Craig Sawyers

She certainly lived a full life in the fast lane! Quite a character. RIP Zsa Zsa.

RIP the maneuver man - who lived to a ripe old age, and contributed greatly. Not a lot of people end up with a life saving technique named after them.

I forget now which liquefier we bought when we moved from Eynsham to Tubney. But it was big. Because this was cryogenic systems manufacture on a large scale we had to deal with a serious amount of helium. Every magnet could take typically 5 (and sometimes many more) training quenches. And because these were in less than efficient test cryostats, each quench took at least 100 litres of helium (for cool down and reservoir). So 500 liters plus per magnet, at a production of one a day or thereabouts. Not counting all the other systems (variable temperature inserts, He3 and dilution fridges). So a daily use of 600-700 litres was typical, which had to be compressed and stored (two monster pressure tanks outside), and then liquefied 24/7.

Yup - I did say "about". But as a reasonable ball park those prices are comparable enough. What would be the comparison for LHe? A fairly decent quality wine I was thinking.....

Finally something that looked less scripted (it still was of course) in Ep5 Hammond and May play battleships and cruisers using cars packed with explosive dropped from cranes, the idea being to hit the opponent's cars parked on a grid. By far the best sequence of the series to date.

Seriously though - you're right. In defense I got sucked into a conversation and lost track of the thread subject

Oh wait - this is the Stax thread, right. This is head-case though

That was interesting. For seven years in the '90's I ran engineering at Oxford Instruments, and apart from some outrageously complicated superconducting magnets, we pretty much had the world market in dilution refrigerators. These are the leaping-off point for many techniques to get even colder, using processes like adiabatic demagnetization. Anyhow, the dilution fridge works by a really strange quantum mechanical effect using a mixture of regular helium 4 and a lighter isotope of helium 3. As with all these cooling processes (brought out in the video) it is multi-stage using a series of heat exchangers until at the bottom of the machine is a mixing chamber less than the size of an ice hockey puck. In this the helium 4 becomes a superfluid and sits at the bottom, and helium 3 floats on top and has the viscosity of corn oil. The hotter atoms of helium 4 diffuse upwards into the helium 3 (no viscosity, remember), and a truly impressive pump attached to the mixing chamber sucks these hotter helium 4 atoms out. That shifts the equilibrium point, and the next hottest helium 4 diffuses upwards, etc etc. We designed and shipped products using this process to labs around the world - about 1 per week - which produced a base temperature somewhere between 1 and 3 milli-Kelvin. A long way above pico-Kelvin sure. But the race for ever colder temperatures all starts off with a dilution fridge - other than the Bose-Einstein crew, which use a different cooling process altogether. Anyhow, here is the business end of a dilution fridge. The thing at the bottom is the mixing chamber, the disc-like things are a series of counter-flow heat exchangers filled with sintered silver, and the copper coil has a capillary inside and is the next highest temperature. Not shown is something above all that called the "1K pot" which is what is says on the tin - so everything in that image sits at less than 1 Kelvin, and getting colder as you go towards the bottom of the image until 1 milli-K in the mixing chamber.

General rule of thumb is that liquid nitrogen is about the same price as milk, give or take, for about a gallon of each. Bulk price is much cheaper than milk.

Port Talbot in Wales is home to a massive steelworks and docks, and has a current population of 30-odd thousand. It is not a particularly nice place, frankly. And includes Aberfan, where the coal spoil heap slid into a school 50 years ago killing 116 children and 28 adults. Yet from it has come a stream of first class actors: Bernard Fox Richard Burton Anthony Hopkins Michael Sheen No one has any idea why this is the case. But in any event - RIP Bernard Fox.

I once got involved in a project for a superconducting gravity gradiometer, around 20 years ago. This was for the GOCE mission (Gravity and Ocean Circulation Explorer). Because the cryogens were the closest uncontrolled mass to the gradiometer, we had to constrain them. One of the design team came up with a cryogen cycle in which there was a solid hydrogen outer shield (which sublimed to space through a capillary, and what was left was held on a wire mesh) and a liquid helium inner vessel that cunningly moved around the phase diagram so it was always full - for the 1 year mission anyway. So no gas-liquid boundaries and uncontrolled motion. I presented this solution to ESA, and they were very unhappy about the solid hydrogen. I must admit I found that puzzling since it was sitting on top of a rocket with hundreds of tons of high explosive propellant in it. Fortunately we substituted solid neon, which worked just as well, but was substantially heavier.

Or high temperature superconducting power and speaker cable? http://www.amsc.com/documents/hts-cable-systems-for-ac-networks/ . Might be a problem in terminating it into Stax 'phones though

OK - I have filed a report with Action Fraud. I spoke to someone rather than do it on-line because I needed to know how to do this under the circumstances of a UK criminal preying on US victims. The way this all works nationally (copied from their website) is: City of London Police The City of London Police is the national lead police force on fraud. It provides a central resource for counter-fraud policing and runs the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) and Action Fraud. National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) The NFIB is where cases of fraud are reported to and was created by the police to help them catch fraudsters. All confirmed reports of fraud from Action Fraud are passed on to the NFIB. I have a case number. NFRC 161 201 671 640, against which victims can report their particular circumstances. So we need to encourage as many of those to go on-line and enter their data. The process for adding victim data is as follows: 1. Generate a new fraud report http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report-a-fraud-including-online-crime-questions 2. Use the reference number NFRC 161 201 671 640 (not sure where that is added, but I assume it is obvious at some point in the process) 3. The data entered by the victim will be associated with the data I supplied them

OK - there is a UK National Fraud Reporting Service called ActionFraud. That acts as the first point of contact in reporting fraud, and it is then routed to the police force in the area in which the crime has been committed. http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ . I'll phone them this morning, and find out how this is best reported - whether I can report it, or whether it has to be reported by the victims. If it is possible to report this on behalf of multiple victims, it would sure help if I had as comprehensive list of victims as possible. I'd need a steer on that from someone in the US to unpick this guy's trail of financial destruction. The UK police would ultimately need to phone up victims as part of evidence gathering.

Ran a check on the IBAN code ( GB67BARC20253680571172). It turns out to be a valid code, and refers to the bank account he quotes 805711792, so that checks out. Except the bank that this account is held at is Barclays in Leicester (LE87 2BB)! Now the sort code he quotes 20-25-36, which cross validates with his account number and leads back to an account at the Barclays Leicester LE87 2BB branch. So - Coventry is a scam - the account is actually in Leicester; the IBAN, account number and sort code all lead there. By the way, the SWIFT code he quotes is incomplete. BARCGB22 simply says it is Barclays. There should be an additional three digits that identify the branch - but I guess that he did not want to make it too easy to find out where his account was.

Squirrel is making a comeback in the UK. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086571/Anyone-grey-squirrel-pie-Victorian-delicacy-enjoys-revival-bid-save-red-cousins-extinction.html . There are even Indian restaurants with curried squirrel on the menu.

Just been looking at the image of the guy's passport. It is definitely fake, as compared with my expired passport from the same generation as that one. If you look just under the "f" of "of" (as in United Kingdom of...)you will see a small typed letter "P". That is in the same font and size as the lettering on the rest of the passport. You can see that the lettering in his fake is much, much larger and the wrong font. Also it is cropped and missing the bottom 20%. So the whole passport image is a complete fake. The utility bill is also a fake. As noted above the address is a fake. The bottom of the page is cropped (the bit where the bank sort code is for direct debit payment). And the last time a utility bill looked like that was more than a decade ago. And even then it did not look like that - they had by law to state the dates for which the bill related. This, from the British Gas website is what a real bill looks like https://www.britishgas.co.uk/youraccount/discover/your-bill/understanding-your-bill.html . Note that there are four pages with an astonishing level of detail. One potential route to tackling this POS scammer is for those who have been ripped off to contact BBC's programme Watchdog. They regularly track down people like that, confront them on the doorstep, and involve the police. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mg74 . And the Police will take this very seriously. Obtaining money by fraud is a crime, and they will prosecute, particularly as this goon is a serial offender. In fact they could probably do him for money laundering too. I feel very strongly about this clown - he is the worst of our country, preying on overseas customers who he can feel confident won't or can't track him down. Let's prove the bastard wrong.

Well isn't that interesting. Kingsbury is in London. Four Pools (Lane) is in Evesham, and has post code WR11 1DJ (not WR11 4TJ - but note the close similarity). And Four Pools Lane is a road through a trading estate with no houses. WR11 4TJ is a tiny isolated development of about 100 houses about 2 miles North of Evesham in which the road names are Byrd Row, St Egwins Close, Heathfield Road, Kings Lane and Lloyd Close. No Four Pools there at all. So it is anyone's guess where precisely he is, or even what his name is - I've seen various versions even from the Head Case threads. The only other slightly obscure reference I found is that someone with the same name on his (perhaps photoshopped) passport was registered as an absentee voter in elections in the Philippines. I noticed that his 100% positive feedback on eBay from 76 sales are not possible to see - he has set his eBay account to be private. So the 76 sales could be all shill bid and entirely fictitious.

It is a wonder we persevered in WW2 with muppets that are so naiive running around. The ship was a lot tighter back then - as an example Bletchley Park, the cipher cracking place, had 10,000 staff, most of which commuted in special trains laid on for the purpose. And said nothing about it to anyone at all; in fact they kept quiet about it for the rest of their lives, until the remaining few opened up about it in the last decade or two. Churchill said of them "The geese that laid the golden egg, and never cackled". And it worked the same way in the US back then. At least that era was when Russian spies were real spies, like Klaus Fuchs on the Manhattan Project and the Russian cell in British Intelligence (The Cambridge Five). And now, on both sides of the pond, when cyber war is the way a county will be brought to its knees (no power, no transport, no petrol/gas, no water, no food, no hospital care etc etc) we have critically insecure data systems, staffed by clowns and blithering idiots.

Both the above

Got it. He looks like a real piece of work that needs to be taken down. Where he allegedly lives is about 70 minutes drive from where I am. If anyone knows where and if he is auctioning something, I'll contact him and ask if I can drop in to inspect the goods

I read that three times and still don't have the foggiest clue what it is all about.

Because I'm a grumpy old git, I got my university education entirely free of charge. In fact the UK government *paid* you a (means tested) grant, in today's money about £6-10k per year for living expenses, books and hedonism, and tuition was free. And that was both degrees. But in those days back in the mid 70's (pass the walking frame...) only 6% of school leavers went to university in the UK. Fast forward. John Major introduced the concept of tuition fees in 1997 at a low, £1k per annum, and means tested level. Then Tony Blair set a target that 50% of all school leavers should go to university. Why 50%? Who knows. But it had two effects. First the government could not possibly fund that level of university places, and upped the fees. When my kids went through 10-13 years ago it was £3000 per year for tuition fees plus a "student loan" for all other exenses. But under Cameron's government it was increased to £9000 a year for tuition fees, plus an annual student loan of £3575. Second effect is that in order to cope with the massive influx of students, universities went into a huge building programme, and generated all sorts of strange courses like Ethical Hacking (University of Abertay Dundee), Brewing & distilling (Heriot-Watt University), Applied golf management (University of Birmingham) and International Spa Management (University of Derby). There are endless examples. And those who currently emerge from a UK University owe around £40k + compound interest, and a payback time of typically 25 years. So you could be pushing 50 before you're free of the University financial yoke.

Ayre are a very interesting company. Their preamps in particular sound glorious, and are works of art internally (the KX-R). Can't afford one, but that is a different story.....

Saw him with Carole around 25 years ago in some London arena (forget where), and maybe four years ago in Birmingham with Lizzie - front row seats right in the middle bang in front of the keyboards (20 feet away) and the laser harp even closer. Much longer ago a good friend made the trek out to London Docklands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtTsCbfXZuQ in the pouring rain for one of his greatest outdoor extravaganzas - I unfortunately missed that one. But that was a great heads up Dusty - cheers!