What Colour Blue Are You?

You Are Navy Blue

You're a true adventurer. You constantly find yourself drawn to new experiences, people, and places.Sometimes you feel quite scattered and bored. If something exciting isn't going on, you feel a bit lost.

What Colour Blue Are You?

Islam vs Schools

It's been an interesting few days first this then this. I find it interesting that in both of these cases Saudi influence is implicated.

Taj Hargey, Meco's chairman, said he was also willing to organise a campaign
among Muslims nationally to resist "this largely Saudi-driven campaign to make
the niqab a compulsory requirement for Muslim women".

and

He also alleges that when he complained to school chiefs about the content of
the curriculum and questioned whether it complied with British laws, he was
told: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia".

Naturally saudi Arabia being our wonderful ally in the "War Against Terror" (not to mention grateful arms costomer) is doing all it can to stem this flow of hatred spewing forth from its borders.

hmmm...

Mind your "Ps" and "Ks"

I see Lord "Cashpoint" Levy has been arested again. Of cource it is all too easy to gloat about NuLabours current difficulties, so I think I'll do just that.

What with first Ruth Tuner and now "Cashpoint" being arrested it seems the noose is tightening around number 10. I wonder how long before Tony gets that knok on the door, although I suspect it wont happen - not while he is still in office anyway - knowing his luk he could well get away scot free.

Personally nothing would bring me more pleasure than to see Tony dragged out of No 10 by the met.

Islamofascism/Regular Fascism

This is probably the first time I've heard DC express a strong stance on anything*. It is certainly a step in the right direction. The BBC video report on this is interesting, amongst other things it quotes the Conservatives as explicitly accusing the "moderate" Muslim Council of Britain of being equivalent to the BNP. Not that this is the first time that I've heard similar accusations of their being extremist, but never from one of the main parties.

This quote from the end of the BBC report is a bit mystifying

But invoking white racists in his argument some worry he will promote alienation
rather than integration.

Who worries about that and what the hell are they smoking! Seriously I cannot understand the objection to this. British Muslims obviously hate the BNP, Cameron is just saying that disagrees with them just as much he disagrees those who wish to impose sharia law on Britain. It seems a perfectly reasonable position to me.

*with the exception of climate change which all of the mainstream parties seem to broadly agree on.

Bank for the Wind

This weeks New Scientist is running a story about a improved method of storing electricity (you need a subscription to read the whole article) from wind or other transient renewable energy source. It uses flow batteries which store up electricity as chemical energy in the same way as conventional batteries, except that the electrolyte is drawn out and stored up in tanks. Charge flows across a membrane between two solutions however the membranes in previous batteries had been known to leak.

This [research] focused on one of the big weaknesses of these devices. The
membranes separating the two electrolytes allowed molecules of electrolyte to
leak across. As a result, each solution became increasingly contaminated with
the other, reducing the battery's output.

The type of battery featured in the article - at Kings Island Australia - gets around this by making both solutions with vanadium in different oxidation states.

Best of all, it didn't matter too much if a few vanadium
ions on one side of the membrane leaked across to the other: this slightly
discharged the battery, but after a recharge the electrolyte on each side was
as good as new...
....One of the key advantages of flow batteries is
their scalability. To increase peak power output you add more battery cells, but
the amount of energy they will store - and therefore the time they will operate
on a full charge - can be expanded almost indefinitely by building bigger tanks
and filling them with chemicals. The result is that the batteries can be used in
a wide range of roles, from 1-kilowatt-hour units (like a large automotive
battery, say), to power-station scales of hundreds of megawatt-hours.

Research into these batteries is continuing.

Vanadium sulphate solutions cannot be made very concentrated
so the energy stored in a given volume of vanadium flow batteries is about half
that of lead-acid batteries. This rules them out for applications where
compactness and low weight are at premium - electric cars being a prime example.
So Skyllas-Kazacos and her team
want to replace vanadium sulphate with vanadium bromide, which is more than
twice as soluble. She expects that research to be completed by 2008.

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

Also in new Scientist(these don't require subscribtion):

-Setback for Storing Nuclear Waste

-How to leak a secret and not get Caught

Cameron is a True Tory

...apparently. So what to make of Cameron's claim to be a TruBlu rather than just BluLubour. Well he certainly has done little which convinces me of that so far, although it is possibly still early days yet. He has spent the last year sorting out the Tories image problem - lets face it he needed to - by bing nice and cuddly. If I were in his position I'd do it too, even if I did plan a more right-wing government. He hasn't specifically ruled out tax cuts on principle(see below), and I think it was right to focus attention on the working poor. True tory policies such as a flat tax(or tax cuts), workfare or independant and selective education would ultimatly help such people of cource. It's the working poor that are screwed most under socialism. The problem is convincing the public of this, Darfur Dave perhaps gives us on the right the best chance of winning these arguments. For the time being I think I'll give Dave the benifit of the dought and stick with the tories, but if I don't see somthing more right-wing over the cource of year two I may switch to UKIP.

He goes out of his way to deny that he would follow Labour's tax-and-spend
policies and holds out the prospect of possible tax cuts. "We are pledged to
share the proceeds of economic growth between public services and lower taxes,
thereby ensuring that over time the state takes a smaller share of national
wealth," Mr Cameron writes.

Perhaps there is more to Cameron than his "cuddly" image.

Cartoon from the telegaph.

United Kingdom or Bust...

...at least for NuLabour.