Posts by Neil Craig

Mystery 'doughnut' materializes in front of Mars rover: 'OH MY GOD! It wasn't there before!'

Though the "doughnut" isn't in the 1st picture there is a slight rounded shadow in exactly the same spot. This cannot be coincidence.

So it could be some chemical process whereby the shadow has grown into something solid or, perhaps less credibly, it could be an effect of different shadows producing a more distinct image, like the way the inside of a face mask can look like a projecting face.

Ir the chemical process might be life. I totally exclude the possibility of meteorite ir falling rock because it is statistically impossible it could land exactly on the spot of a previous depression.

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

I have long campaigned for a well funded X-Prize Foundation run by successful engineers, scientists, accountants and venture capitalists not politicians and civil servants.

To be fair such an organisation would not have directly funded this project in advance but if they had known that by achieving a target, short of commercial viability, the winning company would have won anything from hundreds of thousands to millions, real venture capitalists would have showered him with immediate offers of financial support.

Blighty could put a (WO)MAN on MARS by 2040, says sci minister

Or, somewhat earlier than that they could just buy tickets on SpaceX, Virgin, Emirates, Singapore or Chinese Spaceships.

Parasitic western governments have had hundreds of billions to do this and done nothing. But there is no doubt it can be done.

Another DEVASTATING Chelyabinsk METEOR STRIKE: '7x as likely' as thought

If meteors of this size are 7 times more common than expected does it scale up to those over 40 m which are likely to hit the ground?

First rigid airship since the Hindenburg cleared for outdoor flight trials

Putting prefabricated houses in place. Since the width of road moved loads is 3m normally, being able to deliver much larger units and pretty much leave them in place (at least initially in non-urban areas until flying over urban stuff is proven safe) would probably be cost effective. After all conventional building there is horrendously expensive.

Elon Musk: 'Fudged' NYT article cost Tesla $100m

Re: Who cares?

A telemetry record seems difficult to dispute.

AQs to whether one should believe the New York Times or somebody with no record of lying - I really don't see that any honest doubt is possible.

Radiation TERROR on Scottish beach! Except it's quite safe

I have done some investigation of this case since, a couple of years ago, I was answered on a BBC phone in show when I suggested that it could be natural radiation by the SEPA spokesman stating that they had done chemical analysis and found that the radioactive particles were paint. Several Freedom of Information inquiries later it emerged that they had simply made this up. The BBC are aware of these FoI's but, in a demonstration of the highest standard of honesty ever to be expected from the BBC, are still pushing this deliberate lie.

The radiation is natural background. Here is a letter sent to various papers and, with the normal bias to be expected in the British media, not yet published:

Sir,

It seems SEPA are now threatening to permanently close off the beach at Dalgety Bay in their empire building campaign to ramp up false fears about radioactivity. SEPA have previously been caught telling at least 2 major lies on the subject.

Firstly claiming, on the BBC, to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made.

Secondly to have found "radium and its daughter elements" in the beach rock. In fact the "daughter element" that radium breaks down into is radon - a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.

The aforementioned FoI enquiries have brought to light the fact that their consultants did, years ago, tell them that "the highest reading recorded at Dalgety Bay was still less than 2/3rds that found in a typical Aberdeen street".

Everywhere has natural radiation. A square mile of earth at Dalgety Bay will contain 3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium and 1 gram of natural radium because that is what every average square mile on the planet contains. By comparison the possible presence of less than a gram of water soluble paint, only a small fraction of which was actually radium, from the figures on the dials of a few aircraft 66 years ago is immeasurably small. Indeed SEPA have, despite their claims, been wholly unable to find any trace of it.

Beyond that there is no evidence whatsoever that radiation, up to well beyond the higher rates found in Aberdeenshire, causes any harm whatsoever, indeed the balance of scientific evidence strongly supports the view that such levels are beneficial to health. Though the sort of ignorant bureaucrats who do not know the "daughter element" of radium is a gas, have long pushed the theory radiation, even well below the naturally occurring level, being dangerous no honest scientist anywhere in the world agrees.

It is disgraceful that the local people are being frightened and may be permanently deprived of their beach to promote what anybody scientifically literate in SEPA must know to be a false, though newsworthy, scare.

Neil Craig

200 Woodlands Rd.

Glasgow

G3 6LN

0141 332 7785

Refs - Dalgety radiation less than 2/3rds background in Aberdeen http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/dalgety-bay-my-reply.html

- Radioactives in soil http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/radium-at-dalgety-bay-guest-article-on.html

- scientific illiteracy undenied by SEPA http://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/roundup/articles/2009/06/11/388386

- SEPA threaten publicly funded legal action "reserve its position" if anybody says anything untrue about them http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/02/sepas-reaction.html so clearly they accept I haven't.

Boffins find new way to spot stars which have planets

Does this fit with the other Lithium problem?

I wonder if this could be related to their being only 1/3rd as much litium in stars generally as expected refered to recently in a New Scientist article. I think it quite likely that some unknown process in formation of planets & other body from matter which would otherwise be part of the stars is heavily selecting lithium which is thus unobservable. If so one of the few problems with the Big Bang is not a problem.;

"OUR best theories of the early universe also tell us which atoms should have been forged in the first 5 minutes after the big bang. The existing amounts of hydrogen and helium match theory perfectly - so well, in fact, that cosmologists claim this is the best evidence we have for the big bang. Things aren't so good for the third element, lithium, however is different.

When we count up the lithium atoms held in stars, there is only one-third as much of the lithium-7 isotope as there should be. Another isotope, lithium-6, is overabundant: there may be as much as 1000 times too much of it.

So something in the big bang is not adding up."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.700-13-more-things-the-lithium-problem.html