Unpleasant Require making new/breaking old habits.

Let's take lighting: Do nothing. Business as usual. 60W

Low energy bulbs. Light is less useful so the saving is not as great as claimed but still worth it. 23W

Traditional fluorescent. More efficient still. But fittings are 'ugly' and often give off more light than is wanted so making little or no saving! 58W Go to bed when it's dark and get up when it's light. Inconvenient. It's dark 16 hours a day (or more) in the UK in winter.

What I'm saying is that whilst I applaud green tech in general all it can do is 'wind the clock back' a few years. Whilst the really radical lifestyle change to real green is just too difficult and nasty and politically impossible.

[meow2222]

Effectively the fan blades act as the throttle. Interesting. You still need a throttle - unless variable pitch blades are a practical throttle

- as grossly coarse control alone is no use for road conditions.

By how much would this improve efficiency, ie what proportion of power is lost by the inlet semi-vacuum? And how much weight and cost of equipment would be needed to harness it? And how much more fuel would that extra weight require to reach the same target vehicle performance? A lot of these ideas fail there.

A good example of this is using exhaust heat to raise steam to run an extra steam cycle cylinder. It works, but the extra weight is the killer. Then theres the cost.

NT