Hattix

This post will focus on a large source of highly polluting chemical waste which households generate largely through incompetence.

No, not Gordon Brown’s underwear, but batteries. Disposing of them is difficult and highly polluting and most people spend more money on them and generate more chemical waste than they need to.

It’s almost a scandal that battery companies go to great lengths to avoid disclosing the actual capacities of their batteries. I’m yet to see a primary cell (non-rechargeable) state its capacity in either packaging or on the unit itself. All rechargeables state their capacity both on packaging and on the cells.

We measure capacity in milliamp-hours (mAh), a battery with a capacity of 1,000 mAh can deliver 1,000 milliamps for one hour, or 100 milliamps for ten hours.

Zinc Chloride

The first kind of battery, and the most common, is also the least suitable for almost everything. It’s the zinc chloride battery, also known as “heavy duty”, “extra heavy duty” and “super heavy duty”. They’re the ones you can buy at markets and get 20 for £1.

They typically have capacities around 300 to 700 mAh for AA size. They’re the biggest selling batteries and also by far the most expensive, both in terms of your wallet and in terms of environmental impact.

A pack here, labelled “Panasonic” and in red and black have a 670 mAh capacity as measured by me and cost me £2.99 for 12. That’s a total capacity of 8,040 mAh or 2,689 per pound.

Zinc chlorides are best suited for shop shelves and worst suited for any electrical device. They’re especially bad suited for lighting (e.g. flashlights, torches) and cameras, especially digital cameras. The capacity of a zinc chloride in a digital camera may be as low as 100 mAh.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 37.2p

Alkaline

Alkalines have very high capacities, usually 2,000 to 3,000 mAh for an AA cell, but are also a little more expensive. They’re always labelled as “Alkaline” somewhere.

A pack of 12 AA alkalines from Boots in black with orange text and Boots own brand will set you back £6.84 and I measured them to 2,400 mAh each. That’s a total capacity of 28,800 mAh or 4,211 per pound, around half the price of the zinc chlorides above.

Alkalines are best suited for remote controls, flashlights and torches, kids toys, and almost any other electrical appliance. They’re not suited for digital cameras, the high power draw of a digital camera reduces an alkaline’s capacity to around a quarter of what it should be.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 23.8p

Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)

These are rechargeable batteries and vary in capacity from those cheap Energizer things in Tescos at 1,300 mAh to the more expensive 2,500 mAh units which can be bought from electrical stores.

Some places still sell nickel cadmium batteries, which have capacities much lower, often around 400 – 800 mAh. They’re still a fairly good deal and I’ll include them in the final cost summery.

The single most important thing to do is to buy a smart charger, these are often marketed as “intelligent”, “smart” or “automatic”. The number one cause of rechargeable battery death is overcharging. If you don’t have one and can’t yet get one, then undercharge; You’ll do no harm.

A pack of four 2,100 mAh cells set me back £8.49 and they’re rated for 1,000 cycles, improving their life to an “effective” 2,100,000 mAh. Of course their capacity does decline in time, reaching about 75% of its initial capcity before the battery fails completely. So I’m going to list them as 1,800,000. I’m also going to add the price of a four-cell fast smart charger (two hours charge for most batteries, four hours for these) at £12.99.

For the NiCd batteries, I picked up a set of four 800 mAh cells with their own charger (not a smart charger, but the instructions were clear enough as to how long to charge for) for £4.99 from the local Netto.

Of course the price of mains electricity is a factor, so I’ll include that too. 1,000 mAh is 1,500 mWh (the amps being replaced by watts once we factor in the voltage), which takes about 2,000 mWh to charge up, or just 2 Wh. The price of 1,000 Wh is about 14p, so each type has 0.028p added to it.

Rechargable batteries are very well suited for digital cameras (and other cameras) and for all other electrical devices. They’re less well suited (but still acceptable due to their phenomenally low price) in remote controls

NiMH Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p
NiCd Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p

In Closing

We can all do our bit to be greener. As seen above, for every £1 that you spend on a rechargeable battery, you’d need to spend £8.50 on alkalines for the same amount of power. You’d also generate the waste of 4 batteries for rechargables but over 20 for alkalines. Those numbers are even worse for zinc chlorides.

So not only do you cut down on highly toxic chemical waste, but you also save quite a fair amount of cash. Works for me.

Normally this would be run of the mill news, that the Tories want to give the Bank of England regulatory powers over financial markets.

Wait a second here.

Labour oppose this kind of regulation and have denied the Bank’s governor, Mervyn King, the powers he requested. The Conservatives are proposing regulation which Labour are opposing! This is the Conservatives soundly in a position to the left of Labour, just as this blog told you a few weeks ago.

One of the first things Labour did when they came into power (under the leadership of Blair) back in 1997 was remove power from the Bank of England and share it among the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority. It made sense at the time, or so they thought, but what it actually ended up with was a response being recognised by the Bank, acted on by the Treasury and regulated by the FSA, where before the Bank would do all three. A certain loss of agility and coordination was the result.

After a 21 year old died from a reaction to the stimulant GBL, her mother is leading a holy war to get it banned.

Excuse me? Mrs. Stewart? Making it illegal will make party-goers want it all the more, haven’t you seen how common and popular heroin, cocaine, ecstacy, cannabis, amphetamines and other controlled drugs are? Are you perhaps thinking that if your daughter died, you’re wanting more to join her out of some perverse lust for revenge? Maybe trying to shift the blame? The coroner’s toxicology report even states that her alcohol level was excessive. This wasn’t some young woman out for a good time, it was an irresponsible kid with a death wish.

Britain has the most oppressive drug laws in Europe and, spookily enough the highest rate of adult drug consumption. The Netherlands has the loosest drug laws in Europe and it has the lowest rate of consumption. If we go through Europe plotting how tight drug laws are and how high consumption is, it’s a direct relationship: Tighter laws correlate very closely with higher consumption.

Is it too far a stretch to speculate that the tighter laws are causing the problem in the first place, perhaps? Nobody goes for legal drugs (like GBL, it’s very rare on the street) because they’re legal. They’re not the good stuff. If they were the good stuff, they’d be illegal by now.

Yet again we see knee-jerk headless chicken reactions which will only make the problem worse. We should expect it by now.

Update: Alright, it is The Sun and normally as reliable as a ten year old Apple Mac, but it does reference a genuine UN report. Britain is Europe’s drugs capital for cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. Obviously the very harsh laws we have need to be tightened further, right? When something doesn’t work, the obvious thing is to keep doing it all the more. If you’re in government, that is.

It’s August in 2090. You sit on your patio enjoying a glass of 2054 Derbyshire vintage, widely regarded as some of the best wine in the world after southern France became too hot to grow grapevines. While you would prefer a Cornwall champagne, it’s best to be prudent with one’s finances. The Sun is beating down from a clear blue sky as you read a report on the recent wildfires consuming the North Yorkshire moors. The Government’s bungling this year’s malaria outbreak, you notice from another report; 1,700 cases, up 4% from last year. Scandalous!

Why don’t people just not go to the malarial swamps of Norfolk? What’s there to see, a few century old ruins of cities and the Ipswitch Ruin Visitor Centre?

You go back inside after ten minutes, there’s only so much of the 45 degree heat one can take, even with a cool wine. The hum of the airconditioner takes some getting used to, though.

Your children arrive home from school after being on a visit to a museum. “Dad,” one of them calls, “Did we really used to have white bears? They look so funny!”

You reply that they didn’t live around here, but in the Arctic.

“The Arctic?” The child gives you a puzzled look. “Bears don’t live in the sea.”

You tell him that the Arctic used to be all ice, all year round. The child shoots you one of his grins and says “Dad, you’re so silly.”

Does all this come out of some crazy futuristic sci-fi movie? Nope, it comes from the Met Office’s UK Climate Projections 2009 report.

Isn’t that some pagan thing those new-age folks make a bunch of noise about?

Well, no. It’s not. There are two meanings to it, one civil, one astronomical. I’ll do the astronomical one first. The summer solstice is simply when the sun reaches its highest in the sky, the tilt of Earth’s axis pointing directly to the sun. For this year, that time will be 05:45 UTC, June 21st. It’s the year’s longest day and, in places where the seasons aren’t lagged by seas or oceans, represents the height of summer. Of course here in Britain, the seasons are lagged by the Atlantic Ocean and we get the height of summer about a month later.

The sun will rise in the north east and set in the north west. Overnight it will never get truly dark, the northern horizon will glow as though the early stages of dawn constantly all night long because the sun just isn’t far enough below the horizon.

In civil use, it’s Fathers’ Day. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is the longest day of the year! Fathers’ Day is held on the third Sunday in June, this being a much later Christian addition (early 20th century Unted States) which held that festivals could only be held on Sundays. This is merely the modern adaptation of the numerous summer solstice celebrations.

Not too coincidentally, Mothers’ Day, the third Sunday in some peculiar Christian festival called Lent, is almost on the Vernal Equinox and before the Christians ruined it, it was on the Vernal Equinox.

So if we start at the first equinox and run through the solstices, we have Mothers’ Day on the Vernal Equinox, Fathers’ Day on the Summer Solstice, various Harvest Festivals on the Autumnal Equinox and finally Christmas on the Winter Solstice.

Or you can just think of it as some pagan thing, that’s good too.

Now I’m no clueless amateur with Photoshop but the best artisan is always limited by the tools available. In my case, that tool is a Kodak Easyshare CX6200. Now Kodak’s consumer point and shoots aren’t exactly the greatest snappers and the Easyshare series are fairly close to the bottom. It’s a creaky old 2.0 megapixel (1600×1200) disaster.

The objective was to capture noctilucent clouds: Night time photography. This is all but impossible on a point and shoot, they simply don’t have the exposure or the sensitivity. The longest exposure it can do is half a second and the sensor is noisy as hell. A crop of a shot from the session is to the right, but brightened up a bit since this blog has a white background.

It’s a foul mess of noise and hot pixels, and while you can indeed see the clouds, it’s hardly a great image and there’s only so much you can do in Photoshop. Garbage in, garbage out. There had to be some way to give Photoshop more information about the image.

There is. Using a small mini-tripod (that’s why the hole at the bottom of your camera has threads), I placed the camera on the ground and fired off 18 shots, then covered the lens and did another. It’s imperative that the camera does not move and your subject is absolutely still.

In Photoshop, you then load the 19th (dark) image and subtract it from all the others using the Apply Image function. This removes junk added by the sensor such as hot pixels. It’s called darkfield subtraction and commonly used by amateur astronomers for exactly the same purpose.

The next step is to add all these images together. This CAN be done in Photoshop but it’d probably take forever. I use a piece of freeware called RegiStax 5 for it which has an incredibly awful interface. It adds all the images together and averages them, a process known as stacking. Noise, which is random from frame to frame, does not survive the averaging, but the detail of the image reinforces from frame to frame.

You then drop it into Photoshop, pull the curves around a bit and you get an image far better than any one shot could have been with much less noise.

The Government is reportedly looking at an overhaul to the democratic process by which MPs are put into office. Our current “First Past The Post” system has been criticised as being undemocratic and favouring few parties over more parties.

The current system works like this:

Suppose we have an election tomorrow with five candidates. Tom, Dick, Harry, Sarah and Jessica are on the polling card and we have 1000 voters. The results come in with Tom 130, Dick 200, Harry 210, Sarah 320 and Jessica 140. Sarah wins the election even though 68% of the electorate did not want her and voted against her!

This is patently unfair and not terribly democratic. It ensures that incumbents have a huge advantage over any new party. It’s a testament to the strength of the Liberal Democrats that they’ve even managed to become a credible parlimentary party under such a system which inherently favours two-party politics.

The alternative, already used in Scotland, Northern Ireland and many places around the world is Single Transferrable Vote.

In STV, we vote for two candidates, marking one “1” and the other “2”, our order of preference. It can go to more than just two preferences, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll use two and run the election again.

First choice: Tom 130, Dick 200, Harry 210, Sarah 320 and Jessica 140

For a “one round win”, someone needs to have over 50% of the vote. Nobody has a majority, Sarah has just 32% so the second choices come in.

Second choice: Tom 190, Dick 330, Harry 180, Sarah 200 and Jessica 100

Adding up, Dick has 530 votes and Sarah 520, the winner of the election is Dick with 53% of the electorate considering him their first or second choice. Under First Past The Post, Sarah would have won the election even though fewer of the electorate considered her to be acceptable.

STV is a much more democratic and fair system, I’ll be following the debates over the summer with interest. The Conservatives already oppose it (as they stand to gain from the current system) while the Lib Dems acknowledge the system is unfair and in long need of reform.

In an economically trying time, the parties of the left traditionally do best. The European Parliament election has taken significant swings to the right, what’s going on? Centre-right parties such as the Dutch PVV and extremists like the British BNP and French National Front, these are parties which wish to abolish minimum wage laws, cut benefits and clamp down on religious freedom. Why would people vote for parties which would make an economic crisis even worse?

The answer is that they didn’t, at least not knowingly. The right is traditionally populist, they will say what the people want to hear. So they run on campaigns of limiting immigration, wanting people to believe that immigrants are taking their jobs (truth is the average immigrant creates jobs by virtue of making the economy larger), this fits in nicely with the anti-patriotic nationalist views of these parties.

However, the right in Europe has long been marginalised. We can all remember what the Nazis did, their direct descendants such as the British BNP and French National Front had to wait until the bad feelings towards them subsided a little. This allowed a lot of other right-leaning groups who weren’t as extremist to pop up.

Hence the votes were fragmented among all these populist parties clambering over themselves to tell the people what they want to hear while hiding their true intentions.

The message from the voters was, then “We don’t understand politics anymore”, people who don’t understand how tremendously bad these parties would be are the ones who’re most easily taken in by their carefully researched populist messages.

It’s politics of the lowest common denominator.

Between the European Parliament and the local elections taking place on Thursday, we learned quite a few things. The first and most obvious is that the people have completely lost their support for New Labour.

This turn of events is not at all surprising as people look for someone to blame for the financial crisis, it’s easy to blame the government. This isn’t all, however. Tony Blair oversaw a fundamental shift in Labour’s political stance. Prior to about 1997 or so, Labour were a leftist party which championed the rights of the common man in contrast to the Conservatives, who sought to undermine those rights in the interest of security.

Now the roles are reversed. Blair’s revolution shifted Labour to becoming a conservative party, politically almost identical to the US Republicans, they removed a great many rights from the people. Firearm ownership was banned (and gun crime went up), police gained the power to search anyone on the street without any form of warrant (and concealed weapon crime like knives went up) while economic regulation was abolished (and we entered the worst economic crisis anyone can remember); These are all very reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s rule.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has become what Labour once were. Now they champion economic regulation and seek to restore the rights of the people, which is exactly what Labour used to be.

Not only that, but Labour fostered a culture of fear. We’re told to be scared of terrorists and that the police need all these new powers to help combat terrorists, it’s blanket coverage all across the media. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s when the IRA was bombing the shit out of city centres nationwide, the police didn’t need these powers.

The plan was that a scared populace was an obedient one, first noted by Julius Caesar and again stated by Herman Goering at the post-WW2 Nazi trials and by Donald Rumsfeld in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. As people naturally do not want war, the government simply states there is a danger to the people, denounce the pacifists for exposing their country to danger, and the populace will support whatever they’re told to – it worked in the US, Bush gaining his second term – but has not worked for Labour.

It has worked, however. People are scared of foreigners, usually Muslims but anyone who looks a bit tanned is suspect. They do not, however, support Labour, they’ve gone to support the British National Party, a hilariously named bunch of neo-Nazis who share ideology with banned German extremists: They are not British and the core values we hold dear as British values are hated by the BNP. They hate Britain and all it is, wishing to transform it into a dystopian hellhole.

Proof? The BNP gained tremendously in the European Parlimentary Election, even gaining a seat. If they continue their advance, we are all screwed. Nationalism can only work on fear, it always has to be attacking someone who’s different to the majority, so long as it retains the veneer of protecting the majority, it’ll remain in power. The BNP in the past have attacked blacks, Jews and Muslims, blaming all kinds of maladies on them. Their entire political viability is based on the politics of fear.

So let’s say they kick every Muslim out of the country and all the “foreigners” (basically, non-whites) – the BNP have stated they will do this, first by “voluntary repatriation” of non-white Brits, then by forced expulsion. Who do the masses fear then? Probably Jews, Nick Griffin is on record stating his belief they’re everything wrong with the world. So we perform a second holocaust, set up concentration camps and gas chambers (oh yes, part of their manifesto is to bring back the death penalty). Then who do we fear? Likely homosexuals. We imprison them all or just execute them. Then who do we fear? Probably Catholics, so we ban its practise and raze its churches, outlawing public protests. Then who do we fear? The Irish, so we invade and annex them. Then who do we fear? Dissidents who obviously want to weaken our nation, so we outlaw elections and imprison the dissenters. Then who do we fear? Intellectuals, the educated, the “elitists”, so we imprison or exile them. Then who do we fear? Well, there’ll likely be not many people left.

In the process we’ll have lost our ability to get these idiots out of government when they banned elections. We’ll have lost our ability to protest against the government, that’s banned too. All the foreign professors, scientists and engineers we attracted will have fled to other countries during the repression of the elitist intellectuals, crippling our economy and innovation.

Britain would be destroyed and we’d be its destructors, the British values we stupidly thought they’d protect would be obliterated. That is why we cannot continue playing the politics of fear. That is why Labour has lost its support to the BNP.

To follow up from my coverage of the Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, SamKnows and BBC News are reporting that three million homes do not have access at 2 Mbps or above.

What worries me, however, is that many homes which should have greater than 2 Mbps do not and it’s their own fault. I do broadband installation as part of my whole freelance techie thing as well as troubleshooting problems with it. It’s amazing how many people don’t wire their systems properly. One home I was at just a few weeks ago was achieving 1.5 Mbps and disconnecting often. Actual throughput was less than 1 Mbps.

When the actual throughput is less than the sync rate would predict (divide the sync by 9 to get the usable data rate, then multiply by 8 to get megabytes per second) it means a lot of errors on the line cause retransmission, thus slowing down the observed data rate. In this case, the DSL microfilter was plugged into the phone hookup for the Sky satellite TV box, so placing a phone device before the DSL device, absolutely verboten.

After I reorganised the wiring, the sync rate shot up to 6.2 Mbps with an actual data rate of 590 KB/sec. Service providers need to educate people better so that these elementary mistakes aren’t made. The DSL filter should be on the master socket or a filtered NTE-5 faceplate should be provided. Extensions done “properly” (that is, from the back of the master socket) are bad for DSL since they’re not filtered and so to make the best of a bad situation they should be filtered immediately on their socket.

Ask your neighbours how fast their Internet is or use the SamKnows Mapping Engine to query an average for your immediate locality. Remember that the average includes people who’re set up badly so you should be well above the average. My average is 3 Mbps, I get 4.5 – 5.2 . The average at the example I gave above was 5.0, they get 6.2 – 6.5.

If you’re significantly below what you should be getting, check your wiring. All lines are bundled so any problems with lines will be affecting your neighbours and the rest of your street too, too many people have said “Oh, my line is just bad” when it wasn’t. If the line really is bad, get a BT engineer out to sort it out. Be warned, however, that if the problem is with your wiring inside your home, you’ll be charged about £200. Make sure all your wiring is flawless first!