Posts by James Green
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I prefer to just be James, but I do get annoyed by being mistered. On forms I prefer not to check any of the boxes. Most places data entry systems fail to accept this. I sometimes wonder whether I'm going to get grumpy one day and point out the error of your ways.
Amusingly, in a work context when emailing foreign academics I've never met, I invariably run with Prof. X...
I've done a little research on this in a certain context... and there is a watershed around 45, where the proportion of people who would prefer to be addressed by their first name drops to just under 60%.
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Thanks Kyle, I kept clicking links and eventually managed to find the bibliography. That is acceptable, but I find the alphabetical 500 list very distasteful. I also find it interesting that they only managed to dredge up 4 papers for the sea-level rising.
Some of the references come from pretty prestigious peer-reviewed periodicals, viz
Cara Lowe, graduate student at Canterbury University in New Zealand, who reported on warm-water survival of an Antarctic fish species at the New Zealand Antarctic Conference at Waikato University in 2004. See “Antarctic Fish Set to Survive Warmer Seas,” New Zealand Herald, April 16, 2004.You have to wonder why Singer and Avery didn't find and cite this. Or perhaps this didn't fit with their thesis?
Seebacher F, Davison W, Lowe CJ, Franklin CE, BIOLOGY LETTERS 1(2):151-154. 2005 .
Specialization to a particular environment is one of the main factors used to explain species distributions. Antarctic fishes are often cited as a classic example to illustrate the specialization process and are regarded as the archetypal stenotherms. Here we show that the Antarctic fish Pagothenia borchgrevinki has retained the capacity to compensate for chronic temperature change. By displaying astounding plasticity in cardiovascular response and metabolic control, the fishes maintained locomotory performance at elevated temperatures. Our falsification of the specialization paradigm indicates that the effect of climate change on species distribution and extinction may be overestimated by current models of global warming. -
Scientists compile these types of research surveys all the time. This one might be not very well done, but I don't see why scientists are demanding not to be on the list.
I haven't ever seen one. Care to cite an example? It seems very weird to me. I would accept a meta-analysis or a review paper which collated references to the work. A list of 'co-authors' tells me very little. I can't easily find the specific paper that apparently meets one of the 7 criteria, or indeed see which of the 7 criteria it apparently supports.
It is certainly possible to re-interpret the findings of others, but without providing any context, just a long list of people, it seems very much a 500-strong 'appeal to authority'. I don't profess to know anything about climate science, but as a scientist, I would place no credence in such a list. -
Now you've got me obsessed Matthew (not that that is hard). I'd always thought the North Island locos looked a little on the flimsy side. It transpires that the NIMT fleet receive 25kV AC from the overhead lines, and I suspect the weight is in sodding great transformers which convert it to a lower voltage to drive the traction motors (otherwise, what would they keep in the main part of the body). Interestingly, and something which would be a bitch for further electrification, wellytown has 1500V DC. Apparently electrics are popular for freight, especially because of regenerative braking. Further interestingly, according the wikipedia page, half the cost of an electric loco is in the drive electronics (which are apparently not very simple at all). This is to do with making AC traction motors variable speeds, something DC is relatively good at (e.g., the 'inverter' heat pumps convert electrickery to DC so that they can vary the compressor speed).
The rails could be more cambered, but the bends are also pretty tight. I've wondered whether we could have trainer wheels for our trains so they would be more stable at high speed. Or we could just have tilting trains. That technology seems pretty good now. I didn't actually realised I'd been in a tilting train, but it turns out that I've probably ridden them in Switzerland (ICN) and Germany (ICE) without realising.
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We'd be better off spending those large sums of money on re-cambering NIMT to allow higher speeds.
Isn't the issue then that the slower freight trains can't deal with the greater camber?
Also, I don't know what they have inside them (because, actually it doesn't make any sense) but Wikipedia reckons the NIMT EF-class electrics are a touch heavier than the DX (although they have more power, the same weight, and the same no wheels, so may have worse traction than a DX) -
Hi Andrew,
I know that running the meter backwards is not technically correct. I think perhaps 10 years or more ago it was occurring to a small extent and was largely ignored. I think it may depend on the extent to which you are still a large net user as to whether it gets noticed. Certainly, you wouldn't want to go away for a month and produce a negative power bill.
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And it seems like Scott Base could probably get reasonable use out of solar hot water in summer, which is presumably when their hot water demand is highest. And it would have to beat transporting in fuel I'd assume.
Franz Josef seems to be the main mainland contender for being a crap place to install solar hot water, however.
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There's a nice summary hereof home generation and feeding power back to the grid
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Do people with solar panels on their roof now - what do they do with any surplus electricity during the day? I can't imagine all of them put it back into the grid, do they sink it into batteries, or does it just get lost?
They other don't generate more electricity than covers standby electricity use, store it in batteries, or managed to keep their old electricity meter. Older ones run backwards, which makes for far more satisfactory grid repatriation :)
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And of course, the further south you go, the less sunlight you get, due to the shorter days and the aspect effects (which is why the poles are colder than the tropics).
While the south does have shorter days in winter, this is no barrier to solar hot water. You may need a bigger surface area to catch the same energy, but the price of panels is dropping rapidly. I'm pretty sure my Otago-based folks got theirs for around $4,000; and I think they mainly switch the electricity on for visitors.