When the Emir of Qatar’s Boeing 747-8 BBJ touched down in Palma at the end of June 2025, it brought with it a rare sight and a logistical challenge. The aircraft, often called a flying palace, is one of the largest and most extravagant private jets ever built. Its arrival marked the beginning of the Qatari royal family’s annual summer stay in Spain, a tradition that combines opulence with routine.

On June 30, 1973, a supersonic jet screamed across the African sky at 58,000 feet, chasing darkness at 1,450 miles per hour. Inside Concorde 001, seven scientists peer through holes cut in the roof, watching the longest solar eclipse in human history unfold. //

Over Africa, the Moon’s shadow raced across Earth at over 1,300 miles per hour. Ground observers got seven minutes before the shadow moved on. But Concorde at Mach 2.2 could actually outrun the shadow, staying locked in totality for as long as fuel lasted. //

Height mattered as much as speed. At 58,000 feet, the aircraft flew above weather, water vapor, and atmospheric turbulence that would blur ground observations. The combination of speed, altitude, and precise navigation created a stable observatory hurtling through space faster than a rifle bullet.

Supersonic cruise generated fierce aerodynamic heating, raising the skin to temperatures that would alarm passengers on any other jet. At the nose, engineers recorded figures as high as 261°F (127°C). The wing leading edges often reached about 212°F (100–105°C), while most of the fuselage settled between 194 and 203°F (90–95°C). //

At those temperatures, the entire 202-foot Concorde stretched by 7 to 12 inches. That expansion was most visible to the crew at the seam beside the engineer’s station, where the caps went in. //

The ritual of sealing a cap in the fuselage became most famous during the retirement era. On British Airways Concorde G-BOAG’s delivery flight to Seattle in 2003, flight engineer Trevor Norcott slipped his BA cap into the expansion gap while supersonic over Canada. As he later explained, “The Hat was meant as a permanent link between the aircraft and the crews.” Hours later, as the jet cooled on the ramp in Seattle, the seam clamped down, locking the cap inside. To this day, visitors walking past G-BOAG at the Museum of Flight unknowingly pass a hidden time capsule wedged between metal panels.

A rare shot shows the Concorde taking off with the NASA 905 carrying the Space Shuttle

The British historical novelist C. S. Forester is best known as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, whose rise from midshipman to admiral and peer during the Napoleonic Wars is told in a series of twelve novels, beginning with ‘The Happy Return’. Two of the Hornblower novels, ‘A Ship of the Line’ and ‘Flying Colours’, were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938. This comprehensive eBook presents Forester’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 2)

Please note: the eBook is only for sale to customers living in or visiting Canada, China, Hong Kong, Pakistan, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand and any other 50 year countries due to copyright restrictions.

The Gilwell Park Weather Rock always has the up to the minute weather conditions and has been placed here for your convenience.

The Official Weather Rock is located on Gilwell field and may be used in the following manner:

First -- Observe the rock for motion

The Rock is not moving- 0-3 MPH ligh breeze
The Rock is moving slightly - 4-10 MPH Mild wind
The Rock is moving in a small arc - 11 to 20 MPH Wind
The Rock is moving in a medium arc - 21 to 40 MPH Wind-Gusts to 50 MPH
The Rock is standing off to one side by 15' - Gale Force Winds
The Rock is standing off to one side by 30-45' - Big Blow Coming
The Rock is standing off to one side by 60'-Hurricane!!
The Rock is standing at 90'-Tornado!! Get to a root cellar! Take Toto!
The Rock is bouncing up and down-Earthquake !!
Second - Touch and Look at the Rock

The Rock is cold, dry and easy to see- Clear, Fair Weather, it's Cold
The Rock is cool, dry and easy to see- Overcast Weather
The Rock is warm, dry and easy to see- Clear, Fair Weather
The Rock has a shadow - It's sunny
The Rock is hot & dry and easy to see - Clear Weather, It's Hot
The Rock is warm and white - Chase the birds away
The Rock is cold, wet and easy to see-It's a cold, wet, day-Dress warm
The Rock is wet on top and dry on the bottom- It's Sprinkling
The Rock is cool,wet, and easy to see-It's rainging. Get your poncho.
The Rock is dripping on all sides-Its a downpour-Too late for poncho

A case of oops rather than UPS

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better be going

That was a powerful joke

The sort of thing that could spark a pun-off: a current trend at El Reg.

We Volted at the chance to have some pun

A landmark work of over 100 scholars, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution provides unique line-by-line analysis explaining every clause of America's founding charter and its contemporary meaning. Second edition completely revised.

• An unprecedented collaborative work of 114 leading scholars, with over 200 original essays
• Completely revised, nine years following the original landmark work
• Foreword by Edwin Meese III, 75th Attorney General of the United States

calibre has a binary install that includes private versions of all its dependencies. It runs on 64-bit Intel or ARM compatible machines. To install or upgrade, simply copy and paste the following command into a terminal and press Enter:

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

sudo apt install libxkbcommon0

Regular expressions are features used in many places in calibre to perform sophisticated manipulation of e-book content and metadata. This tutorial is a gentle introduction to getting you started with using regular expressions in calibre.

Start the calibre Content server. The calibre Content server exposes your calibre libraries over the internet. You can specify the path to the library folders as arguments to calibre-server. If you do not specify any paths, all the libraries that the main calibre program knows about will be used.

The calibre Content server allows you to access your calibre libraries and read books directly in a browser on your favorite mobile phone or tablet device. As a result, you do not need to install any dedicated book reading/management apps on your phone. Just use the browser. The server downloads and stores the book you are reading in an off-line cache so that you can read it even when there is no internet connection.

sudo pip3 install pyqt5 

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx libxdamage1 libegl1 libxkbcommon0 libopengl0 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libfontconfig

The NTP Pool DNS Mapper tries mapping user IP addresses to their DNS servers (and vice-versa). It also tracks which servers support EDNS-SUBNET and how well that actually matches the client IP (as seen by the HTTP server). You can see a demo at mist.ntppool.org.

It's done to research how to improve the DNS system used by the NTP Pool and potentially other similar applications.

How can I help?
Thank you for asking! The easiest way to help is to help get more data.

If you have a website you can have your users help by adding one of the following two code snippets to your site.

The reviewer begs the reader’s indulgence for combining a book review with an appreciation of the author. Yes, Leonard Read is my guide and inspiration, and I was thrilled to learn of the republication of Government: An Ideal Concept (FEE, 1997, $12.95 paperback). This book is to me much like the fruits of scripture.

In 1982, I wrote to Read asking if he still believed what he had written in 1954. His reply: Just the other day I re-read Government: An Ideal Concept. Today I wouldn’t change a word of it. All of my books have been consistent with this book you like.

I have read all of Leonard Read’s books; they are consistent. Read is constant in character and consistent in thought. Given his premises, his freedom philosophy, as he called it (to disassociate himself from the anarchists who had appropriated his earlier use of libertarian), is consistent and corroborated by history. Read has grasped and described a natural law.

In Government: An Ideal Concept, he limits himself to basics and a few clear examples. Other issues and secondary points he leaves for other books, other writers. The argument of this work is logical, consistent, and neither circular nor abstruse.

Read is never a polemicist but warns against provoking antagonism with unnecessary personal attacks and criticisms of error, when what is needed is self-improvement and demonstration of truth. Although he says Government: An Ideal Concept is an essay in clarifying his own thinking, he writes with the authority and serenity of someone already possessed of a truth.

Not at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 nor when Read wrote Government: An Ideal Concept, says Read, was there any well-defined . . . principled, spelled-out ideal theory of government or liberty. The founders attempted to limit government, but lacking was a well-defined theory or positive rationale as to why limitation.[1]

Read was familiar with political and philosophical ideas from earliest writings to the present. Yet he was convinced that extant theories of liberty and government were inadequate and that this lack would have to be supplied before American society could secure the Blessings of Liberty cited in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

Read’s plan is to try to justify government, an effective but surprising strategy for one who sees that government, the immune system of society, designed to protect from internal and external dangers, has itself grown unhealthy, and, by proliferation, become an agent of social dysfunction. He seeks to understand the healthy state of government in society as the ideal—a key word in this book’s title. Properly limited government, he asserts, because it is necessary, must be a positive good rather than a necessary evil.

Fundamental to Read’s theory of limited government is his analysis of social versus individual problems, and the role of force and coercion in society. By definition, government is organized force. It monopolizes the legal use of force in those geographical, social, and economic areas under its jurisdiction. Read posits, Man’s purpose on earth is to come as near as possible in his lifetime to the attainment of those creative aptitudes peculiarly his own. He then explains why all of creative human emergence can only be a personal, voluntary undertaking. This leaves those actions of man which impair the source of creative energy and stifle its exchange, and also the actions which are parasitic on the flowing energy as the only social problem. To remove these inhibitory actions, it is necessary to restrain aggressive force and/or penalize those persons who indulge in it. Read explains why force can only restrain, never create. Therefore, the only proper use of force is to restrain aggressive use of force and fraud.
...

American Founders
Leaders at the Creation of the Republic

Download Link

Key Topics
The Founding Era

Why the American Founding Matters

Leading Founders

Their lives, ideas, public service, and selected writings

Primary Documents

Records of the Founding

Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. William Happer cover the sound reasons for climate science skepticism, the politicization of research funding, and the limitations of current climate models. //

Happer and Lindzen discuss how government funding mechanisms and political narratives shape climate research priorities. They argue that scientists who challenge mainstream views risk career marginalization and loss of funding. Rogan’s audience was treated to a robust review on how ideology and media framing have amplified what Happer calls a “CO₂ cult,” and how vital it is to question the reliability of predictive climate models. //

rhhardin | October 24, 2025 at 7:22 am
It was clear that science had nothing to say about global warming right from the hockey stick curve long ago, for two reasons that intersected with what was known about other things:

1. You can’t solve the Navier Stokes equations, which govern fluid flow. In 2D, flows go to larger and larger scales, and there’s no problem with numerical calculations. In 3D, flows go to shorter and shorter scales, and no numerical calculation can do the physics because the grid size is always too coarse no matter how fine it is. (The mechanism is that in 3D, vortices can kink and break up, which they cannot do in 2D. Those fine scale flows resulting feed back on larger scale flows by way of constituting a change in viscosity – transport of x momentum in the y direction etc. – on the large scale flows. Actually a tensor, not a scalar)
   So every calculation includes a term “effective viscosity” which does not appear in the Navier Stokes equation, and at that point stops doing physics. So no calculation is possible.

Weather forecasts are good for two or three days, which is how long it takes large scale vortices to kink. After that they’re no good.

2. You can’t say any historical change in temperature isn’t part of a long cycle and not a trend. A long cycle can’t be man-caused, a trend might be. The mathematical mechanism is that the linear system you have to solve to distinguish long cycles from trends develops eigenvectors of about 10 to the 30th power, which instantly multiplies any noise in the measurements and swamps the effort to distinguish. You need data that’s not shorter than they cycles that you want to eliminate, called the uncertainty principle in math (and quantum mechanics which has the same math but not other relation).

So there are no models and no data in support of man-caused global warming, in principle. //

DaveGinOly in reply to rhhardin. | October 24, 2025 at 11:58 am
The models themselves can’t provide any predictive authority. Even the UN cautions that the results spit out by models aren’t predictions. The trouble with models is that they are built by modelers who have preconceptions of how the climate works and changes over time. If a researcher thinks CO2 has an effect (there are good arguments that it doesn’t, for instance the geologic record shows the CO2 rises in response to warming, and not the other way around, there is also some – I think – very convincing science that CO2 causes warming up to a certain concentration, after which adding more CO2 has no effect), then he builds a model in which the virtual climate reacts to its virtual CO2 levels. If you had a theory that said the climate responds to the number of houses that are painted yellow, you’d build a model that had such a feedback mechanism in it. And, sure enough, if you increase the number of virtual yellow houses in the model, the virtual climate would respond. But that wouldn’t mean it isn’t utter nonsense.

Models can only show how a natural system might work. They represent theories and therefore prove nothing. Real-world observations are necessary to validate the theory. Even if the climate models are accurate, nobody has demonstrated, with real-world observations, that the actual climate behaves like their models.

Also note that there are literally dozens of climate models. Nearly every research group creates their own. This should inform us that no climate researchers have any faith in the climate models of any other researcher. What does that say about the reliability of the models?

“Science…requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results.”
Dr. Michael Crichton
Speaking at the California Institute of Technology, 2023. //

Ironclaw in reply to rhhardin. | October 24, 2025 at 12:32 pm
I understood that political science is the only science involved with climate when they started going back and “correcting” measurements made nearly a century ago.

4 days
jakeSilver badge
Reply Icon
Locking MollyGuards.

Available at a sparky supply shop near you; usually under $CURRENCY20 each. //

Sorry for Molly? Nah.
She has a story to tell that nobody else does.

Many moons ago I took my daughter to SLAC on take your kid to work day. At the ripe old age of 9, she had been there many times before and knew the ropes, but I figured she deserved a day out of school.

She told me as we were walking in that it'd cost me ten bucks for her to not push any buttons. I gave her the money.

On the way back out, I told her that it'd cost her ten bucks for me not to tell her mother she was running a protection racket. She made a face and paid up ... and promptly told her mother as soon as we got home. They both still laugh about it :-)

Call it a badge, sticker, button, or whatever you'd like. Create yours below. Pick some colors, enter some text, and you'll get a button you can download for your site.

Beef costs have stayed relatively stable over the last 50 years. One pound of ground beef in 1980 was equivalent to the earnings of less than 15 minutes of labor, and that ratio is roughly the same in 2025.

At the same time, input costs have soared. //

“A hamburger full of high-quality protein and nutrients for $6 is an incredible deal, especially when you consider the cost of foods with far less to offer,” said Justin Tupper, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association.

Others contrast beef prices to the cost of nutritionally empty, mass-produced products.

“A Snickers bar weighs 1.86 ounces,” said Chris Earl of Reverse Rocking R Ranch in New Mexico. “At $2.69 a bar, that equals $23 dollars a pound for a Snickers.” //

Many producers believe Trump is responding to demands from powerful meatpacking companies to increase supply and slash the premium prices they are being forced to pay for American beef products.

The advocacy group R-CALF USA has long criticized the unchecked power of the four meatpacking companies that process 85 percent of the American beef supply.

“Packers and retailers have become so concentrated they now control the market,” R-CALF posted in an X statement. “A generation ago, ranchers earned over 60% of the consumer beef dollar. Today, they get under 40%. Trying to lower prices by inviting even more imports only speeds up the dismantling of America’s beef industry. We don’t need more foreign beef. We need fair markets and country of origin labels.”

At the very least, ranchers argue, they should have the right to compete against imported beef with clear and transparent labeling.

“I don’t really care if Argentina imports beef, as long as it’s clearly labeled,” said Arizona rancher Casey Murph. “American ranchers are more than ready to compete with the rest of the world’s beef with their lax standards.”

Mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL) would require meatpackers to label beef products with the country they came from, giving American producers a market edge. Ranchers have called for this legislation for years to no avail.

Burke warned that flooding the market with cheap foreign beef could turn ranchers against a president who has historically enjoyed enormous popularity in cowboy country.