A Place to Stand

From the Times

Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.

The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.

The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.

The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

The scheme is likely to infuriate environmentalists. The revelation comes as more than 11,000 politicians, green campaigners and others are gathered in Poznan, Poland, for the latest talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week the Met Office released a report warning that if greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, the world could warm by an average of 5.5C by 2100. Inefficient buildings are one of the world’s greatest sources of greenhouse gases.

However, Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”

Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project. The hotel will be marketed strongly in the UK where Dubai is a popular tourist destination, attracting about 800,000 Britons a year.

Abedian’s firm began its association with Versace a decade ago with the idea of creating the first chain of luxury fashion-branded lifestyle resorts.

The first Palazzo Versace is already operating on Australia’s Gold Coast – where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, the actors, have stayed – and the Dubai hotel will be the second when it opens late next year or early 2010. The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.

Competition to serve the world’s rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The city already boasts the world’s first seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, while Armani, a competitor with Versace, is building a similarly branded Dubai hotel.

The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles. The system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers.

Versace's plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.

“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.

--------------------------

Good for Dubai. I have previously described Dubai as being the equivalent of a seastead - ie a small piece of territory with nothing going for it except the absence of government parasitism. Dubai is not oil rich, unlike the rest of the Emirates, but is the most successful of them purely on having a high growth, free market attitude. I suppose that can be considered a "bubble world" but the fact is that climate change, far from being something to be concerned about, is being used, fraudulently by government & eco-fascists to get more control over us. There is nothing destructive about using energy if there is no shortage of it. We know that there is no shortage of energy - there is enough for at least the next 5 billion years in easily available natural uranium & millions of times more than that could be produced by solar power satellites. It is only a matter of government ceasing to prevent us using it.

One thing that can always be said for certain is that if somebody is doing something, or it has been done in the past, it is possible to do it & every politician who says it isn't is a liar.

Any person or indeed political party or "news" outlet which claims that that there is any need for a shortage of, or the present high price of electricity is personally a wholly, completely & totally corrupt fascist who will tell any lie whatsoever to enhance their power & whose word can never, ever, on any subject whatsoever, be trusted. This, of course, includes the Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative & SNP parties & the entire news & managements staff of the BBC, ITN & almost all our press - not one loyal member of whom can claim as much integrity & human decency as a normal person's toenail clippings - no offence.

With presently understood technology we can make everybody in the world the equivalent of a billionaire within decades & all of these politicians know that to be the case but prefer power.

Labels: British politics, eco-fascism, Government parasitism

So we have an election. As Henry Kissinger said about the Iran/Iraq war "to bad they can't both lose" & in fact that war ended up with not an inch of territory or anything else gained so they both did. My preference is a hung Parliament, leading to the replacement of David Cameron & either a Conservative party with real policies or, as Peter Hitchens has called for, a complete new competent & free market party.

There is no question that we can have a successful economy simply by government parasites getting out of the way & letting the market operate. There is equally no question that the 3 main parties (4 main Scotland) are overwhelmingly committed to destroying at least 1/2 our national wealth, wish to increase state power at all points, are willing to use any scare story to promote their fascism, have a proven record showing that their promises, as with the Lab/Lib/SNP manifesto promises of a referendum & the similar Tory "cast-iron" promise, are of absolutely no worth whatsoever. The Lab/Lib/Con party is also undeniably involved in war crimes, genocide, the sexual enslavement of children & dissecting living people to steal their organs

The facts prove that & cannot be honestly denied.
===============================

http://www.votematch.org.uk/2010/index.php Provides a useful way of checking which party is a closest fit with your wishes. It isn't perfect - there are questions like "the Bank of England should have overall responsibility for financial regulation" or that "the government should be compelled by law to halve the deficit in 4 years" (a Labour Bill brought forward simply to have something to say while doing nothing in reality but still who can deny the principle that government should be cutting the deficit) to which there isn't a simple yes/no answer & the questions obviously & incorrectly, imply that each party actually has an intention to keep its promises, which we know not to be the case.

Nonetheless it is a vital tool for anybody who thinks we should vote for what we want not for the leader with the most attractive wife, accent, smile etc.

My result:

76% - UKIP
71% - BNP
63% - Conservative
39% - Liberal Democrat
35% - SNP
21% - Labour
20% - Green

That seems decisive. I assume this is because I support nuclear power as the only practical alternative to blackouts; believe catastrophic global warming isn't a problem; want the promised EU referendum; & am opposed to massive 3rd world or EU immigration for Labour's vaunted "social reasons".

There are other considerations - The BNP are, if the BBC, the rest of the media & a general agreement among the other parties are beyond the pale. On the other hand the BBC is a corrupt, racist, criminal organisation whose employees will tell absolutely any lie to promote genocide & worse whereas in reality the BNP is the only party to have publicly denounce dissection of 1300 living human beings to steal their organs, chosen on racial grounds & murdered by "police" deliberately hired by our own government. No other party or part our monolithic media has shown any opposition whatsoever to such Nazi crimes.

Another consideration is that promises from the Lab/Lib/SNP/Con party, even manifesto promises, which are the most important they can make, can't be trusted in any way.

My constituency, Glasgow North, is expected to be a Labour/SNP marginal. Thus if I vote tactically to get a hung Parliament the best option is to vote SNP. I suspect, but don't know, that UKIP will not put up a candidate & the BNP will (the BNP, being more socialist & less libertarian tend to do better in working class constituencies) in which case if voting for principle, which I would prefer, I will vote BNP.

I would not have expected that before but the facts, of what each party stands for, is clear & I always follow the facts.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism, Yugoslavia

An interesting article on North Korea. If correct NK is becoming increasingly unstable. The Chinese would like to replace the government with a sensible pro-Chinese one. If mobile phones have made it impossible for NK to seal itself off from the rest of the world then the regime, whose failure is proven by satellite photos, cannot survive. The problem is to make sure it dies with a whimper rather than a bang & in that case a Chines supported coup would seem to be the best option. If such a coup were successful I doubt if it would be possible to form an NK government that would not seek some form of union with the so much richer south. When the Russians sought to replace the Czech government with reformers their coup succeeded but they could find nobody to lead such a government.

North Korea knows that Chinese options are few, because the last thing China wants is chaos in the north. That would mean millions of starving North Koreans pouring into China, and the risk of unification under South Korean rule. China, however, fears that North Korea would use those nukes to threaten China. Thus it comes as no surprise that both China and North Korea have increased espionage activity against each other. North Korea fears that China is trying to organize a coup by pro-Chinese officials in the North Korean government and military.

But the situation in North Korea is worse than it's ever been before. The people are not only angry, but they have more information about what's going on in North Korea, and the world, than ever before. Cell phone users along the Chinese border allow information in, and out. This despite secret police mobile cell phone monitoring patrols... most of the illegal cell phone users get away with it, and North Koreans not only know they are screwed, but how and by whom. Thus the looming famine is unlike the big hunger of the 1990s (that killed two million and stunted the growth of a generation), in that back then, the population were convinced that they were victims of an international conspiracy. This time around, North Koreans know that the cause is their own government. People are increasingly speaking out in public, and the security forces do nothing (or, more ominously, nod in agreement.)

One of the more damaging stories to spread through North Korea recently was the one about the several billion dollars Kim Jong Il has stashed in foreign banks...

March 26, 2010: A South Korean warship suddenly exploded and sank off the west coast, near the maritime border with North Korea. Most of the 104 crew survived, but 46 apparently died. Given the nature of the explosion, and how it broke the ship in half, the most likely cause was a naval mine. And probably a mine of recent manufacture (the 3,000 laid during the early 1950s by North Korea have long since been found and disposed of). The media is rife with speculation, but since the 1,300 ton Cheonan (PCC-772) went down in shallow water, it will be salvaged. That means the cause of the explosion will be obvious eventually.

Labels: International politics, space

A very informative letter in the Herald on Friday.

If anyone is pondering why there has been a recent upsurge in the number of small (12-15kW) windmills across the countryside, I would suggest this is driven by the recently enhanced financial subsidy rather than a desire to save the planet.

From yesterday, a new hidden subsidy called the Feed-in Tariff has been introduced which increases dramatically the hidden subsidy from around 5p per unit (kWh) to more than 26p per unit generated, regardless of whether the electricity is fed into the grid or not. This contrasts with the 12-14p per unit consumers presently pay our electricity supplier and, of course, the cost of this subsidy is added to the retail cost of electricity for all consumers.

This subsidy can be calculated to be of the order of £6,000-9,000 per year per windmill depending on capacity and the availability of wind. There are also grants and interest-free loans plus the savings in reduced electricity bills for the installer.

Saving the planet? I don’t think so.

G M Lindsay,

Absolutely right. The disgraceful thing is that this appears only in newspaper letter columns. The media have been full of puff pieces about how wonderfully windmills are helping local communities survive by shovelling money at them, here. That no questioning journalism appears in the "news2 pages &n it depends on the public to write letters on the subject to get any truth into the paper says a lot about how corrupt & obedient our media are.

And even when the public do draw their attention to the facts the media are still often going to decide to simply censor & deliberately promote the lies. Scottish Renewables, a lobby organisation for the entirely subsidy dependent windfarm industry published a letter which said that approx 25% of our power comes from renewables & that instead of wind needing back up from conventional baseload power, conventional systems need baseload back-up from wind. I wrote pointing out the facts & they didn't publish. However they did publish a gentler letter asking for evidence. They then published Scottish Renewables reply which simply repeated & extended their lie. I rewrote & sent the ubndernoted & this time they refused to publish any reply form anybody. The result is that the Herald have twice published something which they know to be a total pack of lies people working for a government supported fraud & deliberately refused even to allow replies from people they know to be telling the truth (having the references to prove it). This is not on a matter of opinion, for which there could be some excuse, but on a matter of clear & unambiguous lying about a matter of solid fact.

Once again Ms Hogan, speaking for Scottish Renewables, claims that "renewables" produce 1/4 of Scotland's power, of which 8% is wind & presumably the rest is traditional hydro. I would not wish to suggest that this represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty to which the renewable lobby aspire. However she produces no figures & the most recently available figures Scottish Energy Study: Volume 1: Energy in Scotland: Supply and Demand, 2006 shows the total amount of renewable electricity, almost all of it hydro power, was 5.46 TWH out of 109.76, i.e. just under 5%. Since the only expansion of hydro since then has been the Glendoe project it is difficult to understand how hydro output can have increased nearly fourfold.

In her previous letter she said that wind was not only not an impractical generation method needing conventional power sources to provide the baseload but that wind should provide the baseload because conventional power was insufficiently reliable. However a previous wind spokesman for Scottish Renewables, Jason Ormiston, is on record as saying wind can be no part of baseload (in a letter in another paper explaining why wind will not be to blame when the lights go out). Again I would not wish to suggest that either assertion represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty that we can expect from the eco-lobby but would appreciate knowing how such opposite claims can both be true.

We are facing blackouts. Energy production is a matter in which the laws of physics & indeed arithmetic rule absolutely. When 25,000 pensioners die annually from the effects of hypothermia because of fuel poverty because our electricity prices are up to 4 times what France has I consider it wicked when those seeking subsidy for their "Green" projects do not tell the truth & grossly irresponsible when the media do not discriminate in their reporting between facts & spin.

Neil Craig
200 Woodlands Rd.
Glasgow
G3 6LN
0141 332 7785
Ref the 2006 study - I simply do not believe we have built windmills producing an extra 20% of our power in the interim - if nothing else the fact that windmills work at only 28% capacity this would mean a capacity nearly equal to all our other power. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/19092748/8 fig 21

The Ormiston letter was in the Scotsman a few years ago. I can give you the date if requested - it was on the same page as a letter of mine which I have kept.

This precedent means that to the question "are there any circumstances whatsoever, under which any statement made by this paper & claimed tom be truthful or factual, can be accepted as such without overwhelming supporting evidence" the answer must be no.

To be fair there may be some newspaper claim mentioned Orwell's 1984 which shows a greater degree of dishonesty there than our media/lobbyists/government tell, but I know of none.

Incidentally this from John Brignal explains why even if it were produced & actually supplied to the grid (we electricity customers subsidise not only the windmillers who intend to feed electricity into the grid but even those who use it all themselves) it would still be worse than useless. Basically the grid managers need to have a very good idea of how much electricity they have at any moment or the grid may collapse. Again this gets censored by our free & honest media.

Labels: eco-fascism, Media, Unpublished letters

Since at least Roman times & probably much longer people have "taken the waters" for their health. I must admit I have not found any statistical evidence that it works, or indeed that it doesn't & it may be both supporters & conventional doctors have been unenthusiastic about making a definitive finding. Nonetheless thousands of years of repeat customers is a positive anecdotal result.

The waters that are taken are uniformly from springs deep underground, often polluted with sulphur & containing varying levels of radioactivity from radon & other deeply buried radioactive materials. If the sulphur isn't doing the good that leaves us with yet another example of radiation hormesis. Here is an example of the popularity of particularly highly radioactive spa.

Every day hundreds of elderly Germans splash around in the spa waters at Schlema, which contain low levels of radon, a radioactive gas generated from the decay of uranium, with the conviction it can cure ailments such as rheumatism...

Germany’s handful of radioactive spas have a tradition dating back a century and even in this post-Chernobyl age, more sensitive to radioactivity, local officials are betting on the radioactive spa to revive the town’s future.

Schlema, with a population of about 6,000, enjoyed its heyday during the Nazi era, when it boasted of being the most radioactive spot on Earth and had more than 100 hotels and guesthouses to receive visitors...

After the war, the victorious Soviet occupiers realized the uranium in this region about 150 miles south of Berlin was too valuable for just splashing around in... The spa was destroyed and visitors barred as mining continued until the collapse of East German communism in 1990...

“Radonia," a statuary tribute to radon personified as a water nymph, stands naked outside, drinking from a jug of irradiated water...

Spa marketing director Evelyn Weiss says radon treatments not only cure ailments, they revive visitors’ sex lives. As is normal in Germany, male and female guests share a naked sauna.

At the government’s Radiation Protection Agency, officials say the radon spa is fine for those suffering health problems.

{Since this does not fit the official LNT theory it would be astonishing if officals didn't oppose it, indeed it is surprising how little hysteria they are producing]

But some experts say the healing powers of radioactive radon are dubious and risky.

“Other aspects of the ‘spa experience’ may be beneficial overall, but the irradiation of internal organs by radon and its decay products or exposure to radon per se is unlikely to be helpful," said Otto Raabe, professor emeritus of radiation biophysics at the University of California at Davis.

William Field of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health says patients suffering from arthritis may feel better after a hot bath in ordinary water.

And he says there are health risks from radon. “Numerous epidemiological studies of radon-exposed underground miners and the recent residential epidemiological study we performed in the United States indicate that radon gas exposure causes lung cancer," he said. [um not so, the opposite is the truth]

“The radon spas should not serve as a substitute for conventional health care," he continued. “While it is possible that the radon gas exposure does cause some beneficial health effect, owners of the spas should inform the spas’ users that there might also be some risk involved."

In Schlema, nearly everyone discounts such risks and cites a 1992 study that said radon was more effective than hot water. “On weekends we have little babies swimming here," Weiss said. “We couldn’t do it if it were dangerous."

Just in case, workers in the area of especially concentrated radon baths wear a dosimeter to measure radioactivity.

At the spa’s main swimming pool, a disco version of the Beatles “All My Loving" started playing as a geriatric water aerobics class got under way. Gray hair and candy-colored bathing caps bobbed up and down.

Off to the side rested Gerd Richter, 66, who once mined uranium in the nearby hills. Now he is turning to Radonia again, hoping the nymph can cure his aching joints after decades of tough work in the mines.

“I’ve noticed that it does help," he said, adding that he now comes twice a month.

I haven't found the 1982 study mentioned but have found this paper on Radon spas in Montana.

the people who use radon therapy are predominantly elderly. With increasing age, the body metabolizes medications less efficiently, and compounding the problem, age brings more chronic illnesses, and the increased likelihood that multiple medications are being taken. Drug side effects, which can be severe at any age, can be worse for elderly people. And, according to many mine visitors, the medications they had been taking had lost their effectiveness over time. 03-31-2010, 11:56 PM lazybratsche

This fits very well with an intelligent suggestion of an evolutionary mechanism by which radiation particularly slows the effects of aging that I got in an online discussion in which I had possibly overstated the relevance of evidence of animal hormesis to humans.

Hormesis actually fits quite well with evolutionary theory. First you must realize that evolution does not select for long lifespan, but reproductive success. There's only a slight fitness advantage to living longer in order to reproduce more often. The basic argument (supported by quantitative genetic modeling) is that genes that allow an individual to age a bit slower and reproduce successfully for an extra season or two don't confer much of an advantage since that individual is likely to be killed off through a multitude of other causes (disease, predation, competition, etc). Furthermore, there's a strong link between reproductive timing and longevity. Experiments have shown that if you take a population and select for earlier reproduction, you also get shorter lifespans. The converse is also true -- select for delayed reproduction, and you get animals with longer lifespans.

How does this connect with hormesis? Well, that hits another fundamental evolutionary trade off: should I spend the resources to reproduce now, or grow and maintain my body so I can better reproduce later? In times of plenty, with good conditions and availability of food, a successful individual will reproduce as much as possible. But in harder times, that individual will have greater success by conserving resources to survive until better conditions arrive again. Hormesis is thought to be part of the mechanisms involved in sensing conditions, and allocating resources in the body accordingly.

Dietary restriction is probably the most obvious sort of example -- it's not exactly the same as hormesis, but it has a lot of shared underlying genetics. When there isn't much food around, reproduction is clearly a foolish choice, since neither the parent nor the offspring are likely to survive. So under those conditions, animals activate genetic pathways that allocate resources away from reproduction and instead to maintenance and longevity. Similar results occur from other types of stress that are known to cause hormesis.

(FWIW, I study the genetics of longevity and hormesis, using aforementioned worms.)

Labels: Hormesis, nuclear, Social

In a request for information issued yesterday, Pentagon scientists say they would like to hear proposals for "deployable nuclear reactor technologies for the generation of electrical power and military logistic fuels (JP-8) in forward land based and maritime military operations".

JP-8 is standard US forces jet fuel, regarded as relatively easy to synthesise from commonly available ingredients compared to the other main military fuel, diesel.

Boffins at the US Naval Research Laboratory have already developed processes by which it would be possible to make JP-8 using carbon dioxide and hydrogen extracted from sea water. The process would require a lot of energy, but in a US naval context this might not be a problem: American aircraft carriers have powerful nuclear reactors to drive their propulsion and catapults, which would have plenty of surplus grunt whenever full-speed launch operations weren't in progress...

Pentagon RFI has this to say:

Technical approaches to fuel production should accommodate a broad range of hydrogen and carbon feedstocks (water/seawater, biomass, waste materials, etc). Concepts that involve carbon capture or sequestration should be well justified in terms of technical feasibility ...

"Biomass/waste materials" most probably alludes to the huge, odorous lakes of sewage which have accumulated next to some of the bigger bases in Afghanistan, much complained of by the resident servicemen. This could potentially be an excellent carbon source, and turning it into jetfuel would have the added benefit of making the bases pleasanter to be in.
From The Register (H/T Ivan)

Now if the armed forces are doing it that doesn't mean it is commercially feasible in normal life. They are doing it for remote places (Afghanistan, deep ocean) where transporting jet fuel is as or more expensive than the stuff itself. However the sort of small reactors they use don't have the economies of scale of commercial 1000 MW reactor either. Best of all, because reactors produce at a flat rate day & night the electricity they can produce after midnight isn't much use.

If "boffins" have already produced the technology to do this on a major scale then it can clearly be applied to nuclear power stations & civilian "bio-mass" disposal works & at rates which, depending if the nuclear plants' costs are largely engineering ones or multiplied by politicians parasitism,

Nuclear can not only now* supply us with all the cheap electricity we want but also with oil & hydrogen fuels. And it solves our big waste problem.


*Well as soon as we build them.

Labels: Fixing the economy, nuclear, Science/technology