Craig Sawyers

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!

My corns are definitely popping

I don't know about anything other than booze in Dubai, but if anything else goes down it has to be absolutely under the radar. Anyone getting caught is going to have a seriously bad day.

Indeed - I was invited when in Dubai to the home of a guy who used to be Secretary General of OPEC. Out came the whiskey. I was pretty shocked, until I clocked that if you are influential you get access to all sorts of prohibited stuff. Provided you are discreet of course.

RIP John Noakes. He is probably only known to Brits of a certain age, but he was one of the presenters on a Children's magazine programme called Blue Peter in the 60's and 70's, and was a must watch (it is still running!) Noakes was known as a high risk guy - on one show he climbed Nelson's column with the pigeon shit cleaning team. Up a set of wooden ladders, including an overhang at the plinth. With no safety gear, harness, hard had etc - and wearing the 70's fashion statement of bell bottomed trousers. Died at age 83 after a battle with Alzheimers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40083025 And this has the Nelson's Column sequence.

I have the original mono 1967 first pressing. Bought new when I was but a pre-pubescent lad.

Now that shows solidarity with the injured big time. Particularly since the Queen is now 91 years old. Respect. She did not see, and rightly so, those injured with life changing injuries - massive facial trauma, limb amputations and on life support.

I cut my whiskey teeth on Bushmills Black Bush when I was about 18. http://www.bushmills.com/whiskey/ Must buy a bottle and see what it is like in retrospect. But that Redbreast cask strength was a great shout - well chosen.