Cycling UK Forum

simonineaston wrote: ↑15 Feb 2025, 10:47am The excellent cycle.travel springs to mind...

cycle tramp wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 8:38pm
Britain has long had a history of saying 'stuff you, we'll do it our own way' and in doing so we've brought the world, Oasis, Madonna, the Beatles, The Internet, the telephone, pneumatic tyres, Middle Eart, Harry Potter, James Bond, the SAS, Beatrix Potter, William Morris, the Harrier Jump Jet, Charles Dickens, the Mini, the Vincent Black Shadow...
..we'll survive in the same way we ways have, luck, innovation, effort, an acknowledgement of risk and sheer bloodied mindedness..

Carlton green wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 9:40am

Nearholmer wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 9:23am One thing to bear in mind when batting %GDP figures about is how large the GDP of the EU is: about ten times that of Russia, and heading towards that of the USA.

In absolute terms (fiscal) GDP values are misleading. In Russia it costs relatively little to build weapons and to pay servicemen. Russia is large and doesn’t necessarily have to import anything from high cost countries so its external buying power isn’t crucial. In terms of weapons Russia has been enormously successful in the way in which they have undermined other states from within - it’s taken decades but open up your eyes and look at what a mess the Western World is in.

The Russian (leadership) mindset is different too. They are prepared to pay in suffering and deaths in a way in which Western countries are not.

djnotts wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 9:58am I'm currently again waiting on cancer test results - don't seem all that important right now!

djnotts wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 9:23am 7% anyone?

"Thee Sunday Telegraph, external focuses on a warning to Reeves from the foreign secretary at the security conference. During a speech David Lammy hinted at Cold War levels of defence spending, which would be closer to 7% of GDP, if Russia was victorious in Ukraine." (BBC News)

Mtb tourer wrote: ↑16 Feb 2025, 2:49pm Concrete emissions on a global scale https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/11 ... tal-impact. Read this and find out how much damage it causes. Just saying everything that's made has side effects. Structural engineering projects using concrete might need a rethink if it's 8% of Co2 output.

Mtb tourer wrote: ↑15 Feb 2025, 8:45pm At least our Winter heating is not used, have you eaten supermarket imported fruit this winter or the phone /computer we use on forums come from Asia . You would need to be hermit cut off from the commercial world to be Co2 free. Also the concrete bases for imported wind turbines etc . We are all guilty.

pwa wrote: ↑13 Feb 2025, 5:03pm the concepts lead to mad places straight out of Alice in Wonderland, and I am left wondering if physicists are so concentrated on the detail that they don't step back and consider the strangeness of their conclusions and say, "Hang on, this can't be right......". Because if half of what is presented is correct, reality is so mad that I begin to think that maybe physics is knocking on God's door. It feels so divorced from what we see and feel that it takes on a supernatural appearance.

Paulie73 wrote: ↑13 Feb 2025, 12:48pm Most my punctures appear to be glass or thorns ! My wheels are 26 inch size on my cannondale mtb I changed to road tyres from knobbly as was always on cycle paths ! Tyres are less than a year old

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑13 Feb 2025, 12:52pm Absolutely - Neither cosmological nor quantum scales map onto human experience.

You can do some simple astrophysics with "experience led" intuition, but it falls apart very rapidly - and I tried to stay away from physics modules marked with a T during my degree.
T was for Torture, or maybe Theoretical

[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑13 Feb 2025, 11:33am The concept of "not even nothing" is odd, because it's *so* far outside of our experience. There is always space into which something expands - but in this case it's space itself which is expanding, and that's very weird.

pwa wrote: ↑13 Feb 2025, 10:42am So let me get this right. When you reach the furthest limits of the Universe (capital U because it is a place name) and all that is left is Nothing, a void or emptiness, beyond that would be No Nothing. What would it be like to look in the direction of No Nothing, I wonder. Possibly a bit like Swansea on a wet day, I expect.