The Three Bears, Italian-American style

The manual-typewritten text below was given to a Brooklyn-raised member of the family nearly fifty years ago. It's based on a 1960/61 recording by Lou Monte (or vice versa?), now available on YouTube, as you see - but you may enjoy the challenge of deciphering it yourself before listening!



Di Tri Berrese

Uana appona taim uas tri berres: mamma berre, papa berre, e beibi berre. Live inne contri nire foresta. NAISE AUS. No mugheggia. Uanna dei papa, mamma, e beibi go bice, orie e furghetta locche di dorra.

Bai enne bai commese Goldilocchese. Sci garra nattingha tu du batte meiche troble. Sci puscia olle fudde daon di maute; no live cromma. Den sci gos appesterrese enne slipse in olle beddse.

Bai enne bai commese omme di tri berres, olle sannbrone enne send inne scius. Dei garra no fudde; dei garra no beddse. En uara dei goine due to Goldilocchese? Tro erre aure inne strit? Colle pulissemenne?

Fatta Cienze!

Dei uas Italien Berres, enne dei slippe ona florre.

Goldilocchese stei derre tri uicase; itte aute ausenomma en guista bicose dei esch erre tu meiche di beddse sci sei "go to elle," enne runne omme craine tu erre mamma, tellenerre uat sanimabicese di tri berres uer.

Uatisuse? Uara iu goine du? --- Go compleine sittiolle ?


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Harness your own wind

From dutchnews.nl

Engineering and Technology Magazine (link may require registration) reports on a new Dutch design for domestic wind turbines.

A super-efficient and completely soundless wind turbine developed by a Dutch company aims to enable every household to generate its own wind energy.

Officially unveiled today, the shell-shaped Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine offers much better efficiency compared with conventional designs. Its shape, modelled after the perfectly logarithmic spiral of a Nautilus shell, allows the turbine to always position itself at the best angle towards the direction of the wind, achieving efficiency which is about 80 per cent of what is theoretically possible.

With an average speed of wind of about 5m/s, the turbine generates about 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy – about half of the consumption of a regular household. The Archimedes, the company behind the Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine, believes that in combination with efficient solar panels, the turbine can make every household completely energy self-sustainable.

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Getting rid of Clegg?

Mike Smithson over at politicalbetting.com thinks serious money has been spent on a recent ICM poll designed to put pressure on Nick Clegg.

Hopefully later today ICM will release the detailed data [*] from the private polling that’s splashed by the Guardian this morning. The broad message of what’s been leaked is that the party stands to do worse in four key seats that it already holds without a change of leader.

The choice of pollster is interesting. ICM has over the years tended to show the most favourable position for the Lib Dems.

What struck me are not just the numbers but the fact that serious money is being spent on the effort to try to get Clegg out.

Constituency surveys like this are just about the most complex and expensive political polling that you can do. They can only be carried out by phone and the bill for this job will have been tens of thousands of pounds. It also takes time and planning. It is not the sort of thing that could have been commissioned last week.
[*] my link

Well it is easy enough to believe that powerful Lib Dem insiders want to be rid of Clegg well before next year's general election. As for the wider picture, I wonder if we are seeing the demise of the Lib Dems.

Without an obviously unique Lib Dem selling point, three mainstream parties may be one too many. The success of UKIP clearly highlights the lack of political choice in UK politics and the Lib Dems may pay the price. Dire he may be, but I suspect the problem runs deeper than Clegg's unappealing political persona.

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Splits, knives and growing up

A few days ago my wife and I both happened to mention a game called splits which we both played as youngsters in the fifties and early sixties. For those who never played splits, this is how it went.

It had to be played on grass for reasons which will soon become obvious. Two of us stood facing each other with our feet together. One had a knife, preferably a small sheath knife, but a penknife or even a table knife would do as long as mum didn’t catch us taking it.

The one with the knife threw it into the grass by the other’s feet. The blade had to stick into the ground cleanly to count as a good throw. The non-thrower then had to remove the knife from the ground and put their foot on the spot where the knife had been. Then it was their turn to throw.

The aim of the game was to throw the knife far enough away from the other’s foot that he or she couldn’t reach it – hence the name splits. However with too long a throw there was less chance of the knife sticking in the ground properly, so getting the distance right was essential.

Another rule allowed you to throw the knife between the other’s feet. If it stuck into the ground cleanly between the feet, you were allowed to bring your own feet together again.

Most older kids seemed to have at least a penknife in the fifties. They were used for harmless games like splits, carving initials on trees or school desks, sharpening pencils and other important functions. In my world it was part of growing up on a council estate and we did not see knives as street weapons.

No doubt there were accidents and possibly a few tragedies, but our role models were mum and dad and clean-cut heroes on black and white TV such as the Lone Ranger. Role models presumably strong enough for us to be trusted with knives, and tacitly allowed to play games such as splits.

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European Elections - splitting the UKIP vote?

Loki, the trickster of Nordic mythology (pic)

Odd how many Eurosceptic parties have appeared on the voting paper for the West Midlands. The Harmony Party is 2014-registered. Hmm.

Remember the "Literal Democrats", "Conversative Party" and "Labor Party" from the 1990s, resulting in an Act to stem the confusion? The first of these split the Liberal vote in 1994 and let in a Conservative.

We've all heard now of the Tories getting into bed with The Guardian to feed anti-UKIP stories into the public perception; but is there any other jiggery-pokery going on?


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Is Clegg off to the EU?

Nick Clegg seems to be using every opportunity to hone his EU credentials.

Having begun this European election campaign by challenging the UKIP leader to debate whether Britain should stay in or get out of the EU, he is ending it by insisting that being pro-Europe was the best way to be pro-British.

In a speech in Oxford, he attacked those he called "false patriots", saying:

"Ukip. Conservative backbenchers. Isolationists. They are not thinking about Britain's interests. They shroud their narrow nationalism in the language of patriotism. They mask their hostility towards Europe as British bulldog spirit. But these are false patriots. The isolation they offer is a breach of our history, of our great British tradition of engagement, and of our enlightened national self-interest. If the forces of insularity and chauvinism get their way they will ensure that Britain no longer benefits from the political and economic advances in Europe that we have shaped. And they will hand the keys to running our European continent to the Germans, the French and others, while we retreat back across the English Channel."

It seems to me that this is not genuine political campaigning so much as preparing the ground for defeat. Lining up his next job.

Clegg is rallying the troops of course, but only where the rallying cry suits his personal circumstances. He's preparing for failure. He isn't saying what Lib Dem MEPs would do for the UK, because the answer to that is nothing.

No doubt this is the kind of thing the Lib Dem faithful wish to hear from their leader, but as ever with Clegg, the focus is tightly trained on his own situation.

Here are my credentials. I'm on your side. Always have been, always will be. I'll fight tooth and nail for the EU.  

From a suitably prestigious office over at your place.  

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Climate, CO2 and cooling

A very interesting and detailed take on climate change is to be found in this fascinating post by E M Smith, aka blogger The Chiefio. Written back in December 2012, it is long and detailed but well worth reading. This brief post is merely my take on his ideas.

Firstly the role of CO2.

Most people interested in the climate change debate will know that CO2 in the stratosphere is thought to have a cooling effect as opposed to its supposed warming effect in the troposphere. The cooling effect of CO2 may also be causing the stratosphere itself to cool.

One key finding was the importance of the impact of CO2-induced temperature change on stratospheric ozone in estimating temperature trends. The decreased stratospheric temperatures due to a CO2 increase slowed stratospheric ozone destruction; the higher ozone concentrations caused heating that slightly offsets CO2-induced cooling.

Although simple physics suggests CO2 could act as a so-called greenhouse gas in the troposphere, it doesn’t tell us the magnitude of any resultant warming. A possible warming effect may be swamped by other processes – the physics doesn’t tell us. Many have tried to torture the data into telling them what they want to hear, but so far none have succeeded.

Yet many climate sceptics and all orthodox global warming proponents agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 should cause some detectable warming in the troposphere. Put simply, both groups think CO2 must slow down radiative surface cooling because of its capacity to absorb outgoing infrared radiation.

The crucial difference in views between the two sides is how much warming we should expect - the so-called climate sensitivity to CO2. Yet the current global temperature standstill shows both views to be wrong. Climate sensitivity to CO2 appears to be as near zero as makes no difference.

So instead of bodging the thing with ad hoc hypotheses why not assume that heat transfer in the troposphere is primarily driven by convection, evaporation and condensation? Hardly a radical assumption given our knowledge of weather. There are many other factors to consider such as clouds, El Niño, volcanic activity and ocean heat capacity, but to avoid an impenetrable fog of complexity we first have to stand back and look at broad possibilities.

Next the tropopause.

The tropopause lies between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Smith sees understanding the nature of the tropopause as a key to understanding how global heat transfer from the surface occurs in two distinct bands in two distinct ways.

The troposphere where heat transfer is primarily driven by convection and water vapour.
The stratosphere where heat transfer is primarily radiative.

Of particular interest is how the height of the tropopause is influenced by the amount of heat which has to be transported from troposphere to stratosphere. As a result, the tropopause is higher at the equator than it is at the poles.

Source 

Even if CO2 does warm the troposphere by an amount we can’t yet measure, the heat may be transferred upwards via convection, condensation and evaporation - not radiation.

Stratospheric cooling rates: The picture shows how water, cabon dioxide and ozone contribute to longwave cooling in the stratosphere. Colours from blue through red, yellow and to green show increasing cooling, grey areas show warming of the stratosphere. The tropopause is shown as dotted line (the troposphere below and the stratosphere above). For CO2 it is obvious that there is no cooling in the troposphere, but a strong cooling effect in the stratosphere. Ozone, on the other hand, cools the upper stratosphere but warms the lower stratosphere. Figure from: Clough and Iacono, JGR, 1995; adapted from the SPARC Website. 

Note the above picture of stratospheric cooling rates. The red bit in the bottom left below the tropopause (dotted line)  is heat being dumped into the stratosphere by water vapour. The narrow pale blue band to the right of that and also below the tropopause – that’s CO2 doing nothing much.

Above the troposphere, convective heat transport ends, radiative processes take over and CO2 plus ozone are kept busy radiating excess heat into space. Those are the two colourful elongated oval shapes.

I’m not suggesting Smith's overall schema is what actually happens because nobody has that sorted, but I like his style. Climate conjectures are all vulnerable in one way or another, because that's the nature of the beast, but even in outline these ideas feel coherent to me. They do not seem to violate any scientific laws and fit well with observation.

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