The Air Ambulance.

On Tuesday afternoon I was strolling homewards from Erith station after a day spent working in Canary Wharf. I could hear the distant whine of a gas turbine engine, but could not determine where it was coming from; giving it no heed, I passed through the Tunnel of Doom (tm) and then up the steps and into Pier Road. The engine sound was suddenly much louder, and I could see a helicopter swooping low over the area in front of Erith Riverside Shopping Centre, where the buses stop. It was the Air Ambulance, and it was clear to me that the pilot was looking for a place to land. He quickly realised that the bus halt area was unsuitable – there were too many street lamps and covered bus stops in the way. The helicopter then climbed, probably to give the pilot and the observer a better look at the area, before it flew towards the river front. I followed on foot, in time to see the helicopter land on the piece of grassland next to the Running Horses pub that used to be home to the old Erith Swimming Baths. As this happened, the sound of Police sirens seemed to be coming from all directions; it was pretty obvious to anyone in the area that something pretty serious had kicked off. I charged home at top speed, picked up my camera and strode back to the riverside as fast as I could. The helicopter observer had exited the craft, and used a large pair of bolt croppers to cut through the padlock which secured the gates in the fence that surrounded the piece of land. It was pretty obvious that the helicopter crew had to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, and came readily equipped. From speaking to the Police who had turned up en masse, it appeared that a young lad had been in some kind of altercation, and had been stabbed in the chest. I did not actually see the victim, as he was being treated further along West Street; the helicopter crew assisted the local ambulance crew for some minutes, before it became evident that they were no longer going to be required. After a few more minutes the helicopter crew returned to their aircraft and they took off, heading Northwards across the river.  I took quite a number of photos, some of which you can see on my Flickr account here, and they are also being used by the News Shopper with my permission here and here.

The much anticipated break in the wintry weather was greeted by pretty much everyone I have spoken to; having said that, there does seem to have been some reluctance to shed the winter garb; despite the welcome rise in temperature, I have still seen quite a large number of people dressed in heavy coats and woolly hats. I am unsure if this is because they are creatures of habit, and are reluctant to change their outer garb, or whether, after such a long periods of bitterly cold weather, they don’t trust the forecast and think it will still be freezing outside. It all rather smacks of the legendary cold weather protections espoused in Victorian Yorkshire and elsewhere – where certain protagonists were sewn into their woollen underwear from Autumn until the middle of Spring.

The Woolwich ferry celebrates its’ 50th anniversary this week; or more accurately, the current ferries that make up the service are in their 50th year of use. There has been a ferry on the River Thames at Woolwich for  far longer than this. The three vessels in service are currently undergoing a major refit in order to extend their service life, decrease their running costs and reduce harmful exhaust emissions. The £50 million project to life extend the vessels is being undertaken by marine engineering firm Briggs Marine; this should extend the operational life of the ships by another seven years or so.  The M.V James Newman, the M.V John Burns and the M.V Ernest Bevin carry between them approximately fifty thousand people and twenty thousand vehicles a week, and make an invaluable contribution to the transport infrastructure of South East London. The seven year life extension is important; it is designed to cover the period in which a new river crossing – either a bridge or a tunnel can be constructed to replace the Woolwich ferries.  The favourite solution with some local Councillors is a bridge at Gallions Reach, between Woolwich and Thamesmead. The counter to this which seems not to have registered on the said councillor’s radars is that the site of the proposed bridge would be located slap bang next to London City Airport. The problem for any potential bridge developer is international aviation law. Under this law, it is illegal to build any structure more than fifteen metres tall within a kilometre of an airport runway. Any bridge built over the Thames at Gallions Reach would need to be taller than fifteen metres to allow ships to pass underneath into the Pool of London, and the new liner facility opening adjacent to the O2 Arena, not to mention the possibility of the QE2 moving opposite the O2 Arena to be converted into a luxury hotel – a story I covered here.

Many people get targeted by cold callers; some of these want to try and sell you compensation services for mis – sold personal loan insurance, or the classic silent call that comes from an automated call centre somewhere obscure and outside of Europe. The big threat nowadays is from what is known as virus call centre scammers.  You may receive a call out of the blue from someone purporting to be from Microsoft, telling you that your computer has a serious virus and that they have detected it remotely. If you go along with this (and many do, not realising that neither Microsoft or Apple will phone users directly) the scam will proceed along these lines. The caller will tell you that your computer has been remotely detected with a number of serious virus infestations. The caller instruct you to download a remote access tool such as PC Anywhere. The caller will then get access to your Windows PC and start the event viewer utility, saying that a number of the event viewer notices are warnings of a virus infection; at this point the caller may well also tell you that your Windows activation key is invalid and has expired. The caller will then offer to “re- activate” your Windows installation for a fee of $160, payable annually, as part of their “software loyalty programme”. All of the above is utter tosh, and completely fraudulent. The scammers are trying to create FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) in the person on the other end of the phone line. These calls are coming mainly from organised fraudsters in India, who have industrialised this phone based crime with large call centres targeting people in Europe, the USA and Australia. Investigations are ongoing as to who the master minds behind this activity are, but in the meantime, don’t believe anyone who phones you saying that you have computer problems – just put the phone down. If you have any questions or concerns, get in contact with me for advice – hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Erith couple Jerry and Wendy Crabtree appear to have stirred up a hornet’s nest in the News Shopper this week. They have made a complaint to Bexley Council regarding the behaviour of staff working for the council’s parking warden contractor. Wendy Crabtree is disabled, and the couple had to fight hard to get permission for a disabled parking bay to be created outside their house in Appold Street, off Manor Road. The traffic wardens were checking cars parked in the road, and in doing so they parked their own vehicle in the Crabtree’s parking bay. The Crabtrees then then returned in their own vehicle to find the bay occupied; they beeped their car horn and asked for the warden to move the vehicle, but they were ignored. When the wardens had finished their checks, they then drove off without an apology. I am surprised by this turn of events because of a number of factors. 1) I have never seen parking wardens in Appold Street or Manor Road – I wonder what caused them to visit? 2) I know Appold Street well – it is the road I recently highlighted as being the most infested with dog mess of anywhere in Erith, and the place where I ruined a previously perfectly good pair of boots after I accidentally stumbled into a particularly juicy and noisome turd – which I discussed at some length a couple of weeks ago. 3) Appold Street does have traffic problems, but not usually caused by people parking badly – quite the opposite- the road gets used as a cut through, or rat run when Manor Road gets busy in the mid afternoons, when traffic to and from the Slade Green Industrial Estate is at its’ peak. At the far end of Appold Street, where it joins with Wheatley Terrace and the site of Abbey Car Breakers, there are a row of bollards sunk into the roadway to prevent cars from taking a short cut round James Watt Way (the road that runs around the edge of Morrison’s car park) to bypass a great wodge of traffic that at times sits almost immobile in Manor Road. The problem is that the bollards are too widely spaced apart, and small cars can squeeze through the gap. This fact has become widely known by local drivers, who break the law using the shortcut all of the time. The mix of dog poo, fly tipped commercial rubbish (I nearly forgot to mention this) and illegally driven cars makes for quite a potent mixture in the street. I don’t think the offending traffic wardens had any clue about Appold Street being used as a rat run – from the News Shopper article describing the incident, the wardens were too busy looking for cars to ticket to actually address the far more pressing issue of the improper use of the road.

I took the photo above last Sunday afternoon; it was the first day when the terrible weather finally broke, and I took the opportunity to take a stroll up to the Larner Road Estate with my camera. Nowadays the place is a ghost town; all but one of the tower blocks have been evacuated, and the residents housed elsewhere until the demolition and reconstruction work has been completed. What was rather spooky was that a lot of the flats still have curtains at the windows, and some windows are even open, making the place feel like people are still living there, even though the tower blocks are blocked off with high hoardings and locked gates. When I visited, the main part of the physical demolition had yet to be started, but by the time you read this, much of the real estate depicted in the photo above will be gone; it is likely that the photos I took of the Larner Road tower blocks are some of the last ever taken, and may with luck become some kind of historical record of the events.As I wrote last week, I do feel that the new name for the reconstructed estate is anodyne and bland in the extreme - "Erith Park" is meaningless and non descriptive of the ambitious new development that will spring from the corpse of the old, failed estate.  

I gather that there have been a number of very specific rumours circulating on Facebook concerning a couple of alleged attempted child abductions in the last week or so in the local area. The first of these was raised at the start of the week, and was concerned with an alleged abduction attempt in Dartford. In my role as Neighbourhood Watch Co-Ordinator for part of Erith, I was contacted by a couple of concerned residents, and I did some research into the subject. It turns out that several non - specific accounts of "Eastern Europeans" trying to abduct British children had been voiced. The Police investigated, and the stories turned out to be incorrect - there was no factual basis to the allegations whatsoever. It does sound like someone with an axe to grind has been making up these tales in order to make scurrilous and racist accusations where in fact there is no case to answer. A second, similar story arose later in the week, where a parent alleged that an Eastern European woman had tried to abduct a child in a very similar scenario in a park in Beckenham. The original Dartford abduction incident has now been dismissed by Police as nothing more than a fantasy that has been fuelled by online gossip mongers on Facebook. I have little information about the second reported incident, but at the time of writing, it seems to have a very similar profile. Abductions of children do occasionally occur, but they are extremely rare, and almost never occur where the parents are present, as has been alleged in the two incidents this week. I get the feeling that these are protective hysteria mixed with a racist subtext, and fuelled by someone with a hidden agenda. As always, time will tell.

About this time last year, rumours started circulating around a number of technology gossip websites; the scuttlebutt was that Google were investing a huge amount of their unbelievable fortune in a research and development of an enhanced reality set of goggles. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this rumour turned out to be correct, and Google have just launched the pilot of their  Google Glass wearable computer  hardware. A select few Americans, who entered a lottery for the privilege of paying $1,500 for a pre- release set of glasses, are now receiving them, and they are beginning to publish their findings online. Google Glass is an attempt to free data from desktop computers and portable devices like phones and tablets, and place it right in front of your eyes. Essentially, Google Glass is a camera, display, touchpad, battery and microphone built into spectacle frames so that you can perch a display in your field of vision, film, take pictures, search and translate on the go. The principle is one that has been around for years in science fiction, and more recently it has become a slightly clunky reality. In fact, the "heads-up display" putting data in your field of vision became a reality as early as 1900, when the reflector gun sight was invented. Google Glass consists of a spectacle – like frame that has a miniature camera and a refractive prism screen, which acts as both a viewfinder for the motion and still camera functionality, and as an output device for the enhanced reality features, such as simultaneous language translation – a person talking to  you in for example, Mandarin, could have their words translated into English to be read from the tiny screen; the conversation could then also be automatically transcribed to read later.  The prism screen has  a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels, the camera has a five megapixel resolution, and is capable of recording 720p HD video. Connectivity is via both 802.11 b/g WiFi and Bluetooth tethering to a mobile device running an Android device running Android 4.0.12 or higher. Glass comes with 16Gb of built – in storage, 12gb of which is available for the user (the remainder is used by the operating system). Voice recognition software used by Glass cleverly circumvents the problem of ambient noise by using a bone transducer to pick up voice sounds from the wearer’s skull, rather than using a more easy confused conventional microphone. Glass tethers with Android and iOS devices using an app for extended functionality. You will be able to dictate Emails whilst on the go, and quite creepily, developers are working on software that will recognise the faces of your friends in a crowd, which can be linked with data from the Glass’s onboard GPS receiver to record location data. This creates serious privacy and security concerns – what is to stop someone continuously scanning attendees at an event, or even people in your average high street, and comparing them with faces in photos online to record who is where and when? The technology being developed both by Google and large numbers of third party Glass software engineers is awesome – a real sci – fi gadget that is coming into real life. As with many things of this nature, the marriage of cutting edge technology and the law of unintended consequences can produce results that nobody can predict.  The initial version of Glass, code named Explorer is currently being deployed to the beta testers who have paid handsomely for the privilege. The current version cannot be used if you wear prescription spectacles or sunglasses, but later versions are planned which may involve collaborations with companies like Ray – Ban, and versions for prescription spectacles are planned for late in 2013. On top of the previously stated privacy concerns, there are also legal issues relating to the use of Google Glass in public, not least whilst driving. I would expect that in the UK at least they will be classed in a similar manner to mobile phones – and banned from use whilst driving. It will be instructive to see when the first prosecution takes place. British users are not able to join the initial beta rollout of Glass. When the production versions become available later in the year, it is anticipated that the UK retail price will be around the £995 mark – which is sure to come down in time.

The Bexley Times are reporting a story about a graffiti “artist” being found guilty of a string of graffiti offences over a ten year period. The scrote – a certain Kristian Holmes of Sidcup was convicted of a total of thirty eight counts of criminal damage, with repairs to his vandalism costing a total of quarter of a million pounds. The damage was mostly around railway stations and trains; I recall seeing a great deal of graffiti at the South Eastern Trains depot at Slade Green; from the account it seems probable that it was indeed Holmes that was responsible, as he seems to have been “target number one” by the British Transport Police. What amazes me is that Holmes is now thirty two years old, and has a job as an accounts manager. Considering he has been carrying out criminal graffiti damage for the last ten years, whatever possessed him? Even as a twenty two year old, he surely should have gown out of the juvenile desire to vandalise? All I can surmise is that he must be amazingly immature and self obsessed to continue with this childish activity. Hopefully when he is sentenced, the court will punish him effectively. Before you counter “well, what about Banksy then?”. I have first hand experience of Banksy’s early work. Between the year 2000 and 2007 I was based in an office building in Blackfriars Road, on the South Bank of the Thames. All around the area were railway arches and warehouses – a relic of the areas’ industrial past. This was where Banksy first started his unique and humorous take on street art. I recall seeing one of his very earliest pieces – a life sized cartoon of a Coldstream Guard in full ceremonial uniform, taking a surreptitious leak against the pillar upon which he was painted.  Even at the very beginning it was obvious that this was no mere destructive paint dauber, but someone of a unique and unusual talent. I have been a follower of his career ever since.

The end video this week is a bit of a departure; it is a cover version of the classic Genesis track "Entangled" - a song about hypnotic past life regression in 6/8 time. This version is a bit of an update and change from the original, in that it uses heavy fuzz guitar instead of the original trio of two twelve string and a third six string Ovation acoustic guitar, and eliminates the huge Mellotron choir and Moog Taurus bass pedal ending. It is  an interesting take, but to my mind not a patch on the original Prog Rock classic. See what you think, and please feel free to leave a comment below.

Potion commotion.

The photo above was taken by me on Wednesday afternoon on Erith Pier. It shows the bulk carrier ship the M.V Willeke moored up as she so often does. The Willeke is one of the most regular visitors to Erith Pier, and normally spends around three days of any seven day week period on the pier. What was quite unusual this time was that she was in cargo. She was loaded with what appeared to be raw talc - as used in talcum powder, or nowadays more likely used as a thickening agent in the production of non - drip paints. Normally when bulk carriers like the Willeke moor alongside the pier it is when they are in ballast and awaiting a cargo. so seeing it loaded was quite a novelty. None of the crew was around, though the ships' generator was on, and people were definitely aboard her. The crew like to visit Morrison's to stock up on provisions prior to their voyages, and it is not uncommon to see one or two of the junior crew members pushing a shopping trolley full of groceries along the pier and onto the ship. I would not be surprised if Morrison's is the only supermarket in the UK where commercial ships can stop off for shopping visits. Let me know what you think - comments are welcomed below.

One of my local informants has recently contacted me with some information to follow up a story I featured six weeks ago on my update entitled "Kebabs and College". I wrote about how B and Q in Lower Belvedere were displaying parking warning notices that were illegal - you can read my post about the subject by clicking here. Anyway, it would appear that the notices have now been removed and replaced with new ones. Whether I, or my contact had any influence over the situation I really cannot say, but the coincidence is noticeable anyway. What my contact also reported upon entering the store was the following, in his words: "I popped into the shop this morning for a small electrical accessory needed in a hurry. Checkouts are now four customer operated terminals and one traditional checkout - which was unstaffed. There was a small queue for the customer operated terminals so even that small advantage (no queue) has gone. B and Q Belvedere deserves to fail". This echoes my own thoughts on self service checkouts to a tee. I simply won't use them anywhere for any reason whatsoever. It has been proved that they are purely there to save the shop money and sod the shopper. As I have said before, why have a dog and bark yourself? The checkouts have been proven to take longer to use than a traditional one; they are purely a tool for reducing staff headcount. This can itself be a false economy, as shop lifting has been shown to increase in stores with self service checkouts. It may seem a good idea to reduce the number of checkout staff, but when the store then has to hire more security staff (who earn a higher hourly rate than the checkout staff) it can actually end up costing more money overall. 

There are echoes today of the controversy that arose some years ago when Erith Sports Centre opened. There was a competition to select a suitable name for the impressive new facility, and several local papers featured the story. The whole thing turned into a bit of a farce when, after much solemn consideration the name selected was, er, Erith Sports Centre. It would have not been so bad had not the national tabloid papers got hold of the story, and much merriment and ridicule was heaped on the choice of name. A similar total lack of imagination has struck the developers who are currently in the process of demolishing the old Larner Road housing estate. The name that has been selected for the new housing development to replace Larner Road is "Erith Park". Ahem. I can fully understand the desire to not tarnish the new development with a name associated with the dubious past of Larner Road, but surely something a bit less anodyne could have been chosen? When you spend the thick end of £100 million on a cutting edge combined commercial and social housing development with the latest energy saving green technology, you would have thought that a more forward thinking and dynamic name could have been selected – something along the lines of “Selkirk Heights” for example. (You may already be aware that Alexander Selkirk – the inspiration for the fictional character of “Robinson Crusoe” landed back in England at Erith after his experiences of being shipwrecked and left to survive for four years alone on a desert island – I would have though this hardy and resourceful individual would have been a great inspiration for local residents). There has been much going on regarding the Larner Road redevelopment over the last couple of weeks; I hope that sooner or later I will be in a position to write about it, as I am sure many readers would find the story of interest, but unfortunately now is not the time.

You may recall that I have mentioned the butchering to the exterior fascia of the former White Hart pub that now houses the seedy and disreputable drug den that is Potion bar. The owners of Potion illegally ripped out the preserved Victorian salt glazed tile and acid etched glass frontage, and replaced it with plate glass, even though it was specifically prohibited from doing so by Bexley Council Planning Department.  Not only is the building listed, but the whole of the Eastern end of Erith High Street is a architectural conservation zone, and no major architectural changes are permitted. The council forced Potion to get an architect to draw up plans to return the appearance of the exterior of the building to something fairly closely resembling its’ original look. Since then precisely nothing has happened, and after some research, I have discovered that the council have now dropped the entire case, probably as the owners of Potion are claiming poverty. It would seem that we will be stuck with the anachronistic and ugly glass frontage for good now. As previously mentioned, one of the down sides of the large plate glass front windows now in place is that they afford a very clear view of the establishment’s regulars inside, and it is not a pretty sight. If you recall the cantina scene in the original “Star Wars”, then this is loosely what you see occupying Potion, though possibly with fewer blasters and a bit more cocaine. I have heard an unconfirmed rumour which I heartily hope is true. One of my confidential sources tells me that Potion may not be around for very much longer. A combination of repeated Police raids due to a combination of public drunkenness and a reputation as the local drugs supermarket may now have take their toll on the unscrupulous owners of the dive. The rumour is that Potion is shortly going to be put up for sale, and that an investor is interested in turning it into an Indian restaurant. So far there is nothing on the Bexley Council planning application website, so I can only take the story with a pinch of salt at this point, but I would not be surprised if there was not at least some truth in the story. For much of the time Potion is largely devoid of the knuckle draggers and coke heads that lurk in the place on Friday and Saturday nights. I doubt it breaks even, let alone make any semblance of a profit for the owners. I think they have caught a cold on this enterprise. Their other Potion Bar is in Fitzrovia, and is a rather different, more up – market affair, which seems to specialise in cocktails – whereas the only likely mix of drinks in the Erith outlet would be  a half of strong cider and a half of noxious and gassy lager to make a snakebite. Hopefully more information will come to light about the precise fate of the unloved by many bar in the very near future.

I am happy to report that Welling born Kate Bush has now been appointed CBE in the last round of honours. Personally I would have like to see Kate given the full Damehood (one grade above a CBE and the equivalent of a Knighthood). She's done so much for the British music industry on both a business and a creative front; she's also inspired many other musicians - I doubt that Tori Amos or Florence and the Machine would have existed in anything like their current form if it was not for our Kate. Very few musicians inspire the level of devoted following that Kate has; the only band that spring to mind who have an equivalent dedicated band of fans who follow them around the world are Marillion, a band that many have not heard about since around 1985, when they were responsible for many parents naming their daughters Kayleigh after the hit song of the same name. Marillion are still going strong, albeit in an unusual, semi underground manner. The band were the very first group in the world to dispense with a record label and publisher, instead doing it all online - they were very early to grasp the power of the web, and the democratising of communications between band and fans. Their revolutionary business model is now taught at Harvard Business School as part of their highly prestigious MBA programme.

Here is the latest "Simon's Cat" video. Whenever a new one is released, they never fail to make me laugh. See what you think below.

Most ordinary, non technical people know about the Windows operating system, and may have seen an Apple iMac or two in their travels, but as far as the third major desktop computer operating system is concerned, most have not heard of it, and probably would not care if they had. Linux has been around for ages - 1991 was the year of its' birth, and I first started dipping my toes in it back in 1997. Back then it was very difficult to use, had little hardware or driver support, and was really only suitable for hardcore tech savvy people like me to use as a desktop operating system for my computer (I dual booted with Windows XP back in 2001). Much has changed over the years; the free and open source nature of Linux means that improvements and updates to the operating system are made collaboratively - a new hardware driver, for example, could just as readily be developed by a blue chip company, or someone sitting in their bedroom. For all that, the updates go through the same high level of peer review and checking, to ensure a consistently high quality level of coding. This is one prime area why open source software tends to have good quality programming code - the code is open to any programmer to see, comment and improve on, unlike in confidential, closed code that makes up Windows and OS X, where you just have to take the creator's word that the code is up to scratch. The end result for years has been curious - Linux is used in huge mainframe and supercomputers almost to the exclusion of other operating systems. it also is used in embedded systems - anything from a Sky+ HD or Virgin Media set top box, through to industrial equipment such as computer controlled machine tools; the internet is powered by Linux - almost every network switch, domain controller and firewall runs it in one form or another, and the very largest web based organisations like Google, FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter all are powered by giant distributed server farms running Linux. On top of this, the recently released Google ChromeBook range of laptops, and the famous educational computer, the Raspberry Pi runs it too. Did you know that the Android operating system, so beloved of many smart phone and tablet computer users, is actually Linux with a whizzy graphical touch screen interface layer grafted on top by Google? I think it fair to say that if you stopped a random ten people in the street and asked them if they had ever heard of Linux maybe one or two might have vaguely come across the name, but I doubt any would realise that they use it every day. Well, after this shameless plug for my favourite operating system, I guess you are wondering where this is all going. Well, after year upon year of Linux being out in the wilderness as far as being a popular desktop / laptop OS is concerned, the tide may be finally changing. High end gaming PC specialists Alienware have released a series of gaming PC's running the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is partnered by Valve Softwares' extremely successful Steam online game repository. Not all Windows versions of Steam games have yet been ported to Linux, but more are becoming available, week on week. Bearing in mind that Alienware are actually a hardware division of Dell Computers, and Dell already sell a small number of desktop workstations and specialist laptops running Ubuntu Linux, it is looking quite rosy for the operating system to finally get a foot hold in the living room in something other than the guts of a smart television or HD recorder. Time will tell, but it should be an interesting journey. 

The somewhat controversial Erith wind turbine has now settled down to become merely the latest landmark for the area; Personally I find it a very useful aid in assessing the local weather conditions. It tells you if there is low cloud (the tops of the turbine blades get hidden as they turn), it gives you an idea of the wind speed and direction (the speed of the blade rotation and the direction the turbine head is facing) and it also warns you of poor visibility (when you cannot see it). On top of this, it is a local landmark, which pinpoints the Manor Road Industrial Estate from afar. So all in all it has a multitude of benefits to the area. I wonder if anyone will set up a society for wind turbine enthusiasts? You may well mock, but there is an active and enthusiastic group of people who enjoy spotting electricity pylons – they have even published pylon spotting guide books! You can read more about pylon spotting and how to become a pylon spotter by clicking here.

Science fiction death rays have been promised in a real world environment by researchers and military suppliers since at least the mid 1960’s. Until now they have never got beyond the testing stage, mainly mounted on experimental aircraft. It has been the generally accepted wisdom that a military laser does not actually have to work; they have been so big and heavy that all you needed to do was drop the thing on the enemy to effectively wipe them out. This is all about to change. The U.S Navy now has a weaponised laser capable of destroying an enemy aircraft or fast attack boat (the kind of vessel used by Al Qaeda to attack NATO ships in the past). The laser system, which will be experimentally deployed on U.S ship, the unfortunately named U.S.S Ponce, will be used to test the defensive system in the field – in this case, in the seas around the Middle East; it would be likely that its’ main area of operation will be the Persian Gulf – where Iran operates small surveillance drones, and is also known for swarming and harassing U.S Navy warships with small and very mobile high speed gunboats. The laser, which is solid state, is said to work like an invisible blowtorch on targets; the $35 million development budget (actually tiny in defence procurement terms) will be offset by the $1 per shot cost of powering the system. A video released by the Navy shows the laser lock onto a slow-moving target, in this case an unmanned drone, which bursts aflame in mid-flight. The drone soon catches fire and crashes into the sea below. Laser weapons do have drawbacks – they are badly affected by rain, fog and sea spray, which drastically reduce the transmitted power of the laser beam, and the laser installed on the USS Ponce will not be able to target fast moving objects like fighter jets or incoming anti ship missiles, but the rumours are that version with this extended capability are only a few more months away. It will be interesting to see if Iran’s small fast-boat navy experience some unexpected fires when shadowing the American fleet. We are heading for interesting times.

Although I am not very active on the bands, I have been a radio amateur since 1997, and hold an advanced class radio licence. On the 18th April, World Amateur Radio Day celebrates the forming of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) on 18th April 1925. This year the theme is "Entering its Second Century of Disaster Communications". This commemorates the first known use of amateur radio in a disaster situation when, in March 1913, the Scioto River in Columbus, Ohio flooded its banks, killing more than 100 people. According to local newspapers, Herbert Akerberg, a 15-year-old from Hilltop, Ohio used his home radio transmitter to send SOS calls via Morse code for nearly 72 hours. His actions were highly commended by the city authorities and his achievement widely heralded over the country as a new contribution to the comparatively new science of radio.

The video this week is from an American TV show that has not been transmitted in the UK - yet. It is called Food Tech, and is all about the science and engineering that goes into producing some commonly eaten food products. The episode features the humble cheeseburger and chips - the staple of so many fast food joints. Before you dismiss this as a programme about junk food, it is actually far more than that. It explains the production of each ingredient, even going back to showing how the seeds that are used to grow the onions in the burger garnish are grown, separated and refined before being sold to the farmer to grow the actual onion for consumption. It explains why processed rather than "real" cheese is used, and how the fries are produced so that they are uniform in size, and how iceberg lettuce goes from the field to the restaurant table in less than 48 hours. The amount of engineering skill and management organisation that goes into many of these systems and processes was a real eye opener to me, and it certainly made for very informative viewing, whatever you think of the end product food itself.  Do give it a watch and let me know what you think.