sethoflagos

Emily learns of jungle justice defence against cultural appropriation, and some barely appropriate prefixes: Mad a meta-covert no-wit came to take Eka-totem. Act I won't revocate, Madam.

Interesting. Not really a viable lifestyle option given my freelance employment pattern, which relied heavily on close of business social networking, especially in those days. Still, that's getting rather off-topic.

The Sherlock? Did quite a reasonable fissionships as I recall.

Pity. (I did live in Scheveningen for a while. A bit chilly but matjes on the seafront were nice)

Similar to what I thought walking around the safari game park munching on a rack of ribs 🤕

Curious, since for many years the two taxa were considered end members of a classic ring species. This invites some question as to where exactly on the spectrum one taxon ends and another begins. I think Dawkins covered it in the Ancestor's Tale. However a 2004 paper, The Herring Gull Complex is not a Ring Species, threw a bit of a spanner in the works with an argument that divergence was more due to occasional long distance allopatric speciation. I did like the old picture. The jury is still out perhaps. Quite enjoyed the occasional trip to Bempton Cliffs to photograph the two where they overlapped. (I have no time for hostility to either; hardly their fault humanity is so messy that it needs a clean up crew).

Using exhaust air as the driving medium is a tough call as it carries so little momentum. First notion would be a conventional sealed tanker hull with forward water intakes funnelled into turbines which drive fan-assisted exhaust air ducts discharging aft. Not great since fans are fairly low efficiency devices, and much of the limited input energy would be lost as heat. Never going to match a pair of high efficiency propellers, or possibly even better, pumped water jets again discharging aft. But these deviate from the letter of the OP.

Just has to be Turnip's codename for the planned beach invasion of Lesser Tunb.

We still have some pretty large ones in the tropics (Apologies if there's a forum ban on myriapod porn)

I don't follow your logic. Surely I'm enforcing a probability distribution of 0,50,50,0 in order to subvert its ill-posed nature. I say 'ill-posed' on two counts: firstly, it is posing two different questions at the same time, the conventional understanding of which contradict each other; and secondly, there is no 'correct' choice offered for the 'non-random' answer. It's basically asking you to select the capital of Albania from four types of jellyfish. PS... Perhaps that last bit was hyperbolic: it isn't a category error as such.

See Arthropleura

I... Hades! I recognise face not! As mums at one cafe sing o' Cerise Dahi.

After a little thought, I shall define a 'random answer' as the result of one toss of a fair coin. If it is heads, the choice would be B; and if tails, C. Ideally, B and C each have a 50% of being selected, B clearly being a uniquely correct answer for this methodology. I do however recall being downmarked in exams for this kind of reasoning. Too 'engineeringy' perhaps. (It works; don't ask questions).

Because the transition from four limbs to six requires the precise coordination of thousands of individual genetic and behavioural adjustments. Statistics greatly reduces the chance of such a revolutionary change occurring all at once (see Saltation), especially in organisms above a certain level of complexity. On the other hand, achieving the same through many thousands of incremental changes is only feasible if each generation is at least as 'fit' as the previous. Which means that eg. an extra quarter of a leg must offer some survival advantage exceeding the extra energy needed to grow it, and having more bits that can potentially go wrong (see Exaptation). Not impossible, it's how we got our limbs in the first place, but still a major hurdle. Evolution is blind: even if six limbs were better than four, evolution has no way of knowing this in advance and therefore no reason to head off in that direction.

Could it be down to the use of SU carburettors on most British cars of the time? There seems to be a suggestion that the piston/metering needle principle design they used may have simply been better at creating a fine aerosol out of dodgy fuel like wartime 'pool petrol' across a broad range of operation than the fixed venturi carburettors used elsewhere. It was certainly widely copied in later years.

Good call. It was basically straight kerosene.

Worth noting that from WWII to the early '50s the British public didn't have access to anything above 70 octane. Consequently production vehicles were built with low compression ratios. Hence the first family car I remember (1960-61ish) a hand cranked A30, would have had a compression ratio of about 7:1.

Ditto rope pull starters on generators. Many a sprained wrist even before the spring rewind falls over.

... that can't be explained by the national general ESE dip in sedimentary structures? Different thread maybe? You've strayed a very long way from rotational shear landslides that had perhaps some tangential relevance to the OP. ... or to put it another way: This isn't firmly established science. It belongs in Speculations.

Yes. It's the shared geological heritage of most of England, Wales, and Eire save for bits of Cornwall and the bottom half of the Isle of Wight which we gained a little later from the Normannian terrane. It's just a really strange way of putting it. At exactly which horizon do you suggest it stops being Dorset? Surely not the 2,000 m thick Triassic Sherwood Sandstone Group of the New Red Sandstone that outcrops famously at Budleigh Salterton and (obviously) Sherwood Forest among many other locations? Or the underlying Devonian marine cousins of the Old Red Sandstone supergroup that Dorset shares with... well, Devon? I can understand you thinking that Dorset is something special geologically: it is! I spent many happy hours fossil hunting Black Ven. But treating it as an isolated little island like Big Island Hawaii (that really is only 400,000 years old) risks losing all context of its rich shared history with the rest of the country, which really is a lost teaching opportunity. Plus, given recent events, if we don't nail our flag to the underneath bits, Trump's likely to send Thunderbird's Mole unit in to annex it.

Surely this only applies to the surface geology of Dorset. At depth, it's underlain by a continental crystalline basement of up to 1bya followed by a great depth of later sediments. See Wikipedia entry on the London-Brabant Massif, particularly the 'Formation' section.

I find the ratio of latent heat of vapourisation to surface tension quite a fascinating subject. You can just about measure reasonable values for each in kitchen experiments and they yield an interesting probe into molecular scale. Take a sphere containing a gram mole of water. It has a: Volume of 0.000018 m3 Radius of 0.01626 m Surface area of 0.003321 m2 This sphere can be subdivided (bear with me) into n3 spheres of radius/n and n times the total surface area. Now taking: Molar latent heat of 40,700 J mol-1 Surface tension of 0.0725 Nm-1 = Jm-2 Yielding a ratio of 561,379 m2mol-1 Taking the ratio of this to the molar surface area quoted above we get the following estimates: n = 169,039,238 Particle radius = 0.0962 m-9 Number of particles = 4.83 * 1024 Getting within 1% of the OH bond length is mainly coincidental I suspect, but the 8-fold overestimate of Avogadro's, (corresponding to n being out by a factor of almost exactly 2.0) is also curious.

Reminds me of a less than positive interaction I had with a client 'engineer' many moons ago. He'd been tasked with reviewing a rather in depth pump calculation I'd done. Now I'm generally quite meticulous in keeping track of units in formal calculations, but there was one quantity, pump specific speed, where I'd left the number undimensioned. He asked that I add the dimensions. I replied that they wouldn't help anybody. He insisted. I added the units: rpm gpm0.5 ft-0.75 (L0.75 T-1.5) He stormed off accusing me of taking the p**s out of him. The relationship didn't improve over time.

Not tried the thymus version yet. I would, but it would have to be the right place, I think. In fairness, I should have given a shout out to the Zebra i Kosci restaurant. Truly special, not overly expensive, and no more than 50 paces from the Polonia Palace Hotel, which itself has an interesting if somewhat dark history. But I suppose the same could be said for any building in Warsaw that survived the uprising.

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