The Riff-Raff Element

But what is not clear (not to me, anyway) is was the damn thing packed with explosive or not?

[quote user="Miss Babs"]Google is OK, but I think its good to hear about people who have been in a similar situation and share anecdotes, or it could be that some people a really bad at searching google, you know the info there but just can't get to it [8-)]but I do agree that people could thank you if you've helped or even just update on how things have gone.[/quote] Good point. Also it is a pretty poor outlook for the future of human intercourse (do try not to snigger at the back) and the continued health & happiness of internet forums if our online relationships deteriorate to talking solely to a bloody search engine. Plus, some of the results they turn up are complete rot. Asking people is much more...human. But I agree: not at least saying thankyou is jolly rude and no incentive to those trying to help. Neither is the rapidity with which some people seem to get shirty if they don't get exactly the answer they want.

But do other Italian islands have independence movements? Are there sepratists on Sardina or liberationists on Lampedusa? Me, I'd like to see autonomy for Rockall. I know that that is nowhere near Corsica, but what the heck.

"That's a very interesting point about the volume occupied by the cut logs.  If the same logs stay the same diameter, and they are stacked end-to-end like they were before being cut (as in the diagrams) how on earth can they pack more tightly? Does the sawdust derived from the first cut really amount to 0.2 m3, and 0.1m3 for the second (same sized) cut?  No, surely not.  Two cuts would take no more than 2% of the length of a 100cm log, and re-stacking the pieces would need a small gap between the ends. I can understand how shrinkage would make a stere of green logs occupy perhaps 0.7 or 0.8m3 when dry, because the diameter of the log shrinks.  So can anyone explain how this works please?" Nothing to do with the sawdust, nor with logs being dried in between. Simply, the smaller the pieces that you have to work with, the easier it is to pack without gaps.So the same weight of wood packs into a smaller space when cut. If you want an analogy, consider what volume a pile of rocks would occupy with all the gaps in between compared to the same rocks smashed into gravel.

Sellers of wood do have certain notoriety when it comes to quality & quantity delivered against what was promised. I got caught too, some years back. Just the once. That said, they do occasionally get unfairly slighted. An acquaintance of mine (a bit of a twit IMO) got most shirty when he ordered 10 stere of 50cm logs, stacked them, measured the stack and found he’d got a little over 8 cubic meters. It took three of us to convince him that a stere of logs 1m long should indeed occupy 1 cubic metre, but shorter logs stack more tightly and hence a stere of 50cm logs occupies 0.8 cubic meters. That’s the NF definition, not something we made up on the spot. He only conceded once we had taken a small stack of the logs, measured it, then cut them in half and restacked them in a smaller space to demonstrate. And even then he was still muttering under his breath.

For once in my life I'm with Logan. Shorting stock is per se no more speculative than going long – i.e. buying the shares in the belief that they are going to go up in price. The only difference is that everyone thinks that they’re winning when the price of a stock goes up. If some naughty people colluded to manipulate a stock price then that is illegal and they should be punished. In the UK this will probably mean 48 hours detention in the Dorchester with full access to the minibar, but they might get extradited to the US (I believe HBOS has a US listing?) where of course there is a much more relaxed attitude to torture - sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques” -and they could get 930 years to life.   Frankly compared to the blood-letting that is still to come in the US (anyone own Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs?) Europe is getting off lightly: our comparative conservatism with respect to credit default derivatives and other perverse inventions of the twisted Wall Street mind has probably saved our bacon and, like Scrooge, we still have some money left with which to be mean. Particularly since if the above follow Lehman into the abyss they’ll pull a whole pile of awkward transactions in with them and the counterparties can wriggle out.   That doesn’t of course mean that we are going to get off scot free, and it is very sensible to spread risk, but personally, now that HBOS and Northern Rock are off the block, I don’t see there are many other vulnerable institutions in Europe.   Sometimes being dull, unimaginative and traditional is good.

Certainly Axa don't seem to be overly exercised by minor infractions. My dear wife lost a couple of points (not that I EVER mention it in her hearing), dutifully phoned them up to confess and they said something along the lines of  "that's nice, but we don't care." Reading the small print I discovered that all they really did seem to care about was whether anyone had lost their licence in the past X years. Still, since there seems to be a range of experience on this topic I think you're being wise 'fessing up just in case.

[quote user="Bugbear"] Well, lets hope you're right on this occasion Pickles. I just wish I had your in-depth technical knowledge on this subject. Nuclear scientists, for example, are always going on about the safety of nuclear power stations, but I think Chernoble and Three Mile Island tend to pose a question or two. Trust the word of a group of scientists messing about with the unknown, I think I'd rather trust a labour politician.......[:)] [/quote] Be fair now - Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by engineers screwing up, not scientists. Wouldn't be so bad, but in both cases they were only on site to mend the photocopier and they got carried away. True that. Heard it off a bloke down the pub.

You know, that chap in the glasses on News Biscuit looks VERY familiar. In fact, I'm sure I've been drinking with him in the not so distant past...

[quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"] Ash wood (frène) is said by many to be the best for firewood... [/quote] ...or even "frêne," which is very similar, but slightly straighter. [:)]

[quote user="Cathy"][quote user="LyndaandRichard"]Regarding firewood, I have taken a heap of rotted oak panelling off my shed, cut the good bits out and refitted on the shed. I now have a lot of scrap wood which I am planning to cut to size and burn on the fire when winter arrives. A lot of the timber has nails left in it, and it would be a lot of work to remove all. My question is can I burn the timber, including nails and clear the nails out when the fireplace needs cleaning? Someone told me that you should take the nails out, but I don't understand why. [/quote] Can you burn wood with nails in or should you take them out first?  I would like to know this question as well as Linda and Richard.   [/quote] I've been burning off a huge pile of oak spars taken from a barn we renovated, bit by bit, for three years. These are full of nails and they burn just fine. Of course the nails end up in the ash and add to it, so you may need to muck out a little more often. Ash wood (frène) is said by many to be the best for firewood, not least because at a pinch it can be burned green and requires very little seasoning. It is possible to properly season wood in a few months, but is requires quite a lot manual labour to turn and re-stack wood. I do a fair bit of this because I get quite a few free trees to chop up and take away. But when buying wood I ask a lot of questions and really only want oak, beech or ash and then with at least a year outside before I take delivery.

There is a certain piquant irony in the degree of faith that many people who might describe themselves as rational, level-headed thinkers place in science and the pronouncements of scientist. I trained as a scientist, I’ve a very solid grounding in the physical sciences, I am pretty good at maths, and I am as guilty as the next man of doing this. For example, we all know that the Earth goes around the sun and the converse is not the case. But I’ve never made the necessary observations myself to confirm this. I’ve taken it on faith that lots of other people have made them and have reported correctly. Rather fewer people have made the measurements necessary to test the hypothesis that the universe started with a big bang. I still believe it did, but I’m investing a little more faith here. And as science moves forward and into ever more esoteric realms of particle physics & cosmology – comes closer to knowing the mind of God, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Hawking – I’m going to be heading into the region of blind faith because I won’t have a clue how, let alone have the opportunity, to go about testing the hypothesis that are going to be banded around. In fact, only a handful of people will be able to truly understand the “truth” that is revealed. The rest of us will have to make do with a best-selling paperback book that “explains” the findings of these Lords of the New Church. I just hope that they aren’t going to be winding us up. [:D]

[quote user="allanb"][quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"]I stand by what I said: atheist fundamentalism is alive & well and is just as pernicious as its theastic counterparts. I am sure that if you do a web search you will find the term is in current usage and is taken to mean that which I have described. [/quote] RRE: I am an atheist, and I have explained why.  I would like you to explain why you think my view can be described as "fundamentalist". [/quote] Sorry, what can I have said to make you think that I think that you, personally are in any way a fundementalist? There are christians and there are christian fundementalists; there are moslems and there are moslem fundamentalists; there are atheists and there are atheist fundamentalists. Since I have no idea to what extent you are dogmatic about your views I cannot pretend to know what you are. But if, for example, an atheist expressed the view that all reference to theistic faiths should be removed from day-to-day life (demolition of places of worship, abolition of all religious festivals, burning of books, etc) and that all those caught following banned faiths would be persecuted I might regard them as a fundamentalist. Christians or Moslems following comparible paths I would describe in the same way.

[quote user="thunderhorse"][quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"]...Some people, not me, but other people, would say that the evidence for the existence of God is all around us, not least in the existence of “holy” books that are supposedly divinely inspired. Pretty shaky in my view, but then so is casting out the possibility of the existence of the supernatural when the hypothesis cannot be disproved.[/quote] It's very easy to cast out the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, especially when there is no testable evidence to support such a notion. The onus of proof is on those who assert that the supernatural exists. Following your argument, should we accept the possibility of mermaids and unicorns, and teach similar idiotic ideas in schools, seeing as how the hypothesis cannot be disproved? [/quote] Onus? Some key points in the philosphy of science:  - Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence;  - An hypothesis can only be discarded once it can be tested;  - Observations defeat theory;  - A scientist who disregards any of the foregoing is not a scientist. He is a muppet. Sure, I can state that unicorns do not exist. And tomorrow a fossil unicorn might turn up. And I might try to argue that they still don't exist and have never existed, like the people who argued that the Earth was not a sphere and did not go around the sun despite there being plenty of evidence that it does or those who encountered dinosaur bones and argued for years that they were forgeries. On the other hand I could suppose that both unicorns and mermaids are mythical creatures and no evidence currently exists to suggest they were ever real but that I couldn't say that it would never appear. That is a rigorous philosophy. And that is what I would teach, were I called upon to do so. I imagine that some people would except that it is possible that life might one day be shown to exist elsewhere in the universe, it being a big place and all. As things stand – as far as I know – there is not a single shred of hard evidence that life does exist elsewhere. Following your logic, should we now state that we are, definitively, alone?

[quote user="allanb"][quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"]...as for "atheist fundamentalism"...[/quote] I'm glad we have a measure of agreement on the basis of education, but I can't let you get away with that phrase.  Either you don't understand atheism, or you don't understand fundamentalism. Atheists may have various reasons for being atheists, but there is no "fundamental" source that they claim.  No holy book, no inspired prophet, no infallible representative of a deity, no revelation in the wilderness, no visions, no tablets of stone. [/quote] Fundementalism has no need of holy books, nor prophets, nor tablets of stone. They are just props. All it really needs is a totalitarian streak, a lack of tolerence and an unwillingness to engage. I stand by what I said: atheist fundamentalism is alive & well and is just as pernicious as its theastic counterparts. I am sure that if you do a web search you will find the term is in current usage and is taken to mean that which I have described.

[quote user="allanb"] Neither is a good basis for educating children. [/quote] You won't catch me disagreeing with that. [:D] Some people, not me, but other people, would say that the evidence for the existence of God is all around us, not least in the existence of “holy” books that are supposedly divinely inspired. Pretty shaky in my view, but then so is casting out the possibility of the existence of the supernatural when the hypothesis cannot be disproved. As for atheist fundamentalism, I think it is becoming more widespread – people like Dawkins (for whom I used to have a lot of time until he started twittering on about “Darwinian misfires” in an attempt to explain away things that didn’t fit too conveniently – very dodgy approach to science, that) refusing to even enter debate with those who don’t share his views. And, frankly, that is just as dangerous in my view as schools teaching creationism as fact without entertaining other views. Both need to be presented. It’s all about balance. That  doesn't to my mind preclude the  practice of faith-based education. But if they're taking state funding there must be balance.

I suppose that atheists could start their own faith schools. I know that they might not regard their beliefs as faith but rather as the "truth," but that's normal for fundamentalists. They could all be named after famous atheist theologians such as Richard Dawkins. Or the Rt. Reverend Dr Jenkins, bishop of Durham.

This is pretty much a non-story I reckon. Faith schools -state funded or otherwise -  have long been compelled only to take pupils not of that faith if they are unable to fill all the places from their own catchment area. Which, normally, they are able to do since parents will move mountains to get children into a good school and faith schools have, generally, very good results and discipline. They'll even go to church, if that's what it takes. I suspect that the governor quoted was just trying to play things down to avoid trouble. As for the staff...jobs are seldom given based solely on ability in any line. Employers  still consider the personality of applicants: acres of qualification does not overcome a complete inability to deal with the public, for example. For a faith school I suppose this means that an attractive personality includes, well, faith.

Behind the curve as usual, but best wishes to you both.

[quote user="teapot"] Some one had to let the cat out.[:D] [/quote] Ah, all is clear now. The plane being infested with mice (who hadn't paid and were therefore the worst kind of pest), Tiddles O'Leary (TOL to his admirers) was drafted in to eliviate the problem. On being told he would have to pay £15 to check in his kitty litter tray he told them to stick it and, later, being caught short, opened the cat flap in flight. Sucked to his death somewhere over the Nord Pays de Calais (a region which, let's face it, could only be improved by a shower of dead cats) it was he that caused the sudden loss of cabin air supply and unwittingly catapulted the moderately unknown shopping mall explorer Biro Hairdo to temporary fame as an aviation expert.

Well, I suppose Limoges isn't that much further from Barcelona than is Gerona  [:D] Perhaps that "depressurisation" incident was some kind of test for the new routing? We should be told.

What I would quite like to know is why the cabin de-pressurised in the first place? Hardly an every day occurance. Those little oxygen masks seem pretty cosmetic, though the chemistry behind them is moderately interesting. A pilot I knew reckoned that their primary function was to act as a panic suppression device to give the flight crew a relatively peaceful few minutes to make the descent. The ones in the cockpit apparently run off high pressure enriched bottled air rather than a chemical reaction because their job is to ensure the pilot et al remain conscious. No silly “Kenco” coffee filter cups for them!

It would seem that "a total of 16 passengers together with five accompanying family members have transferred, at their request, to a local hospital complaining of ear ache." Since it was at their own request, I wonder if Ryanair will be taking any further responsibility to transfer them on to Gerona (as the non-hopitalised passengers are to be) once they are discharged?

Rumour has it this a.m. that once he has again transited Bangkok he will be heading off to Dubai.

[quote user="Just Katie"][quote user="The Riff-Raff Element"][quote user="babcock"]If someone is too nice to you make sure that you understand whether payment is expected.[/quote] I've had interpersonal relationships a bit like that.... [/quote] Perhaps you could start a new thread on this one Riffy boyo [/quote] Not on a family-friendly forum like this I fear.