Craig Sawyers

You sure forget the decades passing - I well remember the Mary Tyler Moore show broadcast in the UK back when I was a lad. RIP MTM

The amazing Taj Mahal, built in the mid 1600's for, in today's money about $1Bn. The image only tells part of the story. There are more axes of symmetry. The red-ish building is a kind of lodging for visitors to pay honour to the tomb of Shah Jahan's wife could stay. But symmetrically opposite is an identical building which was a mosque. Jahan's problem was the entire workforce (20,000 of them) headed off into Agra to pray several times a day, so he had a mosque built on-site. Then he built the lodging to keep the symmetry correct. Of course he nearly bankrupted himself building this. But, keeping with symmetry, directly opposite across the river he started building a black marble mirror image of the Taj Mahal as his own tomb. He got as far as getting the foundations dug and a few courses of marble laid when his son had him arrested before he spent every penny. He put him under house arrest in conditions of considerable luxury, and with a window so he could see the Taj Mahal in the distance. Agra is a real dump, with massive poverty and beggars by the thousand - and it is where the Taj Mahal is. If you ever get to see it, go there in time to see the dawn - the white marble is astonishing in the light of the sun as it rises.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday!

I watched the - ahem - inaugural address. In the midst of a truly scary speech, there was this: "And most importantly, we will be protected by God" or, paraphrasing "Gott mit uns" (God with us), the German motto to justify war from the Prussian empire to the Third Reich. Worn on the spiked helmets in the First World War and on the belt buckles in the Second Съ нами Богъ which translates the same (apparently)

I take your "living a moist" and raise you a "Layman holding a bare bra, said that I am a Japanese bra...Nonsense, the design of the brassiere is a layer"

As compared with the original gruesome pics you posted Steve, that looks absolutely fantastic!

I'd second that. Just did the same with the failing heated front screen in my Ford one frosty morning recently to give the (Ford) garage no way to go with "no fault found". As a result of the evidence there was no messing around. New screen to be fitted next Friday. Under guarantee, fortunately.

Ice testicles

Those early 911's were widow makers. Porche hadn't got the balance right, and above a certain speed the front wheels lost traction - and as soon as you hit anything other than straight you were toast. It took an iteration or three before Porsche got it right in that regard and later ones through to the modern day stick to the road like glue. The first series 911's in good condition are now considerably north of 100k (of most currencies - they all seem close to unity exchange now). I guess because there aren't many left that weren't wrapped round trees.

RIP Mr Cernan, the last moon man. One RIP I missed was Leo Beranek, who died in August '16. I missed it because it looked like the guy would live for ever - he made 102 and worked right to the wire. It is sobering to think that he was born the year the first world war broke out. He wrote the definitive book on acoustics in 1954, called Acoustics which every practitioner of the subject has (I have). Harvard, MIT, chairman of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, adviser to General Radio. He was also a concert grade pianist. He also wrote a major text in 1962 called Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, which analyzes the acoustics of 55 of the prime concert halls around the world. He revised and updated it in 2004 at the age of 90 to include 100 halls. I have a personally signed copy of that. RIP Leo Beranek

It never crossed their mind to find out where the battery was, disconnect it, get the bike off and then reconnect the battery? They must (ought to) have a spanner or multitool in their toolkit? Last year an idiot farmer terminated the end of the fence onto a steel kissing gate on a right of way. That was quite exciting getting though!

Happy birthday Grahame!

There are dozens of vids of this genius of vocal mime on you-tube

Any audio signal level transformer has a resonant peak at some frequency, hopefully outside the audio bandwidth, caused by leakage inductance resonating with distributed winding capacitance. The RC network on the output is chosen to damp that resonant peak. But if you put a cable after it, which has some capacitance, it screws with the damping. The catchall of using less than two feet of cable comes from that consideration.

I particularly like the heatshrink sleeving over the braid. That is really tough to do without melting the braid.

Taint really relevant other than earworms. David Lloyd George was a UK politician and was Prime Minister in the first decades of the 1900's. He had a major reputation as a womaniser, and was given the name "The Goat" by his cabinet colleagues. Kitchener was concerned about politicians telling secrets to their wives, other than Lloyd George "who would tell other peoples' wives". Apparently he also had a truly heroically dimensioned gentelman's sausage. The earworm is to repeat "Lloyd George knew my father, father knew Lloyd George" to the tune of "Onward Christian Soldiers".

Surprising how many snake oil merchants invoke the word "quantum" without the blindest understanding what it means. In the UK the Bybee equivalent is Peter Belt http://www.pwbelectronics.co.uk/pwb-price-list Anyone for "Gold Message Foil", "Quantum Clip Film", "Morphic Green Cream" or even "“Friendly” Four legged stance device" - Belt has them all, and much more strange and wonderful nonsense beside.

I say to Mrs S, who speaks a little Spanish "what gender is Agua?" "Feminine" "so what article is used with it" "El". OK - so now I'm flummoxed "OK - drop the boot; why does it use masculine El with feminine Agua" "Because it begins with an A" I gave up at that point.

I'm mistrustful of DSP processing too. Take an analogue signal, AD, DSP, DA to analogue signal. What? Yup - I'm a luddite.

I've experienced -40 in Helsinki. What made that trip most surreal is that I flew from Israel where it was +25C. So that flight took me through a delta T of 65C. Then our local marketer took me to a sauna at +100C. That was 12 hours of extreme temperature transitions that I have no real wish to repeat. But -40 is no-ones idea of a good time - the same temperature as a biotechnology freezer.

You'd make a killing selling those in China

Apparently this is a lifesaver. So your ship goes down or plane crashes the sea. You get into the bubble rather than using a buoyancy aid. Oddly I kind of get this - it is common to put something similar to that in the bottom of your pack when walking in the wilderness. When the weather turns nasty you pull the thing out and get into it (personal versions and larger ones for up to ten). The idea is to keep the wind and water/snow off you, and are essential in case of injury.. I have both. They pack really small. They are brightly coloured so emergency rescue can find you. Similar problem in the water - the bubble would go a long way to prevent hypothermia. Some of the other ones above - I have absolutely no idea at all!

A few patent landmarks

I like that this guy is still alive. I have no idea how or why that should be the case.