Amelanchier

New England Dynaglide Throwline.- 2mm

Manufacturers guff – DynaGlide™ is a highly visible, snag-resistant 12-strand throwline of 100% Dyneema® SK-75 fiber that is pre-stretched and tension set and then coated with tinted vinyl in a controlled curing operation, binding the vinyl to the fibers. The result is a very strong, very low stretch throwline that is compact and “slick” that glides easily over branches and through crotches in trees without snagging or catching. The lightweight design permits the use of lighter weight throwlines than traditional throwlines.Available in 2mm diameter in two high visibility colors: Orange and Green

Bought a pair of these lines almost a year ago to replace my old polyethylene lines that were getting a bit short and knackered. I’ve given them a fair test I’d say!

So, Its a throwline. What makes it worth £15 odd per line?

Well New England consider this line to have two unique selling points –

Its Dyneema.

Its got a funky vinyl coating.

There are other dyneema lines out there, though they’re not marketed and packaged as throwlines. Its important to note that a dyneema line is a completely different animal to the classic polyethylene.

Its static, so it won’t stretch and its super strong. (I’ve hung off it!) This means if the bark friction is too great, you can’t twang it down in the same way because there’s no elasticity. More on this later!

A quick note note on the strength of Dyneema. I know a couple of guys wo work at the National Trust, where they’re not allowed to climb. If they see a hanger / dead limb they’ll isolate it with the throwline, tie it to the landrover and drive off!

Dyneema also stores well. I doesn’t have the same knotty, tangly bad habits of some braided lines like Zing-it. I’ve let some of my less able groundies put the line away and its very forgiving (just like me)! Its also splicable (is that a word?) with a hollow braid splice.

Anyhow, lets get on to that coating and back to that friction issue. I use 8oz bags and basically, the friction is too great. Its a real fight to get the bloody bag down on smooth bark like Ash. Smaller diameter branches are worse than larger ones. I lob it a bit harder now to ensure that enough line runs through the union to allow greater velocity on the down side. Then for isolation, I’ll clip another bag on. The dynaglide runs fine with 16oz.

When the lines were new, it was worse! The coating wears off in the first couple of weeks til it is pretty much non-existent. What was the point? I couldn’t tell you…

I’ve adapted to the line because I thought it would break in more and get smoother with time – one year in and it ain’t happened!
My other reason for sticking with it was that I got sick of hitting a good point, pulling my rope in and the line snapping. This, I can say, has never happened!

All in all, dependable stuff. However, if you like light bags, prepare to change your style!

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My fall back plan Tony. Another student contacted me this morning who had used the FOI for a similar survey. A local TO said this morning they were a pain.

 

If I can network around the country to reach sympathetic people it may prove more productive - I don't know.

 

If anyone who can help, directly or indirectly, does I may not need to go along the official route. It's early days but the response over the last 18hrs has been surprising, direct offers - "I can do that for you" and indirect " contact this person" or " I'll speak to this person at such and such authority".

 

Tree people are generally good people:thumbup:

Ah, I meant that with regard to your initial database of contacts.

Be careful not to populate your research with too many opinions of the'good people' - it may not give you a representative sample. Those that are proactive respondents might well be proactive with TPO administration. Or worse, bearing an axe for grinding.

As for FOI requests being a pain - well, I don't know what to say. Perhaps we should just get rid of them and go back to the good old days...

Have you considered utilising FOI requests?

https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/the-freedom-of-information-act

Found it and not exactly as I remembered but useful background.

Its from my regular bed time reading - Carbohydrate Reserves in plants- synthesis and regulation.

 

"According to the predominant carbohydrate storage compounds, starch or fat, trees are classified as "starch trees" like most ring-porous angiosperms, and some conifers like species of abies and picea, and "fat trees" like most diffuse-porous angiosperms and species of pinus."

 

Sad but I find this quite interesting!

You're entirely on the right track. Fraxinus is within the same family as the Olives (Oleaceae) and stores much of its energy as oleic acid - the same fatty acid that is a major component of plant oils and animal fat.

I first registered with planning portal in 2008, it was a load of rubbish, so carried on with paper not that I do many applications.

 

Tried again last year much improved but just would not coupe with my computer! So printed out the forms and sent old school.

 

Did one just now, then realised what the problem was/is after all those £millions it could not handle a "." The humble dot is part of the file name generated by my Mac, I can delete it from my saved file but it adds it back on when I upload it!

 

Back to printing and stamps. Any thoughts on the dot?

You're talking about the file extension right? As in example.doc or example.pdf? That's native to all three main operating systems - it's not a special mac thing sorry. I upload files with extensions shown all the time so it's unlikely to be your problem. Extra full stops in a file name can be a problem on any OS (yes, that includes mac, they don't 'just work'.) though so try to avoid filenames like example.plan.pdf.

And whilst it is often the case that the uselessness of an Govt. IT system is directly proportional to the amount of public money spent on it, I also think it's unlikely to be the case that a website "couldn't cope" with your computer. You wouldn't say a book couldn't cope with its reader or that some music couldn't cope with you listening to it. (Well you wouldn't unless you owned a mac...)

Inevitably reference to QTRA, as in the system and not its company or any individuals, is bound to come up, and I think it would be somewhat artificial to discuss the quantification of tree risk assessment without using QTRA as a reference source...

Humour me. I can only think of two ways in which QTRA (the system) would arise in discussion; in a discussion on the facts or in a discussion of the merits of those facts. In either discussion, there is the potential for dispute - for example Acer may disagree with your assessment of what constitutes a fact about QTRA and would be in a position to complain that you have misrepresented the system on a public forum. Similarly it is not too hard to imagine that he may also disagree with your opinion on them.

In either event it would be unfair of me to to prevent him from responding - just as it would be if I prevented your comments on QTRA from being heard elsewhere on the site.

So I can keep the thread on track provided we don't enter that territory or we can just allow arbtalk to do its thing and you'll have to put up with the involvement of one or more critical voices and derailing by people who like the idea but will never help you move it forward beyond a protest against what's there already.

With regard to your caveat - wait til you've posted something that needs it!

...can't we have one tiny part of the world wide web where t.r.a. can be discussed without fear of being badgered?

I would suggest to the moderators of this site that any further attempts to attack the personal or professional standing of contributors of this thread are treated as 'flaming' and are immediately removed.

Here's what we're going to do - we're going to start again. Sort of.

This time though, consider this your part of the sandpit where you are free from the callous pernicious tactics of the intergalactic hegemony of the evil QTRA empire. Free to stand tall and proud; free to muse on the suitability of different acronyms and the value of a statistical life (or part thereof); free to reinvent the wheel if you so choose... Free to stick it to the man and bring down the system. I'll be here supervising and I'll delete all off topic threads.

One condition though. No discussion of QTRA . Otherwise I'll be obliged to offer a right to reply.

Solomon himself couldn't be fairer.

Following a conversation with my local stove installer he informed me that from 2016 new homes will no longer be supplied with a gas main, I didn't believe it until further research which it appears to be true!

 

Good news for all us firewood suppliers

 

Gas to be banned in new houses in UK | Current Events | Fun Trivia Community Forums

 

I suspect your stove installer is suffering from a combination of Chinese whispers and wishful thinking. There simply is no plan to ban gas for new homes. Homes built from 2016 will be free to have gas as an energy source but they will have to meet the stricter efficiency targets of the zero carbon homes policy and its related regulations.

Its light on sensationalist sound-bites but the facts (damnable accursed facts) are here.

http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn06678.pdf

Perhaps the stove supplier / fitting industry should stick to to their usual shtick of predicting an imminent ice age rather than making up disprovable govt. policies.

Ah it was low hanging fruit. And a way of avoiding the question!

Isn't the probability of 15 out 30 coins (yet to be tossed ) ending tails up is whatever proportion of combinations that makes up out of all possible combinations?

So 2^30 gives us the number of possibilities and 30!/(15!*15!) gives us the number of those possibilities that contain 15 tails so (30!/(15!*15!)/(2^30) giving us P=0.14?

That is kind of my limit with numbers though so tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

Oops, misread that the first time - sorry.

 

I think the probability of 1 person out of 1024 correctly predicting a sequence of ten coin tosses would be closer to P=0.63 :-)

P=0.63 would mean that your guy would be more likely to guess ten tosses than one toss?

However, post event, I would agree that the probability of the winner correctly predicting the sequence of ten coin tosses would be 1. That would be because; in order to win they would have correctly predicted the sequence, therefore it would have already happened, therefore the P=1 :-)

But there's the rub. The chances that one person in 1024 (ten rounds of one-on-one) can correctly predict the outcome of ten consecutive coin tosses is pretty far out there P=0.00000095367431640625 ((2^10*(1/1024) I think?) but structuring the event in a tournament means that the probability of one person out of the competing 1024 doing so is P=1...

The artifice re-frames the probability - someone has to win (all other things being equal) so the otherwise unlikely outcome is certain.

It makes me wonder if we don't make that subtle shift sometimes with trees.

Is the probability of 15 of the 30 coins being tails up?

I would imagine that as the event has already happened the probability is 1.

As an aside (like you guys need an aside right?), I can show you someone who will correctly guess the outcome of ten consecutive coin tosses in the order that they happen.

All I need are 1024 (2^10) volunteers and a ten round tournament. Winner correctly guesses the toss and moves on - loser weeps into his beer over what could have been. The probability of any one sequence of tosses is 0.0009765625 but the probability that the winner (one person in just over a thousand) correctly guesses that sequence is 1...

Thirty rounds is possible but a little impractical (2^30) - you'd need just over a billion people.

Yeah, lucky you! I often have to spend whole days surveying in constant rain, puddles of water colecting on teh screen and having to be wiped off every 30 seconds. Also I have done days on end in sub-zero temperatures when a swipe-screen device is pretty hopeless because if you took your gloves off to use them you would literally have frostbite by mid morning.

 

There's definitely not just one right solution, but in the west of scotland I assume the worst and have chosen kit accordingly.

Thankfully, it is a rare day that I survey anything in the rain. We also have a company policy on low temps insofar as we operate reduced survey durations during cold spells (anything with a met-office "feels like" temp of below 0 degrees C). On the whole I've found clients quite reasonable with explaining those kind of delays - I think it safe to say that I have it easy and am not likely to relocate to compete in your area!

The Touch £G seems unbelievably cheap, I think it is now discontinued but can still be bought. Does it import GPS co-ordinates into a spreadsheet automatically?

Yep discontinued but still plenty available on ebay etc. I don't think it could log GPS co-ordinates natively but there is still quite a back catalogue of freeware that might be capable; e.g., Free Top 10 Windows Mobile 6.1 Classic GPS Downloads

Oh the pain... Did you find any tricks for manually adjusting .tsps? I have a feeling there's no shortcut.

In short - no. But I found the support staff reasonably helpful when I sent them my bloated efforts by email.

Regarding the weatherproof issue, I have just realised that I am lucky enough to undertake over 90% of my work within the driest region in the UK. Others may not be so lucky and you truly have my sympathies The Touch 3G can sit in a clear drybag like this one https://www.alpkit.com/products/aqua-wallit with no impact on the functionality of the touchscreen.

We run Pocket GIS on old HTC phones (Jade / Touch 3G) and then upload to Pear technology's PTMapper PRO and then to AutoCAD LT 2007.

Can't recall all the prices but PGIS was £500, PTMapper PRO is about £750, AutoCAD LT2007 often goes for about £400-500 second hand on ebay and the HTC Touch 3G is about £50 BNIB. Accurate and quick GPS, robust enough to handle knocks, bluetooth to link with our trupulse, lightweight, easily recharged and cheap enough to not worry about being too precious with it. You can even use it as a phone... It's not waterproof but then who wants to be surveying in weather bad enough to test that? Not me anyway. So all in = £1800.

I wrote my own translation schemes and survey themes using PGIS when we had it at the council. Days of my life I'll never get back. We now have PTSurvey which IIRC comes free with the PTMapper software - its basically a third party GUI for writing survey templates in PGIS and it's childlishly simple. I can make a custom survey template, and have it uploaded, tested, debugged and ready to go out on site within twenty odd minutes.

Even as a climber with interest in all things trees, its often painfully boring watching a climbing competition for any length of time, and from my experience most of the spectators seem to be made up of WAGS. here lies the key I think. Make it more exciting for the spectators which will draw a bigger crowd, which will in turn draw more revenue leading to a bigger comp, with bigger prizes, and a bigger turn out.

 

Now someone just needs to work out how to make it more exciting for spectators!

As an ex-climber, ex-ISA TCC competitor and organiser/judge for the East of England Cutters & Climbers for the past eight years I feel confident in saying that the answer to a successful comp depends on how you define the idea of being successful. Semantic word trickery aside, what I mean is; what is the goal of the comp? Who is it for? What is it trying to achieve for them?

If your raison d'etre is crowning a champion and rewarding him/her handsomely then you centre the event primarily around testing climbers to differentiate them based on the qualities you think embody a champion. Everything else is secondary - it has to be; but you shouldn't be surprised if some of those secondary things become so marginal that they barely exist or if entrant numbers dwindle. (It's not a criticism, it's a necessary side effect of that degree of focus.) When you frame the arguments for entering/supporting a comp as "...you might win something if you can beat the other guys who win things regularly..." and "...you might learn something...", I think you unintentionally put people off. That meritocratic angle doesn't recognise individual aspirations, fears or values. I think there is scope for being a lot less serious about things in most competitions.

If you want to entertain, and perhaps inform, spectators you have to go about things in a different way. Firstly you have to base the event around them - you have to travel to them (not expect them to come to you), you have to cater, provide access to accommodation (or at least see that someone else does), some free booze after hours and most importantly – you have to recognise that they will get bored/tired of watching climbers and give them something else to do. If you don’t do that, they’ll just go home and not come back. You can help stave off the boredom with some sort of interpretation (info boards / commentary) but you can’t hold it off forever. None of these things can be achieved well in a field in the middle of nowhere. Every decision about comp structure and operation has to be based on whether it’s interesting or amusing to watch.

We hold the Cutters & Climbers within a larger show and our remit is to entertain. The competition is secondary and although I’d say it was well rewarded by our sponsors (we give five main prizes >£150 and this year issued general prizes to all 38 competitors) everyone is fully aware that we’re only there to put a show on for the wider event. We always get good public feedback, the show organisers annually concede more arena floorspace and over the last 5 years we've had an average of 40 entrants competing as many times as they like on 3-7 events over two days. Are we challenging international class climbers? Absolutely not and I'm glad – I think we have our balance right .

acts and statutes are NOT laws, they are, and always will be acts and statutes, there have been no new laws since magna carta, and as long as we have a parlimentary system there wont be, there can only be acts of parliment......and as we have been operating under naval law sinc way way back, its all a crock of sh1t anyway......why do you think the acused stands in the dock?

Don't post banal FOTL psuedo-legal gibberish on this site please. Its embarrassing.

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I found 'genetic mosaic' challenging; the phrase rhymes, but the meaning escapes me.

 

Conceptually frenetic; not at all prosaic.

 

Certainly kinetic, but is it a 'mosaic'?

 

Not a montage, assortment or medley,

 

It's organically growing, readily, steadily.

 

I'll stop now, 'fore Tony has a cow...

I see your couplets and raise you a haiku;

A single bud forms

With meristem mutated

A new path begins

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Tony, now you've confused me. Why do you suggest that these trees are mosaics rather than grown from a single seed? Separate vascular structures that all share the same common origin/genetics was what I thought was being discussed.

Meristematic tissue can mutate as it differentiates to become genetically distinct from its parent/neighbour tissue. So the buds on a twig can be subtley different from each other - if those buds go on to form twigs and then branches, then parts of the tree may respond differently to environmental adaptive forces (light regimes, pests, etc). The parts of the tree can be likened to the stones in a mosaic...

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Which word did you find challenging Tony?

Only read the abstract but my initial thoughts are that it sits well with the idea of trees as a cumulative genetic mosaic.

Just read this thread from the beginning to here let's move on.

David, let's see the pics of your time with stihlben, sounds like you had a good time, hopefully this will lead to more work for you in the future.

What Andy said. But all will note that I've taken the liberty of tidying up a bit - don't make a mess.

Top handle 200T stolen at the end of Feb from roadside work site in North Norfolk. Almost brand new (bought in 2011 but only just brought into service).

Clearly we'd like it back but we'd also like to offer a £100 reward for information leading to its recovery.

Any information contact [email protected]

Just a heads up...

BS 8545:2014 - Trees: from nursery to independence in the landscape. Recommendations

On second thoughts Laz - get your head down. Nothing to see here

Wouldn't descending involve an acceleration as well?

Rise Lazarus...