I find it highly amusing that most of the news about GW right now is about the main Northwest Passage being open.

 

Hello, is anyone in there?  It closed this week.

 

Reporters, useless. 

So last week when my laptop reported that it was out of battery, I immediately did what I have been doing for the last month and wiggled the power plug.  Except this time it was HOT.  I pulled it out and looked at the melted plastic inside it.

 

Hmmm, thinks I, was this the plug or the laptop.  So I pull out the backup power supply, plug it in and hey presto after 90 seconds I pull it out and that one is red hot and melting too.

 

Hmmm, so am I going to get an early train, go home, do some swapping of other laptop parts and then work form home on Monday?

 

Nope, I went out and bought another one.  A cheap one and not one I would have normally bought.  Was it a dual core? Yes. Did it have 2 gig ram?  Yes.  Does it go better than my old 3 gig PIV?  NO.

 

So I get a crap crushed in keyboard, even though they have acres of space around it, the same screen resolution and the same RAM.  OK I get a 160 gig drive, but it’s 5400 rpm and although Vista says it’s better, it’s slower than my old 7,200 rpm 80 gig drive.

 

OK so I can put 4 gig of ram in it and another hdd, but what I really need is a processor which is not 4 times slower than the PIV when running vmware.

 

Bugger, any TL66 chips out there?????  My TL50 is a joke at 1.6ghz.  Well I have just seen one on ebay and I have offered on it.  If I have to I’ll do a buy it now, but at £197 it’s going to be steep.

 

Oh well. 

Replacement tank, a bit of spray paint and voila, a crappy CB250N looks a little less crappy and I don't have to worry about the rust under the fibreglass patch.

 

I replaced the plugs too.  But still poor top end performance.

 

However it is running better and 98 octane fuel hels a litte too.  So we shall see.  All I need to deal with now is the ominous rubbing noise coming from the drive/chain system.....

 

Eventually I'll have a decent running bike in time to put it in the garage for the winter.....

 

Let's hope it's a warm winter then.

It's interesting to read the news on the current catastrophic melt going on up in the Arctic.  You get so many  conflicting accounts which are reported so independently that it takes a little reading through.

 

I have been reading reports today that the Ice has thinned by 50% in the Arctic because it is almost universally no thicker than 1M.  Now I know it's thinner at the borders but extensive surveying shows that it's no thicker than 1M in the perennial Ice.

 

The perennial Ice was 3M thick or more.  So we can deduce that at least 55% of the Ice Volume has gone due to thinning.

 

Then we read that in 2005, the Arctic lost 20% of it's ice from the norm of the previous 20 years.  This year we read that the Ice Area dropped by 27% from 2005.

 

OK so my maths is a little crap, but it goes like this.

 

Area is the square mileage of the Ice over the sea

which has thinned by 55%

and reduced in extent by 47% (2005 minimum minus the 27% drop this year)

 

47% of 55 is 26 (rounded). and 55 -26 is 29.

 

OK this is not exact because some of the ice is thinner at the edges.  However, not much nowadays and I gave it a 1Meter leeway in perennial ice lost which I didnt count.  Otherwise I would have been taking 47% from 33 which would give us 11.6% of the Ice Volume remaining.  Which is significantly scary.

 

That means that we have only 29% of the average Ice Volme that we would have expected to see in 1979.

 

Given those figures, who would be surprised to see the Arctic Ice vanish completely in the Summer of 2012?

 

Very much a case of lies damned lies and statistices in the framework of a compartmentalised scientific community.  So what do we do?  Book a cruise to the North Pole?  Sit and watch with a beer and a smile?  Or do something constructive.

 

Ah but Doing Somehting will take money and energy.  Lets just get another beer.....!