mistermack

I'm probably way off topic re the recent posts, because a lot of them are too long to get into. But as far as the OP goes, I don't think reality has ever been a big seller in the US, so this is nothing new. I think it all started with the Western novels, and then exploded when movies came about. Americans from an early age are brought up on a diet of fantasy garbage, and it's addictive, like the junk food that is peddled to them. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of fantasy, but that seems to be the staple diet in US movies. And movies and tv seem to play a huge part in people's lives, especially the young. When you are contantly fed a diet of stories where people are either good, or bad, with nothing in between, it forms an attitude to life with similar inclinations. So the US as a nation seems to divide the rest of the world up as good guys, and bad guys. And the same goes for their own politics. Real life is boring by comparison, when you are used to so much fantasy in your life. Of course, that doesn't apply to all Americans. But I think it is a trend.

Something fishy about that, but it's best we skate over it. They must have to apply some mathematics to the brightness levels of the Moon, because the Earth won't always be fully lit, as seen from the Moon.

I suppose you could get some sort of night and day if the disc was rotating around a horizontal axis, but sunrise and sunset would be very sudden and weird. And we would see a very strange landscape, where the whole world sloped downwards towards the centre, and it would get steeper and steeper the further you travelled from the centre. The only bit that would feel flat would be the centre of the disk. Added to that, the atmosphere would be concentrated around the centre, as would the water, so all rivers would converge towards a central ocean. And rocks would roll towards the centre too, with each earthquake. So, you would end up with a globe after millions of years. Funny that.

That's not really relevant to the thread though. The albedo that they measure is due to reflected light, not re-radiated.

Sorry Vat, didn't see you'd already mentioned soot. Forests might produce more cloud cover than grasslands though, so that might cancel out the higher albedo I think you just measure the brightness of the dark bit of the moon. That is lit up purely by the light from the Earth. ( maybe a tiny bit of starlight thrown in too)

Arctic ice is dirtier due to soot particles. So it absorbs more and reflects less. Which also makes it melt quicker. Not a problem down south, as there is far less soot produced down there.

They all agreed that the Sun goes round the Earth though. I'm not sure how you get day and night, with a flat disc orbiting the Sun. And if you are standing near the edge, you could get on your bike and freewheel all the way to the centre. But the return trip would be hard work.

Makes me wonder why we need a brain at all then. Seems funny that people lose conscientiousness when they get hit on the head though. Maybe that's what happened to Trump.

I can't see why this is in speculations. It's not really even up to "Trash" standard. I would advocate a new category of "Verbal Diarrhoea" for these kind of threads. That way, you could promote it up to trash, if it got better.

If I didn't care about re-using the drive, I would put in in an old saucepan without any water, and leave it on a low heat on the hob for an hour. It would need some kind of genius to get data off it after that.

Thanks. That was the sort of thing I was toying with. I don't follow the explanations or refutation arguments, but I can see that it has been examined and rejected, which I thought would surely be the case. I like the "Tired Light" expression, although it sounds a bit tongue-in-cheek.

How do we know that light doesn't lose a tiny amount of energy, as it covers astanomical distances? If it did, would it not give a red shift, similar to what is observed? ( I'm not suggesting that that's what happens, I just wonderd how they excluded it as a possibility )

The only one I can think of is baby jesus.

Most of it is subsidised, or compulsory under certain conditions, so it's not a free market. And the vast majority is ground source not air source. The only big air source market is used extracting heat from exhaust air of buildings, not outdoor air, which is pretty cold in winter.

Disagree. We all breathe electrons. 😊

Society is not one single unit. Even in your country, vicious child killers get a variety of treatments. Somes states keep them for an average of 20 years on death row, and then kill them. I think our killer dogs get off lightly, compared to that. Not that I'm ever in favour of the death penalty for humans. But personally, I value a friendly dog more than an evil human. And I'm not even a dog lover.

If it was a dog that savaged the little girl, much the same applies. Dogs don't choose to be born a dog, and don't choose negligent owners, who are too lazy to train them. Who gives a toss? If a dog kills a little girl, we kill it. And don't care how it got to where it became a killer dog. If a human kills a little girl, we don't kill it. But mainly because of the chance they could be innocent. That's the bonus they get for being human. Other than that, it's irrelevant how they got there, they are what they are. I might feel genuinely sorry for the truly deluded, in the sense that I'm glad that that wasn't me. But just like the dog, you could never be sure that it won't kill again. You can't predict what a truly evil person will do, and you can't predict what a deluded person will do. For practical purposes, they are the same. It's true, I feel sorry for one, and not the other, so giving them a chushier life in a secure mental hospital is fair enough. Even though that leads to many lifers faking mental illness.

In case you hadn't noticed, I was proposing a way of making heat pumps more efficient. That's certainly not a hijack by any stretch of the imagination. Even yours, I would have thought since the title of the thread is " The cost of using heat pumps" !! And since you asked for figures and experience to back up my claim that air source heat pumps don't cut it, economy-wise, you only have to look at your own example as posted, where £8,000 was spent, achieving an effective INCREASE in bills of £100. If you think that is cutting it, you need to brush up on your maths.

My own idea regarding heat pumps is to add two giant insulated water storage units to each new house build. They could be sited under a yard, or garden or drive. One for hot water, and the other for cold. In the summer, you use solar heat to heat the hot water unit. Also waste heat from any air conditioning system. At the same time, you use the cold water unit for ambient cooling, and cooling the AC unit. Then in winter, you use the hot water unit, hot from the summer heating, for direct heating or for use with a heat pump. And cool the cold water tank through an external heat exchanger with a fan. Once the water storage units were installed, they would make AC and heat pump heating very efficient, and so add a heap of value to the property. Hopefully the added value would be more than the cost of installing the units, and if you add in money saved on bills, there would be a substantial net profit after a few years. Also of course, they would save plenty of fossil fuel through the free stored heat energy and free stored cooling. The bigger you made the water storage tanks, the less they would cost in proportion to heat or cold stored. Maybe they could make a tank big enough to serve a whole street when building a new estate.

Most if not all offenders who go before a parole board have some kind of psychological assessment. I've quoted the case of Philip Manning earlier, who got four years, (served two) for a vicious murder attempt on his then wife. He came out after two years, and killed her and nearly killed her partner, within weeks. Don't you think that the first trial judge got psychological reports, before sentencing? And only gave him four years! And then the parole board got psychological reports before letting him out two years early? How much more evidence of scamming to you need? These people simply cannot give any better a guess than you or I, about the future offending of criminals. But, they would never admit it. That's what I call scamming. Studying human behaviour is fine. But claiming or giving the false impression that you can predict it is scamming in my book. Apart from everything else, I would treat attempted murder exactly the same as murder. The fact that you failed is no reflection on your intentions. And practice makes perfect. This really is too silly for words. This doesn't mean that the educational programs caused the lower rates. It just means that the people opting for the programs were already the least likely to re-offend. Which should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. This really is just a case of an industry (the incarceration industry) blowing it's own trumpet to perpetuate the gravy train.

If you ever meet some real criminals, it might be worth reading.

😄 You seem to be living in a different world. This is what google gives, for a search on stolen items : (mind you, I don't know how it all adds up to 100%)

Could you not start with your own original post?

No, I treated your list of links with the disdain it deserves. If you want to make a point, quote from what you are citing, and give the link at the end. Don't expect me to do your spadework by just linking a load of psychologists claiming how good they are. The proof is on the ground. People re-offend, after all of the rehab treatment paid for at massive expense. And not just once, but five, ten, fifteen times, as in my actual quote, above, accompanied by it's link. And that matches exactly with the people I know, and have known down the years. Criminals are laughing at the system, behind their backs, and I know that from what they say, not what psychologists write.

All the indicators point to the UK government favouring heat pumps over gas boilers for political rather than economic reasons. They don't trust Russia, or Belarus or Ukraine to keep the gas flowing, and likewise an independent Scotland. Also, they see heat pumps as a vote winner with the save-the-planet crowd. Purely on economic grounds, air source heat pumps don't really cut it, for most of the UK consumers. People who install the heat pumps often have to massively improve the insulation of their property, otherwise they will be cold in cold weather. Then, when they get it installed, they mistakenly give the credit for supposedly improved bills to the heat pump, rather than the money spent on insulation. If people just did the insulation, and stuck with a gas boiler or got a new efficient one, they would instantly see an improvement in their bills. What the government are doing is taking money from taxpayers, giving it to heat-pump buyers, and hoping to buy votes with it. Ground source heat pumps, in off-the-gas-grid areas, might make economic sense in the long term, but air source ones just don't cut it without massive economic redistribution via taxes and grants. In any case, where will all the electricity come from, to run it all? All the cars, all the buses and all the vans and trucks will need juice off the grid. If you add all the heating for all the buildings, you will need a heck of a lot of power generation. And you need it 24/7, not just when the wind blows, or the sun is shining. The way it's going, I would be investing in a lot more nuclear, and a lot more onshore wind in the UK. Forget the protesters. I like wind towers myself, and the moaners will soon shut up once they are used to them. Who likes electricity pylons? But we got used to them years ago, and now people hardly notice them.