I doubt I’d ever buy a new camera again when you can pay maybe even half the RRP for a used one with a warranty from somewhere like Mpb.com

I’d also never buy a Sony as I don’t like the Way they process colours. Is there a Fuji option?

If you want a new camera I’d really buy it second hand.

I’m going to question this. How does noise come into internet streaming?

Honestly no idea and there’s every chance the suggestion is spurious. 😂

What’s not spurious is the difference in audio quality (yes I’ve tested it, yes it was blind).

Edit. Perhaps the noise in a streaming set up would be introduced at the point the data enters to house. You have a data stream coming out of a router, down a cable and then into the music server (or whatever you’re using). I know that routers are very ‘noisy’ devices and cable runs, which are very necessary, are where noise can end up getting into the signal path.

Again I could be wrong, I’m mostly regurgitating what I’ve read that was written by engineers. What I am knowledgable about is what I can hear and what difference certain things make to what I hear.

Not sure if this is necessarily the case. Digital music is a stream of bits, it doesn’t actually matter if that stream is being read off a CD and decoded in the CD player, or if it’s being beamed over the internet

It’s a fair point but the difference between streaming and local playback is error correction (with locally stored media the error correction process can be done more effectively) and noise, streaming being subject to more noise than locally stored.

The difference is subtle I agree, but it’s definitely there, all other things being equal.

Hey there – hope I can add something useful to this thread.

There are two broad reasons why your current streaming experience sounds considerably worse than a red book CD. One is that streaming is still an inferior way to replay music than having the media stored locally, whether that local storage be red book CD or a downloaded 44/16 or higher copy. This hold true in all instances I’ve tested so far – a downloaded version of the same album sounds better than the streamed version; not by much but the difference is definitely there. Then of course you have the fact that, at this time, Spotify is not even close to 44/16 resolution BUT they are about to launch just such a service.

The second reason is that the equipment you use to receive, organise and then pass the media to your DAC for decoding makes a huge difference. At the moment you’re using equipment not designed for the job to stream to your DAC; it will work, but comparing this set up to the CD player is a bit like wondering why an sports saloon car doesn’t perform as well on track as track car.

You need a dedicated music sever/streamer if what you want is something that will compete with the CD player you have; it doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but if you think about it, you’ve got an excellent transport currently performing the duties of data retrieval for red book CD and then a phone and telly doing it for streaming.

When I put together my HiFi last year, the last piece I had delivered was the music server. Before that, I was using my MBP with Roon. I was not anticipating the server making that much difference but I could not have been more wrong. The inclusion of a dedicated server was a huge jump (yes, OK it was a reasonably expensive server at £5k but still the improvement was astounding).

The other thing to highlight is Roon, which as a user experience for music is second to none. That platform does not have any of it’s own music content (but it does have extensive libraries of information which is what makes it such a rich experience), so you need to integrate it with a streaming service such as Tidal or Qobuz. I use the latter because you can get a lot of super high res media through it, up to an including DSD material, which will blow you away if you can indeed play it through your DAC (not all DACs can handle the files).

So my recommendation would be as follows:

– Look to get a dedicated music server, perhaps something like a Roon Nucleus which will also allow you to run Roon in your system
– Subscribe to either Tidal or Qobuz for high res streaming
– Look to buy and download local copies of media for the stuff you really like and treat having your own copy as being just like buying CDs was back in the day.

Hope this helps. Happy to answer any more questions.

Just curious, but would you be happy for them to receive conventional adjuvanted protein-based vaccines such as sanofi?

In the end I had no problem with my eldest (12) having the vaccine (nor I for that matter) but like the original question asked, I did stop to think more carefully about it and I did have an internal dialogue about how sure I was that it was safe, not that I was able to conclude much on the basis of evidence. In the end, like most people, I reasoned the benefits outweighed any potential risks (and to say there were no risks woudl be wrong as we all know).

My point wasn’t to suggest the vaccine was unsafe, just that you tend to use a different set of parameters for decision making when it’s your kids; it really focuses the mind because it’s now you ‘doing it to them’, which is a very different set of parameters to you owning any potential consequence to accepting the vaccine for yourself.

And, from I have read, whilst mRNA research has been going on for decades, this was the first vaccine used in large scale deployment to use that technology. Tell me if that is incorrect as there are several sources saying it is so.

I come at this from the perspective esposed by Karl Popper, which is to say that the definition of ‘scientific’ is that nothing can be directly proved, something exists as truth in the absence of falsifying evidence but is open to being falsified. It’s a rather oversimplified summary of his philosophy but it works for me.

We just got a letter through offering a Jab for my 9yo. I’m not sure why, but I’m reticent to do so, anyone else?

Two reasons. First it’s entirelty uneccessary in order to protect their health and given that we now have very high levels of transmission with barely any negative consequences, the urgency for anyone to have it to create herd immunity seems less pressing.

Second, it’s a brand new vaccine based on a technology that’s never been used before in human trials and thus there is the potential for a long term unkown negative consequence. There is no way to know this without longitudinal data over years. Whilst it’s reasonable to conclude that the risks of such a new approach are acceptable and valid based on the wider need to protect those (small number of) people who are vulnerable, in a nine year old you take a much more circumspect view because of their age. Factor in the reality that the virus is still here, still spreading (but without the mortality) and your reasoning is entirely understandable.

Hypocrites, definitely hypocrites (and boy aren’t there a lot of them around at the moment)

Or, if you commute round my way, a light that’s brighter than a nuclear holocaust pointing directly into the eyes of the oncoming traffic

I spent the winter of 2014/15 riding in and out of London three times a week (about 60km in and 40km back) and my route took my over Boxhill and Headley Common. I was lit up like a christmas tree the wholetime; a 1200 lumen light on the front, 800 lumen red on the back, two little flashing ones strapped to the outside edge of each drop on the bar (these I felt always helped give a dimension of width for overtaking cars) and a final one on my back pack. Plus a hi-vis jacket over my black top. So yeah, totally agree that you can always do yourself a favour by making yourself more visible.

Except, as pointed out several times over the course of just this thread, it’s not that simple.

Biologically speaking it almost is. The frequency of intersex chromosones is so vanishingly small that we can, to all intents and purposes, remove it from the equation.

Sociologically and psychologically speaking it is a very different, complex and, as I have experienced at very close quarters, painful problem. But however painful that may be, and for as real as the personal experience of gender dysphoria is, it does not negate the underlying biological imperative.

Again, to restate the problem, this is very simply an issue of whether exposure to testosterone during puberty leaves any lasting enhancement to an individual once they transition and start to reduce their testosterone levels.

We simply do not know the answer to that question and until we do (and likely we will never know it), then there will always be people who feel trans women have an advantage. And considering that entry into all elite level competition is predicated on accidents of birth (i.e. genetics), the sooner we realise that all advantages are inherently unfair the better.

but nothing similar for those with affected by their mental health

True but it depends on your definition of mental health as cognitive impairment is, I think, recognised in the classifications for the paralympics.

Can’t help with the website recommendation, but since you’ve specified the La Rochelle region, I assume you’re going to camp on the island of Ill de Rey? If not then you absolutely should; it’s utterly beautiful and perfect for a family holiday. The island is criss crossed by a network of bike tracks well away from the roads and you can hire bikes and kiddy trailers in most of the towns. The beaches are sublime as well.

I have very recent experience of this so first of all, let me offer sincere condolences for the loss, because that is what it is.

The first thing to highlight is that the route you chose to settle the divorce is key. Have a look at something called ‘the collaborative process’. It’s a new initiative launched and regulated by the law society that seeks to remove the adversarial approach to divorce proceedings that is the inevitable result of having confidential positional advice.

In the collaborative approach, all your meetings with your lawyer are done in plenary and everything that is said, is said openly between all parties. This makes a ton of difference. Also keep in mind that you cannot get a divorce without a financial settlement agreed and the court will not grant the divorce if they feel that one or both parties has not got a fair deal based on impartial advice. If you’re just going for 50/50, which is what the law says for marriages over say 10 years, then you stand more chance of getting the court to agree without having to involve a lawyer, but even then, that’s a really bad approach to it; you have no idea what your best interests are at this point!

On the point of the housing, why would you need a smaller house; are you not planning on having the kids at least some if not half the time? If the plan is for one of you to take the responsibility for child care more than the other then the court will want to see that that party has enough equity to buy a suitable family home.

I cannot imagine your partner would be allowed to borrow against a shared asset; doing so would mean that they are ostensibly taking out a second mortgage, which would then make one of the two properties a rental. I can’t imagine a lender would allow that for just one party without the consent of the other and if the marriage is over, why on earth would you consent? Seems very messy to do it that way.

The best outcome is that you sell the house and use the equity to buy two properties, with the asset split being whatever you agree, but ostensibly being 50/50 in law as a starting point and then the needs of reach party are considered beyond that.

Life may feel like it’s about to get tough and how tough will of course depend on how old you are (I was 47 when I applied for my mortgage following separation) as age will determine how much longer you’ve got to pay off the mortgage, how long the mortgage will last and thus how much you can borrow.

My last piece of advice would be to do everything you possibly can to keep it amicable and never give up on that; no matter how bad it gets, just keep trying to be the best ex your partner could have hoped for.

Isn’t telling someone that how they dress is asking for trouble a bit of a no no these days?

Wearing black isn’t the problem as that is easily solved by having (small) lights on your bike, something that almost all roadies do because it makes sense.

But to answer the driver’s question, the reason roadies, until more recently, exclusively dressed in black (and why competition rules required shorts to be black for example) is because back in the day, road racing, in the UK, was not legal, hence we invented time trialling. In order to ‘stay under the radar’ and not draw attention to ourselves, regulations required shorts to be black and consequently black became a standard (non) colour for road cycling.

The stuff about keeping discrimination out of sport also rings very hollow – outside of womens’s downhill, how many pro cyclists are openly gay?

I think you’re in danger of conflating one aspect of discrimination where there is zero potential for someone to have an unfair advantage, i.e. sexual preference, with another in which the question is at best indeterminate. I totally understand and recognise where you’re coming from with that statement, but I’m not sure it’s a valid contrast.

Until we are able to unanimously determine one way or another whether exposure to testosterone in puberty does indeed confer an advantage then we will always have doubt hanging over how fair trans women’s participation in female only events is. And until we do, then we absolutely should continue to debate and discuss it.

On another note, a not all men are stronger than all women, there’s significant overlap between the sexes that are driven by genetics. Some women have the ability to train and develop muscle mass in excess of men (and some of those women may well end up transitioning to a male gender identity) and would be at a distinct advantage over those men in strength based competitions.

Of course the real problem here is that we are so hung up on eugenics when it comes to elite level sport in the first place, but that’s a whole other ball game.

you have to (I think) define what is male and female, and I think that there is a growing acceptance that the mere presence of a willy or muff doesn’t cut it any more.

Barring those people born with intersex chromosones, this is not difficult to do. The biological definition of male and female is quite easy to establish. The sociological definition is where we run into problems (a problem I am very familiar with and entirely sympathetic to).

The problem with that is you run into the same issue that Women’s racing was struggling with for years which is very low numbers.

True but that’s life; you can’t set rules just to keep everyone happy and to some degree you have to become the change you want to see. Women’s participation has increased because women have started participating, which is due to the initiative of women and is the best and only resolution.

what about rock climbing? Woman are pretty much on par with men.

Is that true? I just had a look and the gap is about two grades, with the hardest ascent by a woman being 9b and 9c for a man. That’s still a very big gap, not really par but then really who cares? Competition rock climbing isn’t really what climbing is about.

Its miminal effort and cost on your part or is there something else to this story that makes you feel aggrieved about the way you have been treated…and perhaps deserve a little “compo”?

Not at all but their office is still closed and there is no IT team in the UK to send it to and neither do I know anyone even based here in the UK that might be a good person to recieve it (my boss and the person who interviewed and recruited me resigned and left before I started). Plus it’d be more like £30 via a courier though; recorded delivery isn’t secure and would simply be signed for by the security guy on the desk of the building, at which point it could easily disappear into a black hole that I end up being accountable for and I’m not spending £30 of my own money!

In the future, I suspect we will have a third category of competition for transgender atheletes, addressing much the same need and issue as the paralympics do now.

Can you not just drop it off at their offices?

Not without making a special trip into London no.

Apple stuff can be added to MDM (mobile device manager) without being opened. You just register the SN and it does it’s stuff in the background when it connects to the web first time.

I did wonder if this was possible so thanks for confirming.

All sound advice – I’ve emailed the company again with a note to say that if I don’t hear back from them I will assume they don’t want it.

Anecdotal or not, it’s still true

It’s not accecodtal though is it, we have a year’s worth of data from March 2020 to March 2021 when the vaccine roll out started. So should you actually want to try and understand what the risks really are you can go and look.

Can’t help with a product that will prevent the problem as well as solve the current issue but the enzyme based ones do work really well.

My ex asked me to look after her (was ‘our’) cat last year and she decimated my brand new furniture. Shat in the middle of the living room floor and drenched the two brand new chairs I’d only just had delivered. To say I was ready to drop her in the canal was an understatement, not least as I genuinely thought that my furniture was now ruined (cat pee is notorious). But the enzyme based products came up trumps…..after like three or four liberal applications!

If it’s inflamation it could also be arthritis, which might be stress or diet related.

This paper shows that the largest predictor of mortality in US states was the proportion of people who volunteer (above and beyond obesity level).

I thought gender was the strongest predictor, men being two thirds of all mortality? Interesting correlation to have found though.

LOL I had this once years ago where a firm made me redundant (yeah thanks, three months before my son was born as well) and then somehow managed to pay be four time the redundancy amount I was actually due. I remember looking at my bank statement and thinking how ironic it was that it should be this payment they screw up.

Ivan – The Divided Self: The view From Within

At night, sometimes I can smell sweet blossom in my room even though there are no trees near by

I can’t really help other than to say I experienced the same tragedy with my father and your comments about his behaviour are spookily reminiscent and familiar. For the longest time we thought perhaps we were catastrophising (his behaviour) because the shift was so subtle. He also became OCD about things, fussing incessantly over whether I knew how to turn off the lights at night when I would visit and he would go to bed before me, or worrying as to whose keys and wallet these were when it was blindingly obvious they were mine.

After the OCD he started to develop a somewhat ‘cloying’ demeanour, being perhaps slightly over familiar and coddling with people so that they’d feel a little uncomfortable. At one point, quite a few years down the line, someone even made an accusation of innapropriate behaviour; that was extremely hurtful and difficult, especially as the person persisted with their suggestion even after his condition was explained to him. People can be really vile sometimes.

I feel for you and every fbire of my being goes out to your situation. Watching my father go through this was about the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I managed that process somewhat by also photographing the whole thing, making it into a project. The joy that came out of that experience was that whenever I pointed the camera at him, he connected with me – the look that came back was my father.

He died in 2018 and I held his hand as he literally drew his last breath.

Honestly, I’ve never felt more secure being a bisexual man than at any other time in this country. The freak shows that are ‘conversion therapy’ are so far out of my ‘give a s**t abouts’ as to be almost a joke.

The very idea of it is so ludicrous that it just doesn’t need banning. Besides to do so would be problematic from a civil liberties and freedoms of speech perspective. Banning it is purely ideological, like banning fox hunting.

My list of breakages (all as an adult) includes both collar bones (both plated), humerus (because the collar bone was reinforced – that one really hurt), four vertebrae (crush fractures from landing on my head), scaphoid and ulna.

So I have a fair bit of experience of this but most of what I will write below has been relayed to me by orthopods over the years – i.e. it’s not ‘my’ opinion.

Everyone is a little different but not that different and generally bones in (all) adults take six weeks to create a stable union, which is when you no longer need to provide the break with support. It will then another six to maybe 12 weeks to fully calcify. It doesn’t matter who you are, before at least 12 weeks, the bone is not fully healed and will continue to have a soft crumbly property that will come apart all too easily if you subject it to another knock. If that happens, your healing outcome can be significantly compromised.

Fractures and breaks also vary; those people saying they were able to do x, y and z after breaking their collar bones haven’t had fractures that were displaced. When that happens (both mine ended up in three pieces), you lose all mobility in your top right quadrant. Plating merely stabilises the break; it doesn’t mend it.

When I broke my humerus my consultant radiologist friend warned me from even going near a bike again before the end of three months and recommended at least four as a healing time. He said that an innocuous fall could cause the bone to crumble again and then my outcome could be very poor; worst case he said is that the bone dies all together and I’d risk losing the arm.

In practise I felt fine to get back on a bike but having had that advice from him, I stayed well away (given that my track record for not crashing wasn’t exactly exemplary!)

I’m sure I’ve heard “live virus” used in relation to vaccines, but fair enough, viable is a better way of putting it.

You have and my post wasn’t trying to be pedantic so much as, you raise an interesting point, which is that we’re still not really very sure how to classify viruses in terms of ‘life’.

Did you ever see the film The Andromeda Strain? It was a film based on an early Michael Chricton novel (he of Jurassic Park fame) where a highly lethal pathogen is returned to earth from a satelite and a team of scientists is assigned to isolate and identify it. I mention it as it kind of addresses the same question.

Do LFTs differentiate between live and dead virus

The scientific community doesn’t have a clear consensus on whether viruses are even ‘alive’ in the first place. It’s actually a fascinating question that’s worth reading around.

I was there because I was caught, fair and square, doing 44 in a 40. I was doing 44 in a 40 because I hadn’t noticed the limit change from 60.

So really you were doing 44 in a 60. Are you one of those people who also does 20 in a 30 andfrustrates the bejesus out of everyone? (Actually truth nbetold I am one of THOSE people who tends to do just that!)

I’ve decided to undertake the full Bobby Sands remake/remodel.

I bet it will be crap.

I’ll get my coat.

12 years/sandan of Goju Ryu under an instructor who was a student of Morio Higaonna. I used to train maybe five or six times a week but that seems like a whole other life time ago now. The dojo was initially down the Walworth Road in Camberwell then moved to in and around what was the Heygate Estate (also off the Walworth Road).

I used to really enjoy the sparring but hate the press ups! Each dan grading is etched indellibly in my memory!

To be fair, we managed five pages of reasonable and reasoned debate. I do believe we are making progress.

successful rapper would be a bit better at using words to resolve the matter.

What, you mean like Biggie and Tupac?

Sorry, uncalled for!

Is it civilised to verbally attack somebody in public without provocation?

Well, no but then that’s not quite what happened here is it. The provocation comes in the form of being a celebrity at an event that has become synonymous with roasting. It’s a bit like asking if what Frankie Boyle does is acceptable. If you go to one of his gigs, you have to accept that you might end up being the very hurt butt of his jokes.

Perhaps then the real question is why on earth we feel the need to adopt that kind of appraoch at the Oscars (or the Golden Globes, BAFTAs etc); why do we have to behave like this in order to get people to watch?

I’m not saying that, whether ostensibly or otherwise.

OK noted, it’s just that it did come across as that when you said you stood by Smith’s ‘right to put him on his arse’. I think you probably meant Smith’s right to feel so angry he wanted to put him on his arse, which I think everyone here understands.

The follow up act will be an honest, authentic and deeply vulnerable interview with Oprah where he will make a full and honest apology, act in a sincerely contrite way and then pivot seamlessly into his wife’s alopecia, exploring the psychological impact of that condition on their relationship, how he stands by her and how she is his, ahem, rock etc. For maximum points, he will also reflect on how hard it is for a woman (or indeed anyone) in Holywood to lose their hair given the way that that community tends to ascribe value and judgement based on looks. He will reflect that is this that most triggered him. £10 says he crys again in this interview.

Yeah, I’m behind Chris Rock’s right to make that joke, but I’m also behind Will Smith’s right to put him on his arse for it.

It’s easy to feel some symptahy for what Will Smith did but if you think about the logic of what you’re saying here, you’re ostensibly saying that if someone upsets or offends you then you have the right to hit them. That just cannot be right in any civilised society.

I’m 25kg into my weight loss goal; not sure if I’m still trying to lose weight at the moment but another 5-6kg would be good.

You can lose about 1kg a week if you’re really disciplined and reduce your intake to about 1200-1500 a day (1200 on a non exercise day, 1500 if you do 60-90 minutes or moderate exercise). This is how I’ve managed it. Losing the weight will automatically mean you can ride longer and/or faster without fatiguing so readily. Also try riding early morning before you’ve eaten – just a cup of coffee as this can help promote fat burning during exercise.

Good luck!

Next week – is the term ‘bird’ sexist?

Yeah I think the oringal point would have been better received had he not used that particular term!

Try it down the local pub, 25% of the time I wager you’d get more than a slap.

Sure but this is back to understandable versus acceptable. If you’re saying that it’s acceptable (I understand you might not be saying that) in some instances for one person to hit another in response to a verbal goading, then we are going run into some problems down the line.

He/she was asking for it is a deeply problematic defence that really shouldn’t need to be either explained or debated.