November 24, 2009: Engineers – on tap, never on top

At a gathering last night of the great and the good in the technical and media worlds, something was said that I found interesting. “Have you noticed,” the speaker said, “that when something big is launched in a blaze of publicity, the engineers who actually built it get no mention. It’s the architect or physicist that basks in the limelight. But when it goes wrong, it’s the engineers who have to fix it.”

He cited the Millennium Bridge and the Large Hadron Collider as examples. Both of these were headline news when they first opened, but when things went wrong the people who had been so prominent at the beginning faded away, grumbling and blaming everybody else for the failure. The engineers, meanwhile, quietly set to work and remedied the errors.

Why is the engineer’s voice so rarely heard? Back in June of this year, the House of Commons’ Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee published a report entitled “Engineering – turning ideas into reality”. It suggested that a Chief Engineering Adviser should be appointed, to be directly responsible to the Prime Minister. The Government’s response was that it did not accept the case for a Chief Engineering Adviser; the engineering voice would be through the existing Chief Scientific Adviser. This was in spite of the strong case made by the IUSS Committee that the scientist was not sufficiently attuned to the literal “nuts and bolts” of engineering.

It was Churchill who said, at the time of planning the D-Day Mulberry Harbours, that “the engineer should always be on tap, never on top”. It seems this attitude prevails today.

Compare and contrast, my children, with the status of the engineer in the highest levels of our competitor countries’ administration. Then ask whether these contrasting attitudes could explain the success of these countries and our own falling behind.

November 23, 2009: Those floods – preceded by an apology

Some of you have noted that I have been less than diligent lately, and my Friday-morning missives haven’t appeared. There are two reasons for this: I have a night out on Thursdays and composing pithy thoughts is not easy on the morning after; also, my computer runs a virus-check on Friday mornings and everything slows down. I can’t stand the pain so I might as well give up – with an apology, of course, to those of you who look out for my words every day.

Now to the floods that devastated the North-West over the past few days. Obviously, these were due to exceptional weather conditions in the area and, realistically, there is little that can be done to prevent damage in such circumstances. However, when Local Authorities don’t pay attention to routine maintenance serious flooding can, and will, occur in far less severe weather.

Where a road dips to pass under a railway bridge, it is essential that the drainage there is not obstructed. A drain under such a bridge near my home is currently blocked with leaves. It has been so for quite some time. It won’t take much rain to flush down further leaves which will clog the small spaces that are currently unobstructed, and the road will then flood.

This is not an isolated example. The gutters and gullies throughout this area are full of leaves. The pavements too are littered with piles of slippery leaves because they are not swept frequently enough, making walking a hazardous occupation – not only for the frail and elderly.

Within the past few days, some attempt has been made to sweep the pavements but because the sodden piles of fallen leaves have been well trodden-down, but they are still there – it will need a shovel to remove them. The Council’s reply will no doubt be that this is the time of years when leaf-fall is at its peak – to which I reply that this is hardly new, yet the clearing of roads and gutters is worse now than it used to be.

Failure to carry out simple routine maintenance no doubt saves money in the short term, but the long-term costs may be considerable in terms of damage to property when the road floods, and hospital care for people who slip on the mouldering leaves.

It’s “accountants’ logic” again – short-term thinking to balance today’s budget, with no thought of the overall cost.

November 19, 2009: You read it here first!

Three items have leaped out of the press at me recently. One headline said “Birth control may be best brake on climate change”, referring to a report by the UN Population Fund which predicted a global population of 10.5 billion by 2050, up from 6.8 billion now. (What did I say yesterday?)

The second item was a report that coal-fired power stations in the UK were benefitting from a drop in coal price from $224 a tonne in 2008 to $69 yesterday. Leave aside the question of why we price this home-produced fuel in dollars, it underlines what I have frequently said: it makes sense to burn a fuel that we don’t need to import. It’s a great pity that our mining industry has been allowed to decay as it has, but it’s a tribute to our miners and the mining companies that they are producing coal at all. And as I have often proclaimed here, we could burn all this coal with no measurable effect on global warming. And we’d be burning it in trusty, reliable, workhorse power plants.

Another report, a few days ago in E&T Magazine, dealt with another of my bête noir subjects: low-energy lightbulbs – compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Apparently there’s a thing called the European CFL Quality Charter and this has reported that, since these lamps lose brightness as they age, by the end of their life, they are giving out only 60% of the light they did when they were new. The recommendation is that you should ignore statements printed on the packaging, saying that (for example) an 11 W bulb is equivalent to a 60 W tungsten GLS lamp. You should actually buy a 16 W CFL for the same job! So you sit like a spotlit stage-star in a blaze of light for a few months before the light level returns to the comfortable level you had before you were forced (by the EU) to embark on this crazy voyage! Our government’s Energy-Saving Trust (EST) waters down or ignores these findings completely on its Website. That site also ignores another inconvenient truth: that CFL’s don’t like being turned on and off frequently. Because the EST doesn’t like this truth, it has dropped such “rapid-cycle” testing entirely from its test programmes. It says this is because it does not consider it “proves a good representation of product quality” – although tests in the US showed that over a quarter of the samples subjected to rapid-cycle testing failed. So, if you change your mind as you are about to leave a room at night and want to go back in, don’t switch on the lamp you just turned off – “it’s not a fair test”.

As if we needed further proof of madness, new rules coming in next year mean that a lamp that is today rated A for efficiency and recommended to replace a 100W GLS bulb will after next September be rated at B (or lower) and labelled as bright enough to replace a 60W incandescent bulb!

By the way, E&T Magazine also reports that September 2010 will see the introduction of mandatory EU labelling for all CFLs in the UK “featuring a deluge of technical information including lumen output, colour temperature in Kelvins, switching cycles before failure, life-time and warm-up time”.

Now children, tell me what you know about Lumens or colour temperature.

Apart from leading to the boxes containing the CFLs being much, much bigger than they are at present (more trees chopped down for wood-pulp), or requiring such small print that you can’t read it, this information should make interesting reading when you go out to buy a bulb!

November 18, 2009: Carbon footprints vs population growth?

One of the advantages of being retired is that we are no longer confined to going out and about only on weekends. We went down to a National Trust property on Monday and the whole experience was a pleasure.

The roads were empty; no jostling for position at traffic lights, no stop-start inching along, no hint of road-rage. At the property we could wander along empty footpaths (it helped, of course, that it was a lovely sunny and mild Autumn day). In the shop we could work our way along the displays, taking our time. There was no queue at the cafeteria, and nothing had sold out.

It brought back to mind a point that I have frequently made here before: it’s not CO₂ that’s the problem, it’s over-population. If there were fewer people we would need fewer power stations; the ones that were left could burn whatever fuel they liked with no fear of damaging the environment; our rivers wouldn’t be over-burdened with effluent; we wouldn’t plunder the planet for minerals; schools wouldn’t be over-crowded, so each pupil would get more attention … and so on. (Oh, and by the way, we will cut our carbon emissions too!) Anyway, the list is endless.

The enormous and incessant hype about “carbon footprints” will have minimal effect on global warming. A modicum of campaigning about the population explosion would be far better.

November 17, 2009: Edward Woodward - a failed engineer?

Amongst all the tributes to Edward Woodward, I heard an item on Radio 4 yesterday in which they said he had at one time worked in engineering. “Woodward found acting better than working in a sanitary engineers' office” said the broadcast.

That’s one problem with raising the profile of the engineering profession; convincing youngsters that engineering is actually fun – exciting, stimulating and challenging. And while society fails to recognise that fact, actors will get massive coverage in obituaries when they die, while few engineers will.

Showbiz people loudly proclaim that "there's no business like show business", but that's arrogant presumption. I once got involved with amateur dramatics, and experienced the buzz of staging a performance, the suspense and excitement while it ran, and the bonhomie at the end-of performance celebrations. It was really great, and I can see why youngsters love it.

But I have also been involved with major engineering projects, where all of us experienced the same degree of buzz, suspense, excitement and bonhomie. Only, what we were doing was not ephemeral; it wasn’t here today, gone tomorrow. What we were building wasn’t for the entertainment of crowds, it was for the lasting benefit of the people.

That’s the message we need to get across to young people.

 
November 16, 2009: Adding insult to injury

I apologise for the absence of a blog on Friday (you should have got used to not having one on Saturdays and Sundays by now, but I feel that I do deserve a weekend break!). I was so incandescent with rage that I felt it unwise to sit at the computer in case I said something actionable.

It was the report on salaries and expenses paid to BBC staff that got me going. The thought that some of these people are being paid more than the Prime Minister was bad enough, but to then be told that “the figures don’t include all salaries paid to people being paid £100,000 a year, because their jobs are not responsible enough to warrant disclosure”!

Whaatt? I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard it, and I couldn’t trust my eyes when I read it. The BBC is saying that some of their staff have jobs that are not responsible … but they still pay them £100,000 a year or more?

Look, mateys! It’s our money that keeps you in clover, and you are dipping your snouts in those extravagant troughs at our expense. You are an opinionated load of self-important, self-seeking oafs who think you are superior, but who distort the truth (the true nature of global warming), ignore inconvenient truths (mankind’s small contribution to climate change) and stab our soldiers in the back (Iraq and Afghanistan).

We should all – and I mean all – refuse to pay our licence fees until the Corporation is thoroughly shaken up. Think of them trying to take the whole nation to court!

November 12, 2009: Whingeing BBC

As usual, the clever dicks at the BBC leap with whoops of joy on any sign of dissention when it comes to matters of defence. The American Ambassador in Afghanistan wants the US to send no more troops to the war while Afghan politics are in the mess they are, the Army Commander there is furious. That’s quite enough for our BBC friends who see this suggestion of dissent as a sign of weakness, to be exploited with maximum effort. They’ll be there, driving wedges into the cracks.

Their agenda, of course, is to negate all our efforts to stabilise and bring peace to that country. As I said a few days ago, if we pull out before the job’s done we will be insulting all those military personnel who have been killed by enemy action in Afghanistan. Their lives will have been wasted and, in the future, when passenger aircraft are blown out of the sky, bombs detonated in shopping areas and drugs pour into our streets, our crowing enemies will rub their hands with glee. And the good folk of the BBC will be claiming that we should have finished the job in Afghanistan.

November 11, 2009: The good old days

Now here’s something for a learned professor to get stuck into; a subject for a deep study into economics, leading to lots of fascinating dissertations. The subject is why, when we have so many tools at our disposal today, are things no better now than they were yesterday? In fact, why are they so much worse?

Before you rush off and say it’s all in the mind, or that costs today are so much higher, just give me a moment to explain.

In the good old days, I could walk along the pavement in the autumn without having to skirt piles of lethally slippery rotting leaves. Today, the expensive street-sweeping machine roars and hisses along the road, brushing and sucking where it can – which is not in the gutters, where the leaves collect, because cars are usually parked there – and certainly not on the pavement. Sooner or later the gutters clog and flood, or an old person slips on the leaves and ends up in hospital.

Which brings us to the medical field. In the good old days, if I caught some worrying lurgy, a call to the local surgery would be quickly followed by a house visit from the doctor. Oh, the surgery was a grim, dingy place in those days, but we could always rely on home visits. Today the surgery is bright and shiny, one can log in from the touch screen, and soft music plays in the background, but home visits? Forget it.

And if you end up in hospital, do you really get better care than you did in the old days? The wards may be brighter and more cheerful, the machinery ever more elaborate, but what about the quality of care – and I mean care.

Anybody who has lived through these changes must see that these are inescapable facts, which clearly indicate that things were indeed better in the old days.

And that brings us back to the professorial study.  What are the real facts?

It’s easy to say that costs have risen so much that one can’t afford for doctors to make house calls. But is that really true? Sure, costs are higher, but so are taxes. It shouldn’t be beyond economists to relate costs to, say, average wages and thereby look at the economics of operating a medical practice. Then, if the councils say that the street-cleaning machines are so expensive that they can’t afford to pay for human beings to walk the pavements with brooms, should they be asked to look into the cost-effectiveness of those machines?

Get stuck in, professors, I can’t wait to see the answers.

November 10, 2009: Nuclear power – a deafening silence

Following yesterday’s announcement by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, that we are going to get 10 new nuclear power stations, there’s been a mixture of silence and predictably vacuous claptrap from the green lobbies.

Friends of the Earth’s Website says nothing about it, merely repeating the organization's faded (old, biased and highly misleading) mantra: “… learn more about our work to promote clean energy and efficiency as well as our effort to fight harmful energy sources including bad biofuels, big oil, dirty coal and other dirty fuels, and risky nuclear reactors”. (Let’s go out an buy candles fellas – or are they harmful too?)

The Greenpeace Website doesn’t say much about Miliband’s statement either. However, this morning we hear from Ben Ayliffe, the “head of their nuclear campaign” L that “the figures simply don’t add up … you can’t justify building more nuclear power stations when there is no solution to radioactive waste and when international regulators are saying there are huge uncertainties surrounding the basic safety of new nuclear designs.”

I have no doubt that Ayliffe will have dredged up some figures or statements from obscure sources to justify his claim over safety, but to say there is no solution to radioactive waste is a load of bull. There are very good procedures and technologies available already, and even more extreme ones are being planned. Ayliffe seems to forget that we get nuclear waste from all sorts of different sources where the levels of radiation are more long-lasting than waste from nuclear power stations. Is he suggesting that we put a stop to medical and industrial processes that cause them?

Meanwhile we are being told that each family in the country will be forced to pay a levy, for the next 20 years at least, to fund technology to capture carbon from coal-fired power stations. Lest anyone has missed (or forgotten) the point that I’ve said before about carbon capture and storage, what that does is bury carbon (and in the process shackle coal-burning plants with expensive and unproven technologies). Greenpeace is worried about burying radioactive waste (which becomes steadily less radioactive every second of every day) yet says nothing against burying carbon, which will still be carbon thousands of years from now.

So, what do I say about the latest statement on nuclear power stations? It’s about time, chummies; it’s too late already; and it’s a shame our politicians have led us to a point where we – the one-time leaders in nuclear power engineering – will have to import most of the people, technologies and materials that will be needed.

November 9, 2009: Don’t make their sacrifices worthless

If the BBC had adopted the stance during World War II that it does today, two things would have been certain: they would have been accused of “Spreading alarm and despondency”, and we would now be under the jackboot of Nazism.

As it is, every tragic death in Afghanistan is broadcast in harrowing detail, while every small victory of ours gets no mention, and attention is continually drawn to the public opinion polls that show that “most people want us to withdraw from Afghanistan”.

War is a horrible thing, but if we had not stood up to Hitler where would we be now?

We should never forget that those men and women who died in WW II and whom we remember at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, or around those war memorials across the country, lost their lives fighting so that we could have freedom. That freedom extends even to the thoughtless oafs who hurry by in their cars before the traffic is held up and they become delayed on the way to the shops.

People talk about the soldiers, sailors and airmen “giving their lives” for us. They did not give their lives; life was taken from them. But they took the risk because they believed in something and we respect their belief. Hitler was defeated as much by our national resolve as by our bombs and bullets – and we did have a clear resolve then, to get the job done.

Make no mistake, if we do withdraw from Afghanistan before that job is done, we as a nation will have let down every single one of our servicemen and women who have died out there. We will have made their sacrifice worthless.

If our enemies detect weakness in our resolve they will be heartened. But if they see a nation pulling together and showing determination to finish the job they will be more likely to listen and perhaps agree to talk.

And in the end it is only through talking that we will achieve peace. As long as a single idealist is left behind, believing that his or her suicide will earn them martyrdom and go towards defeating us, our lives will continue to be at risk, because you can never provide perfect protection against a fanatic with a bomb. But we will change their minds if we let them see our nation standing resolutely behind our forces, while at the same time our politicians show clear willingness to negotiate a peace agreement.

Back out now and we will be lost. People who want to see the destruction of our way of life will be heartened, and the small problems in Afghanistan will become big problems for the free world.

November 5, 2009: Intelligence, mothers and drivers

I repeated the point yesterday that it is the population explosion that poses the greatest threat to the planet. Today I went out shopping and – it must have been a bad day – I came to the conclusion that we should do two things immediately to help matters along.

First, nobody should be allowed to have babies until they have passed an intelligence test. That would cut out the mothers who do stupid things like stationing their prams across passageways while they pick over the clothes on the adjacent racks. That would in itself have a huge effect on the population growth.

Second, the award of a driving licence should be conditional on passing an intelligence test as well. Poof! The number of cars and trucks on the roads would be halved, at least.

As I said, it was a bad day!