Chinese Lanterns are Lame

by comparison - Leo Bodnar's balloon - has circumnavigated the globe!  I'm a bit late to this - it happened 12th July / 1st August 2014  - around the world in just under 3 weeks! (-ish) at about 50km/h (30mph -ish)

Launched from Silverstone it travelled 25,000 km around the planet!. More at The Register

As you might guess.....  things are quite quiet at Avoncliff 

- but there are things going on.........

Meanwhile - over at the EA ....

Larceny of pencils and toilet paper is
definitely too passé and unprofitable for some folk.

Headache? believe what you read in newspapers?

Whilst not directly to do with hydroelectric power or even the Environment Agency (although they've precipitated a few headaches here!) - I spotted this yesterday and it struck me as indicative of the way our public servants account for how they spend our money and how it's reported. I daresay many clinicians actually working in the NHS would likely roll their eyes skywards and shake their head at the numbers involved and make a sighing noise.....  since there is obviously something wonky going on  - but  The Daily Telegraph is quoting the notional cost of prescriptions issued, not the cost of prescriptions redeemed.  Hardly due diligence on the part of The Telegraph which used to be a "quality" newspaper.....

"The NHS purportedly spends over £80 million each year handing out paracetamol with the average prescription costing 20 times the price of a packet of the simple painkiller in the supermarket."

This year 22 million prescriptions for paracetamol were written at a notional cost to tax payers of over £80 million pounds – an average cost of £3.67 per prescription.

This is a 13 per cent increase on last year when £73.5million was spent on the medicine, Government figures issued in a written answer have shown.

The gory details and lame excuses from the administrators are here in a Daily Telegraph report.

It just strikes me that as it's a generic over the counter drug that looks like it could simply be given away by doctors and hospitals without the expensive (and time wasting) shenanigans of the present documenation.  Albeit it's a drug that stupid people try to kill themselves with on occasion...

Some people give Paracetemol another "technical" name - and proceed to unscrupulously sell it at a much higher price....  that might be a better story for the Telegraph - but then that would involve some research and erm... thinking.


h/t Tim Worstall

If you thought it was a bit nippy today....

it looks really cold over the next few weeks and the prognosis for early next year is shaping up to be dang cold too.... (I know it's winter - but if you read the Guardian => snow is a thing of the past....)

Some snow is on the way - predicted by the man who reputedly is banned from betting on the weather by Ladbokes (who just love the UK Met Office.)


See HERE

No doubt some dumb PR will emanate from The Environment Agency as a result of bad weather and the Met Office will keep making the customary lame excuses....

In other news...

This is not the Owen Paterson fan club - but the ex senior minister responsible for The Environment Agency  has made another speech  / another review   + video in the works...) which is worth having a look at - mainly because it's evidenced and reasoned - unlike the outpourings of almost every other pol at the moment - and that includes UKIP.  The previous post here on a Paterson speech picked up a surprising number of hits ....

Click the pic for surprisingly long BBC review

tucked away from view I'd say.....

And now for Something Completely Different

I'd recommend if your connection can handle it 

 - that both vids are watched at full screen with speakers on

One hears them whistling overhead - 

but the scale of it when seen in perspective is amazing.

And even higher up...

Astronaut - A journey to space from Guillaume JUIN on Vimeo.

Glow in the Dark

According to a commenter at the Bishop Hill blog - 

Western Power are dispatching glow in the dark fridge magnets  (7.8 million of them apparently). Given the parlous (although not catastrophic yet) state of electricity generation in the UK - it's a pretty farcical thing to do IMO....  

I suppose they'll be green...