Sometimes I lose my faith in human nature.

Fort instance, see this article on the BBC News website. Vandals on the Isle of Wight have punctured an inflatable RIB lifeboat seventeen times.

Why? What sort of mindless idiots vandalise a lifeboat, for Christ's sake?

I hope that the miscreant(s) get a suitable punishment, ideally something with a heavy social aspect.

The Shuttle

When I was a child I went to visit my uncle at Bradford University. Whilst there - it would have been around 1983 - I was shown a high-end computer system that was displaying a basic rendering of the space shuttle.

I wasted many a pleasant hour at school making technical drawings of the craft. The Challenger disaster in 1986 hurt my faith in technology and gave me a lifelong interest in how things fail. It was truly shocking that such high engineering could fail so spectacularly.

Ever since then I have wanted to see a shuttle launch. The problems are many-fold: I live in the wrong country, and the launches are often delayed by days if not months. As an example the current launch, STS-133, was due to launch in late October last year. Problems, including some with the external fuel tank, have led to it being delayed until at least February.

There are three more missions before the scheduled end of the shuttle program in the middle of next year. I am really tempted to fly out to see one, but the Internet is full of stories about people spending a fortune only not to see a launch - some multiple times.

There is a chance that man will never build a rocket of the size and beauty of the shuttle - the cost of such heavy launchers are crippling, one of the reasons why there is such uncertainty about the American Ares V project. Such large rockets are really only needed for manned missions beyond Earth's orbit (almost all satellites can fit in rockets such as the Ariane 5, Atlas 5 or Delta IV).

Even if massive rockets are built in the future, they will certainly not have the flawed if beautiful configuration of the shuttle. So I will have to satisfy myself with watching some amazing videos of the launch on YouTube.

London transport

The recent snow has caused people to complain bitterly about the apparent terrible quality of the country's transport infrastructure. This seems particularly vocal from Londoners.

Yet a great deal of the complaining is blind. A few years ago a colleague came over to visit from our office in Shenzhen, China. This gentleman lived on Hong Kong, and would commute by ferry over to the mainland every day. He had travelled extensively around the Far East, but this was his first visit to Europe.

He was over for two weeks, and during the middle weekend a colleague took him around London. On the Monday morning I asked him what he felt of our capital. His reaction would amaze Londoners: he could not complement the transport system too highly. I have heard similar reactions from other foreigners.

London transport is not perfect, but it performs an amazing job. Three million people travel on the tube system each day, and double that number travel on the bus network. Prices are also cheap given the frequency of the services.

This compares favourably not only with other capital cities, but also with other areas of the UK. Southampton has to be one of the easiest cities I have ever seen to drive around and park in. Yet the local bus from my house near Romsey into the city centre costs over four pounds, far more than the cost to park all day in some central car parks. The buses run twice every hour via an indirect route and take an hour; they are always fairly busy. In comparison, I can easily drive into the city centre within half an hour. I want to use public transport, but it is rarely worth my while on a cost/time basis.

For these reasons, I get fairly fed up with the constant moaning that I hear in the media about London Transport. Some criticism is valid, but the system itself generally seems to work well.

Sprayway Equinox Zip AW10 base layer

I was on a trip to Castleton recently; not for walking, but just for a look around. I got chatting to the salesman inside one of the outdoor shops, and ended up walking out with a Sprayway Equinox base layer shirt.

I am not normally attracted to fads, and tend to run away from anything described as innovative, especially when I am paying for it. Having said that, the base layer felt soft to the touch and was surprisingly warm against the skin when I tried one on. Allegedly it wicks exceptionally well due to its construction - it uses 55% coconut fibres - without the odours normally caused by wicking materials.

After faffing around for a while, I decided to purchase one. I wore it over the next few days - although not on a walk - and was impressed by its performance. It feels soft against my skin, far better than the usual synthetic base layers.

I have worn it on a few walks, and have been pleasantly surprised by the results. It certainly feels much warmer than my usual Helly Hansen or Lowe Alpine base layers, and it had no problems in wicking my sweat away. And yes, it did seem to smell less. The proof of the pudding will be whether or not it will be too warm when walking in summer.

I could make some minor criticisms: the zip is slightly too tight on my neck, and I would have preferred it not to have a crew-neck. But these are minor niggles on what is otherwise an excellent base layer.

BBC Weather, part 4

So it is over. on the 3rd I finally (*) received a response from BBC Complaints that explains the discrepancy I have seen in the BBC Weather system on-line. The previous installments of the saga can be found in part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I reproduce the relevant part of the email below (I emailed them to as for permission, but after two weeks have had no reply). I have included it as I believe that it may be of interest to others.

As for the thinking behind the forecasts they are sent to us from the Met Office via two different feeds, and each feed drives what weather symbol is shown.

Daily Weather Symbol
The daily weather symbol indicates the most representative weather type for the whole of the relevant day or night. This could either be the predominant weather type - that is the weather that lasts for the longest period of time, or alternatively, the most significant weather type.

So if a day is forecast to be predominantly sunny with the possibility of a brief shower, then we are likely to see a sunny symbol rather than shower symbol. However, a thunderstorm symbol may appear if a thunderstorm is expected in an otherwise largely dry day. For the purposes of the forecast the day covers the period from 0600 to 1800 UTC and the night from 1800 to 0600 UTC on the following day.

Three Hourly Weather Symbol:
The weather symbol that appears for each three hourly timestep indicates the weather that is expected at or near the relevant location, around the time indicated.

For example if a shower symbol appeared for Exeter at 1500, we're saying there is a chance of a shower in the Exeter area at, or close to 1500 (there could be one a short distance away and it may actually occur at 1430). As the three-hourly forecast is 24 hours from the point when it is viewed, depending on the time at which you are viewing the forecast the most representative weather symbol for the day might not have appeared.

I think that this explains the observed problems.

It has been an interesting little diversion, and shows the problems there can be in delivering the weather forecast, yet alone forecasting it in the first place.

---

(*) I received the email in the morning. At first, when viewed in MS Live Mail application, it showed as being empty. Only in the evening, after a couple of glasses of wine, did I dig further. I noticed that the size of the mail was 7K, which was much bigger than I would expect for normal email headers. So I dug into the system and retrieved the plain text of the email as a file. It showed a large section like this:

PEZPTlQgZmFjZT0iVGFob21hLCBWZXJkYW5hLCBBcmlhbCIgc2l6ZT0yPgo8UCBjbGFzcz1Nc29O

This was obviously some form of encoding, and a few lines above was:

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

So the email had been encoded in base64. This is often used when you need to transmit binary data - for instance images or audio - over email, which is text-only. I went onto an on-line decoder and retrieved the base text of the message. I have no idea if the problem was with the BBC mail system, a corruption during sending or Live Mail's inability to decipher it.

Epic fail.

Courtesy of the Landslide Blog, here is a fairly spectacular video of what happens if you attempt to crane heavy structures off insecure ground.



Ouch.

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone is having a truly wonderful day.

All the best,
David.

P.s.: In the spirit of Christmas, below is a link to the New Yorker's sensational expose of Father Christmas. Enjoy!

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/12/20/101220ta_talk_greenman