Half-buried factoids

Posted on by Richard DrakeIn Uncategorized1 Minute Read

It can be a quiz. It can just be you showing off. Or, of course, both. Not limited to climate but bonus points if any climate factoid is deemed interesting by 97% of assembled Cliscep experts.

All complaints please to DFHunter

@all – since all the pubs are closed can we have a climate/general quizz night online?

found this site for a starter for 5 – https://www.funtrivia.com/quizzes/

and Jit

@DFHunter

Since you got Warnocked, here’s my humble reply to your suggestion.

A thread for climate-related trivia would be of use I think because the every one of the crew and passengers of this boat must have a treasury of factoids that would otherwise not have a reason to be brought forth. But that of course would be up to one of the crew to arrange.

I am presently half-buried in factoids myself, but don’t want to derail the thread by quizzing you or other interested folk about them!

Should be fun.

 

63 Comments

  1. @Richard ta.

    Folks probably know the following stats ballpark, but for anyone who doesn’t, have a stab without looking it up.

    1. What mass of wood pellets does Drax biomass conversion burn per year?
    2. How much money did billpayers send to Drax in 2019 for this service?

    Further Drax questions up sleeve, depending on interest.

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  3. Hm, well, in the absence of any guesses (either no-one knows, everyone knows, or no-one much cares), here are the answers in case anyone is still tuned to this channel.

    1. Quantity of wood pellets burnt: Four of Drax’s 6 generating units now burn wood pellets. Its website says it receives 130,000 tonnes of pellets a week, which scaling up by 52 weeks gives 6,760,000 tonnes per year.

    Drax owns 3 pelleting plants in the US, 2 in Louisiana and 1 in Mississippi (or is it the other way around?). Between them they have an output of 1,500,000 tonnes, about 22% of Drax’s needs, if all their product went to Selby. From the pelleting plants, trucks take the fuel to (I seem to remember) Baton Rouge, & from there it’s onto a cargo vessel for the 10,000 km voyage to Immingham. A train covers the remaining distance.

    The reason I began to look into Drax was because someone on the internet somewhere claimed that Drax burnt wood at a faster rate than all of UK forestry could supply it. At the time I looked this up, and found the assertion to be true. However, my numbers were faulty. Deliveries of green wood in the UK in 2018 were 11,600,000 tonnes. Allowing for the difference between green and seasoned wood, that means the wood delivered could have been converted into 8,630,000 tonnes of pellets, more than enough to supply Drax. Of course, we don’t use much of our wood for that, and the UK imports 8,000,000 tonnes of pellets per year, most of which goes to feed our hungry friend at Drax.

    2. Subsidies: As well as getting paid for the electricity it makes, Drax gets Renewable Obligation Certificates for three units, with the fourth selling its electricity at a premium via a Contract for Difference. For ROCs, suppliers have to purchase these from eligible generators at a rate of 0.468 per MWh or pay the buy out cost (2018-9: £47.22 each). This cost could in theory reach £0 if renewable generation and conventional generation costs became similar.

    Drax’s annual report indicates that it earnt £528,000,000 in 2019 from these ROCs.

    The fourth unit is enrolled in a CfD, and the annual report indicates earnings of £261,700,000 from this.

    Of course not all of this is directly put on the electricity part of comsumers’ bills, but wholesale buyers will inevitably feed through this increased cost downstream.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. JIT
    More please. And similar. Like how many counties would have to be covered in solar panels to get us independent of fossil fuels? How many gigawatt hours could you store if you concreted over all the glens of Scotland for hydro? I know the facts are all out there (mostly at Paul Homewood’s) but they need assembling into one big album – the Greta Funbook of Last Requests.

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  5. Here’s an interesting little factoid. Remember just a few days ago, lots of people were saying that the numbers of UK deaths was tracking those in Italy two weeks ago, and that therefore we’d have several hundred dying every day and the NHS collapsing in a couple of weeks? Well, here’s the latest comparison:

    Liked by 3 people

  7. Geoff, re solar panels. You could (amazingly) ask the BBC:

    “Climate change: Green energy plant threat to wilderness areas
    By Matt McGrath
    Environment correspondent”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52023881

    “…Green energy facilities are often much larger than fossil fuel power plants, with wind and solar needing areas of land up to 10 times greater than coal or gas to produce the same amount of energy….”

    The whole article is worth a read. Do you think the BBC is catching up with us?

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  8. @ Geoff
    I don’t have the answer to that, as there isn’t an answer, but I have some bits of the jigsaw that I will put together and present as a new factoid tomorrow.

    @ Paul
    This thought occurred to me while washing up: what if an entirely benign infection (BENVID-20) spread through a population? At what point would *everyone* dying be dying “with” BENVID-20?

    @ Mark
    Yes, that was not a slant I expected the BBC to cover. As to whether there is a hint of scepticism creeping in, we can but hope.

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  9. @Richard – thanks for the mention 🙂
    since the post header is “Half-buried factoids”

    one thing I’ve wondered since the “fracking will cause damage due to earthquakes/tremors” worries stopped it.
    can anybody point me to a map/survey showing how many earthquakes/tremors & magnitude we have in the UK since monitoring began?

    I found this https://ukogl.org.uk/uk-onshore-seismic-release/ – but can’t work out how to use it!!!

    thanks in advance quizzer’s (5 bonus points to most helpful)

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  10. Here’s an easy question that I asked Andy West on 2nd March:

    Of course, someone who speaks perfect sense on climate may have got the health dangers of indoor cigarette smoke wrong. (Know which sceptic I’m thinking of there?)

    Once I get the correct answer well, I could do anything.

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  12. question – which Canadian blogger had a Trip to England in 2010

    tip – Mosher Posted Jul 6, 2010 at 1:02 PM

    “A climate scientist’s view of hate mail:
    “How can you justify ClimateGate? You silly wanker.”
    provided by the guardian as an example of hate mail. yes, there are stronger statements in the pile. I’d say most of them are right up there with some of the comments you see on blogs. from both sides.
    Are warministas really shocked that people they call denialists return the favor by calling them Nazi’s
    And yes there are some really nasty death threats, like i hope an earthquake swallows your home.”

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  15. This might be a bit nerdy – the question is “Why do we have winter heating?”

    I have provided the answer below, which is given in a textbook I used at school in the 1970s called “Higher Physics” by E. Nightingale.

    “The importance of entropy in heating rooms.

    In Nature of 21 May, 1938, p. 908, there appeared an interesting letter by R. Emden of Zurich on the subject “Why do we have winter heating?” Is it make the room warmer or to import the lacking inner thermal energy? The author points out that the pressures inside and outside the room are equal. Also the inner thermal energy per unit mass is given by u = Cv T where T is the absolute temperature.

    Thus the energy content per unit volume is given by U1 = u rho = Cv rho T where rho is the density.

    But if P is the pressure, P/(rho T) = r, therefore rho = P/(r T)

    Therefore U1 = Cv P/r where r is the gas constant for unit mass of air.

    The interesting fact thus appears that the energy content of the room is independent of the temperature and is determined solely by the state of the barometer.

    If this be so, why then do we require heating at all?

    This must be for the same reason that for life on the earth solar radiation is necessary. We require temperature and for the maintenance of temperature we require not the addition of energy but of entropy.* The writer concudes “The Principle of Entropy is the manager of the Universe, the Principle of Energy does the book-keeping.”

    * Mr. K. D. Barritt, of Ewell County Technical College, points out that this should be subtraction of entropy, for let S1 and S2 be entropy levels at absolute temperatures T1 and T2 and let Q be the energy content, which is independent of temperature. Then S2-S1 = Q((1/T2)-(1/T1)) = Q (T1-T2)/(T1T2) and if T2<T1 then S2-S1 is positive. Hence to maintain temperature there must be a fall in entropy. This applies to the human body, which virtually "feeds" on negative entropy."

    The 1938 letter by Robert Emden to 'Nature' is behind a pay-wall, but I managed to find a free-to-view PDF version of the letter:

    Click to access emden.pdf

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  16. DFHunter: Correct answer, of course. Like so many things, I have no idea about second-hand smoke. But Andy’s point was a good one and it’s been borne out by the varied reactions of climate sceptics (science and policy) to Covid-19 scepticism (science and policy). That’s to be expected. At least I always did. (On Twitter I think I saw Clisceprs Ben Pile and Barry Woods disagreeing on it. As I say, to be expected.)

    On climate, though, Richard Lindzen towers over almost all. IM ever HO of course.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. @billbedford 27 Mar 20 at 8:08 am

    thanks for the map link Bill.

    still playing with it to find the tremor/Seismic info, any pointers?

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  18. @Bill

    may have found the best website for this info – http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/index.html

    with this link the most useful so far – http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/earthquakes/UKsignificant/index.html

    the guardian ran this story – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/05/fracking-uk-protest-gas

    reporting “In August, after a fracking-triggered 2.9-magnitude earthquake, work was stopped at the industry’s flagship site in Blackpool”

    in the 2nd bgs link above all are above 4.0 mag, although the oldest is dated
    1382/05/21 at 15:00:00 mag 5.8 in the DOVER STRAITS !!!
    looks like we started leaving Europe earlier than I thought 🙂

    also note the recent Earthquakes around the British Isles in the last 50 days are NORTH SEA.

    @Alan – I need a geography person to put this into perspective!!!

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  19. DFHunter. There are few places in the UK where one could predict an earthquake occurring in the next century. Yet, on the other hand there is virtually nowhere where an earthquake couldn’t occur. The strongest recorded earthquake was in Colchester for goodness sake, seemingly far from any tectonic activity. Yet on most detailed geological maps (the old inch to a mile maps) there will be many lines of the map that separate rocks of different age. These are traces of geological faults – surfaces where rocks have moved relative to their neighbours. This movement will have involved multiple small movements each associated with an earthquake or several earthquakes. What this all means is this the ubiquity of mapped faults over the entirety of the UK indicates that earthquakes have been generated, over geological time (millions of years) all across the UK. The land of the UK has experienced very many millions of earthquakes. But then that land has been assembled from multiple bits of crust that have wandered over the Earth’s surface and collided with each other in extreme slow motion at multiple times.
    The only place I can recall where minor earthquakes have been frequent in recent geological times is in Cheshire where beds of salt are dissolving underground in groundwaters, causing the collapse of overlying strata (this has been exacerbated by human salt mining).
    Hope this helps. If you wish me to be more specific…

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Forgot to add my guess that the number of earthquakes may well decrease into the future. Many of the Holocene earthquakes will have resulted as a result of unloading when the last ice sheet melted. The stresses caused by this slow rock bending is partially relieved by small adjustments along existing faults. These adjustments should slowly diminish into the future.

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  22. @ Geoff and anyone still monitoring this frequency.

    What area of solar panels would power the UK?

    A few assumptions:
    Max electricity demand in the UK in 2020 = 59 GW
    Average capacity factor of solar panel = 10%
    Area of 250 W panel = 1.6 sq m
    Tilt = 45 degrees
    Land use = 2 x panel plan area (pers. obs.) = 2.27 sq m/ 250 W

    The existing installed capacity of solar PV is 13276 MW, which by this estimate covers 120.5 sq km.

    Allow daytime efficiency of the panels to be 20% on average (0% at night…)

    To provide an average power of 59 GW would require 2.27 x 4000000 x 59 x 5 sq m or
    2.27 x 4 x 59 x 5 sq km = 2655 sq km.

    In terms of counties, this is one medium county (Derbyshire is 2625 sq km, and would no doubt benefit by being turned into a solar wasteland…)

    That covers you on average during the day. Of course this won’t do on dark days… or at night. You’ll have way too much power at noon in June, and none at Christmas. To cover night time, on average, would require a store of 708 GWh, which in terms of the much-vaunted Hornsdale battery… would be 5,500 Hornsdales. We’d also have to double the area of solar panels to divert half the energy to charging the battery… now Norfolk (5372 sq km) is the target.

    I came across this ludicrous quote on the wiki solar panel article: “The price of solar electrical power has continued to fall so that in many countries it has become cheaper than ordinary fossil fuel electricity from the electricity grid since 2012, a phenomenon known as grid parity.”

    And this, regarding Hornsdale: “During two days in January 2018 when the wholesale spot price for electricity in South Australia rose due to hot weather, the battery made its owners an estimated A$1,000,000 (US$800,000) as they sold power from the battery to the grid for a price of around A$14,000/MWh.”

    Oh, the cost of the battery would be about £250 billion, but when there are power crunches, the owners can sell us a few electrons at a gazillion quid each, so it’s defo a worthwhile investment.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. In response to DFHunter, it looks to me like you’re mainly interested in man-made earthquakes (or anthropogenic earthquakes or induced earthquakes) in the UK, rather than UK earthquakes in general, so your starting point would be a paper like this:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264817215300751

    Various factoids that can be gleaned from that paper include:

    a) For UK earthquakes detected in the period 1970 to 2012, 21% were definitely of anthropogenic origin, 40% were definitely naturally occurring, and the remaining 39% could be natural or anthropogenic.

    b) Most anthropogenic earthquakes in the UK in the past few decades have been connected with coal mining. At least a third of UK earthquakes in 1985 were due to coal mining. The number of coal mining related earthquakes is however dropping off due to the industry shrinking in size over the years – 46 events in 1991, reducing to only 4 in 2012.

    c) The earliest known man-made earthquake in the UK occurred in 1755, caused by a collapse of lead mine workings in Derbyshire.

    Another factoid I can throw in about BGS, the organisation that provides geological services to the UK government including earthquake monitoring, is that it was reputedly temporarily killed off by John Major in the late 1980s before he became Prime Minister. Major was looking at a list of government-funded organisations and noticed there was one called British Geological Survey. Major wondered what this organisation was, and nobody he asked seemed to know, so he decided to get rid of it as part of a ‘bonfire of the quangos’. A few days later some civil servant noticed Major’s blunder and BGS got reinstated.

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  24. Associated factoid: the purpose of the British Geological Survey was to produce a geological map of the entire British Isles. Although areas get remapped, this task was essentially completed before I read geology at university in the early 1960’s. All but a very small area in the Scottish Highlands, kept deliberately unmapped so that the BGS’s prime task remained incomplete.

    Liked by 1 person

  25. @Dave Gardner 30 Mar 20 at 11:42 am

    thanks for the link & factoids, liked –
    “and noticed there was one called British Geological Survey. Major wondered what this organisation was, and nobody he asked seemed to know,”

    @Alan – crafty, is it where Nessy lurks?

    the main reason I was/am interested in UK tremors was the media reporting the “public hysteria/concern” over fracking causing tremors.

    this has caused the suspension of any onshore fracking AFAIK.

    in the present situation (and climate change) where we all must listen to the science/facts to guide our actions, I found it odd that nobody from BGS was on the media (may have missed it) explaining if this was really nessecary.

    ps – recall 1 commentator on NW today news saying something like “the tremor is like a lorry passing your house or a bag of cement dropped on your drive” didn’t say from what height the bag was dropped from thou!!!

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  27. Having been impressed by Didier Raoult citing the Hippocratic Oath as to why he couldn’t have a ‘control group’ for his use of Chloroquine, which Greek god is Hippocrates said to have worshipped? What still-potent symbol is associated with this deity? What’s the mysterious connection with one of most famous passages of the New Testament, chapter 3 of the gospel of John?

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  29. Dave Gardner. There are several reasons why earthquakes are newsworthy in the UK, especially those induced by fracking. First, they were unexpected. Most fracking in the USA does not induce earthquakes and so they were not expected in the relative earthquake-free UK. Second, when they began it was realized that the implied mechanism (lubrication of previously unknown fault surfaces allowing movement along them) could induce deeper, and potentially more damaging earthquakes – leading to local demands for moratoria (very newsworthy). Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, in the essentially aseismic UK, any earthquake that can be felt and, especially if it causes even the slightest of damage, is highly unusual and will be reported ad nauseam in the media. In other countries such events and the minor damage caused would not deserve mention. (During three years living in California, I experienced two sharp quakes, one sufficient to make my office block in San Francisco sway and most residents to evacuate the building. We in the know going up the stairs met them going down them. Neither quake was featured in the local TV news nor mentioned in the newspapers).

    Question: why did we climb the stairs, when San Francisco had reserved road areas for fleeing office workers to congregate in the event of a major earthquake (so expecting most people to descend to street level)?

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  31. My earthquake factoid:

    Prior to modern science’s explanations for the cause of earthquakes, Aristotle’s theory was enough to satisfy most people’s curiosity: Earthquakes were subterranean farts bursting out of underground tunnels. The tighter did Mother Earth clench her bum cheeks, the more rasping and damaging would be the resulting flatulence. As Shakespeare put it, earthquakes were, “a kind of colic pinched and vexed by the imprisoning of unruly wind.” Even as late as 1755 Immanuel Kant was proposing the fart theory for the cause of the recent Lisbon earthquake.

    Nowadays the fart theory has been replaced by some rubbish about fault lines.

    Liked by 1 person

  32. A fart hypothesis might have been given credence in volcanic areas like the Phlegraean Fields where gases rich in hydrogen sulphide are emitted just before, during, or shortly after large earthquakes. In fact, one of the methods used today to predict earthquakes is analysis of gases emitted from the ground.

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  34. No, let’s get back to the farting earth, he says mischievously.

    I’m sure Alan is right about the initial inspiration (expiration?) behind the idea but, as I understand it, the idea quickly gained traction throughout the Mediterranean region. I’ve already mentioned the application of the theory to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, but to that I could add the Ferrara earthquakes of 1570-1571 and the series of earthquakes of 1721 in the Persian city of Tabriz. All were put down to the hidden menace of subsurface air pockets. I think stories of the earth opening and swallowing up gave credence to the idea that there were huge complexes of subterranean caves, fart laden and just waiting for the hapless to drop in.

    What with being farted on by the underworld, shat on by volcanoes and pissed on by the sky, is it any wonder that we won’t let Mother Earth up on the settee?

    Liked by 1 person

  35. Jules Verne was probably not a farting Earth fan, but did believe in a subterranean network of caverns and passages. Pity he had not ventured underground and so experienced the temperature buildup. But then, people had little understanding of geology at these times, attributing volcanoes to burning beds of coal, and granite to precipitation from a primeval sea.

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  36. I remember “Journey to the Center of the Earth” from years ago (think it was a cartoon, not the film).

    the name “Arne Saknussemm” has stuck with me all these years for some reason.

    from wiki – “Arne.. who claims to have discovered a passage to the centre of the Earth via Snæfell in Iceland”

    Factoid Question – wonder what connects Snaefell & TT

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  37. @Alan

    thinking about your comment “Pity he had not ventured underground and so experienced the temperature buildup”

    I had a quick look at “Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive” webpage – https://renewable-heat-calculator.service.gov.uk/Default.aspx

    a rough result –
    “Estimated payment
    Using the information you have provided we estimate that you would potentially receive the following payments if you installed a ground source heat pump.
    This would equate to
    £475 per quarter
    Annual payment
    £1,900
    Payment over 7 years*
    £13,300
    Payment tariff
    20.89 pence/kWh
    * The payment over 7 years has been calculated using the displayed tariff level and does not apply any year-on-year inflationary percentages.”

    more info needed as I probably don’t qualify, but anybody here have thoughts on this?

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  38. So everyone here would have descended a stairwell in a modern San Francisco office block after a severe earthquake would they?
    We, on the other hand, climbed upwards towards the roof. Why?

    First assume that the central core of tall buildings (including stairwells) has been designed to strict specifications to survive even the strongest of suspected earthquakes (magnitudes 6-7), even if the remainder of the building might collapse. Thus stairwells are the safest places to be. If the floors and outer walls collapse (they shouldn’t, but it’s not guaranteed) the building and its immediate surrounds will be a mess and any rescue will be from the top down. So to get rescued early, get as close to the roof as possible. Don’t leave the stairwell – aftershocks!

    I suspect less than one in fifty in our office block followed this advice during “my” earthquake.

    In an old San Francisco building I would assume it had survived previous earthquakes, so would stay in place (under my desk!)

    Living in the San Francisco area, you soon come to terms with the possibility of severe earthquakes. For the first few months you are on tenterhooks, but you can’t live like that. Eventually you come to terms with the possibility (but not necessarily today). I lived the other side of the Bay. All of the bridges would go down in a big quake so we had trainers and supplies in our offices that would allow us to walk home around the Bay, if necessary. It was estimated that if “the Big One” occurred during rush hours, the expected number of the injured in California would fill every hospital bed in the entire USA. I expect this factoid is still relevant.

    Liked by 1 person

  39. I have the CD movie, 1959, ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth, ‘ it stars James Mason and Gertrude the duck. Lost city of Atlantis. 🙂 I luv it. Watch it if yer can.

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  41. Sorry Richard that is the Rod of the God Asclepius (not the rod of Apollo). In the USA they incorrectly use the double snaked (with wings) caduceus, carried by Hermes.

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  43. Alan: I know. Asclepius was son of Apollo, hence my “right family” to Beth. The Hermes bit is interesting, will look into it.

    John: Nehushtan preceded the Asklepian that Hippocrates (we are told) would have known. But they’re intriguingly similar and both have to do with healing. This quiz/factoid exploration was partly triggered by Geoff quoting “What is Truth?” in another thread. But I won’t try to explain that now. I will read the Irish Times piece, thanks very much.

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  45. A Dr Climate Wiseman is currently in the news for selling bogus solutions to climate changecoronavirus. Until a couple of days ago, this £50 product…

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200402122227/https://prophet-climate.com/product/divine-cleansing/

    …was repurposed as a Divine Plague Protection Kit and sold for £91. It was withdrawn from sale after complaints by the Charity Commission.

    Dr Climate Wiseman is a fascinating character. When not calling himself Dr CW (he claims to have a PhD in Philosophy), he’s Bishop CW, Archbishop CW and even Prophet CW but in the early 1990s he was Mann Mann, the gun-toting leader of a gang called The Earth’s OnWagon Fire that sold crack and ran prostitutes in East London. Them came a short prison term for attempted rape, after which he reverted to his birth name, Climate Irungu Mwangi (he was born in Kenya), switched from Rastafarianism to Christianity via Buddhism and Islam and, acting on God’s instructions, moved to Scotland, where in 2005 he became the UK’s youngest Pentecostal bishop. In that role, he built up a big following around the world by peddling faith-based cures for AIDS, cancer, poverty, etc on televangelist channels hosted by Sky and other satellite outfits. These got him into trouble with Ofcom and it looks like these days he only televangelizes at YouTube and at some of his many websites, but things still seem to be going pretty well for him – or they were until a few days ago. (He changed his name from Irungu to Climate only last summer. So what caused his recent problems? Climate change, obvz.)

    A few links…

    Got £10 to spare? Here’s a 38-page paperback about how to stop people talking negative about your tree:

    Puffery for the Divine Plague Protection Kit:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200402125220/https://prophet-climate.com/2020/03/21/you-dont-need-to-fear-you-only-need-to-do-this/

    (The disclaimer is recent – and meaningless. Bishop Climate Ministries means Dr/Bishop/Archbishop/Prophet Wiseman and he’s the founder, boss and sole minister of the Kingdom Church.)

    Dr Wiseman flogging mostly derelict properties in Germany:

    I’ve only watched a few short snippets. In one he says something like: ‘Don’t worry about Brexit or coronavirus. Just get over there and have a look for yourselves. You won’t regret it. Did I regret buying two square feet of Scotland so I could become a lord of the manor? No, of course not.’ (I think that’s what he said but I can’t refind it.)

    The event was only a couple of weeks ago, so after the start of social distancing etc, but at the end of the video he encourages people to cluster around a small table so they can register an interest in the properties. I do hope they bought their Divine Plague Prevention Kits before it was too late.

    Speaking of which, here’s his most recent YouTube upload:

    A bloke who had a dry cough talks about the benefits of inhaling Dr Wiseman’s special olive oil and wearing Dr Wiseman’s special red thread around his wrist. He seems sincere. Most likely he and his wife’s coughs went away because they are young and their immune systems are strong but he credits God and Dr Wiseman.

    And those are your Climate factoids for today!

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  46. @Viiney – re the statement “Did I regret buying two square feet of Scotland so I could become a lord of the manor?”

    he probably has, see this factoid from https://scottishlands.com/
    from the above sites blurb –
    “Scottish Lands” offers a unique opportunity for you to buy a plot of land in the Highlands of Scotland. We sell plots ranging in size from 1 square foot to 1000 square foot, and thanks to Scottish Landowner law, ownership of this estate legally allows you, or someone you love, to use the courtesy title of Laird, Lord or Lady. Many of our customers have updated their driving licence, credit cards and such like to reflect their new status.
    Our smallest plots measure 1 square foot and are available from just ($49.99) located at Glencoe Wood. We will provide you with a plot number from our professionally surveyed estate and a grid reference so you can visit your land. You can use the documents we send you to obtain a title that is recognised worldwide and was once the preserve of the Scottish landed gentry.

    wonder how many times he has stood on his land/estate & shouted “gettoff my land” to trespassers?

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  47. ALAN, JOHN, RICHARD
    What links Hermes’ caduceus, Asclepius’s asklepian, and Moses’ brazen serpent is the helicoid nature of the strands of electric plasma which traverse space, firing up the sun and causing periodic climate change over millions of years. See https://www.electricuniverse.info

    At some point(s) in history these effects were visible in the sky, giving rise to this universal symbol.

    The electric universe theory derives ultimately from the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, who famously predicted that the planet Venus would be found to have an anomalously high temperature. Scientists in search of a quick refutation of Velikovsky (widely seen as a dangerous charlatan in scientific circles because of his catastrophic theories) came up with a number of theories, including that of a mysterious heat source in the centre of the planet (James Hansen and S. Matsushima; Astrophysics Journal 1967) but eventually settled on the runaway greenhouse effect. And the rest, as they say, is mythology.

    P.S. Anyone know why I give Asclepius an apostrophe “s” and not Moses and Hermes?

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  48. Have we now sunk to discussing GreekoRoman, green-grocers’ apostrophes?

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  49. Completely O/T, but generated by the detour to apostrophes. One drive I used to make regularly took me past a roadside snack bar with the sign “Christines Snax’s”. I did wonder whether it was a deliberate parody, but I fear it was not.

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  50. I believe you will find that Apostrophes was the first Greek philosopher to explore the merits of capitalism, and that is why the punctuation mark is named after him.

    I also have to say that it is quite ironic that we should be discussing apostrophes as an aside:

    https://www.etymonline.com/word/apostrophe

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  51. Mark. A clear case for the need for enforceable apostrophectomy and apostrophizing. Remarkable.

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  52. Thanks for that, dfhunter. You’re right. That must be what he did.

    If he had an intruder on his land, they both would have had to stand on one leg and perhaps hug each other as he shouted.

    PS: Bishop Climate changed his name from Irungu to Wiseman last year, not Irungu to Climate. This makes my stupid joke even more stupid.

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  53. I thought quizzes were supposed to be futile. I worked out the rule for myself (and it works for Snax’s too, assuming Snax is singular, like Twix.) Wikipaedia gets it wrong, as does the Guardian style guide. Four Supreme Court Judges got it right, but they were overruled.

    Anyway, I was quite proud of finding out (quite by chance) what James Hansen thought about global warming when the earth was cooling.

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  54. With very few clear answers so far (at least to my mind) here’s another question. I’ve found it hard to settle down to fictional drama but through a short video on the BBC not about the virus (wonder of wonders) I ended up revisiting on YouTube a drama/documentary which seemed to better fit my mood. This is pretty much the last frame before the credits – and moving it is too. Without googling, what real-world story was the hour-long programme about? And, as a bonus, which video do you think led me to it?

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  56. @Richard, need another clue I think. What links the marines and (I guess) China? There are a couple of possibilities, but I can’t see a monument like that surviving on the mainland, which leaves Hong Kong…

    …but I could be barking up the wrong tree entirely. Maybe there’s no China link at all?

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  58. Aha, yes. That is actually a story I knew well… about 3 or 4 years ago. Of course there was no way the name(s) would have stuck, but clearly the grey matter is a little more foggy than it used to be. But in my defence I was expecting something vaguely topical, not sommat about confusing German Intelligence in WW2. Undoubtedly there are other cases of people dying with two names.

    Of course as part of the quiz compact, you can’t use the internet, even the Mail.

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  59. Jit I never signed up to QC.
    My route (expanded) was 1.memorial to one person known by two names (odd) and 2. worthy of a memorial, so unlikely to be a fictional character – 3) lettering on monument still crisp so, even if carved into granite, unlikely to be much older than a century. 4) A world war hero? 5) But why would a welshman pose as someone else – scattered random thoughts – 6) ah the man who never was. Use internet to determine name of the “man who never was (from film). Gotcha. Never previously knew his original welsh name. Further research revealed yesterday’s Daily Mail link which I thought might interest you)

    Not really interested in Richard’s route (= remainder of his factoids). Did he read the Daily Mail yesterday (or equivalent)?

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  60. Don’t worry, nobody’s interested in my route. Story of my life, etc.

    That’s actually a very impressive chain of reasoning Alan. My “without googling” rule was a bit much – bit like the “no picnics in parks” at the moment. What I suppose I meant was if you googled don’t give the game away to others. But to be honest this worked out better than expected.

    “ah the man who never was”

    That’s the original film, right? I never watched that, I don’t think. I came to Operation Mincemeat, by Ben McIntyre, with only vague knowledge of the story. Both the book and the BBC drama/documentary, fronted by McIntyre, were released in 2010, it seems. The video has an interview with the archive researcher who had only recently discovered the name Glyndwr Michael in some official papers, a young Welshman with a tragic past who drifted to London during the War and finally committed suicide there. Nobody knew the name and therefore more of the poor guy’s details. The researcher in question said that he assumed the name would never be known. The words under RIP on the gravestone were added by the Royal Navy not long before Ben McIntyre’s telling of the story.

    As to topicality, Jit, I’d argue there was some, in the strangeness of the video released by the BBC on Friday that led me back to Mincemeat. Those bonus points await!

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  61. Richard, note something else interesting about the memorial – it appears to have been recarved. Just beneath the letters R.I.P. there seems to be the remnants of a line of older lettering (perhaps the crushed rock beneath earlier incised letters). Also the present lettering seems to stand proud of the surface* suggesting more elaborate carving whereby the whole rock surface is removed only leaving areas of the lettering untouched. This would be consistent with the original identity of the person only coming to light at a later date and the memorial being rededicated and even more-elaborately carved.

    *could be an optical illusion due to direction of light, but I don’t think so. Letters appear raised viewed right-way up and upside-down. The surface exhibits no clues as to what it made from. It resembles a hammered granite – also consistent with my interpretation.

    My interest is a remnant of a “fieldclass” I used to run for geology undergraduates in a Toronto graveyard for rock recognition. Thank you for drawing it to our attention.

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  62. Think my comments are barred for some reason – but if it’s a glitch –

    if I am barred, thanks for giving me a heads up on why!!!

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  63. I thought I’d leave this gripping thread, for which I was nominally responsible, for a week, from the day our PM Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital to the day he emerged. Here’s a fun response from a senior ICU nurse for whom I have a lot of time, who isn’t a natural Tory.

    In other parlance that was in on Palm Sunday and departing from St Thomas on Easter Day. Some factoids there if you want to ponder possible symbolism.

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