Jump to content

SkySurveyBanner.jpg.21855908fce40597655603b6c9af720d.jpg

JamesF

Members
  • Posts

    31,960
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    182

Everything posted by JamesF

  1. Fascinating project. I shall follow your progress with interest. James
  2. I reckon you're right. They're all over the place at the moment. We've had Martians parked in the orchard for the last month and the Jovians have only just left the guest room. We won't be having them back. They made a terrible mess. James
  3. Fantastic build, and I also love the artificial grass James
  4. Large roundabouts such as those at quiet motorway interchanges are excellent for practising "getting one's knee down" on a motorbike. A friend told me. James
  5. Perhaps we're all expecting a bit too much. My daughter tells me that Brian Cox and cosmology featured heavily in her Ethics and Philosophy A Level class today. Most of the students are not studying physics as far as I'm aware. I feel it's probably a good thing that they're being exposed to the ideas. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to get my head around Kant, Descartes, St. Anselm and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God because my daughter is confused by it. Perhaps the BBC could find some other presenter to do a series on philosophy that philosophers might think is rubbish, but I might be able to cope with. It could even involve lingering shots gazing off into the distance from a mountain top because I feel that's the sort of thing that philosophers should probably do. Is Helen Czerski free? James
  6. That one is particularly irritating. Whose hands are we supposed to use for this? Has the recipe-writer not noticed that there's quite a lot of variation in hand size? James
  7. I was just thinking that if the image is rotated 90° clockwise, I see a mermaid swimming on her back, with a large wave about to break over her James
  8. My wife has cooked meals a few times recently where the recipe called for "a bunch of spring onions" (salad onions in Left Pondian, as far as I'm aware). How much exactly is "a bunch" of onions when I go out to the veggie plot and pick them? And if I go out and pick two bunches (whatever that is) and then put them together, do I now just have one bunch? James
  9. It doesn't necessarily have to be that some vendors have improved the spec from standard Other possible modifications that occur to me are the quality of the TEC and fans, what coatings are used on the windows, and the amount of RAM provided for buffering (I'm sure I've seen similar cameras where that is different). There may be other types of changes too that don't relate to the materials but to the processes. It's just impossible to be certain when looking at these cameras that we're comparing like with like. Equally, we can't be certain either that the vendor isn't just setting a price that they think the market will bear. Or perhaps Touptek charges different vendors different amounts depending on what they think they can get away with. James
  10. I would be wary of suggesting that all the Touptek-sourced cameras are 100% identical. I don't know if they all are or not, but I am aware that when setting up a deal like this it's often possible to, say, require that the components meet a certain standard. So it may be that different companies are actually selling something that looks the same but isn't internally. I'm pretty sure for example that the Mallincam cameras made by Touptek use a higher grade of sensor than is standard for those models. It seems to be the same with all sorts of products made in China. I recently bought a chipper for shredding stuff that wouldn't go through our little electric "garden shredder". When researching possible candidates I found perhaps as many as ten different versions of what was basically the same machine sold by different vendors at wildly different prices. The basic machine was clearly the same in all cases, but some had electric start and some were pull-start. Different vendors used different engines (eg. a genuine Briggs & Stratton vs. one of several Chinese copies of it), the emergency stop mechanism was slightly different on some, as was the design of the output chute. The stands varied slightly in design and so on. From 20m away though, they'd all look pretty much identical bar the paint job, and in fact the video demonstrating assembly of the one I bought in the end (it arrived in a crate) actually used a machine produced for an entirely different vendor. None of which means that if people are happy with what they're getting for the price they're paying that they should buy something different, obviously. James
  11. Drivers at the front of the queue have to stop and draw straws to see who gets to go first. James
  12. Steady! Or I might have to go to the kitchen and pare a pair of pears. James
  13. Can we go back to driving on the left yet? James
  14. It would now be possible to change the law such that products could be sold using imperial units as the primary measure, though actually I believe it has always been legal to display measurements and pricing using imperial units as long as the metric version was more prominent and that metric units were used for making the necessary measurements. So for example I have always been able to sell honey in 1lb jars, but I'd have to weigh it out as 454g (or whatever the correct number is if I've misremembered) when filling the jars, and 454g would have to be the most prominent weight on the label. However, given that few people under the age of sixty have ever been taught anything other than metric units at school, I'd be inclined to describe such a move in terms that would be highly likely to contravene the CoC in any number of ways and none would be complimentary. James
  15. Where accuracy isn't absolutely required and because I find it awkward to use fractions of an inch smaller than quarters, I occasionally find it convenient to combine metric and imperial at the same time. So I might measure something as "sixty-eight inches and four millimetres" for example. I'm quite comfortable with this, possibly as a result of being taught only metric at school whilst having parents who habitually used imperial. I don't know if my dad used metric at work (he worked in engineering at the time), but at home his lathe was imperial so that's what I was exposed to. Even now I have my own (metric) lathe, I'm not sure what the modern equivalent of "taking another ten thou off" is. James
  16. An idiot in the works certainly does though James
  17. Of course in British English, "spanner" does have another meaning along the lines of "idiot". James
  18. That sound like what I would call a "pin spanner". "A torch", probably Without looking anything up in a dictionary, I'd suggest that in British English "a torch" might be any hand-portable source of light, whether flaming, (other) chemical, or electric. James
  19. Oddly enough, this morning I needed a spanner for a somewhat corroded bolt that might have been 13mm or possibly ½" AF. Fortunately I have a set of these, so I didn't need to work out which. James
  20. I feel like a proper Doctor Who geek now, because I knew what that was without needing to follow the link James
  21. My (Lincolnshire born and bred) dad still does this James
  22. Some sort of aircraft? Given that it is a bit wobbly, perhaps a small aeroplane or helicopter? James
  23. Or perhaps not. I'm a night-time person. Really, really definitely a night-time person. Left to my own devices, my natural "going to bed" time could quite happily slide around to the point where it's actually starting to get light in the (southern) UK summer. Which sounds great for astronomy. But in a piece on the BBC website it reports on research that "owls" have higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer and heart disease than people who identify as "larks". And apparently the good news doesn't stop there either, with "owls" being more likely to be unemployed, underperform at work and have to retire early due to disability. So if you're struggling to stay up as late as you'd like on those rare occasions that the clouds part, maybe it's not such a bad thing... James
  24. Irradiating the planet would probably solve a lot of the climate change issues, too James
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.