I still prefer running tubular tyres personally, for both commuting, sporting rides and racing. Honestly the number of punctures I get riding on tubs compared to either tubes or tubeless is night and day differene. In 8000km of commuting one year I counted three punctures. Yes OK so one of those I could not fix with a tubeless sealant (I run my tubs with sealant as well) and so I had to get the train home but still, three in 8000km is pretty good going.

Not so Jude but i am not wanting to derail this.

TJ you said my argument was ‘pure pish’; I can handle that personally but it’s hardly the voice of someone willing to debate with either an open mind or good manners.

BTW for the record I have always preferred Shimano to both SRAM and Campy and do not see the point in worrying about how large wheels on MTBs are, though having been a dyed in the wool 26 incher since, ooh about 1990, I did rather have to swallow my pride the first time I rode a 29er on my local trails and literally set PBs on every strava segment 😆

But you’re right I don’t know you. What does ‘TJagain’ signify then? Jude the Obscure is one of my favourite books and seemed like a fun pseudonym for an internet forum (where these days you have to be so careful not to tread the wrong line of received wisdom lest you get hounded!)

The Dr’s letter sent to Spotify makes it clearer. If you think none of the comments they have concerns about aren’t misinformation than you’re sadly mistaken.

I read their open letter just now. Thank you for sharing it. Their open letter is the misinformation piece. None of the claims they make are things he’s said but rather it is their interpretation of those claims.

@TJAgain – I think being a bit of a grump is a sign of being unhappy with something about yourself. Most people’s grumpy or aggressive responses to things can be explained by ego at some level. You were pretty rude to me on one of those threads but I can forgive you that and offer a hug if you need one?

Maybe because this time he’s spreading dangerous misinformation about the virus and vaccines.

I’ve read about what he’s said and nothing he’s said is either factually incorrect or indeed misleading.

Young healthy people are not at risk from covid that is a simple fact that is easily established through data (assuming you take the time to look). However even though it is true, it not the same thing as saying you ‘shoudln’t’ get vaccinated; that is however a matter of opinion and one that anyone should be allowed to express in a free society. However, he’s never said you shouldn’t get vaccinated; he’s only said ‘young people are not at risk’.

I get that people don’t like him (Joe Rogan) because he interviews people with views quite different to the mainstream. But that is a reason to like him in my view (which I do).

Like the rest of your arguement

What rest of the argument?

As for reducing transmnission, that may be generally true for vaccines, but in the case of Covid it is not yet known either way (though we do know for sure that it does not stop it).

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission-idUSKBN29N1UH

So your argument is the one that is pure pish my friend.

The video I posted highlights that if your main reason for a strong pro-vaccine argument is to protect those that cannot be vaccinated, that argument is negated by the fact that being vaccinated doesn’t prevent you from passing it on. There’s no moral high ground to having the vaccine, only personal protection.

Playing the Humphrey Littleton variant – Chigwell

Well worth watching.

Coincidentally, this image is a direct interpretation of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earing’, albeit a playful interpretation!

@johndoh you mean Ivan or the lighting in my composition? 😂 thank you though that’s a hell of a compliment ❤️
I am a bit of a fan of chiaroscuro lighting so this often features in my work.

If their decision only affected themselves, we would. But it doesn’t.

No true but then their (the anti vaxxers) counter argument to that is equally as valid and based on the same premise; you cannot know for sure that the vaccine is harmelss just like you cannot know that the lock down didn’t also result in significant deaths.

I totally agree, really, but you post this (below), knowing that a contributor to this thread has lost 2 members of his family to Covid. It’s one of the most deliberately nasty comments I’ve seen posted on this thread or the other.

WHAT?
Are you serious? Everyone on this forum has lost someone to something! I was simply making the point that a) a death from Covid is like all other deaths – tragic and deeply sadenning for those who were close to the individual and b) that you lost someone to Covid does not make your view on Covid or the vaccine any more valid than anyone else’s. If you’re going to take exception to even highlighting that fact that’s not something I’m going to reasonably be able to anticipate!

but I am sick to death of having to repeat the bleeding obvious over and again.

So don’t do it – just accept that some people don’t agree with you and leave it at that. I think the problem becomes most vexxed when you adopt a position of having to convince someone you’re right/they’re wrong (this is something I’ve struggled with myself and have learnt to let go of the hard way!)

My friend Ivan

It’s not mandatory.

I know. But thanks for reiterating the point.

There are place in the world where it is and i guess some people are worried that if it could happen there it could happen here. There is also the problem that whilst not mandatory, general sentiment (as expressed on this thread for example), is very disparraging to those who question the wisdom of the vaccine.

Honestly the level of hostility and rudeness (from both sides) displayed on this thread is the thing we should be most concerned about.

That’s a point, I hadn’t considered that particular can of worms…

From memory, the last review didn’t say that 23 weeks prem had a 100% mortality rate, just that survival was so vanishingly rare that changing the law to account for it was not justified (which seemed like an entirely reasonable conclusion to me). But yeah, watch this space as I’m sure some one somewhere will pivot from that story to that issue.

“Forced” needs to be on that list

I asgree but we do need to keep the word ‘coerced’ and ‘marginalised’ in for fullness of debate. I agree that no one is being ‘forced’ but it’s a subtle difference between force and coercion and that is a very important debate.

It’d be a lot easier if anti-vaxxers just turned around and said “sorry, I don’t quite follow the science,

Very (very) few people do though and I suspect that includes you (as it does me) unless you actually worked on the vaccine itself? This is where the problem lies; the ONLY successful mechanism for rolling out something that no one but those directly involved truly understands, is to make it voluntary. The moment you make it mandatory, either directly or indirectly, you kill confidence.

They are watching us and waiting for us to either grow up

God I hope they’re not on STW! 😆

Indeed it is. There was a review a few years back of the abortion term limit with the question posed being whether it should be rolled back from the current 24 weeks and the review concluded that the chances of survival before 24 weeks were so vanishingly small that there was no justification for such a change. So to read that any baby has survived at such a premature stage is incdeed, miraculous and such an utter joy! (and no, I’m not suggesting we should review term limits!)

I can’t help but think that this thread and the much wider debate in general would be better served if the following phrases were banned wholesale across the country:

– XXXXX people have died of/with Covid
– I had it and I recovered from it without issue
– Any references that include the words ‘cold’ and ‘flu’

If we did this, we might have a more balanced and insightful debate. As it is, the only thing this thread/debate is really debating is your relative level of agreeableness/neuroticism.

The anti Vax brigade have never seemed to come up with an alternative to stop the pandemic with the minimum number of deaths.

I’m not an anti vaxxer (but I am adamant it should be a free choice) but this argument, of minimising covid deaths, is where the problems start. Sure the over 75s and those with severe co-morbidity factors are hugely at risk and it’s right that society take some collective action to reduce that risk. But the idea that we have to minismise the number of deaths from covid is deeply problematic. How many would you be comfortable with; what is a reasonable minimum?

Life is the biggest co-morbidity factor period and tragic as it is that people die, it is rather innevitable and happens 600,000 times a year in the UK alone from a whole host of things including flu and at all ages. Only the novel nature of the virus and your own persional tendency to feel neurotic and anxious about risk are differentiating factors in the overal attitude we see in response to this situation.

I don’t know anyone who died from Covid, which of course is not to say that a good many people did (75% of them were over 75 years old btw and 95% were over 60, so age is overwhelmingly the biggest factor in terms of the risk) but I do know five people under the age of 50 who died from cancer in the last five years (all leaving behind very young families) and I know a great many poeople who died from dementia who were older, my father included.

Risk is an entirely personally perceived construct and my comfort with it will be different to everyone else’s; in this debate that different perception of risk (a factor of your neuroticism) is the only realy variable you should be discussing.

The real head mash is when you realise that beyond the visible horizon of space, the speed of the universe’s expansion exceeds the speed of light (as it did in the period of cosmic inflation). There’s a ‘bubble’ of the current visible universe; behind the bubble’s edge (or horizon) everything is moving away at less than the speed of light and so light, whilst taking its sorry ass time, does reach us. But anything beyond that bubble’s horizon is receding at faster than the speed of light and so is eternally lost to us. Of course, with the rate of expansion speeding up (something we’ve only recently discovered) that horizon is actually shrinking. Ultiamtely, every part of the universe will be invisible to every other part of the universe and there will be nothing but an eternal long dark night of the soul.

Imagine it like this – we meet in a bar and begin to talk. The conversation flows convivially and we decide that we both like each other and so I offer to buy you a drink. You happily accept and drink the drink and we both part as friends.

Now imagine the same scenario except this time rather than offer to buy you a drink, I hand you one and demand that you drink it. Do you think that you would be quite so willing to accept my otherwise kind and well intentioned offer?

No, thought not, and that folks is why you keep vaccines as entirely voluntary because to do otherwise will result if far fewer people accepting it. Besides, we still live in a free society where telling someone else what they can and can’t do with their body is a moral travesty that should be resisted at all costs.

This. It’s a whole village of edgelords.

That right there and the post you quote are prime examples of bigotry. You presume to know, and judge in the process, something about a whole group of people based on nothing more than conjecture.

This feels exactly like the kind of woke racism that John McWhorter is criticising in his new book.

Jeez, you guys still watching TV? The BBC is garbage but then so is most of popular culture. No lament for any potential demise here; I’m happy with music and books.

I didn’t just forget to change my address, I forgot to renew my license. I only found out when I got a £250 debt collection agency letter for the London congestion charge from about eight months earlier! When I went to change my address I realised that my license had expired six months earlier (though luckily two months after the penalty charge).

I renewed my license and it took no more than about 10 days to come through. All this was last November.

Well it’s not really in the area that you are asking about but if you were interested in something technology related then General Assembly is a company I can highly recommend. Their courses are (largely) acredited and range in length but the median duration is around 12 weeks.

In general, online courses are not especially high calibre as traditionally their very existence as ‘online’ (rather than classroom based), means that they were low value/low cost – as soon as you put a trainer/faculty member in a room then you’re costs increase exponentially.

However, the situation with covid has changed the landscape quite a bit and now most of what was ‘professional training and development’, which worked around a model of instructor led, classroom based training, is now also virtually delivered, so the standards of delivery have risen quite a bit. That’s not to say there won’t be lots of still low value/low cost options to try and avoid.

In general, the sad truth is that the quality of delivery and course materials will vary directly with the amount of value those skills being developed will be able to subsequently create. Even more sadly, mental health is one of the poorest areas in that regard. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.

A couple of other suggestions – rather than look for a bluetooth connection, try for a digital input, probably a USB connection would be ideal and then use a laptop as the streaming device and consider Tidal or Qobuz as the media source (Qobuz has much higher resolution media available for a good chunk of its catalogue, i.e. higher than CD 44/16 quality, whereas Tidal tops out at 44/16). Obviously that means looking for a DAC module in the amp as well as a phono stage but your budget should allow you to find something suitable.

As I look back on 2021 I feel pretty happy I achieved my last resolution to lose 25k. I think my resolution for 2022 needs to be to keep it off!

There was me thinking I was the only person choosing Lamb Gorecki as 1st song at our wedding!

In any other forum you would be!

@binners I was wondering when someone would point that out. Interesting side story about the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; I was 16 years old and hanging out with my best friend at the time in her bedroom. Of course we knew about the holocaust, who didn’t (back then at least, quite unfathomably I have spoken to young adults now how have not even heard of it which is terrifying!), but I’d never really seen anything that visually and unambiguously showed the reality of what happened.
It must have been a Sunday night I was at her place as The South Bank Show came on (it was 1990) and the episode was all about Gorecki’s Symphony No.3. The show played the music with documentary footage from inside the camps; I remember my friend and I being shocked to our core. We were both sat there with this vile sick feeling in our stomachs, unable to move or speak as we saw for the first time what really happened in those camps.

@ judetheobscure – that sounds really difficult situation. I suppose if there’s any consolation then it’s making up for lost time now catching up on some great music. Enjoy.

Yes, to say the least. The lack of music, though hard, was the most benign part of the experience. if you’ve ever been in close contact with someone struggling with severe mental health issues you will have some insight into how difficult it can be to be the person they use as a ‘punch bag’ (metaphorically speaking, not literally). The hardest part of that is knowing it’s not really their fault, or maybe it is. The question of to what degree we have to take responsibility for our actions comes into sharp relief.

The very best outcome though is actually that we are now in a much better place; we cooperate and collaborate around the kids. They have fixed many of their issues, as have I (though the healing has taken a while).

I have invented a reverse entropy lego machine. It fixes the probelm of buying expensive lego kits that, over time, get subject to entropy and end up a jumbled mix of pieces in with all the other expensive kits you bought.

The idea beind my invention is that you drop all your jumbled lego into a hopper, select the object that the pieces originally made (from an intereactive screen) and then the machine sorts and bags all the pieces into that kit. Spare pieces are bagged separartely and any pieces missing are presented to you via the display with the option to buy them as part of the service.

Sadly the prototype I built (also from lego) got broken into pieces and now I cannot piece it back together.

What’s this intreaguing statement about? Sounds like a situation that would make a great song itself.

Alas nothing more than the ubiquitous, garden variety ‘difficult marriage’. There were many things that were very challenging about the 15 years we were married but perhaps the most strange was that my ex couldn’t abide music, or indeed noise, of any kind. I think they suffered from a sort of sensory disorder (which interestingly has also manifest in our eldest with some very difficult consequences) which meant that what you and I might hear as music, they experienced as a crashing, sibilant cacophony.
Before we met music was a daily part of my life; I didn’t even have a TV for example but I had a pretty decent stereo and listened to music of an evening as most people would watch TV. I was able to keep up listening for a few years after we got together but the practicalities of how and when became too much so in the end I felt obliged to sell all my kit and bought another bike!
When the wheels finally came off the marriage (that IS a story worthy of a song tbh), and the separation ensured, I promised myself I would spend a decent fraction of the house equity on a new stereo. That was a year ago and since then I have spent maybe at least an hour, often longer, of my spare time in each day listening to music. And I no longer have a TV!

If your listen list isn’t stupidly long, you might want to add Goldfrapp, Lykke Li, Little Boots, The XX, Little Dragon, Eivor to it…

Goldfrap I was already familiar with but the others are great suggestions – thank you. Yes my list is long but there is always space for new music.

Wow – awesome responses thankyou! I have a subscription to Roon and was hoping it might throw up something like this but it didn’t.

<thanks ‘haven’t listened to it for yonks 🙂 >

For me this is in the pot of music I’ve missed the last ten years because I was unable to have music in my life and which I am only just now discovering.

Other equally remarkable (re)discoveries incldude Lamb (Fear of Fours but really everything they’ve done is masterful), Aldous Harding, Emiliana Torrini, Cat Le Bon, Balthazr, Go Go Penguin, The Comet is Coming, Beruit…… lord the list goes on.

But yeah, Natasha’s Laura is quite special.

Anurag Dikshit would be an amusing user name if it wasn’t the actual name of an Indian entrepreneur, the founder of PartyGaming.com

‘woke culture’

It means judging people based on their membership of specific groups based on social, cultural, gender or ethnic identity. It is the far left’s answer to the far right (in it’s most extreme form) and in that form is predicated on Marxist ideology of power groups that seek to exploit one group over another for their own benefit and gain. Where Marxist ideology was previously based on this exploitation being economic, it is now regarded as cultural, hence the term cultural Marxism. All this was laid down in the Frankfurt school in the 60s but has recently gained new vigor with ideas embedded in critical race theory and third and fourth wave feminism.

Don’t shoot me, I’m just explaining the mechanisms at play that explain ‘woke culture’.

I think he pulled out of a talk at Cambridge University because he was expecting to be “cancelled”

He pulled out becuase someone else, who in the past had done an impression of Adolf Hitler, was ‘cancelled’ because of it. He acnowledged that he’d also done impressions of Hitler and withdrew on that basis. Clearly his point was made in protest.

Cleese has been prominent in the issue of cancel culture/culture wars/woke/identify politics etc since the Labour government made it illegal to make a joke about someone’s religion. He predicted then that that path would lead to far worse outcomes and to some extent he is right.

Traditional hifi throws it all together and splits the signal with a passive crossover at 75+v which results in all sorts of horribly broad filters and phase disruption..

Well yes, but there are lots of active speaker designs in the audiophille world. ATC spring to mind as a leading proponent. Audio Note (UK)’s top end speakers all have external crossovers (though I’m not sure if they are active or passive in execution).

I’m not sure why the fashion is for an internal passive crossover but I’m not sure it’s about the upgrade path; external active crossovers don’t preclude this and in fact they increase the potential for endless updagrades exponentially (because now you can even more boxes). Naim are big into this for instance (active external crossovers).

Also, whilst the thing that audio engineers care about is indeed ‘accuracy’, what most audiophiles care about is ‘music’. There’s a subtle difference between the two but when the two intersect then you get an especially good result.