Fake News or False Precision?

I read this today (I won't say where because I have no wish to embarrass the writer or the publication):

In the heart of Africa, energy giant Total is about to build the biggest heated oil pipeline in the world. To extract 1,033,417,417,032 litres of oil, it will displace thousands of farmers, pass through some of the most important elephant and chimpanzee reserves, and threaten crucial biodiversity hotspots.

Call me a geek, but I enjoy reverse-engineering nonsensical or innumerate statements to find out what they are trying to say. Take the number at the heart of the statement, 1,033,417,417,032. That's quite a number. It's a fantastically precise number. The writer is claiming precision to one part in a trillion. The finest Swiss chronometers claim one part in a hundred thousand. Isn't it comforting to learn that crude oil extraction is ten million times more precise than Swiss chronometry?

So, how did this fantastic number arise? From a little background reading of proper sources, I learn that the reserve in question is "estimated at 6 billion barrels". That's a believable figure, properly stated. It means "we're pretty sure the reserve is somewhere between 5½ and 6½ billion barrels". That comes from an oil professional.

Then the innumerate journos move in: Go for the top of the range, 6.5 billion barrels. How big is a barrel anyway? Google it! A barrel = 158.987295 litres. Where's the calculator? How do you write 6½ billion?

6,500,000,000 x 158.987295 = 1,033,417,417,500 litres. Look, nobody's going to believe that 500 at the end. Change it, who's to know – 1,033,417,417,032  Job done.

Sorry, guys, but the correct rendering in litres is "more than a trillion". Next time, OK?

How to weigh a car using a tape measure and a tyre pressure gauge

There are two pretty good ways to weigh a car:

1. Drive it to the nearest public weighbridge and wait your turn.
2. Look up the manual under General Specifications, ‘kerb weight’

But let's suppose the nearest public weighbridge is fifty miles away and you've lost the manual (and temporarily forgotten how to use public libraries and the Internet) and the burning urge to weigh your car just won't go away- what can you do about it?

The good news is, you need hardly any equipment. All you need, for a reasonably accurate result is:

• a hand-held tyre pressure gauge which can be analogue or digital
• a retractable steel measuring tape
• a calculator, pencil and paper, or a good head for mental arithmetic

The method

• Park the car on some clean, level concrete
• Observe that the car is held up by its four tyres (!)
• Measure the width of the tread of one tyre: e.g. 6 inches
• Measure the length of tread in contact with the ground: e.g. 7 inches
• Work out the area of tread touching the ground: e.g. 6 x 7 = 42 sq ins
• Now use the gauge to measure the tyre pressure: e.g. 25 psi (pounds per square inch)
• This tyre is therefore supporting 42 x 25 = 1,050 pounds
• Repeat for the remaining three tyres and add the four results together for the total weight.
• Front tyres carry more weight than rear: e.g. 1,050 + 1,050 + 900 + 900 = 3,900 pounds

If you are in a hurry, just measure one front tyre and the rear tyre on the same side. Sum them together and multiply by two. This works because cars tend to be left/right symmetrical.

The method can be used on a wide range of vehicles, such as:

• Cars, pickups, minibuses, buses, vans, lorries, old Bullnose Mercedes trucks, articulated trucks including effing-great eighteen-wheelers that shouldn’t be allowed on the roads, garbage collectors, tankers (full or empty), concrete pumps and aeroplanes, but not railway engines, steam-rollers or seaplanes with their floats down.

To weigh your seaplane...

You will need slightly different equipment. Forget the pressure gauge. The thing has floats, not tyres. The steel tape measure will still come in handy though:

• Procure an extremely large displacement tank and fill it with water.
• Using a crane, gently lower your stupid seaplane into the tank.
• Collect the displaced water in another smaller tank.
• Measure the volume of displaced water. (This is where your steel tape measure comes in).
• Apply Archimedes Principle to obtain the weight of the blasted seaplane, shouting Eureka at the appropriate moment, if you like.

Motorbikes are tricky too...

because they fall over. To weigh your motorbike, if you really must: 

• Get a set of bathroom scales.
• Park your bike with the kickstand resting on the scales.
• Measure the area of both tyre ‘footprints’, as above.
• Measure the tyre pressures.
• Calculate the weights on front and rear tyres as above.
• Add these to the reading on the bathroom scales.
• Job done.

While you’re hanging around like a lemon with the bathroom scales, you can weigh any convenient bicycle by the simple method of:

• standing on the scales and noting your weight.
• picking up the bicycle and noting the combined weight.
• subtracting your weight from the combined weight.

This method can also be used to weigh dogs, cats, sacks of wheat, sea turtles and children, but not hamsters or postage stamps, because the difference is too small to register on bathroom scales.

To weigh your hamster, use the kitchen scales instead. Can I go now?

The Three Jars - Being an Anthology

 Just one of twenty-odd familiar nursery rhymes uniquely shredded and illustrated by Douglas McClure. Available on Amazon "The Three Jars - Being an Anthology" by Douglas McClure. Check it out!

The New Welsh Sphinx

Among this morning's Google selection of tailored appropriate advertisements, I find this one suggesting a trip to Wales. This might be a nice idea, but all I'm seeing is a gy-normous cat with a human head and hands. A latter-day Sphinx, maybe?

Heard in Heaven

God: Jesus, have you seen my sink plunger?
Jesus: I think you had it with you when we went to Chipping Camden.
God: Ah yes, there it is! Thanks Son.

The Punchary, Al Mansoura

The Punchary- but what is it? An establishment that turns out bespoke metal pressings, an unsubtle martial arts centre, or just somwhere to have your burst tyre patched? I suspect the last. But it is still a good addition to the lexicon.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary...

How does your garden grow?
With stones and rocks
And broken blocks
And sewer lids, all in a row.

doha gardens

Knees, Plungers & Aliens

The old way

A long time ago, I studied photography. I used a manual SLR camera, took light measurements (incident and reflected), applied filters, adjusted focus, aperture and exposure, developed my own negatives, mixed my own chemicals, did my own darkroom work and, occasionally, achieved some pretty creditable results, none of which appear on this page.

I did all this because I wanted to be in complete control of the image, from inception to display. But recently, because of my traveling lifestyle, my photography is reduced to quick snapshots with a mobile phone - low quality, granular, soft, flared, shaded, blurred - but fun and immediate. And you know, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. But there's a special class of picture for which the mobile phone is second to none - the complete accident!

what plungersome thing art thou?

Exterminate... Exterminate...

The phone rings, you fumble it out of your pocket, press a couple of keys by mistake, and click - another random picture for the archives! This one could almost be a wounded Dalek, its infamous sink-plunger attachment sadly limp. Or maybe Davros has put it on floor-sweeping duties as a punishment for failing to exterminate the Doctor, yet again. Or it could just have fallen downstairs of course. The Daleks would hate Lisbon. Stairs everywhere. They'd be completely scuppered. Rome isn't much better. The Spanish Steps. Daleks top and bottom and the girls would still be selling flowers on every tread. The human spirit triumphs over technology again.

being a triptych

the knee

the alien

the peak

Sights unseen

Sometimes, body parts feature. Here is the right knee, mine, and seated, if knees can sit. With a crease that wouldn't shame Beau Brummell. But what about the other leg? Not mine. The turned table-leg, emerging from, or perhaps disappearing into, the Stygian gloom. Its machine-cut concentric rings flashing wan highlights through the knee-lit murk.

- o -

When they come, they will not be green. They will not speak with human tongues. They will know you. They will know you. They will know you. And then you'll say - is someone there? Your voice is all the sound you'll hear. And still they know you, know you, know you.

- o -

Though you bind me, even to my face, I will break free. For through the tightening shroud, will there come no light? I am no wrapped parcel for your friends' amusement. Are their teeth as white as mine? From the strained peak shall spread cracks. As Prometheus, as Samson, even as the Phoenix, I shall rise again, and sing of things untold.

That third picture in the set of three - the one I called 'the peak' - has me completely baffled. I have absolutely no idea what the phone camera was seeing. That's the joy of accidental photography.

serendipity

where there is life

And finally

After so much surrealism, let's close with something less outlandish. This accidental phone-snap has four people in it, one relaxing, three going about their business. The guy mostly hidden by the chair he's sitting in is Croatian. The walking girl in blue is Filipina. The man in the distance is Syrian, and the one standing with clasped hands is Tunisian. And that's one of the things I love about the Middle East - a genuinely random accidental photograph catches four different nationalities in one place. It's a privilege to live and work here among people from all over the World.

I hope that, after reading this, you might look again at some of your own happen-stance pics, before automatically going for the delete key. You too might have some hidden gems, or even the seeds of a flight of fancy. Thanks for reading my nonsense. Click, click!

Bull-neck and the Blue Lagoon

More random photographs

We can't be serious all the time. What follows is my latest selection of wholly accidental phone pictures, usually taken in the process of fumbling the phone into or out of my pocket. The descriptions probably say more about me than about the pictures, but I'll leave others to judge.

 

bull-neck and the blue lagoon

"Without prejudice" mutters Bull-neck, apparently to himself, lost on his mission to pass through life unencumbered, even by clothes. The almost apologetic bolt from the blue makes no impression; if he so much as notices it, he gives no sign, but blunders on, looking forward and down. Always down. His early baseball cap years have taught him there is no sky, no stars. Now sure in this knowledge, he has no need to shade his eyes. There is no light.

memories of a copper still

The roof is long gone. The malting loft has crumbled and fallen onto the the stills below. Rats have ravaged the barley sacks and mice gleaned their leavings. Wind, rain and time have stolen the last vestige of brewing aroma, leaving instead dankness and mildew. But the gleam of copper, caught in a wet Hebridean sunbeam, still speaks of uisge beathe, the water of life, and of death. 

the farm of dragonhide

The Farm of Dragonhide is where the lines are straight and all that is green is painted.Clapped out tankers pass for tractors for nothing is sown, nothing grown and nothing harvested.

Dragonhide Farm mattered once.No-one remembers why.

the lady in purple mohair

And if I see you when the rowans are ripe, walking alone by the mill stream, will you remember two younger people, eager and a little scared, talking of blackbirds and finding new ways to hold hands by accident? Will you know me still, or see only a worn mask? And will you be wearing that purple mohair, the one that smelt of spilt Guinness and Hartnell's 'In Love', the best a student could afford? 

the shining ones

This is the cavern and council of the shining ones. This is their forum. They are their own light. When they meet it is always in splendour. The golden ones are first among their kind, their radiance of a higher order. They do not speak in words. There is no need, as they come together in perfect agreement, and their will is done. They know us, know our ways, and wonder. 

the nevada desert highway

This picture is a complete mystery - a fortuitous combination of colours and camera movement conspiring to create a highway crossing a red sandstone desert. It's one of my favourite random snaps. One I'd have been proud to have created deliberately. Suffice it to say it's indoors, in Doha. I've been to Nevada, but this wasn't it! 

hey mr dreamseller

Come buy, come buy! The shrouded dreamseller rattles his wares, with promises of a chemical future. Come buy! He needs your love, your, trust, your money, as all his own is gone. His face, too, is gone, with the last of his humanity, He who should have died, remains to kill. Come buy, come buy!

By now, if you've read this far, you probably think I'm quite mad. But I'm not. Not quite :)

Thank you for reading! 

Still Life with Wheelbarrow, Truck and Candelabra

I have no idea what the candelabra was doing there, perched on a half demolished wall in Muntazah, and judging from its very French shrugging posture, it probably didn't know either. Even within the category of 'things you'd miss if you were driving a car', this little tableau was unexpected, to say the least.

If you have lost a candelabra and suspect this might be it, let me know and I'll take the same walk next weekend. If it's still there, I'll retrieve it for you.

Same goes for the wheelbarrow.