Huguenot

Rudolph had lost his sleigh, and Santa was a right grouch.

This delightful and haughty trio were encountered in Pushkar last year... The one in the middle went like a camel.

All you'll be doing charliecharlie is burning money from your wallet when you're not even there to enjoy the flame. ;-) Your money, our planet.

It does peckhamboy. That's life. The difference between the two figures will depend on your insulation. If you've got very good insulation, there'll be little heatloss, little requirement from the boiler to reheat, and little difference. Poor insulation and the opposite happens. But regardless of the size of the difference, it will always be there. That's physics for you. Did you know a bullet drops to ground at the same rate regardless of whether it's been shot horizontally from a gun or dropped from your hand? Goes against intuitive thinking, but that's just the way it is. They even tried it on Mythbusters.

Reading the Sainsburys thread, I was struck by the impact that a sh*t job can have on your personality. As a complete social retard, I wondered whether these two real shockers had an impact on me: Winder: Coomber Electronics made those really ugly tape recorders we used to have in school language classes. They were ugly to stop kids nicking them. For the same reason the power cable was attached permanently. This meant you had to wind the cable onto cable stays to stop it flopping round the box. I did that. Three months Paint Shop Operative: Britax Vega make baby seats and indicator light internal surfaces. The plastic for the indicator light was black, but needed reflective chrome paint on it for maximum brightness. The paint smell really gave you a headache, but spraying it was quite skilled. The plastic formings would come in on a conveyor, but painters would then spray them by hand and put them on a piece of cardboard next to them to dry. After that someone needed to pick them off the cardboard with their right hand, transfer to their left hand, and put them in a box. When the box was full they got a new box. The last bit was the job I did. Three weeks. Any other shocking jobs out there?

The insulation etc. doesn't actually have an impact on the key question about whether to keep the heating on or not. reggie's got the answer - it's about thermodynamics kind of. I'll put it in easily visualised terms although it's not strictly accurate: Imagine a line drawn horizontally through the wall of your house from the inside to the outside. Then plot the temperature across it, from the inside to the outside. Let's say it's 20 degrees inside, and 0 degrees outside. The line would be level, and then a steep decline. So that steep decline could be termed a 'temperature gradient'. Like a hill, things roll down it faster the steeper it is. Think of 'heat' like a ball rolling downhill, and you realise that the steeper it is, the faster it'll disappear! Insulation then is like a 'rough' slope. It delays the 'heat' ball rolling. But it doesn't get away from the fact that the ball will roll, and the steeper the hill, the faster it'll go (albeit slower than a ball on a smooth slope). Hence your boiler will work less hard to increase the temperature from 10 to 15 degrees, than it will from 15 to 20 degrees, because it's losing less of its energy to the outside world at lower temperature gradients. Let's say for example, that your boiler loses 30% of its energy externally at 10 degrees, and 50% at 20 degrees. That means that 'average' loss in heating your house up from a low temperature at home time will be somewhere between 30%-50%. Whereas keeping it at 20 degrees it will always be 50% (a higher value). It doesn't really matter what the 'real' figures are, or how good your insulation is. The temperature gradient calculation ensures it will always be more efficient to only heat the house when you need it.

I'm a great fan of soldiers, but I wouldn't ask them to write the constitution.

So reggie, you're against file sharing yes?

"ooh I wouldn't have said that Magpie, you will be denounced as a Islamaphobe, racist and may even be called a white prick by certain sections of the forum, don't you know to hold this view is simply not allowed and is probably in contravention of the human rights of these mentally ill, and therefore totally without blame, wannabe terrorists" You really can't work it out, can you vinceayre? One was a bloke who appeared to be mentally ill, the other was a silly bunch of stoodents who create identity through conflict. One is an argument that debsases people because they're foreign and ill, the other debates benefits for people who reject the political system. Arse / Not arse.

"I assure you it does not feel like that to the large numbers of people who have had their life ruined by taking statins that they did not need." Point earlier about booze. You didn't even have to toss with percentages. Justin. Mate. If you have a valid point go to the authorities. If they're not listening it's probably because they think you're an idiot, not because there's a conspiracy. Masturbating your references on EDF does not a track record make. If you go peddling snake oil and seraphim, you need to think very very closely. People will die because you're being self-indulgent. We don't need to spend our days listening to engineering kooks inviting people to attend a self-help course. I'm not part of the establishment. No-one pays me. You do get paid. Your book, your seminars. I really, genuinely think you have very cynical motivations. You undermine doctors to get dollars in your wallet. Like any quack, you've started to believe your own hype. Your card is marked, not because I'm a weirdo, but because you are. Your activities reflect a long history of come from a history of carpet-bagging. (Even if you're right, I'll think badly of you, because this is not the forum for your observations). Clever men talk to clever men. They don't hypothecate on forums, they test and refine. Not you. Lookim, I ashore you his hat is trendy. Gwillum don't mean no harm.

Dammit, I'm going to have to subscribe now!

Thank heavens. It wasn't just me. 'Tis tru I was locked in a logical smellhole though.

HAL9000, indeed a symptom of healthy deomcracy ;-) Justin "Huguenot, I believe that I have posted sufficient information and references on this thread for people to decide for themselves if we can just sit back and accept that everything is being taken care of for us. " ...Well of course, you've chosen a forum of non-medical people ill-equipped to respond to your debate. You've found yourself a room full of primary school children and proven to them that Justin is stronger. and then you've asked them to join your gang.... at a price.

He may indeed. And whilst I may have appeared light hearted, I was perhaps putting a little bit of weight on the other side of the seesaw.

Interesting idea this one, it's a bit like trees falling in woods. Presumably this track is unlikely to attract its reserve price, which means no purchase will be made, and no punter gets to hear it. The protest can't be sustained unless the track is never released - because if it is, the absence of the 1m purchase will have prompted free distribution, and proven that the internet can influence an artist's choices over their music distribution even when they DON'T put it on the web. Hence the creator would never have actually had any control over it. However, control is exercised if the music is not released, but then how can we be sure that there was ever a bit of music in the first place? Without the music, the artists can't demonstrate control, so the original premise is lost anyway.

[Oops, missed a page - this post is in responses to assertions that it is possible to ban unsafe drugs] Possibly Mick Mac, but I don't think that's practical. Medicine isn't a black and white issue. Drugs aren't either safe or unsafe. Every drug carries a risk - what the industry tries to do is manage that risk against proposed benefits. Look at chemotherapy and radiotherapy: massively destructive treatments carried out only when the risk of not employing them is considered worse than the risk of employing them. I'll be betting the case for and against statins is not nearly as cut & dried as the conspiracy theorists will have us know. There are clearly medical practitioners who consider that the benefits outweigh the risks. The majority it seems. Trotting out examples of where it's been injurious is hopeless science unless there's a balance of evidence. Many people take aspirin, but these kind of anti-inflammatories are calculated to cause over 7,500 deaths a year in the US. You drink beer, and that causes 85,000 deaths a year - because you perceive the benefits to outweigh the risks. Read the Daily Mail: coffee causes cancer today, and cures it tomorrow. So the question is, do we accept the view of isolated conspiracy theorists who profit from attacking contemporary medecine, or do we accept the majority view of the educated medical profession. Doctors who care about their patients?

Sorry KK, didn't want to paint you as anything, no intention to hurl insults. Just saying there's two sides to every story. There's plenty of people in the world who will make mountains out of molehills, and the fact that you're now prepared to speculate that he's a paedophile does suggest that you're willing to embellish a story to suit yourself. The fact is this bus traveller wasn't a bomber and wasn't a paedophile. We have your word that he was annoying, but that is rather subjective. You told us that he was shoulder barged, and you left me with the distinct impression that you'd physically assaulted him to get him off the bus. He must have been scared silly. Terrified even. All this bloke seemed to to do was muttering in a way that suggests he was mentally ill. Are you absolutely sure that you didn't overreact here, and end up punishing him for other people's crimes?

So is the campaign just this - a fake track for 1 million pounds? It seems a bit weak.

In Finnish, apparently SAIPPUAKUPPINIPPUKAUPPIAS means soap cup trader. Can any Finn's confirm?

Yay! More conspiracies! They're everywhere I tell you. One libel case doesn't make every newspaper a liar, one faulty repair doesn't make every plumber a thief. For every drug that has a sorry tale, there's dozens that make use of the best possible knowledge and research to improve people's lives. Trust no-one, trust nothing and whatever happens DON'T TALK TO THE EXPERTS. They're in on it.

Can you have a pattern if there's only two elements?

For those without a copy of the book... "Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."

Sorry Vince, it's just my manner. I'm very nice really. I was just reading the thread and visualising the encounter, and wondered whether this guy wasn't really a monster at all. Maybe he was a little crazy, very sad, and a very long way from home. The rest of my post was just rhetorical flourish. ;-) Playing to the gallery etc. What's the gag about never judging a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. Because then you're a mile away, and you have his shoes.

It's amazing how big this conspiracy is. There appears to be a helluva lot of Doctors out there actually murdering people for a bonus. Very clever people who pretend to care, but really are telling us lies in order to get in the good books of the sales reps. In fact since nobody's blown the whistle, they're all in it together. Powered by hate, and the desire to furnish themselves with another second hand Vauxhaull Senator. Thank God we've got people who studied very hard at University in Engineering who will stand up and be counted. They know the truth. That kind of valiant Spartacus shite must get them lots of sex as well! All those times we visit the doctor, they're looking us in the eye and brazenly thinking "If I kill this one, I'll get a free pen" Wow, there's just not enough Engineers in medicine, or in climate science. They should write a book or something.

I still don't get it - can other people hear the track? Is the joke that you can't hear the track? *Drums fingers, scratches head*