Craig Sawyers

Happy birthday! Hope you're having a spifflingly good day

https://www.facebook.com/reel/844095039115471 Driving home, missing exit. Chaos ensues

It is bewilderingly difficult to spot the things in the wild - its kind of bizarre to find a Koala in a house.

Aged 86 with Alzheimers and Lewy body dementia. RIP Patrick Stewart. What a rotten way to go. Was lucky to see him several times on stage, three times in Chichester. Malvolio in Twelfth Night, MacBeth in the landmark production as Macbeth in the tiny Minerva (so close I could have touched him), and as the aged Shakespeare, and his death in Bingo. That particular production of MacBeth transferred to the West End, and then two theatres on Broadway, and was made into a movie. And on the London stage with McKellen in Waiting for Godot and both of them in No Man's Land, a rather bleak play by Harold Pinter. A really superb actor of stage and screen. I'm really gutted he's gone.

Albert Anker (Swiss artist in the 1800's) clearly loved his coffee. There is another Girl drinking coffee, Still life with coffee, Bernese peasant woman drinking coffee, Still life with coffee and potatoes, Coffee and cognac, etc etc

This thread looks like a happy hunting ground for endless audio snake oily things.

This multiple assault on Russia's data centres was in response to Russia knocking out one Ukrainian data centre on the pretext that it was used for military purposes. But Russia lies to its teeth, all the time. Like you rightly say - Russia really fucked itself over this.

I don't think we should be sad - she had a life well-lived, and acted in podcast works well into her 90's.

Well if you have woofers, you need a meower too. Stands to reason.

That is using magnets in attraction to apply a force to unipivot suspension string, presumably to resist the tendency to wobble. Attraction between magnets is of course stable.

Simple opposing magnets are not stable. The only thing that is stopping this instability is the jewelled bearings - but because of the magnetic instability there is more force on the jewelled bearings to apply a centering force that might be naïvely be expected. I guess that is why the Castagna model A was pretty much the only tone arm to use the magnetic principle. Although at around the same era there was a design and prototype for a parallel tracking arm the used opposing magnets in a saddle arrangement; but that never made it to production. Now it is now possible to levitate stably. The idea being the the repelling magnets are stabilised actively using a set of coils. Around 8cm diameter (so not small) and because of the active control a potential source of electrical interference near to the cartridge. Then there is Meissner effect levitation. That is not entirely daft with high temperature superconductors. Of course it needs the superconductor to be cold enough, so a source of liquid nitrogen is needed. I've done exactly that as a table top experiment when my kids were small, and I was working at Oxford Instruments, so had ready access to chunks HTc superconductor, and a small expanded polystyrene pot for the LN2.

Each of his three marriages has been to a model. The mind boggles.

Happy birthday Andrew, O tall one! Hope it is an awesome one

That absolutely made my day!