The Spaceguard Centre, Knighton

 On a recent visit to Knighton, we paid a visit to The Spaceguard Centre just outside the town. We had booked a tour (£10, 1½ - 2 hours) in the knowledge that the weather forecast was wet and blustery for that day (Sunday 29th September 2024). Fortunately the rain held off but being on a hill, the wind was buffeting (according to Jay Tate, a mere breeze!).

Photo 1: Two of the Three Observatory Domes

Photo 2: Third Observatory Dome

This is not your run-of-the-mill space observatory though it can still do some of that. As the name Space Guard suggests, this is the UK's contribution towards a rather important international endeavour - the detection and monitoring of asteroids and comets that are on a collision course with Earth. This could be rather catastrophic - just ask the dinosaurs!

Jay and Anne Tate, who live onsite, run this enterprise on a shoestring with no funding from the government's science budget (an absolute disgrace). They rely on tour fees and donations from visitors, including schools, revenue from a small but well-stocked gift shop, local businesses and a band of hardy and dedicated volunteers. Even then, the income only covers the running costs for the Centre - Jay & Anne are also volunteers.

The green dome (Photo 1) was built by Jay and the volunteers and will house a telescope from Cambridge University's Observatory that is surplus to their requirements. The new facility will enable The Space Guard Centre to search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) in addition to their existing capabilities for only tracking known comets & asteroids identified by other observatories.

Please support Jay & Anne in their endeavours. Pay for a tour. Buy something from the gift shop. Make a donation. Volunteer. Your children and grandchildren will thank you for your foresight.

Halloween 2024

Photo 1: Grandchildren's Pumpkin Carving

Halloween has just passed and we didn't really notice. There were no trick or treat callers and we hadn't stocked up on sweets/candy so I've no idea what we could have given them. In the past we offered satsumas but I don't think the children were too impressed with those!

I had to pop into Hereford this morning and on my way back came across this rather splendid effort ...

Photo 2: Celebrating 'Halloween'

... someone had put in a lot of work in for just one night. Mind you, this is the same household that puts a grand display on for  Christmas ...

Photo 3: Christmas 2023

Photo 4: Christmas 2023

Photo 5: Christmas 2022

On a more serious note, how much edible pumpkin ends up as food waste? This UK survey  suggested that about 40% of the 35 million pumpkins bought in 2021 would not be eaten. I suspect this is largely down to the often messy job of extracting the pumpkin flesh and seeds through a small exit hole carved into the top or back of the pumpkin.

The next hurdle is what to do once you have separated the seeds from the flesh. The seeds can be roasted and the flesh turned into soup, bread, pie, cake, curry, hummus, and more. Pumpkin flesh is, in itself, fairly bland so you will need to add plenty of spices and flavourings. Roasted pumpkin has a better flavour but you will still need to add some flavour.

Autumn Colours at Queenswood Country Park & Arboretum

 

Photo 1: Autumn Colour at Queenswood

Once the sun had burnt off the morning mist, Saturday 26th October turned into a beautifully sunny day with crystal-clear blue skies (Photo 2) and that coolness that tells you it is Autumn.

The Ludlow Fine Book Fair was being held at Ludlow Racecourse - some 25 - 30 miles up the A49 - and Mary said she quite fancied going. In another life, she would have loved to be a professional bookbinder! We spent an hour and a half mooching round the stalls either selling fancy papers, leather hides, binding equipment, unusual books, etc and/or advertising book binding and calligraphy services. Mary spent £15 on a couple of books.

On the way back home we decided to visit the Ludlow Farm Shop (only a few minutes away) for another mooch (Photo 2). There is a large food hall, an artists' gallery, cafe/restaurant, gift shop as well as the Ludlow Distillery The Plant Centre is no longer.

Photo 2: Ludlow Farm Shop

We bought two individual pies (vegetarian) for tea and some spelt flour for breadmaking then headed off to Queenswood Country Park and Arboretum to see the autumn colours.

Photo 3: Queenswood Arboretum with the Autumn Garden in the Distance

After a cup of tea and a piece of cake (brownie), we headed off to the Autumn Garden (Photo 3) which is full of colourful acers at this time of the year.

Photo 4: Autumn Garden I

Photo 5: Autumn Garden II

Photo 6: Autumn Garden III

Photo 7: Autumn Garden IV

Photo 8: Autumn Garden V

Photo 9: Autumn Garden VI

The sun was starting to go down and we were losing the heat of the day ...

Photo 10: Autumn Sun Struggles to Light the Forest Floor

... so we headed back to the car and the short journey home. Tomorrow the clocks will be going back an hour at the end of British Summer Time - the extra hour in bed for one night does not compensate for the loss of evening light (Sunset timed for 4.51 pm the following day). Hopefully, the journey through Winter will not be a harsh one.

Photo 11: The Journey Ahead With Light at the End of the Tunnel?

The Law of Unintended Consequences

 Most people will be able to give you an example of "the law of unintended consequences" where the expected beneficial actions of a person, group, organisation or government turn out to have unexpected and unhelpful effects. For example, the town of Quelimane in Mozambique had a rat problem which they tried to solve by offering a bounty for every dead rat - unfortunately, this led to a profitable business opportunity breeding rats! Or, maybe that was an apocryphal story and it really happened in Hanoi, Vietnam? A similar anecdote involved cobras in Delhi, India (The Cobra Effect).

Photo 1: Does an Increase in Minimum Wage mean Job Losses? TL:DR No!

We are about to have the first Budget of the new Labour Government on Wednesday 30th October 2024. There is expected to be an inflation-busting increase in the minimum wage and we can expect some economists and political reporters to raise this old chestnut as an example of the law of unintended consequences: any increase in the minimum wage (designed to alleviate poverty) will lead to higher unemployment (i.e. make poverty worse). The connection between higher minimum wages and higher unemployment was debunked many years ago by Card & Kreuger, 1994; Leonard et al., 2014; Hafner et al., 2016; Forth et al. 2020.

Which brings me nicely onto a real example of the law of unintended consequences related by this story on the BBC website.

Embed from Getty Images

For millennia, we have disposed of our waste by digging holes and burying it in waste pits. For a long time this wasn't too much of a problem as much of the waste would be hardware (e.g. broken pottery) and very little would be organic (e.g. food waste) because anything unsuitable for human consumption would be used as pigswill. It is now illegal in the UK to feed food scraps to farm animals following outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the 1990s. In addition, the proliferation of convenience foods along with the forgotten art of reusing food leftovers has increased the percentage of food waste (residential and commercial) disposed of in landfill sites.

Hence, our first unintended consequence - the decomposition of food and organic waste under the anaerobic conditions of a landfill site producing methane, a greenhouse gas some 85 times worse global warming potential compared to carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In 1996, the UK Government increased landfill tax from £7 per tonne to about £84 per tonne to incentivise a reduce/reuse/recycle behaviour in the population.

By making the disposal of waste via landfill expensive, it has given rise to a proliferation of energy from waste (EfW) incinerators and anaerobic digestion (AD) plants. There are good arguments for both waste disposal methods but their proliferation has resulted in unintended consequences.

The BBC report now classifies EfW incinerators as our dirtiest form of electricity generation since the UK no longer generates electricity from coal.

More than half the UK's waste is now incinerated and there are plans for this percentage to increase if all the proposed incinerators are built. If you recall, the problem with landfill was the production of methane from the anaerobic decomposition of organic waste. By diverting the organic (e.g. food) waste from landfill to EfW incinerators, the operators could claim to be the 'green' option because CO₂ is a less potent greenhouse gas than CH₄. Unfortunately, for the environment at least, the amount of organic waste in our general waste has decreased (diverted to AD plants or composted?) and been replaced, to a large extent, by plastic. Strange as it may seem, the best place to dispose of plastic waste (assuming you cannot reuse, re-purpose or recycle it) is a landfill site where it will remain buried & unchanged for decades/centuries.

Another drawback to both incinerators and AD plants is the need for a steady consistent feedstock supply. Once built and operating, this disincentivizes other 'disposal' methods such as waste reduction/recycling/reuse. Local authorities sign long-term contracts (25 years) with an agreed tonnage supply of waste and penalties if they do not meet those targets.

So, in a nutshell, the original aim of increasing the landfill tax was to reduce the overall amount of waste. This could be achieved in many ways: e.g. dispensing with unnecessary packaging, repairing rather than throwing away, re-purposing, reusing and recycling, car-sharing clubs, etc. Instead, we have ended up with the dirtiest form of electricity generation through a series of unintended consequences.

Citizen Science - Turbidity (Part 1)

The Wye Alliance is a network of citizen scientists monitoring pollutant levels in the River Wye and its tributaries and working closely with the Environment Agency (EA). Citizen Science (CS) projects often work with basic instrumentation/equipment collecting vast quantities of data that regulatory bodies, such as the EA, could only dream about. For example, there are over 400 citizen scientists collecting twice-weekly data in the River Wye watershed. All the information is uploaded using the Epicollect App and is available to one and all via the WyeViz database.

Turbidity is an important measure of water quality and clarity that is widely used in both freshwater & marine ecological studies as well as in many industrial processes (e.g. sewage and potable water treatment, breweries, pharmaceutical preparations). In simple terms, it provides a measure of the haziness or cloudiness of a fluid caused by the presence of suspended microscopic particles.

Here is a recent photo (Photo 1) of Belmont Pool, a fishing lake in a country park on the outskirts of Hereford. In addition to the avian population, coarse fish, insects and plant life, there is also a colony of terrapins. Unfortunately, at the time this photograph was taken (October 2024), the turbidity of the water was excessively high which is bad news for all the flora & fauna tenants.

Photo 1: Belmont Pool (October 2024)

There are a variety of units used to quantify turbidity which is extremely inconvenient and confusing. However, the most widely used are Nephelometric Turbidity Units (NTU) so we will stick with these units. So what are good and bad levels of turbidity?

• Drinking water should always be < 1 NTU and, typically, <0.3 NTU
• Freshwater will vary from <10 NTU (visibility to depths of 50 cm or more) to >240 NTU (visibility to depths of 10 cm or less)
• Turbidities > 10 NTU cause short-term stress to aquatic life
• Turbidities >100 NTU are unsafe for aquatic life

The turbidity level in Photo 1 will be in excess of 100 NTU.

Why is high turbidity water bad?

1. higher water temperatures because the suspended particles trap more heat from the sun
2. reduced photosynthesis at lower depths due to less light penetration
3. reduction in dissolved oxygen content due to points 1. and 2.
4. clogs fish gills making breathing more difficult
5. sediment can smother fish eggs and affect larval development of aquatic life (insects)
6. stressed fish (points 1 - 4) are more susceptible to disease
7. predators (e.g. birds such as the kingfisher) cannot see their prey
8. Bottom feeders such as swans, ducks cannot see their food source
9. silts up ponds, river courses, etc
10. may encourage/sustain toxic algal blooms (Photo 2)

Photo 2: Toxic Blue-Green Algae

What causes high turbidity?

1. In these parts, the main source (> 70 %) of high turbidity is soil run-off due to poor or incompetent agricultural practices. The coffee-coloured streams contain the nutrient-rich red topsoil that is the lifeblood of Herefordshire's agricultural heritage (Photo 3).
2. Sewage discharges from CSOs and poorly maintained or leaking septic tanks
3. Road run-off after heavy rainfall plus other urban sources
4. Algal blooms
5. Erosion
6. Chemical pollution (Photo 4)

Photo 3: Typical Coffee-coloured Soil Run-off

Photo 4: Chemical of Natural Foam?

In part 2, I'll describe how we, as citizen scientists, measure turbidity.

Apple Bobbing on the River Wye?

 Mary & I were walking to the AGM of CPRE Herefordshire that includes a stretch of the River Wye as it passes through the city of Hereford. We noticed some green vegetative matter and the odd log in the water but didn't stop to investigate as we would have been late for the meeting. Some 2½ hours later, we returned along the same stretch of river bank to see the same scene (Video 1).

Video 1: Apple Pollution

This time we could identify the nature of the pollution as apples, and more specifically, cider apples for which Herefordshire is famous.

This is the view from the Hunderton Bridge, formerly a railway bridge but now carrying the Great Western Way cycle/pedestrian path over the River Wye. The raft of apples can be seen (Photo 1) in the distance towards the right bank* ...

Photo 1: Looking Downstream Towards the New & Old Bridge

... and a little clearer (Photo 2) when zoomed in ...

Photo 2: Close-up of the Floating Apples

[* the left and right banks of a river/stream are assigned in the normal way when looking downstream; when looking upstream, the right bank will now be on your left and the left bank on your right] 

We hadn't seen or heard anything about an apple bobbing competition and, as far as I knew, Westons Cider were not using river transport as a means of getting the apples from the orchards to the cider mill. Best guess is that a riverside cider orchard was flooded, due to recent heavy rains, and the apples, along with a few fallen branches (see foreground of Photo 1), floated off into the river. There were a lot of apples and, according to a local angler, this was a recurring phenomenon.

Classic Vinyl #2 Stevie Wonder - Innervisions

 A talent like Stevie Wonder only comes along once in a generation. A multi-instrumental singer/songwriter/producer who signed up to his first record deal (Tamla Motown) aged 11 and had his first #1 hit when only 13. Born 6 weeks premature in 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins, he was blind virtually from birth. He is still performing and active musically.

Innervisions was released in 1973 which makes my copy 51 years old; and it still plays beautifully. See here for a bit more on the story behind this album.

Front Cover

Back Cover

I've included all the tracks from the album below, courtesy of YouTube (sorry about the ads), so you too can appreciate this wonderful music. You can still buy copies on vinyl or you might be lucky and find second-hand copies in record stalls, shops, e-bay, etc.

My favourite track is Living in the City but it is a close call.

SIDE ONE

Too High

Visions

Living for the City

Golden Lady

SIDE TWO

Higher Ground

Jesus Children of America

All in Love is Fair

Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing

He's Misstra Know-it-All