{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Liam's write-only LJ","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/","description":"Liam's write-only LJ - LiveJournal.com","lastBuildDate":"Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:53:53 GMT","generator":"LiveJournal \/ LiveJournal.com","image":{"url":"https:\/\/l-userpic.livejournal.com\/4401328\/461964","title":"Liam's write-only LJ","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/","width":"88","height":"31"},"item":[{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310412.html","pubDate":"Thu, 24 Feb 2022 18:40:21 GMT","title":"Blog moving.","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310412.html","description":"20 years was a long time, and it makes me a little sad, but there are things I want to say that I am not allowed to say on LiveJournal...

So, this blog is closing down. You'll find me over at Dreamwidth<\/a> now.

I've moved all the content, but sadly, comments didn't transfer. I will leave this here, but future updates will happen over there.","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310412.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310058.html","pubDate":"Tue, 08 Feb 2022 10:57:23 GMT","title":"Let's celebrate! My blog is 20 years old","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310058.html","description":"
\n
\n \n \"Blimey.\n \n
Blimey. Twenty years. I don't use it much any more but it isn't dead, honest.<\/figcaption>\n <\/div>\n <\/figure>\n


<\/p>","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/310058.html?view=comments#comments","category":"#ljanniversary"},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309963.html","pubDate":"Sun, 19 Dec 2021 14:58:25 GMT","title":"The crumbling Thwaites Glacier","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309963.html","description":"I shared a news article that gradually spread across a lot of the media last week. I said:

TIL (Today I Learned) that the state of Florida is bigger than England + Wales, and only a bit smaller than all of the island of Britain.

How did I learn that? Oh, because so is the Thwaites Glacier. It's the one that holds back the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Well, held. It's crumbling.

Scientists watch giant ‘doomsday’ glacier in Antarctica with concern
Cracks and fissures stoke fears of breakup that could lead to half-metre rise in global sea levels – or more<\/a>

This got some reactions, as it should, but of course, it also aroused (as ever, ill-informed) scepticism. It seems inevitable. So I tried to answer some queries.

> Their maths isn't very good. First they say it's the size of England, then they say it's 50 miles wide.

Hint: it's not square.

Here's a fairly explanatory pic.
\"Vox

(Source: Why scientists are so worried about this glacier)<\/a>

If that narrow bottleneck goes, then the rest slides into the sea rapidly. It doesn't need to melt, any more than ice cubes dropped into a glass need to melt to make the glass overflow. It doesn't matter if they take decades to melt; the sea-level rise due to displacement will take only about 12 days to spread out and equalise worldwide.

The key point here is that the fairly narrow point where the glacier flows into the sea is a bottleneck, and once the bung is removed, the flow speeds up.

Another said:

> TIL that the estimated time it could take for the doomsday glacier to melt has reduced from 40
> years to just five years in the space of seven months.

It doesn't need to melt. It doesn't really matter<\/i> when it melts.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is sitting on rock that is below sea level. Ice is very slightly less dense than water. That means it floats. If water gets underneath the ice, it slides into the sea and floats off. It displaces vast amounts of water and the sea-levels rise.
\"\"<\/a>
It is not about melting. Melting could take decades to centuries but it's irrelevant. It's when it floats away that is important.

And the Thwaites glacier is one of the 2 main points that the WAIS pours out into the sea.

I added some other articles:

BBC News: Thwaites: Antarctic glacier heading for dramatic change<\/a>

NBC News:
Antarctic ice shelf could crack, raise seas by feet within decade, scientists warn
Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world, has doubled its rate of melt in the last 30 years, a researcher said.<\/a>

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder:
The Threat from Thwaites: The Retreat of Antarctica’s Riskiest Glacier
Ice sheet’s demise poses the biggest threat for sea-level rise this century<\/a>

> The article refers throughout to Antarctic ice "thinning and melting"

I specifically already addressed this.

If you are lying in a bath tub & the water is within millimetres of the rim, which will cause it to overflow quicker?

[a] Turning on the taps and adding 10 litres of water. That takes 1 minute using typical bath taps.

[b] Dropping 10kg of ice cubes into the water, in one motion. 1kg of ice is 1 litre, in case you don't know your SI units. I'm a sprightly 54 but I don't speak fluid ounces and all that stuff I'm afraid. It doesn't matter in this context.

If I tip a 10kg bag of ice cubes into a full bath, it will overflow immediately. If I pour water in at 10l\/min it will take tens of seconds.

No, it is not about melting. It is about adding ice to the oceans, which adds mass. Archimedes' principle etc. Crystalline solids are a state of matter, a phase. It is irrelevant what phase the water is in; it's how much you add.

> Since 1950, the waters south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current have warmed at a rate of only 0.02º\/decade.

The poster didn't say degrees F or C.

But I submit that the numbers are irrelevant. The poles are warming much faster than the rest of the globe, but because most of Antarctica is a big raised continent with the icecap on top, it's much less in there. *Except* the Antartic peninsular – the long spur that points towards South America – which is the fastest-warming land on the planet:

Climate explained: why is the Arctic warming faster than other parts of the world?<\/a>

The southern polar ocean is warming faster than the oceans as a whole:


Antarctica has experienced air temperature increases of 3°C in the Antarctic Peninsula. Although that might not seem very much, it is 5 times the mean rate of global warming as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).<\/a>

The numbers may look small but the changes are vast. As a comparison, the Gulf Stream transports about 0.8 of a petaWatt of energy from the equator to the north pole. A fraction of a unit doesn't sound impressive. But the total energy output of humanity is about 23 teraWatts (2018 figures, latest I can find.)

1 PW = 1000 TW.

So humanity produces 0.023 PW. The very slightly warmer water flowing up the east coast of North America transports about 35 times<\/b> the total energy output of humanity.

I have seen other estimates it's more like 60 times.

Which means that any human attempt to change the Gulf Stream is pretty futile. A mosquito pushing on the prow of a supertanker.

But the increase in CO\u2082 levels humanity has accomplished, from 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 410 now, is more than enough to trap enough heat to melt Greenland faster than it's collecting snow in winter, dumping over 500 thousand million tonnes of freshwater into the Arctic ocean and slowing the Gulf Stream, which is powered by warm, saltier water cooling and sinking to the bottom in the Arctic ocean.

The numbers look small but the real effects are vast<\/b> and impossible to imagine on human scales. 0.2ºF (my guess as to what they meant) sounds like nothing, it seems trivial, but it's huge.","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309963.html?view=comments#comments","category":["climate","thwaites"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309664.html","pubDate":"Fri, 24 Sep 2021 16:03:05 GMT","title":"Oops! Wrong blog.","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309664.html","description":"That should have been over here:

https:\/\/liam-on-linux.livejournal.com\/82328.html<\/a>","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309664.html?view=comments#comments"},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309165.html","pubDate":"Fri, 23 Jul 2021 17:10:53 GMT","title":"Why I support private spaceflight over, say, charitable giving by sportspeople","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309165.html","description":"Unchecked capitalism is rapidly destroying the climate and most of the life on the planet. The Earth will be fine <\/a>-- it's survived at least half a dozen mass extinctions before. But we might not.

We face a choice of 2 options:

• End capitalism, free markets, consumerism, globalism, and democracy. Move into a period of degrowth, massive population shrinkage, switch to green technologies, a low-power way of life for the remaining population: no international travel, no flying, no cars, etc.

This is probably the best way but it's extremely hard, nobody really knows how to do it, and there are a vast number of extremely powerful entrenched entities implacable opposed to it.

• Or, embrace growth and expansion, in which case there is only one place to go: move industry and power generation off the Earth and into space. Meantime, switch to greener tech here, such as mass solar power generation, electric cars, telecommuting, etc.

To do option 2, we need<\/b> cheap, accessible space transport. Governments only did it in the 1960s to show off, and once the race was won, they stopped trying. They did it with extremely expensive, disposable vehicles, and as soon as their flags were planted, they stopped doing the hard stuff.

Some will now exclaim "but the ISS!" The ISS is about 220 miles, 350km, above us. You could bicycle that in a couple of days and drive it in an afternoon. No human has been further from the earth than that in about half a century, and there is no prospect of any government doing that very soon. Only Russia and China can currently do it; the American government gave up on it with the end of the Space Shuttle programme.

But SpaceX has done it repeatedly in the last year.

Yes, billionaires are going to space (or at least out of the atmosphere). Because only the biggest wealthiest companies can afford to do it. Because it costs billions, so only billionaires can afford it<\/i>.

Yes, arguably, we shouldn't have private citizens who can afford their own space programmes. Our governments ought to be doing it, and they ought to be taxing those people to pay for it as well as for free healthcare and education and much more.

But they aren't.

So be glad that somebody is.

It doesn't matter why. What matters is that if the economy continues to grow on Earth and only on Earth it will kill all of us. There is only one place else it can<\/b> grow, and that is space, where there is no air or water to pollute, no life to exterminate.

We need<\/b> to embrace and support SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. They are, for venal reasons, the trailbreakers of literally and precisely the only place we have to go<\/i>.

The human race needs cheap spaceflight. We need solar power satellites. We need cheap lunar helium for fusion reactors.

It is by far<\/b> the easiest path out of the mess we're in.

Yes, these early efforts are a bit poor. They are short hops, barely out of the atmosphere, not really into space at all and only just out of the atmosphere. They fall straight back.

But look at the context here. SpaceX nearly<\/i> screwed the pooch. Falcon-1 launches #1, #2 & #3 all went wrong and were aborted, destroying their science payloads. Only the 4th worked – and delivered a bunch of scrap iron to LEO.<\/span>

So many companies\/efforts have tried and failed: Xcor, Armadillo Aerospace, HOTOL, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries...<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
This stuff is hard<\/i>. Spaceplanes are hard.<\/i> Launching from a plane is hard<\/i>. Landing rockets is hard:<\/i> no superpower ever managed it, because governments aren't much worried about cost.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
No, Virgin "Galactic" aren't going into orbit with their current tech. Blue Origin are planning to, although they can't yet. But they got humans out of the atmosphere and back<\/i> safely and that's a big deal<\/i>. Only a handful of major nations ever did that before, and just 3 private companies have ever managed in history.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
But the Wright Brothers only flew less than the wingspan of a 747 first time. They only managed 26 seconds and 846 feet. Not so impressive. But look what it eventually led to.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
I used to live within walking distance of arguably the first public railway in the world<\/a>. It was horse-drawn, and it was replaced by a canal -- arguably a step backwards. <\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
But still, it was an important forerunner, and today a tramline I used to use a lot runs on that track. It wasn't a big deal in itself but my points are that what it led to was hugely important, and it's still around <\/i>in some form.<\/span><\/div><\/div>
Yes, the first efforts at anything are a usually rubbish compared to what comes later. But SpaceX set a benchmark and now others are striving towards that, and that IMHO is wonderful stuff.<\/span><\/div><\/div>","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/309165.html?view=comments#comments","category":["blue origin","spacex","virgin galactic","space"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/308921.html","pubDate":"Fri, 11 Jun 2021 11:29:21 GMT","title":"Fun with Czech! [cont. from p.94] #projectPrague","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/308921.html","description":"
Yesterday's Czech lesson was in the Locative case<\/a>. <\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
Locative, lokál<\/i>, the declension for the state of being in a location. Used only after v<\/i> (in), na<\/i> (on or to), po<\/i> (past, after, on, to, for, by – yes, all of them), p\u0159i<\/i> (by, nearby, with) & o<\/i> (about, with). Although s<\/i> is normally "with". Except if the word starts with a vowel, then it's se<\/i>, although that normally marks a reflexive verb. Lots<\/b> of verbs are reflexive.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
The locative is, naturally, different for all four genders, and in the plural, and there are different endings depending on the final letter, or possible the penultimate letter, or possibly both, or you might drop the penultimate vowel, and then you might change the last letter.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
*Brief pause for broken weeping*<\/span><\/i><\/b>

One of the problems with learning Czech is that Czech people only do very basic grammar at school, so unless they have special training, they don't know how it works -- they just do these many incredibly complex convolutions, like declensions on multiple different plurals of irregular nouns in a hierarchical gender system, without thinking. <\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
Which means that, because they don't know they are doing it<\/b>, they can't not<\/b> do it in order to, say, make life easier for a beginner. They can't stop doing something they're not aware of doing, nor can they explain it. <\/span>
<\/div><\/div>
Many years ago my then-lodger Ulrike<\/span><\/span><\/a> asked me what the difference between "who" and "whom" was, & I had to think hard to answer.

But I could, and it maps easily onto one structure of her native German, so from then on she used them perfectly – better than a native. We English-speakers only have he\/him, she\/her etc. and it only applies to pronouns, not to normal nouns or to possessives.<\/span>

<\/div><\/div>
Czech has cases for:<\/span><\/div>

  1. the thing doing the verb<\/span><\/li>
  2. the thing being owned (also, all plurals >=5)<\/span><\/li>
  3. the thing being given something<\/span><\/li>
  4. the thing the verb is being done to<\/span><\/li>
  5. the thing being summoned or identified<\/span><\/li>
  6. the place the thing is in, or on, near, past, close to, with or about<\/span><\/li>
  7. the thing being used for something or with something else<\/span><\/li>
    <\/ol>
    Yes, they must<\/b> be in that order. People don't know the names, only the number. I use the mnemonic "No Good Driver Arrives Very Late & Intoxicated" to remember the names (in English\/Latin).<\/span>

    Czechs use a system of little questions to work out which they're using:<\/div>

    1. pád (Nominative) - Kdo? Co?<\/i> [Who? What?]<\/li>
    2. pád (Genitive) - Bez koho? Bez \u010deho?<\/i> [Without whom? Without what?]<\/li>
    3. pád (Dative) - Ke komu? K \u010demu?<\/i> [To whom? To what?]<\/li>
    4. pád (Accusative) - Vidím koho? Vidím co?<\/i> [I see whom? I see what?]<\/li>
    5. pád (Vocative) - Oslovujeme, voláme<\/i> [Who! What! (calling or addressing someone\/something)]<\/li>
    6. pád (Locative) - O kom? O \u010dem?<\/i> [About whom? About what?]<\/li>
    7. pád (Instrumental) - S kým? S \u010dím? <\/i>[With whom? With what?]<\/li>
      <\/ol>
      These help me not one whit. Not even slightly. None of them "sound right" to me.

      The saintly Jana has memorized all the names for the cases so she can tell me which word is in which case when I ask. I can hear her quickly asking herself "kdo? bez koho? ke komu? vidím koho?<\/i>" Then she goes "it's in accusative."
      <\/div><\/div>
      All these use-cases overlap. They apply to all<\/b> nouns, to names, to posessives and<\/b> to pronouns, are different for number (of which there are four: ordinary singular, plural singular, two to four, and five and higher), and are different for all four genders (and of course there are at least two to four patterns per gender plus exceptions).<\/span>

      Some nouns, for instance, have the feminine ending but are masculine, which means in some declensions they take the feminine forms, but not always. I think. For these nouns there's a special extra feminine ending bolted on (-kyne) <\/i>to tell you that that form is really<\/b> feminine.

      The declensions for case #4, the most common – no, of course<\/i> they're not in frequency order, that would be way too easy – make many masculine nouns (e.g. names) in the accusative take the same ending as feminine nouns in nominative. The endings for case #6 sometimes are pronounced the same as the different endings for case #2. The endings for nouns in case #5 closely resemble the endings for adjectives in case #4. And so on.

      Vowels are closely rationed in Czech, you see. There's a national shortage. There's no easy way to distinguish "bull" from "bool", or "hut" from "hoot", or "bat" from "bart". So endings get endlessly recycled because there just aren't enough vowel sounds to give every case in every gender a unique ending.

      I am slowly compiling tables of declensions and endings in a series of spreadsheets. If I can find a way to export these to LJ simple HTML, I'll post them on this blog.<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","comments":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/308921.html?view=comments#comments","category":["projectprague","czech","projectbrno"]},{"guid":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/308486.html","pubDate":"Wed, 14 Apr 2021 21:38:18 GMT","title":"The wonders of masala chai. (#projectPrague blog post)","author":"lproven","link":"https:\/\/lproven.livejournal.com\/308486.html","description":"
      Sometimes I get very annoyed with Past Liam.<\/span><\/span>

      I had two favourite Asian-foods shops in Brno. I looked up a few here, and in three-and-a-bit years in Prague, I never visited either.

      Well, I've finally got around to it.

      A couple of weeks ago, I found Orient Food<\/a> in Holešovice. I spent about £60 in one go and staggered out with all I could carry. It's a good thing I didn't make it there with Ada a month ago, on my previous attempt to visit the place. She was on foot, which means progress was slow and inefficient at best. (Although she did great and was a little star – we went all the way into the city centre, to I P Pavlova (named after the great Dr Pavlov, who I am sure would be delighted<\/i> at how a billion humans now jump and reach for their pockets at a mere hint of vibration). Foreigners affectionately call the station "I P Freely". That time, we went to the Candy Store<\/a> where I stocked up on Marmite, crisps, biscuits and beer. Especially custard creams, which Ada picked for me and put in the basket. She gamely tried to carry it, but it was rather big for her.

      (She put quite a lot of things in the basket, in fact – she very much enjoys putting things in other things. Today, while we were Skyping with her grandma, she raided the kitchen vegetable drawer, found a bag of onions, and after playing with them in the kitchen, she brought the bag into the living room, and unpacked the onions onto the sofa. And then back into the bag. And then out onto the sofa again. Then back into the bag. Then she gave her mum an onion. Her mummy told her to give daddy an onion too... so she took mummy's onion back and handed it to me.

      I spent some time sweeping up onion skin this evening.)

      Anyway. Back to the Oriental Potraviny. This time, it was more like a spicy orgy to make a Fremen sietch proud. Biriani paste and<\/i> mix, plantain chips, frozen parathas, Bombay mix, some Tetley       masala chai<\/a> tea-bags, and more. I have been sadly missing a lot of my favourite spicy foodstuffs. <\/a>ednun<\/b><\/a><\/span> and I made quite a few shopping trips for such things in the Before Time.

      I never knew Tetley's made masala teabags! The box proudly proclaims that Tetley's is now a Tata company. Tata, if you don't know the name, is a Mumbai zaibatsu<\/i> who make everything from coffee to cars. I only knew the tea from my beloved and much-missed Sri Lankan restaurants of Colliers Wood. For tea, I especially recommend the       Apollo Banana Leaf<\/a>. (Prague's only Sri Lankan has closed down, and I am dismayed.)

      Turns out, it's great. Being the real Indian deal and not some watered-down British version for feeble white people, it has a strong punch of both spice and tea. Wonderful morning pick-me-up.

      Well, today, I visited the second such grocery store on my list – and discovered it was within walking distance of my old flat on Charles Square. How did I not know that?       Swagat<\/a> do both retail and wholesale, so although smaller, there's a quite different selection, including multiple blends of masala tea at 25% discount. I was recommended Wagh Bakri<\/a> and I bought a tub of leaf tea.

      And lo, I now know the recipe for masala tea! Well, the ingredients, anyway. I don't recommend making your own; I have no idea about the quantities.<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/div>