Craig Sawyers

Two or three years ago I took my son to see Clapton and Steve Winwood in Birmingham (UK). Awesome concert. Apparently Crosby, Stills and Nash asked Steve Winwood to be a band member. But he had other commitments and did not really want to anyway, so Neil Young ended up as second choice.

I got involved with noise cancellation at one stage US5018203A.pdf In the late 80's noise cancellation was in its infancy. So while I was working on that I found that Dick Rutan's round the world Voyager airplane used noise cancelling phones. So I phoned them up in the Mojave - and instantly got through to Dick Rutan. He told me that they were using an experimental Bose system, but that they broke around ten hours into the 9 day flight. I also had a natty idea for enhancing the sound attenuation of double-glazed windows. The idea was to sense the sound pressure inside the cavity and use a transducer to servo that to zero (or as close to as possible). But a patent search revealed that someone else got there first. But no such system has been made available to my knowledge.

Grahame - where on the planet are you that has god's gift to toast (Marmite) on sale? I thought you could only buy it here in the UK. And does tasty salted pig parts do boneless pork rectums

-ium is an interesting thing though. Titanium, Lithium, Sodium, Calcium, Magnesium, Iridium, Curium etc etc. Without the "i" those would be Titanum, Lithum, Sodum, Calcum, Magnesum, Iridum and Curum, which would be just silly So Aluminium is completely logical

Just picking up on this thread. I've used chassis punches, hole saws and (ugh) forstner bits depending on the size of the hole and thickness of the material. And only on Al. They key thing with hole saws and forstner bits is lots and lots of lube.

Happy birthday Justin!

Apparently the contractor had that block of flats on their website as a selling point for their services. They have since removed it. Someone, or possibly several will be prosecuted for certain. And since this is "social housing" it is managed by a company wholly owned by Kensington council. So heads will also roll in public office too. A litany of corner cutting, incompetence, and not enough money. Currently getting on for a hundred not accounted for, although to date only 17 have been confirmed - the news just gets worse.

I'm about to irritate everyone by waxing lyrical about "Ye", as in the title of this thread. This goes back to pre-Caxton times, when there was a letter called thorn, written Þ . This had the sound value "th". So "the" would have been written Þe . Now Caxton, back in the 1400's standardised his printing press on the latin alphabet, and so had no way of writing the thorn. So he picked Y as being the equivalent of Þ . So "Ye" is actually just pronounced "the". The thorn, as Birgir will immediately point out, is still a valid letter and sound in Icelandic.

Death toll has risen to 17, and likely to rise significantly further (some floors are still smouldering with local fires still burning). 37 in hospital with 17 in critical care. Astonishingly there seems to be no good data about how many people were in the building.

RIP the 12 confirmed dead in an horrendous fire in a 24 storey block of flats in London. Fire broke out in one flat, and rapidly spread to others. A refurbishment was complete a couple of years ago, including an external cladding, which turned out to be flammable. No sprinklers, single stairwell. Not in a third world country - in London. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/14/fire-24-storey-grenfell-tower-block-white-city-latimer-road-london Many dozens in hospital, the rest escaped in night attire.

Bloody hell - that is awesome!

Good to see his is relatively undamaged after that fearsome crash. I also was not far off on energy storage in the batteries. From the Rimac website, the battery (650V!) is 90kWh capacity. Which is 324MJ, 27% less than my engineering estimate of 450MJ. But it is a bit of a beast. 2.5 seconds to 100km/h, top speed of 355km/h, 1224hp, 1600Nm torque http://www.rimac-automobili.com/en/supercars/concept_one/ Edit Just to put those numbers into context, I have an old early 80's, V12, 5.3 litre Jaguar. That takes 8 seconds to 100km/h, top speed of 250km/h, 350hp, 480Nm torque.

Thank heavens he is OK in a way he wasn't in the rocket car a number of years back. As to what causes the fire - stored energy in batteries. Suppose you have 1000 hp - 740kW. And suppose you can run at that level for ten minutes. Battery stored energy 450MJ. A hand grenade produces about 800kJ. So the stored energy in that supercar batteries is equivalent to 600 hand grenades. Even if that hand-wavey order of magnitude physics shit is wrong by a factor of ten, there is still massively enough energy in the batteries to cause a major fire or explosion. Now, how badly do you want that Tesla?

Oh bugger. Adam West. More recently the voice of Mayor Adam West in Family Guy. RIP Batman

Bye then

Oh YES. Vinyl arrived today - gob smackingly good. An unremittingly bleak picture of modern life in Waters' glorious prose, with such superb one liners: "Picture a leader with no fucking brains" and in another song "And every time a nincompoop becomes the President"

Hey it is late, and a bottle of wine has gone down. Covfefe.

Woah - how did I miss this? Welcome back cat whisperer - belated happy birthday!

Hate to suggest this - dry solder joint? Through-hole plating on one component flakey? Resistor with flakey end-cap? I absolutely detest intermittents. Back in the day (late 70's) I was using a Tektronix 7912 transient digitizer to record fast laser pulses. This was in the days that you strapped a polaroid camera to the faceplate and photographed the trace. Except the readout of sensitivity and sweep speed would jump up and down just when you clicked the shutter. To cut a long story short, as part of the readout insertion circuity, the signal went through a plated hole from the top layer to an internal layer on a 6-layer board - and that was an intermittent contact - the plating had not taken to the internal trace. I flooded the damned thing with solder in the hope that the flux would help make enough of a solder bridge to cure the problem. It did - or enough to get me through the measurements with no further readout-jumping incident. That took quite a bit of detective work and quite some time, and Tek's excellent manual, to cure.

^

Just watch for the barbed wire!

Got the vinyl 50th anniversary Sgt Pepper delivered today. Bloody awesome.

Don't forget now!

^ Not available in the UK.

Happy birthday - and hope to see you back soon!