British Society of Catalunya

BRITISH SOCIETY OF CATALUNYA -

BAY OF ROSES BRANCH

10^th Annual Mini Golf Competition 2008

Round 1 To be played between Sun 11^th and Sat 24^th May

David Gary 678112 v Roger Hardcastle 452744

Peter Cross 552029 v Alan Briggs 552714

Pauline Rawbone 451350 v John Willis 451292

 

Peter Raynor 450630 v John Richards 530120 v Rona Cross 552029

Jan Reed 152468 v Diane Hughes 151992 v Brian Taylor 257614

Keith Hughes 151992 v Sue Richards 530120

Paul Beardsmore 158097 v Arthur Rawbone 451350

Hilda Taylor 257614 v Sheila Shaw 254204

Hilary Raynor 450630 v Howard Staniforth 151976

Richard Edwards 530509 v Allen Turner 552253

Joan Usherwood 451934 v Susie Severne 530735

Jane Routh 530849 v Barry Turner 151490 v Brenda Hardcastle 452744

Roger Williamson 15298 v Malcolm Tilbury 451559 v Tony Severne 530735

Evie Gary 678112 v Ros Robinson 530853

David McMurdie 152314 v Chas Robinson 530853

Liz Beardsmore 158097 v Val Staniforth 151976

Please play matches within the timescale.

First named competitor to make arrangements.

Winners card to be left at “The Greens” for collection.

Please check phone numbers are correct.

Any problems please phone Alan Briggs 552714

The local council in Roses is taking a number of measures to handle the water shortage caused by the drought. Among other things, it is forbidden for private individuals to use tap water for filling swimming pools, watering gardens, or washing down terraces and garages. More to the point, there is now a hosepipe ban in Roses. Businesses are also affected by water restrictions; for example, cleaning leisure boats with tap water is no longer permitted. The supply of water for drinking is, however, secure for the summer, so that there should be little effect on the tourist season. The quality of the water still remains perfect.

Nevertheless, there are swindlers taking advantage of the present situation, and we therefore give warning: these people first telephone to arrange a visit in order to examine the quality of the tap water. Once in the house, they fake low water quality readings using manipulated instruments and then sell useless equipment for water purification to the victim for about 1,000 euro

Submitted by Robin Flood

Tags: roses, spain, water, drought

I’ve just found the most amazing website: www.gutenburg.net It contains over 20,000 out-of-copyright books as free downloads, ranging from simple text files to audio books. Lots of classics from Kipling, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Jukes Verne, Mark Twain - an almost endless list.

It could not be simpler to use and the average novel downloads in two to three seconds as a text file. Read it off your screen or store it on desktop, drag it to “documents to go”, load it to PDA, SmartPhone, or other portable media.

Because:

Whilst I would be the first to admit it’s much nicer to read a “real” paper book printed in ink, there are so many times one is waiting (airports !) or travelling and BORED, and with a 4Gig card in your PDA and the average book text file size being under 500k, it’s now possible to carry hundreds of complete books in your pocket.

A brilliant website !

Submitted by Robin Flood

The more I read the more I realise that our universe is stranger than we believe, or even stranger than we can believe.

1) Dark matter and the cosmological web (see below). Is a local branch of the Web bringing Force or Dark Matter to a place near you ? Remember, this isn’t fiction.

2) My ex-employer the European Space Agency recently installed a quantum optical terminal on the Spanish island of La Palma, generating entangled photon pairs and sending one towards the Island of Teneriffe (150 kms away) and holding the other locally for comparison. The entangled state remained unchanged and instantaneous over this distance, proving an entangled signal will survive a journey into space and vice versa, making satellite distribution of global quantum keys feasable.

My comment: several science fiction writers (Ursula K. LaGuinn for one) make use in their stories of an “ansible” or communications device which has no limits in distance and which permits instantaneous communication. Of course this was derided by “scientists” as impossible but now it seems they were wrong.

Dark matter and the cosmological web

Our universe is a mess — a colossal “cosmic web” of galaxies strung into filaments and tendrils that are millions or billions of light-years long.

Although this web’s basic structure is resolved, astronomers say understanding it in more detail requires new observatories, better computing and a lot of luck.

“When you look into a large telescope, the reality of the cosmic web hits you in the face because you can see how galaxies are organized,” said Rodrigo Ibata, an astronomer at the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France. “We have clear evidence for the cosmic web’s existence, but there is still so much we don’t know about it.”

Ibata explained that the cosmic web filaments are held together by dark matter, unseen stuff that makes up 85 percent of all mass in the universe.

“It’s intrinsically tough to study something you can’t see, so dark matter makes understanding the cosmic web an exceedingly difficult challenge,” Ibata told SPACE.com.

Ibata and other astronomers detail some of the cosmic web’s mysteries last week in the journal Science.

Intergalactic highway

The cosmic web is thought to funnel galaxies, gas and dark matter around the universe, something like a chaotic intergalactic highway. Ibata said he’s looking to our own celestial neighborhood for effects of this network.

“We think cosmic web tendrils feed directly into galaxies, dump matter onto them and build them up,” Ibata said.

Ibata hopes new star data gathered by the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, set to launch in 2011, will help gather evidence of such activity near the Milky Way.

“It’s going to make things very interesting over the coming years,” he said of GAIA, which will finely measure the distances and movements of more than a billion local stars. Such data could reveal where — and what — cosmic web tendrils might be spilling into our neck of the celestial woods.

“The environment within these tendrils could be one of the most important factors in galaxy formation,” Ibata said.

To use mountains of data that GAIA and other observatories are expected to deliver in the future, however, Ibata said computer technology will have to catch up. “If we were to get such data now, we wouldn’t be able to efficiently process it,” he said.

Simulating the universe

Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, a graduate student in astrophysics at Harvard University, agrees.

“We need powerful computers to deal with raw astronomy data,” Faucher-Giguere said. “But another aspect is that once it’s processed, we need to be able to learn something from it.”

Faucher-Giguere said computer simulations help with the task by giving astronomers grounds for comparison. If a simulation fits a set of observations, it helps astronomers pick the best theoretical track to explain what they see.

Our current big-picture view of the universe is based mostly on optical light, Faucher-Giguere said, but new observatories will look deep into the cosmos in wavelengths such as infrared and radio.

“We’ll need new, better simulations to make sense of data we haven’t yet learned how to analyze,” he said. “We need to be prepared or else we won’t know what we’re looking at.”

Faucher-Giguere expects astronomers to increasingly team up with computer-savvy theoreticians to extract the latest knowledge about our universe in an efficient way.

“Astronomy is driven by new observations,” he said, “but to make use of these new windows onto the universe, we really have to keep up with the theoretical work.”

Submitted by Robin Flood

Imagine if, as you reached the age of 65, with another ten or twenty years of growing older and facing the usual geriatric problems, there was an alternative. You could sign up for an option ten years ahead - thus, at 75 - to join an off-world army and fight in interstellar wars. Implicit in this is that somehow you’d be rejuvinated. Exactly how and why isn’t known, as at the moment of taking up the option you are declared legally dead, shipped off-planet, and never seen again - because no-one doing this has ever come back.

You wouldn’t do this at 40 or 50 - maybe - but at 70 ? Be young again ?

“An Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi, and the two follow-up books - “The Ghost Brigades” and “The Last Colony” - are built around this theme, and got rave reviews in the British press. I ordered them, (from amazon - not expensive) opened the first page and have not been able to put them down again.

Submitted by Robin Flood

I have been alerted by the editor of the BSC in Barcelona that they have a website- www.britsoccat.com - and very nice it is too. He adds: ‘all Roses Branch members are of course quite welcome to join any of our events (that tend to be in Barcelona).’ So have a look on their site and if there’s anything there you fancy, get in touch!

Also I found another very informative website from the BSC Emporda Branch: www.bsce.ch.

I’ll put both these sites into the Links section permanently.

Webmaster

” I note the problems being experienced in some parts of Spain with obtaining the Resident Cert.

In Fuengirola, since the change over, they have operated an appointment by phone system, with an English speaking volunteer; thus avoiding queues. They have also recently installed a dedicated line, for English callers (952 197 114) to reduce further communications problems.

Since the abolition of the Residencia it has become apparent many ‘foreigners’ are increasingly finding problems of proving their identity. My Residencia expired in April and thus I have seen first hand the problems. The British do not have a National ID card and even if they did, like many other countries, they would lose their right to it on moving to Spain. This means the only legally accepted ID is a passport; very difficult to carry at all at times. Again with the Brits it means when the passport becomes ‘dog-eared’ one must apply for a replacement. A UK passport can only be obtained in Madrid and thus the overall cost, including courier service, is around 200 euro. I am seriously considering applying for Spanish Nationality, thus renouncing my British Nationality, so that I can have an ID card.

For about 10 years I have worked as a volunteer translator with the National Police and the Guardia Civil. Many times I have seen officers taking denuncias refuse to accept copy passports, copy Residencias, national driving licences and various other ‘ID documents’ which people have produced, insisting they return with their original passports. I accept some officers are more understanding and will on occasions waive the legal requirement for the original passport.

The Residents Cert, which has a highlighted warning, printed in two places,, that it is not proof of identity, seems to be a worthless piece of A4 paper. Almost nobody I have spoken to can understand why the Residencia was abolished. What was needed was a simplified method of application and immediate issue. At Fuengirola it is anticipated that a machine, which will produce a Spanish ID (DNI) instantly, will shortly be operating. It probably could have produced Residencias too!

Having supported the abolishment of the Residents Card can I now suggest you use the same efforts to have a replacement for it introduced so we are not ‘second class citizens’ required to carry passports as proof of ID having been deprived of our Residencias ! ”

Note: If you want a British National Identity Card now which is as far as I can tell is identical to what the Government-produced ID card will eventually look like (unless they change their minds again), see below - Robin

http://www.phidentity.com/03-uk-national-identification.html

Submitted by Robin Flood

I suppose everyone knows how to get cheap phone calls to the UK from Spain.
You dial 700-500-700, wait for the announcement from the computer, then dial the full UK number (starting 00-44-). These calls are priced at 4.60 cents a minute to anywhere in the world. Bills appear on your usual Telefonica bill as calls made to Contacta SL, 700500700. Quality varies from excellent to echoey as it’s a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) call. But cheap !
I’ve just found a company in the UK that does the same, and not just for Spain. The website is listed below. Basically from the UK you dial 0844 799 0181, wait for a new dial tone, then the full (e.g.) Spanish number (starting 00-34-). These calls are priced at 2p a minute and will appear on your usual provider bill as calls made to Planet Numbers and/or 08447990181.
Both systems work from UK landlines and UK mobiles to Spanish landlines. Tell those friends and families back in the UK that you never hear from “as it’s too expensive”………………
Further details are on:
http://www.planet-numbers.co.uk/phone_spain.jsp

Submitted by Robin Flood

this is quite funny….

obviously not a high percentage of English speakers in Terrassa!

submitted by Webmaster

Once upon a time……

Foreigners living in Spain all carried a small plastic card, the proof of being resident in Spain, and the card was known as the “Residencia” - a useful document since residents in Spain enjoyed many tax advantages over non-resident.

And then one day, our EU Masters in Brussels decided it was somehow “unfair” to EU citizens living in Spain (unfair ? But Spanish have to carry an ID card, so why shouldn’t foreigners in Spain ? Seems no one asked Brussels this interesting question….) so ! it was unfair to make them have a Residencia, and forced Madrid to discontinue the Residencia for EU citizens.

And the EU citizens who were resident in Spain now had no way to prove this.

So Madrid introduced a “Register of Foreigners” spending more than 180 days a year in Spain, to which everyone had to belong - By Law ! - with financial penalties for disobeying.

The administration of the Foreigners’ Register was given to the National Police, and not just the National Police, but only National Police in Province Cities - which means for example Figueras National Police cannot issue certificates of being on the Foreigners’ Register, but one has to go - twice - to Girona. That’s a total of 180kms to drive for us living in Mas Fumats.

And if one finally gets the Certificate, well ! it is a large sheet of paper which you fold up and carry in your wallet, not a nice little convenient card like the former Residencia.

Oh, and one last thing.

When you have your Certificate, you still have to carry with you your National ID card, or if you are British, your Passport - at all times, as the Certificate doesn’t have all the information the old Residencia card did.

So once again, our EU Masters took a perfectly good system which functioned to everyone’s benefit, and destroyed it - and a Member State of the EU was too cowardly to stand up in favour of the former system.

Vive the EU !

submitted by Robin Flood