Would you notice?

From Bloomberg Businessweek

Xerox is now saying that some of its scanners can alter numbers in documents, even at the highest resolution setting. It blames a software bug for which it does not yet have a fix. “We continue to work tirelessly and diligently to develop a software patch to address the problem,” the company said in an Aug. 11 statement.

The problem came to light when German computer scientist David Kriesel scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that it changed numbers on some of the room measurements.

Would you notice such a thing? I'm not sure I would.

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UK carbon capture

Click Green reports:-

 
National Grid has successfully completed test drilling of a carbon dioxide storage site in the North Sea – a major milestone in delivering a storage solution for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

Early indications are that the undersea site 65 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast is viable for carbon dioxide storage and will be able to hold around 200 million tonnes permanently. This is equivalent to taking ten million cars off the road for 10 years.

The drilling is a major milestone in its Don Valley storage work programme funded by an EU grant to advance CCS in Europe. The findings are significant as this type of storage site is common in Europe.

If we take that figure of 200 million tonnes of CO2 and compare it to a reported 35.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted globally in 2012, we may easily calculate that the National Grid CO2 storage project would accommodate global CO2 emissions for about two days. So after two days it would be full.

One might ask if that two days respite represents good value for money in terms of CO2-induced global temperature changes. Good value for the well owners no doubt, but good value for us?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Re cycling

We’ve just returned from a week in the caravan at Minehead, Somerset. We use Minehead as a base for walking in Exmoor and the surrounding area. Not quite as rugged as Derbyshire, but a most attractive area for walking.

Withypool to Tarr Steps and back via Knaplock is a fine circular walk if you are ever in the area.

One thing we notice about these caravan jaunts is how many caravans and motorhomes have a couple of bikes stowed somewhere conspicuous.

Another thing we notice is how rarely we see any of these cycle owners actually cycle off somewhere. The cycles are unloaded from the car roof or the back of the motorhome right enough, but after that brief burst of activity they seem to lie around as a mute sign of good intentions.

Can’t do that with walking boots I suppose.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Polkerris

We were lucky: a young couple having an in-car heart-to-heart vacated their space for us at the Rashleigh Inn. We'd gone there to catch the westward view over the bay, where the BBC Weather site had forecast a clear sunset.

It was a gray evening and the tide was out. Adults and children wandered over the harbour beach and wall. A wraith of mist stood on the sea over by Charlestown, as though someone had lit a bonfire on the water.

 

In we went and ordered a pasty, which turned out to be locally made and excellent. I nicked chips from my wife's plate. We sat at a long table under a large portrait of a sixteenth century Spaniard in his fine clothes and chain of authority, his gilded helmet beside him. A shih tzu and a Jack Russell-terrier cross fidgeted at our feet, while their middle-aged owners examined a property online and discussed ideas for refurbishment and building a new house on the back lot. At the bar counter, an old man with a bent back sat open-eyed and unmoving, while the evening swirled about him.

 

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NS&I to hit pensioners on Armistice Day

"Tens of thousands [of] customers with old National Savings & Investment savings accounts will see returns cut in November, it emerged today.

"The changes affect savers who took out an NS&I Savings Certificate before 1996.

Roughly £745m is held across 967,000 of these accounts, according to NS&I. The government's savings arm told The Telegraph that the return on 89,057 accounts, typically held by older savers, will fall from November 11, 2013."
 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10233444/NSandI-reduces-rates-again-hitting-90000.html

The Telegraph also says:

"NS&I was created in 1961 as the Post Office Savings Bank to encourage saving and attract deposits for the Treasury to use running the country. These two tenets remain today. The simplest way to raise money is to offer alluring rates to savers. However, NS&I is bound by rules that force it to balance the interests of three parties: the Government, savers, and the banking industry.

"A flood of money going into NS&I coffers has upset this balance and the Government has ordered NS&I to stop taking so much money. As a result it has cut rates and accounts to dissuade savers. The latest version of NS&I Savings Certificates is no longer on sale."

Yet again, the Treasury shows that it has forgotten its own history, or feigns to have done so. As I have shown here and to my MP, both the Government and the Opposition expressly recognised a social obligation to pensioners to protect them from inflation, when Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced in 1975. This was made clear in exchanges in both the Commons and the Lords (please see the link just given, for details).

I don't know whether the choice of Armistice Day for these new changes to take effect, is a deliberate insult to the elderly, some of whom may still recall the last World War, or simply another example of the crass, oblivious obtuseness that I am coming to expect from the finely-honed minds of the Treasury.

At least there is the option for existing holders to switch to new index-linked certificates - but the rest of us are excluded from making fresh purchases. And this still leaves open the question of how RPI may be manipulated in future to minimise returns to savers.

I read some general trends here: the Government is quietly abandoning its duty to keep inflation down, its grip on the public finances is slipping, and the public (rushing to NS&I for safety) can see that the Emperor has no clothes.

One commentator on the Telegraph article (1066goldberg) says buy physical silver; another (oldkingkole) says he doesn't understand the logic; I think I do.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Not enough O2 in the H2O?

Adam Nieman: "Global water and air volume" (Science Photo Library)

Professor Jason Box is continuing his research into the effect on Greenland snow melt of particulates from fossil fuel burning and forest fires, and this set me wondering about how much atmospheric oxygen is being locked up by the same processes.

O2 levels have varied radically during last 600 million years:

(from Wikipedia article "Atmosphere of Earth: Third Atmosphere")

- as corroborated by analysis of ancient gas bubbles trapped in amber.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper in 2008, Peter Tatchell said that research by Professor Robert Berner suggested "humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago", though I can't track down the original statement and suspect Tatchell may have misunderstood. (A paper by Berner on oxygen in the Phanerozoic era can be read here.)

Tatchell appears to be on firmer ground voicing concerns about air quality in cities, though what's in the air is more worrying than what's absent, as this article from last month's Mail Online India edition says. That said, cities that are prone to temperature inversion layers (e.g. Los Angeles, Beijing) may find that not only is smog locked in, but oxygen not replenished from the surrounding area as fast as it is being consumed.

Globally, there seems to have been a very small decline in atmospheric oxygen since 1990, according to an 18-year longitudinal study by Dr Ralph Keeling. According to a post on the Climate Emergency Institute website, the decline is even less than Keeling had expected, and it's possible that increased CO2 is stimulating the growth of vegetation.

Certainly the self-styled "Rational Optimist" Matt Ridley claims greenery is increasing, but I am inclined to take his professional bullishness with a pinch of salt. Surface spread as seen by satellite misses the third dimension: the UN FAO estimates (2012 forest report) that forest cover has dropped by around a third in the last 10,000 years, and the loss has accelerated from an average of 360,000 hectares per year since civilization began, to 5.2 million annually over the last decade.

Which brings us back to the carbon dioxide-global warming debate. CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" but there are so many other factors affecting the Earth's surface temperature that I don't think anyone can say which way the thermometer is going to move. However, if the sea continues to warm up there is a danger that the level of dissolved oxygen in the oceans will be reduced. A study reported last year in Science Daily says that 15% of the seas are "dead zones" and suggests that an increase of a couple of degrees - as has happened since the end of the last Ice Age - can have significant effects. Again, industrial pollution and waste dumping exacerbate the damage.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Oxygen_Depletion


The Tatchell article also refers to a claimed 30% drop in oceanic oxygen-producing phytoplankton in the thirty years since 1980, though this is disputed. Even if true, our gas tank will keep us going for the foreseeable future: the Earth's atmosphere has a total mass of some 5 quadrillion (10¹⁵) tonnes, a fifth of which is oxygen. There's so much that the CEI article concludes "even when fossil fuel reserves (mostly coal) are exhausted, the maximum potential loss in oxygen is only small (Broecker, 1970)."

Further, as this 1994 paper by Duursma and Boisson says:

"Oxygen concentrations are ... the consequence of larger terrestrial and aquatic loops in which factors of temperature, light, nutrients and co2 play a role; for longer periods, elements such as sulphur and iron are involved. Hence the present level of 20.946 vol. % of atmospheric oxygen is merely temporary, and will change in the course of millions of years. The question of an optimum concentration for sustaining life on earth is equally time-dependent; but bearing in mind that these changes occur over periods of the order of millions of years, evolutionary processes are likely to keep pace with oxygen changes."

Those evolutionary processes may or may not have a place for humanity in the long run, but we have plenty more pressing threats to worry about. One of which is that the health and productivity (for us) of the seas may be compromised if warming continues and subsurface oxygen is depleted.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Driverless trucks and their social implications

"Mish" reports on the development of automated trucks, with what appears to be econohawkish glee - oh, the savings we'll make.

But this will be replicated not just in blue collar jobs but the white collar middle class that until recently felt their college degrees and head-expertise insulated them from the uncertain and lower-paid employment of their socioeconomic inferiors. Even fund managers might easily be replaced by machines, as I understand arm-waving, shouty stock market traders are being right now.

The debates over State benefits and the redistribution of wealth are likely to become more lively in the years to come, and people who used to take one side may surprise themselves by crossing the floor.

Besides, when few have a job, how will the demand for goods and services be affected? Business owners need not be complacent, either.

Is the future in community policing and shopping at LIDL?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.