Wind

[peterbirks]

Bucketing down at 6.15. Windy. By 10am. Not a cloud in the sky. Now bucketing it down again. However, no sign in London of the potentially serious winds (“Hurricane Force 12”, said one journalist, presumably unaware that hurricane forces only go up to 5) that appear to have struck parts of the south-west.

I’m seeing someone off from Heathrow to Thailand this evening, but the long-distance flights seem okay at the moment.

A new mouse has appeared in the kitchen, dammit. Clearly it’s time for another battle.

Comments

Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[(Anonymous)]

Pete,
Are you confusing Beaufort scales (12=Hurricane) with the (Saffort-Simpson) measure of Hurricane strength? For somebody older than myself I'd have thought that you'd have done the Beaufort Scales in Geography!

JG - Pedant

Re: Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Presumably at around 133 radians per second, ignoring the effects of friction, and assuming both that there is no kinetic loss incurred between Mr Beaufort's body being buffeted by the aforesaid 120km/h "hurricane" and the consequent rotational effect. (Also assuming that the body has a cross-sectional average of 1/2 metre in diameter, Beaufort being a fat bastard, and that it is also fully exposed to the hurricane in question. The effects of fluid dynamics are simplified to unity here, which presupposes a constant wind velocity of 120 km/h, rather than -- as is more usual with Beaufort scale 12 winds -- a certain amount of gust, vortex, etc. The integration of such additional forces across an appropriate time series is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I think Birks' point might well, indeed, be that 12 = hurricane -- at least if you're tied to the mast on a Royal Navy ship in the nineteenth century. The Saffort-Simpson scale is a dubious measure, at best, and entirely incomprehensible to the lay audience in ... well ... the typical case downwards, to be honest. (I include myself in this lay audience.)

More to the point, it appears that the Great Clunking Fist of Birks is simply pointing out (a) the inability of the average journalist to get absolutely any single simple concept right ("Beaufort scale != Hurricane scale"); (b) a marked tendency amongst the ignorami to refuse to check their sources; (c) a ludicrous desire to exaggerate for effect, which doesn't really work anyway because the underlying assumptions are buried in a heap of excrement. cf plastic bags, global warming, or drawing to non-suited connectors when out of position.

Not that I want to put words in Pete's mouth, of course. Nice piece of pedantry, btw.

Re: Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Actually, 66 radians per second. My bad -- the divisor is radius, not diameter.

Re: Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Much though I would like to claim an astute assessment of journalistic incompetence, I fear that I must hold up my hands here. The Beaufort Scale, which I have only once referred to at "Gale Force 10", is, I believed, termed "Hurricane Force 11". I was typing quickly and assuming too quickly that the journalist concerned was a twat. He may well have been, but in this case it was my fault. I always write about hurricanes in Saffort-Simpson terms, rather than in the shipping forecast measurement. I forgot that "Gale Force" in Beaufort Land can reach "Hurricane Force" at a certain level.

PJ

Re: Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, that's all right, then. Further to my inability to handle basic maths, I should admit that the fact that v = ω/r implies that I'm not talking about a divisor, but rather a multiplier.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. That's what it said in the rubric for my A-Level maths, anyway.

I'm presumably missing something about hurricanes here. I thought that S-S started at Beaufort 12 and worked upwards in some inscrutable and pointless way. You appear to indicate that the two actually overlap, with B10 or B11 (not sure which) becoming S-S1.

It still looks like journalistic laziness to me. I take a simple view on this. If the forty-foot poplar behind the house chooses to break in half and spear through the roof of your bathroom and into the tiled floor (not that I would know anything about that, of course), then the weather is Bad. If my umbrella turns inside-out, then the weather is merely Annoying. It would be peachy if journalists could at least pass on a degree of accuracy on this one.

Incidentally, how do you know that it's a "new" mouse, as opposed to a "slightly used" one? I can see the headlines in Tinseltown now -- "George Romero meets Agatha Christie in ... The Mousetrap Returns!"

You don't need cheese. You don't need Maltesers. You don't even need an EMP device, although a sufficiently powerful one would endear you to any local jihadists.

What you need, my man, is a butler.

Re: Beaufort will be spinning in his grave!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

That would, of course, have been more appropriate had I written "What you need, my man, is a detective."

I'm batting 0.000 at this point.

Entrapment

[(Anonymous)]

Ive been told that Maltesers work a treat - cheese is just used in Tom & Jerry cartoons apparently. I should be up in the loft this evening with a torch looking for signs of rodent activity as my daughter has mentioned about a scratching noise above her bedroom.
Keith S

Deterrent

[(Anonymous)]

I recommend one of those deterrents that you plug into an electrical socket. The ones that have an electric pulse component as well as a sonic component are highly effective and they don't mess with your other appliances.

Re: Deterrent

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I would quite like a machine gun, to be honest. This mouse seems to be able to get the stuff off the trap without getting caught. But, dammit, he'll get careless, I know he will.

Where's the fun in deterrence? He'll only go away and breed.

PJ

Re: Deterrent

[(Anonymous)]

Woohoo,

Eliot Spitzer, the moralist crusader has got himself in trouble in a prostitution ring investigation. Seems he doesn't quite live up to the standards he expects of others. This is the bastard who screwed over Mastercard for processing gambling payments - long before the Port Security Bill.

Can we now hope that Bill Frist is caught with his pants down too?

DY

Re: Deterrent

[(Anonymous)]

I've had a couple of close encounters of the furry kind. Squirrels were responsible for the noises in our roof and after attempting to block ingress routes, cut down tree branches, we trapped the bugger using a 'humane' trap and I then took the little bugger across the river and 5 miles away (apparently they have a 2 mile homing instinct.

Last night I met another resident, one very small mouse, who scurried away rapidly and is now hiding in the utility room with no routes in or out. I tried leaving the humane squirrel trap in there last night but he's probably small enough to get through the mesh - and he didn't seem to take the cheese (fresh out of Maltesers guv). So I'll set to in there this morning, clearing behind the washing machine etc and see if I can't corner the bugger.

Re: Deterrent

[(Anonymous)]

I can confirm that meece go berserk for cheap milk chocolate. They don't seem to eat much of it, but they sure love ripping the foil off chocolate Father Christmases as I discovered... at Christmas.

The only mouse we caught in our four humane traps was a victim of bad luck. He ran out of a hole in our skirting board and shot behind our telly while we were watching it. My quick-thinking other half put one of the traps facing out from the hole it had come from and lo and behold five minutes later it hurtled into the trap. We dumped it on the railway embankment at the bottom of the garden, hoping that it might hitch a lift on the West Croydon to London Bridge train. But we think it's back.

Lurker