Clive James on man-made global warning. Nail, head.
Whether or not you believe that the earth might have been getting warmer lately, if you are sceptical about whether mankind is the cause of it, the scepticism can be enough to get you called a denialist.
It's a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated.
Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn't happened yet, and there are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by the same computers that can't even predict what will happen to the weather next week.
In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that's the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don't know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled and it isn't.
BBC iPlayer here, or a transcript of the whole thing here.
Good stuff.
H/t to Counting Cats in Zanzibar.
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Engine Pr0n
Just thought I would include a couple of photos of the work-in-progress that is the XT and its rusty appendages ...
First, with the cam cover removed ...
And second with the head off, revealing a nice dirty piston.
Golly, that is a big one, as it were. It's bigger than the last piston I looked in the face, which was on my 2.25 petrol Land Rover. And I thought they were big. The engine I fettled before that was a Rover 3.5 V8 in my trialler, and they were tiny in comparison.
On the advice of a complete stranger (and Internet acquaintance, this time), I will need a lot of heat to shift the rusty bits, so I have taken out the valves and set the workshop out ready for a session of heat'n'hammer later this week. I will also lap the valves in, as there is evidence that they aren't sealing too well, and therefore harming the compression. I haven't lapped valves for a long time. Should be fun.
First, with the cam cover removed ...
And second with the head off, revealing a nice dirty piston.
Golly, that is a big one, as it were. It's bigger than the last piston I looked in the face, which was on my 2.25 petrol Land Rover. And I thought they were big. The engine I fettled before that was a Rover 3.5 V8 in my trialler, and they were tiny in comparison.
On the advice of a complete stranger (and Internet acquaintance, this time), I will need a lot of heat to shift the rusty bits, so I have taken out the valves and set the workshop out ready for a session of heat'n'hammer later this week. I will also lap the valves in, as there is evidence that they aren't sealing too well, and therefore harming the compression. I haven't lapped valves for a long time. Should be fun.
Thank you, Mr Pirsig
Fresh from a night's sleep, I approached the recalcitrant bolt again. In three seconds, I had the answer. The bolt was set down in a well, which prevented me getting the Allen key into the socket far enough. The only (very limited) angle where I could get the key in fully was blocked by the frame. So, looking at the situation from a different angle, it was the frame that was the problem, not the well. And when I looked at the frame to see what, exactly, was stopping the Allen key swinging, I found it was a thin metal strip with formed a guide to the horn wires. I bent it out of the way, and undid the bolt.
Obvious when you think about it. Not obvious at all when you are feeling 'stuck'. Although daylight and fresh head might have helped, I suppose.
The cylinder head is held on by six bolts. Yes, it is six - I checked with the manual. Five are easy to get at, but the sixth isn't. It's tucked away, underneath the front of the engine, and again the frame is stopping any kind of tool access. I may have to lift the engine a couple of inches to get at it.
One step forward, two steps back. So what's new?
UPDATE:
Six, no, seven bolts [1]. There was a useless little Allen bolt tucked away and apparently serving no purpose, but this time I spotted it immediately and gave it what for. The sixth bolt came out without a problem, strangely.
The cylinder head is now off. It all needs a good decoke, but it all seems OK in there. I am now abandoning the subtle tools in favour of a hammer and cold chisel to get the rusty exhaust headers out. Wish me luck.
[1] Nobody expects, ect.
Obvious when you think about it. Not obvious at all when you are feeling 'stuck'. Although daylight and fresh head might have helped, I suppose.
The cylinder head is held on by six bolts. Yes, it is six - I checked with the manual. Five are easy to get at, but the sixth isn't. It's tucked away, underneath the front of the engine, and again the frame is stopping any kind of tool access. I may have to lift the engine a couple of inches to get at it.
One step forward, two steps back. So what's new?
UPDATE:
Six, no, seven bolts [1]. There was a useless little Allen bolt tucked away and apparently serving no purpose, but this time I spotted it immediately and gave it what for. The sixth bolt came out without a problem, strangely.
The cylinder head is now off. It all needs a good decoke, but it all seems OK in there. I am now abandoning the subtle tools in favour of a hammer and cold chisel to get the rusty exhaust headers out. Wish me luck.
[1] Nobody expects, ect.
Saturday, 24 October 2009
Great cartoon
Picked up from another blog, and I can't remember which - sorry! Worth sharing, though.
Stuckness
Writing the previous post reminded me of a passage in ZAMM (link below) on 'stuckness'. It's one that stuck (heh) in my mind for a long time after I first read the book. I've found the whole passage and I'm going to copy it here. If you don't like philosophy, or mechanical things, or non-traditional approaches to problems, look away now. Your loss.
The passage starts with a hypothetical situation - you are trying to get a screw out of a side-cover and it won't turn. In your haste, you have applied too much force and have torn out the slot, so that your screwdriver will no longer work. (Anyone who has worked on Japanese bikes up to about 1990 will remember the engine screws made of pressed milk-bottle tops that they used to use.) So now you are stuck. In Pirsig's words:
Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
He continues:
You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck ...
This book is no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is a hypothesis for how you are going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you are doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.
It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.
What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness" in other words - are completely outside its domain ...
Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollow-flexible" attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded full of ideas.
The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 24
The passage starts with a hypothetical situation - you are trying to get a screw out of a side-cover and it won't turn. In your haste, you have applied too much force and have torn out the slot, so that your screwdriver will no longer work. (Anyone who has worked on Japanese bikes up to about 1990 will remember the engine screws made of pressed milk-bottle tops that they used to use.) So now you are stuck. In Pirsig's words:
Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.
He continues:
You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck ...
This book is no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is a hypothesis for how you are going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you are doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.
It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.
What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness" in other words - are completely outside its domain ...
Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollow-flexible" attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded full of ideas.
The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 24
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