tomo; many thanks, much appreciated

tomo,
The "Are farmers allowed to grow their own food?" case is another demonstration of the big bureaucracy -> bigger bureaucracy positive feedback loop. We've been aware of it for a while.

Enjoyed reading up on Miss Shilling's orifice. Hadn't heard of it. Such a simple idea, but easily missed if you went looking for a perfect solution rather than a good enough one.

Solar roads *might* be the future. At €14,000 / MWh we can be pretty sure they aren't the present.

Couple of things spotted in comments at Jo Nova's:
EU banning repairs on (not very) old cars. Environment as a pretext, but pretty sure it's all about bolstering ailing manufacturing (at the expense of the repair industry).

Enjoyed this technical view of the SR71. Lots of interesting stuff, and not just on supersonics. I think my favourite bit was the aileron/elevator input mixer control. Glad I don't have to design things like that!

tomo: thanks for flagging up Calum Douglas' talk on Beatrice Shilling. She was brave as well as being a gifted engineer: lapping Brooklands at over 100 mph on a motorcycle was not for the faint-hearted!
I'm always interested in anything he produces since reading his book which you brought to my attention.
I've just checked his website but there's no mention of it so I guess it will appear in due course.

tomo,
Boris is surely on the upper tail of the narcissism distribution, but that goes with the territory. I could confidently rate our former PMs Rudd and Turnbull as having egos that would dwarf Johnson's. And the same trio would hold similar spots on the incompetency distribution.

On the ONS, hitherto they seem to have been above board, but this ~400 parameter expected deaths model looks like a hole below the waterline to me. The attitude that wants to hid the results is likely to want to hide the data too.

That vaccines paper is a nice example of obfuscation through explanation. In the spirit of Rutherford, you hardly need *any* exposition. Show Figure 2, and invite the reader to interpret it for himself. About the only other thing needed is a reminder that the figures are observational, so the groups with 0, 1, .., 4 doses may differ in significant ways other than number of doses.

That last point makes it pretty dodgy to draw conclusions like the one you quoted (3.8x risk), but the clear dose-response relationship (i.e. the way the graphs fan out) would be pretty strong evidence that the vaccines are harmful.

This, on the poor record of lockdowns, was linked in a comment at Jo Nova's. Nothing all that surprising in the article, but one of the comments surprised me:

Every time I see Spiked, or the DT, or w*nkers like Piers Morgan, or any of that previously lockdown-loving ... ilk

Anyhow, not leaping to their defence; just a bit surprised.