Cold snap

Ron Stockey sent me this picture taken on his way to work during the recent freeze up here in Toronto. Apparently the gauge was showing -28°C but changed in the time it took to get the camera out. Ron also sent a pointer to some great pictures of old gas stations. I recognise the one in Odell, Illinois.

East Grinstead: the return of steam

The Times has the story.

Playing at Life II

Playing at Life....

Old Planes at Nice Price

What a funky idea - don't design a new plane - just build the old one with updated avionics. Viking Air Ltd., of Victoria, British Columbia has already revived the de Havilland Twin Otter and now wants to build the Buffalo search and rescue plane. The Globe & Mail has the story.

An Appeal to Reason - A Cool Look at Global Warming

In this book Nigel Lawson, the former British Chancellor, systematically demolishes the bunk that passes for the "science" of global warming. He rightly points out that the emissions cuts in the UK are an expensive folly, a cost today with no benefit for succeeding generations. All done because of Blairite views on morality and ethics, the same ones that brought us the dodgy dossier and the Iraq war.
Lawson has done us all a great favour in exposing the sham for what it is. As he points out no British publisher would touch his book which he says he was able to write only as his public career is over and he no longer seeks employment. Many thanks to The Overlook Press of Woodstock, New York for righting the wrong. The greatest danger he points to is that scientists who are sceptical about the United Nations and its fell works are denied access to funding. This is science as religion which plans to snuff out academic freedom. After all the argument is "settled." Not while Lawson is around it isn't - as he says "that is no excuse for abandoning reason."
Lawson pokes fun at Al Gore, the man who invented the internet, as he invented most of the scenes in the film An Inconvenient Truth. Actually the truth is inconvenient as it does not support the doomsday cultists who say the end of the world is nigh. Here in cold Canada we would be glad of a bit of global warming! Bring on the northwest passage.
Any contrarian should read this book. It is a tonic for those spoonfed the pap from politicians and gullible journalists. Only 106 pages long and heavily footnoted, Lawson nails the flabby thinking, particularly the reliance on computer modelling, and the liberal guilt of the west.
Lawson opens with a quote: "There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted." (Schopenhauer, Die Kunst Recht zu Behalten.) I have a shorter saying: "There is nothing so stupid that it won't happen."

Heathrow Rail Hub

After decades of NIOL planning on the railways - not-in-our-lifetime in the jargon - the UK government goes berserk announcing grandiose plans that it won't be around to deliver. Connecting Heathrow to the London-Portsmouth line by a short spur has been on the drawing board for as long as I can remember, opening up the possibility of direct services to Waterloo, Gatwick and many other places too. Will I live to see the day?
I posit that Metcalfe's law applies here. See PunchBuggy Passim here and here.
If they laid all the plans to improve the railways around Heathrow end-to-end I wouldn't be at all surprised!