sime42

Andrew the drover from a huge cattle station in the Australian outback appeared before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. "Have you ever done anything of particular merit?" St. Peter asked. "Well, I can think of one thing," the drover offered. "Once, on a trip to the back blocks of Broken Hill out in New South Wales, I came across a gang of bikers who were threatening a young sheila. I told them to leave her alone, but they wouldn't listen. So I approached the largest and most heavily tattooed biker and smacked him in the face, kicked his bike over, ripped out his nose ring, and threw it on the ground I yelled, "Now, back off!! Or I'll kick the s**t out of the lot of ya! St. Peter was impressed, "When did this happen?" "A couple of minutes ago."

I do believe you've spread yourself too thin this evening: multiple pointless arguments, with multiple people, across multiple threads. That would explain the lack of any cohesive reasoning so far. Bet it gives you that good old buzz of battle though. I suspect it's futile, but go on then, I'll try one last attempt to squeeze a coherent point out of you. So, elaborate on waste of time. What to you constitutes a good use of time? Other than the aforementioned mock battles. Theoretical as opposed to facts and common sense. Elaboration required again. Which bits about cars belong in the left hand column, and which belong in the right hand column?

There's plenty of multiculturalists here it's true, some good junglists too for that matter. But no, that was in the Nevada desert I think. Read the book. Have you been to Birmingham and had a bad experience or something? You've developed an odd preoccupation with the place recently. I don't have team mates, or indeed even a team. (I think all that guff is only in your own head tbqh.) I don't know Beth Rigby, but if I've dodged a question then it was inadvertently. Feel free to repeat it if you need to, or forever hold your peace.

Missed that bit in amongst the slop. Steel wheels on steel rails. At least, until someone clever develops a strain of mycelium that's suitable for tyres. Brake pads - you dont need them with regenerative braking.

I suggest you read the article. You'll get a much better informed analysis of the whole topic. A lazy AI question doesn't really bring a lot to the discussion. I didn't ask why cars are getting heavier anyway, it's easy enough to work out. Safety is one of the lesser factors actually, it's behind consumer preference, electrification and increased profits for the car makers. What's the point of EVs if they're barely better overall, due to their increasing size? The only silver lining is the regenerative braking, as Steven mentioned. The stats on car usage are crazy; most journeys are single occupancy of vehicles designed to carry 5 people. Passenger safety might well be improved, but it's at the cost of safety of other road users. Have a look at how much more dangerous SUVs are for cyclists and pedestrians. And that's just talking about impact consequences, not even considering air quality. <Larger cars/suv’s etc already are taxed more 🤷‍♂️ HGV’s pay an astronomical amount to be on the road. If you can find an alternative to rubber tyres or a new brake pad material, let me know if you need any financial assistance to get it going, I reckon that could be a winner. 🤪> So tax them more then. If the numbers of SUVs are increasing then they're obviously not taxed enough. HGVs - what do you think is inside most of the HGVs on our roads? I expect it's consumer crap that people don't need to waste their money on. Probably mostly from China, to add insult to injury. Get freight back onto the railways. The 100s of billions being wasted on HS2 would be far better spent on that. Don't you agree?

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The logic does kind of apply to cars, but the logic isn't being applied, if you see what I mean. Yes, they're cleaning up the combustion emissions, but the government is doing nothing, (that I've seen anyway), to address the problem of brake and tyre emissions. In fact the problem is getting worse year on year, as cars get ever bigger, heavier and more numerous. Looks like they've got the right idea in France. We could be taking a similar approach, rather than trying to stop people burning wood. Why do so many people need a SUV in a city anyway? 'Carspreading’ is on the rise - not everyone is happy WWW.BBC.CO.UK In the UK and across Europe, cars are becoming longer, wider and heavier.

I for one, would love to see some pictures please. I had a tour of a watermill in Brittany a couple of years ago, friends of friends. It was fascinating. There's seems to be no shortage of old watermills still kicking around in France.

Lots of people are making lots of things out of Mycelium now. Furniture seems to be a favourite. I can understand that. Making electronics from mushrooms is a bit more of a stretch. Growing Mycelium - Materials Assemble MATERIALSASSEMBLE.COM Discover the world of mycelium design with Materials Assemble. Explore sustainable cultivation, natural interior panels, and... ‘Nature’s original engineers’: scientists explore the amazing potential of fungi | Fungi | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM Unique properties of fungi have led to groundbreaking innovations in recent years, from nappies to electronics

Brilliant, that's going on my/my son's Christmas list. Thanks. We made lots of things like that as children, but I don't remember ever seeing a book of ideas.

I like your thinking here. So the new plan is: we all, alongsides our friends the fungi, set about devouring as much plastic as we can, before Alzheimer's sets in. We then take it six feet down with us when to depart, to leave a clean world for our children. Worth a shot I suppose. My brother once suggested that we could bury all the plastics deep underground, to one day revert back to something akin to crude oil and coal. That still seems like a sensible idea to me. It's got more legs than trying to pretend that we're recycling it, which is in reality just a mugs game.

We see it on here too frequently. Speaking in the context of the wider population, not of Arbtalkers: I reckon we might have reached the inflection point already, where more people get their "news" from socials and AI, rather than actual news agencies. Or "do their own research". This should be in its own thread really, but on AI doing science, I saw this today. Genesis Mission: why Trump’s plan to put AIs in charge of science could backfire THECONVERSATION.COM AI enthusiasts are right that projects like AlphaFold are a huge leap forward, but the philosophy of science shows why...

<I wonder, I would expect plastics to be a small part of oil use.> - I think you'll be surprised. And as I say, as it'll grow as fuel usage for oil declines. Wood is an absolute wonder material when you think about it. It has so many diverse properties and uses. It can be grown, cut, planed, smoothed, polished, screwed, nailed, glued, bent, laminated, burnt .............. It's almost infinitely repairable. And when it's reached the end of its useful life it's just good fungi, plant and micro organism food. Plastic on the other hand. It's always frustrating when a plastic thing breaks, it's generally very hard, normally impossible, to repair so just ends up as waste. With a half life of hundreds or thousands of years. But, it does readily breakdown enough to release toxic micro fibres and particles. Oh, and it's also full of other chemicals just itching to leach out. It's lovely stuff. People are discovering/developing fungi that can devour plastic, but I doubt it'll ever be enough to address the problem.

I'm thinking of the bigger picture Davey. You should do the same occasionally. I thought I was fairly obviously talking globally. The UK is hardly known for it's plastics production industry is it? So no, I wasn't presenting you with an opportunity to hyjack yet another decent thread to push one of your tedious agendas. Keep up. Global plastic talks collapse as countries remain deeply divided WWW.BBC.CO.UK The latest round of UN-led talks have ended in deadlock, with disputes over plastic production and recycling. As if we're going to recycle our way out of this hole. Is that what you believe? I don't. Obviously the oil states are going to try to protect their revenues.

AI alert! No need. Pretty sure we all know the ins and outs of burning wood. Given the forum, and even the thread title.

PFASs like plastics are just to damn useful and convenient. If they weren't then we wouldn't be in this predicament. Plastics of course are now being pushed on us even harder because the oil industry is starting to lose its fuel revenues. I think the long term effects are just beginning to be seen actually. Micro plastics and PFASs are both starting to be implicated in lots of serious health problems. Apparently someone did a study on the brains of Alzheimer's suffers, all had high concentrations of micro plastics present .............. too soon to decide between correlation and causation, but it's not going to be good news. Smoky wood burners will be small beer in comparison.

I know, we've been here before a few times I believe. I agree with all of that. I was talking mainly talking about local air pollution, air quality, not global CO2 emissions. The elephant in the room that you didn't mention is the non-combustion particulates that come from cars and trucks. The brake and tyre dust predominantly. I believe that is probably now a bigger issue than engine emissions. Especially with all the bigger, heavier electric cars. That very rarely gets talked about in the promotion of EVs. It's something that requires far greater scrutiny. Urgently. Micro plastics, and the myriad of chemicals within them - yeah, that's the real demon here. We've only just found the tip of the iceberg, in terms of understanding the damage that they're doing to all of us. We're breathing/eating/drinking it in all the time.

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That and just trying to grasp the easiest low hanging fruit, just to be seen to be doing something. I imagine wood burner smoke is a very small proportion of the total air pollution, compared to the millions of cars and lorries on the roads and aircraft in the skies. Maybe they think they can cancel out the effects of all the extra runways they're intent on building, dreamers.

Lucky you. I imagine he is a pleasure to talk to. He had some good stuff to say when I heard him interviewed quite recently. I hadn't realised he was English until then.

Mici, Romanian beef and pork sausages. With a generous helping of sour cream and garlic, (raw). Bloody lovely.

We can both share Alex's vintage suet. I'm sure he won't mind posting it off.

What was in yours? I've never cooked them. My dad used to, I've find memories of steak and kidney pie with dumplings.

Too fluted for beech.