World Famous New Zealand mountaineer and explorer, Sir Edmund Percival Hillary has died at the age of 88. Sir Edmund was internationally renowned as the first man ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

Sir Edmund had been experiencing a decline in his health since he suffered a fall in Kathmandu and was subsequently hospitalised upon his return to New Zealand.

Sir Edmund conquered Everest with sherpa Tenzing Norgay in the expedition of 1953. According to wikipedia, his first words to his friend and fellow mountaineer on his descent were:

“Well George, we finally knocked the ******* off.”

In the following years, Hillary climbed no less than ten other Himalayan peaks and even visited the South Pole.

He will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the greatest explorers to have lived. I hope that the human spirit of exploration does not die with him.

Image Credit: Graeme Mulholland

Well, here’s to 2008.

I wish everyone the very best prosperity for this year despite our shaky looking economy and the UK credit crunch.

I also wish that our politicians should make more moves towards domestic energy security so we don’t have to send our boys and girls to fight over dusty strips of land with oil underneath.

I wonder if we will see a correction or crash in house prices this year as so many hard working people in the UK are unable to afford to live in even the most decrepit of places. I fear that the situation will once again be engineered to protect the interests of ‘buy to let’ and property developers to the detriment of the already massively-overstretched normal mortgagees and to the exclusion of the ‘first-time-buyer’.

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that in 2008, we can look forward to the first introduction of UK National Identity Cards giving the government never before seen powers of authoritarian control over the population and a unique opportunity to lose practically every piece of information known about an individual in one go. This as other nations have a sudden outbreak of common sense and scrap their ID Card programmes. If any politician should wheel out the damned lie that ‘biometrics’ is in any way useful for preventing the wholesale physical loss/theft of identity data this year, I’ll be inclined to swing for them.

Try to have a good year. Wherever you may find one.

Here we have the Battle of Kruger video.

The video, shot by David Budzinski in the Kruger National Park in South Africa shows a full-on pitched battle between a herd of buffalo, a pride of lions and at least 1 crocodile over a buffalo calf.

You’ve probably seen them, you may own some, perhaps you’ve even tripped over one…

Solar Powered garden lamps seem to be practically everywhere these day illuminating small spots of grass with their relatively asthmatic led bulbs. Admittedly from the angle of light pollution, these devices are quite low polluters but they are, none the less, kitsch.

Now, you’ll have heard, whether you know it to be true or not, the argument that solar panels (photovoltaics) never produce more power than it takes to manufacture them. This is, of course, false. A photovoltaic panel on it’s own would probably pay back it’s manufacturing energy cost in a few years of use. In terms of solar kitsch however, this is not the whole story.

Solar garden lamps have several other components, the most obvious being the ultra-cheaply produced plastic casing which becomes brittle after perhaps just one season of use. Then there is the charge-controller and it’s often integrated led lamp which often has insufficient protection to avoid the tracks and solder joints from oxidising. Finally, there are the rechargable batteries which are more often than not the cheapest that money can buy. Each of these components can cause the failure of the whole lamp and as with so much other kitsch, I suspect that once it is broken, it is discarded.

Now that’s a shame. That solar panel in the top of the lamp may have paid back it’s manufacture energy alone during the lamp’s lifetime but it is probably still some years from paying for the thermoplastics, circuits and batteries that make up the rest of the lamp.

There’s probably nothing wrong with the solar panel itself. A photovoltaic is a relatively simple and very robust device which could last 40 years or more, constantly producing power when exposed to the sun. It makes me cringe to think how many of these small solar panels have ended up in landfills already simply because they were attached to fashion-fad kitsch.

If you were to salvage those panels however, it would be trivial to build them into large arrays to produce useful power for years to come.

So, whatever you do with your solar kitsch, save those panels!

Quite honestly, using a motorway in the UK at peak times these days is not much fun.

Generally speaking you’re likely to sit in stop/start traffic and use substantially more fuel than if the road was clear while take an eternity to get to your destination.With the appliance of just a little technology, this could be made so much better.

Motorways are designed to be carefully controlled systems and if everything happened as it was designed to, they would work well. The trouble is, adding just one thing breaks the system: Human beings.

Human beings driving on motorways tend to be both selfish and stupid. They drive with excessive speed, fail to use proper lane discipline and ‘tailgate’ other drivers causing sudden braking and wave-effects in the traffic flow. They also crash. Badly.

I suggest then that the motorways are an ideal place for the application of modern technology. What we need is the ‘Motorway Autopilot’.

The moment you join the entry slip road at peak time, your car’s autopilot would take over control of throttle, gears, brakes and steering. As you arrive at the filter point, the other vehicles, also all controlled by autopilot would already have made a gap just 10 feet longer than your car into which you would slot yourself.

As your car is a lightweight, lightly laden car with performance sufficient to handle any gradient found on the motorway network, another gap would form in lane 2 for you and then another in lane 3. Once in lane three, you would find yourself moving with other vehicles of the same class and loading at 60mph. The car ahead would be just 5 feet away and the one behind just as close. Packing the vehicles in so tightly would allow many more vehicles to use the motorway without causing a complete standstill.

Despite only travelling at 60mph, you would arrive at your destination sooner than in the ‘bad old days’ before autopilots simply due to the free flowing traffic. This reduced speed helps to reduce pollution while the removal of the human-induced speed oscillations reduces pollution further. The reduced speed also allows leeway for the vehicles to make small adjustments to speed to allow traffic to filter between lanes.

Obviously, emergencies would have to be handled carefully by the system but even then, the autopilot would be a great help. Mechanical failures could would be trivial.

Let us say your car, travelling along in the tightly bunched traffic of lane 3 suddenly blows out a tyre. No problem!

1. Sensors on your vehicle register the blowout and immediately inform the motorway network.
2. Within a fraction of a second traffic in lanes 1 and 2 and behind you in lane 3 begin heavy braking.
3. Your car’s normal Electronic Stability Program, coupled to the Motorway Autopilot expertly guides you across the now wide open gap in lanes 1 and 2 to the hard shoulder.
4. The motorway network sends out a recovery vehicle to you automatically while immediately instructing the autopilots of the vehicles which slowed for you to accelerate back to normal cruising speed.

Even emergencies such as foreign objects falling into the road could be handled with little drama as the vehicles could perform controlled emergency stops without risk of pile-ups.

The system could be extended further to eliminate the full-time hard-shoulder and automatically and efficiently force all traffic across one lane in the event a vehicle breaks down.

Just think, you could go to sleep on the M40, not kill yourself and arrive in London in about an hour and a half with your own car.

You may not have heard but over the weekend some wannabe terrorerrorists tried to drive a Jeep into Glasgow Airport…..

…hell, who am I kidding? You will not only have heard but you will have had it seared into your brain by the unending newsgasm perpetrated by the media at large.

These Terror Clowns only managed to get one of three vehicles to actually catch light using their combination effort of petrol and camping gas. The media made a big play of the fact that the cars were ‘packed with nails’ well, guess-what? Which ever way you touched these cars off, you could be sure the nails would still be in the car afterwards.

Once again El Reg has a great write up on the Clowns of Ph3ar by Lewis Page, a former MoD bomb disposal operator.

I particularly liked this quote:

Remember, this country carried on successfully for six years with hundreds - thousands, sometimes - of tons of explosives raining down on it every night for six years, delivered by very competent Germans who often died doing that job. The civilian death toll was around 60,000 according to most sources; the equivalent of 20 9/11s, more than three for every year of the war. Civilisation was not brought down. Germany and Japan withstood even greater violence, and survived it too.

Yet the modern press are such wet-weekends that is almost as though we’re no longer allowed to retain our Balls of British Steel(tm)