Jo Nova is on the case today of Miliband's plan to use flywheels to store electrical energy.

On a completely different topic, I've just discovered the Torque Test Channel on YouTube. Lots of scientific testing of spanners and the like, and many popular beliefs being tested.

Good to see Steve McIntyre is still cutting through the crap. Pity there's no activity at Climate Audit. I guess moderating the comments was onerous, so he leaves that to Twitter.

Post Office ongoing coverups:

We take any allegations of wrongdoing extremely seriously through our established processes and procedures.

From comments at Jo Nova's, I see that EVs are soon to be paying the congestion charge. So much for the honeymoon.

That fellow's rants are quite enjoyable. For example, his trip from Cornwall to Northhampton in a Citroen C4E.

I'm sure BEVs will stay with us, but there are going to be a fair number of dead branches on the evolutionary tree: the bigger the vehicle, the worse. eScooters and skateboards, fine; Tesla Semi, not so great.

Also at Jo Nova's was a little dog with a typical little dog's sense of proportion.

A nice collection of labours of love there. Sense of occasion taking any of those for a spin. Makes my '70s era stuff feel young.

Another Matt Ridley article, this time in the Spectator, and it's about the UK topping the charts for electricity prices. Lucky your petrol prices are so high, otherwise nobody would be able to afford their EVs :-/

tomo,
Didn't need to do much reading before I realised that I had overlooked the potential advantages under light load. The old "constant pressure" all the way down the power stroke was what was behind diesels' torquiness, but at lighter loads, the smaller amount injected only happens at the the start of the stroke. So much for torquiness.

By spreading that small amount to be injected over a larger run of crank rotation you simultaneously get back the longer "push", and reduce the stress of the all-at-once squirt. If you could meter the flow to the injector, you could do it all in one longer, less intense squirt, but good enough to spread it over several short full-intensity squirts.

tomo,
I'm in no position to complain about anybody else's little lapses of memory. It would be depressing to have figures on what percentage of my waking hours are spent looking for things I had in my hands moments earlier.

I'll try reading around Bosch EDC (Electronic Diesel Control, cf BMW's EDC: Electronic Damper Control). Interested to know how it's an advantage to pause injecting, let the piston continue down its stroke (and the pressure to fall) and then resume. I'll make a preliminary stab that it's to reduce emissions, not for greater efficiency.

Colin Wallace story is disappointing, though not a huge surprise. If this is how the good guys behave, think how bad it must be amongst the baddies!

Enjoyed the Tom Holland interview. While I agree about the different ideas of morality then and now, it strikes me as lazy to attribute it to Christianity. The love of Christ is expressed in far gentler terms today than it was (say) five centuries ago.

I think morality has evolved with the growing importance of job specialisation. When it was all nobles or labourers, each labourer was roughly interchangeable with another: disposable. As workers became more specialised, you didn't want to lose your good cook, or blacksmith or whatever.

And here we are now with the modern nobility fantasising about making the peasants disposable again through AI.

Love the ferry tale (as the wag in the comments put it). Time and again we have stories of bureaucrats making a change, then trying (and failing) to make it work. Are they so dim they can't see that swapping the steps would make things go smoother, or are they on the take?

Somewhat related, I've been catching up with a TV series, Vintage Voltage, where they fit electric motors and batteries to classic cars. Had to feel sorry for the guy with the 944 Porsche. Conversion cost him something like £50,000, and all he has done is subtract from the value of his car. The little BMW Isetta was about the only one that made sense. But at least these are mostly fools being separated from *their* *own* money. Better than the Danish ferry business.