toucana

I think the explanation you are looking for can be found in this thread: https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=101567 The internal timing of a magneto ignition system on these early cars was controlled by a linkage that adjusted an internal cam ring with a bump which knocked the points open creating a spark. https://www.themagnetoguys.co.uk/magneto-internal-timing The strength of the spark depended on the spacing between the bump point and the flux points of the permanent magnets in the armature

Wrist and arm fractures caused by cranking over early automobile engines with the starting handle were once so common that doctors coined a new medical term for it - ‘Chauffeur’s Fracture’. https://forums.aaca.org/topic/120754-cranking-early-cars-broken-wrist-medical-term/ According to this account, inventor Charles F. Kettering (1876- 1958) formed Delco (Dayton Engineering Laboratory Company) and created the automatic starter motor after a close friend and fellow engineer called Byron Carter (founder of Cartercar) died in April 1908 from pneumonia after having his jaw broken by a starting handle while trying to hand crank a stalled car near Detroit.

Vacuum cleaners with cable drums that automatically rewind the mains lead back inside the housing are another good example.

TIL - It’s not a good idea to try repairing one of those spring-loaded retractable steel tape measures that carpenters use. I was helping a friend measure up some trees with a 5m tape that became over extended and detached from the retaining spring tab. No problem I thought - take it back home, open it up and fix. There are plenty of YouTube videos on this subject - some of the better ones are in Hindi and Arabic as it happens. But the one I decided to link here is a 28m long Australian video which captures the full magnitude of all the problems and stages of grief that can ensue with an 8m tape - (wear gauntlets and eye protection !) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfnuO8SIqA It’s actually a lot simpler and safer to just bin it.

Presumably no one told him the Pope is a Catholic either ? https://ca.news.yahoo.com/morning-joe-hillary-clinton-calls-181002033.html

Modern Italian uses the word Magnete when referring to magnets in a scientific or engineering context.

The sculpture is called Calamita Cosmica (“Cosmic Magnet”) created by a reclusive Italian artist called Gino de Dominicis (1947-1998) who died in Rome of a heart attack aged 51 - not long after exhibiting this work for the first time. Apparently he was fascinated by Sumerian myths and immortality. The Italian word calamita meaning a "magnet" has an interesting etymology. It probably comes from the Latin word calamus (“reed”, “stalk’ or “straw”) because early versions of mariner compass needles were made of lodestone, and were inserted into a reed or straw to float upon a bowl of water.

The Go analogy came to mind while trying to find a precedent for a strategy as odd as answering one threatened naval blockade with another - which president Trump has now done. Japanese Go like Poker is a zero-sum game where one player’s gain is matched exactly by another player’s loss,with no draw/tied state outcomes possible - (with a couple of very rare exceptions in the case of Go). Real war on the other hand is regarded as a non zero-sum game by game theorists. It’s entirely possible for all of the antagonists to suffer significant or even catastrophic losses in a ‘lose-lose’ game with no winners. The MAD (mutual assured destruction) concept of thermonuclear deterrence depends on this concept. I came across a discussion of this topic in a recent article by the writer and evolutionary theorist Robert Wright called “The NonZero Newsletter” in which the author asks the question: It’s a good question which the article discusses at some length before suggesting that two levels of accounting can occur in the type of thinking that encourages leaders like President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to pursue military “excursions” (to use Trump’s word) in the Middle East. One is a belief that in a final tabulation, a significant gain of territory, resources, and an enhanced level of border security may (in the mind of leaders at least) outweigh the loss of life, economic damage, and the international opprobium that you will suffer. The second level of calculation is entirely political. The fact that domestic political benefits can accrue for particular leaders who initiate wars. Prime minister of Israel Netenyahu skilfully exploited the appalling security lapses of 7 October 2023 which occurred on his watch, and turned them into a get-out-of-jail- free card by sustaining a war on Gaza well past the point where Hamas had been neutralized - and rose in domestic public esteem by doing so. He then started another conflict first in Iran, and then in Lebanon when public attention began wandering away from Gaza and back towards the fact that he should have been in gaol. In the case of President Trump, there was no remotely plausible national security threat that justified attacking Venezuela, and the same goes for his attack on Iran: That - and the fact that it provided an opportune distraction from the growing domestic discontent and the political fallout from the Epstein files and the ICE fiascos of the last few months - not to mention the fact that he (like Netanyahu) should have been either in gaol for fraud, or in a lunatic ayslum for the criminally insane.

President Trump’s threat to ‘blockade the straits of Hormuz’ following the collapse of the Islamabad peace talks between the US and Iran yesterday brings to mind something known as a ‘counter-pincer’ in the Japanese game of Go. https://senseis.xmp.net/?CounterPincer A ‘pincer’ or hasami 螯 in Go occurs in the opening phases of a game when one player attacks another player’s corner stone, and that player defends their corner by pincering the attacking stone with one of their own. A counter-pincer occurs when the pincered player doubles down by pincering the pincering stone This almost invariably leads to a highly complex and fluid contact fight in that area of the board. Suffice to say it’s a line of play that novices are strongly recommended to avoid, and one that even experienced Dan level players think twice about, because of the complexity of the territorial exchanges that can ensue. The Straits of Hormuz carry not only about one fifth of the oil shipped around the world, but also large amounts of key mineral resources such as aluminium that many Asian economies depend on. Shortages of oil caused by a naval blockade in the Straits of Hormuz don’t just affect the price of petrol at the pumps. They also affect the supply of many other items such as plastics and pharmaceutical products that depend on a petrochemical feedstock. Relatives living in France tell me that there are major concerns there about the future availability of quite common household medicines, as long-standing supply side problems in the French pharmaceutical industry are compounded by the current blockades in The Straits of Hormuz. Several days ago the Airports Council International (ACI) warned that European airline operators could start running out of jet fuel within three weeks because around 50% of Europe’s aviation fuel comes from Gulf sources. This could lead to wholescale flight cancelations and the shutdown of smaller airports right in the middle of the summer holiday season https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3w37ggp011o Yet another problem arising from the ongoing blockade of Gulf shipping will be a worldwide shortage of helium which has already doubled in price since the start of this crisis. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/3/26/helium-hitch-why-us-israel-war-on-iran-could-cause-mri-scan-delays Around one third of the world’s supply of helium comes from Qatar, the world’s chief producer of this chemical which is of critical importance in the operation of medical MRI scanners which rely on superconducting electromagnets; and to the semiconductor sector which uses helium extensively for cooling purging and plasma control during chip manufacture.

Oddly enough I had completely forgotten about that A.C. Clarke story, from 1970, though I do vividly recall the Larry Niven story ‘Neutron Star’ which came out 4 years earlier in 1966 as part of the ‘Known Space’ series. Niven later said that he kept meeting people who had done full mathematical analyses of the tidal effects in his story, and they told him the hero could not possibly survive, as the ship comes out of hyperbolic orbit spinning.

Done ? - You have been !

More questions are being asked about the real nature of the SAR (search and rescue) mission conducted in Iran by US forces last weekend. According to a website called Defence Security Asia, US losses included: 1× F-15E Strike Eagle destroyed 2× HC-130J Combat King II destroyed 1× MH-6 Little Bird destroyed 1× A-10 Thunderbolt II destroyed 1–2× MQ-9 Reaper drones destroyed 2× HH-60 rescue helicopters damaged https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/us-2-billion-burned-iran-f15e-rescue-mission-hc130-helicopter-losses/#google_vignette Additional reports suggest that an F-16 Falcon and a KC-135 Stratotanker also declared emergencies over the same period, amounting to a jaw-dropping $2 billion worth of destroyed hardware. The Hercules HC-130J in particular is one of the very largest cargo aircraft flown by the US air-force, making this one of the most expensive SAR missions in US military history. The incident began on 3 April when an F-15E fighter belonging to the 494th Fighter Squadron of the 48th Fighter Wing based at RAF Lakenheath UK was shot down inside Iran by IRG air defences. Initial reports suggested that this happened within mountainous terrain inside Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province in southwestern Iran. But the subsequent destruction of US aircraft took place several hundred miles further north at a disused airfield about 35 Kilometres from the city of Isfahan which happens to be one of the principal Iranian nuclear material storage sites believed to hold up to 400 kilograms of near weapons grade Uranium 235. On 1 April (two days before the F-15 was shot down) the BBC posted an article suggesting that president Trump was mulling the option of sending a special forces team into Iran to seize this stockpile of Uranium in what would have been a high-risk covert operation https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvglv5v4yvpo The BBC News website returned to this theme last night with a follow-up report suggesting that the SAR mission to rescue the missing F-15E was actually used as cover to conceal an operation of this type - an operation that went very badly wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0t7WBITyk Iranian defence sources are in no doubt that this is exactly what happened, and are already describing the weekend events as ’Tabas II’ - a reference to the ill-fated ‘Operation Eagle Claw’ in 1980 when US Delta forces were forced to abandon a covert operation to rescue US diplomat hostages after a Hercules C-130 and a helicopter collided at a staging area called Tabas during the early stages of the operation - a disaster which killed 8 US service personnel, and cost president Jimmy Carter the 1980 presidential election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw

By pure chance I happened to be watching a YT video about the difference between gasoline and kerosene, and why jet aeroplane engines are designed to run on the latter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKl7Gva_ums At just over 1m elapsed you will find this handy illustration of a fractional distillation tower, and what all the different distillation products are used for.

Few actions can convey just how well a war is going as firing three of your top military leaders just four weeks into hostilities - yet this is exactly what has happened at the Pentagon earlier this week. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/hegseth-fires-us-army-chief-of-staff-in-reported-string-of-dismissals On Thursday April 2nd Pete Hegseth the so-say ‘Secretary of War’ stunned the military establishment by announcing the immediate ‘retirement’ of General Randy A. George the Army Chief of Staff since 2023, in tandem with General David Hodne, the head of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, and Major-General William Green jnr - the Army’s Chief of Chaplains. This move which has been described by some military insiders as “completely insane” was reportedly provoked by a personal clash between General Randy A. George and Pete Hegseth over the latter’s decision to block the promotions of four officers - two black and two female - in a list of 29 otherwise white officers gazetted for promotion. According to the Baptist News, this marks the first occasion that an Army Chief of Chaplains has ever been dismissed from post within their four-year term of service - by a curious coincidence Major William Green jnr. also happens to be black. https://baptistnews.com/article/for-first-time-ever-army-chief-of-chaplains-fired-by-hegseth/ Meanwhile in other war news; The Sun has published a video of two US military aircraft that had to be blown up by their own special forces while searching for shot-down F-15 pilots after the rescue aircraft themselves became bogged down in sand behind enemy lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siqL6V70McU The Mirror has published video of a $700 million AWACS E-3 spy-plane reduced to rubble on the runway at Prince Sutan Air Base in Saudi Arabia by a $20,000 Iranian Shahed 136 drone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQn04k-eUD4 And The Times of India has published a detailed report claiming that an Iranian drone attack on the US Embassy in Riyadh KSA on 3 March last month caused far more damage than previously acknowledged:

Trump Says Intelligence Played No Role in His Decision to...“Intelligence is for losers.”

Ketamine and Ecstasy (MDMA) which are popular ‘party’ drugs among young nightclub attendees are both capable of causing some degree of hyperthermia - i.e. a rise in body temperature as well.

At least they didn't have to sit through another turgid and incomprehensible speech delivered in robotically inflected English...

Article 5 of the Constitution of Iran refers to the leadership of the Ummah (Islamic community) during the occultation of of the Twelfth Imam, and states that this post should be held by a just and pious faqih (Islamic jurist) who is knowledgeable about affairs of the day, in accordance with Article 107. Article 107 of the Constitution of Iran specifies the qualities and theological qualifications (further specified in Article 109) that such a candidate is expected to possess in order to be elected supreme leader by the 88-man ‘Council of Experts’. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989 If you are interested in a balanced discussion of the Constitution of Iran, then you might also wish to consider: Article 13 (Recognized religious minorities) - which states that: "Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education." Article 14 (Non Muslims) - which states that : "In accordance with the sacred verse ("God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not fought against you because of your religion and who have not expelled you from your homes" [60:8]), The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and all Muslims are duty-bound to treat non-Muslims" with "Islamic justice and equity", provided those non-Muslims "refrain from engaging in conspiracy or activity against Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran". I have found nothing in the text of the Constitution of Iran so far to support your claim that:

The maverick Victorian adventurer, linguist and explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) made a scholarly contribution on this topic while serving as the British Consul in Trieste from 1872 onwards. https://greatbritishnutters.blogspot.com/2008/03/sir-richard-burton-gone-to-devil.html Unfortunately this unusual piece of scholarship did not long survive his demise from a heart attack in 1890 aged sixty-nine, and the protective behaviour of his wife.

The Constitution of Iran (in its 1989 amendment form) contains 177 articles organised in 14 chapters. Perhaps you would like to specify which articles you are referring to ?

Today I learned that the word TARE found on railway wagons and shipping containers comes from an Arabic word طَرْح ṭarḥ meaning “deduction” or “that which is removed”. The word refers to the unladen weight of a cargo van, vessel or container, and its use in English dates back to the reign of King Henry VII at the end of the 15th century. A TARE weight is subtracted from the value recorded on a weighbridge to calculate the actual weight of the cargo for customs or shipping charges. The photo is of a “Cavell Van” a type of railway parcel van, so named because it was famously used to transport the body of nurse Edith Cavell from Belgium back to Britain in 1919. https://kesr.org.uk/the-cavell-van/

I’m not entirely sure what you are criticising or taking exception to here. The pernicious effect of what is commonly known as ‘Christian Zionism’ in neo-con political circles concerned with US foreign policy has been widely documented for quite a number of years. To avoid any misunderstanding, what is being referred to here are white evangelical fundamentalist christians who believe that they are living in elder times in which the apocalyptic events described in the Book of Revelation are being re-enacted. They fervently believe that the locale and the geo-political objectives they are pursuing will coincide with the arrival of the Antichrist and his defeat in the final battle of Armageddon on the plains of Megiddo and the valley of Jehoshaphat, followed by the second coming of the messiah, and a ‘rapture’ of the faithful up into heaven by the Lord. President George W. Bush was susceptible to this form of bible-thumping, and it was one of the factors that helped direct his administration’s disastrous march into the second Persian Gulf war from 2001 onwards. Mike Pompeo a former director of the CIA who became the Secretary of State in the first Trump administration was yet another believer. A New York Times article from 30 March 2019 spelled out quite clearly what that belief system involved: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html Mike Huckabee the current US Ambassador to Israel is another senior political figure who has expressed views similar to those of Christian Zionism in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson https://forward.com/news/807715/mike-huckabee-christian-zionism-tucker-carlson/ President Trump still routinely holds ‘prayer meetings’ in the Oval Office with fundamentalist christians, and there have been troubling reports that key foreign policy decisions are sometimes being influenced by what used to be known as Stichomancy (from the the Greek root στιχος - “row, line, verse”) aka Bibliomancy, a form of divination in which the bible is opened to a random page and a finger placed on a verse with your eyes closed. The same was said to have happened during the G.W Bush administrations as well.

“I think it means bringing the end of the world closer, sort of.” (Illuminatus! - Vol 1 - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson) According to a report in ‘The Guardian’, US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops, according to complaints made to a watchdog group. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran-war-christian-rhetoric The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received more than 200 complaints from personnel across the US armed forces including members of the Marines, Air Force and Space Force. According to one complaint from an NCO in a unit on standby to be deployed “at any moment to join “operations against Iran, their unit commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added. According to Mikey Weinstein (MRFF’s president) “These reports indicate an increase in Christian extremism in the military”, noting that the complainants “report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders” who perceive a “‘biblically-sanctioned’ war that is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”

On Sunday March 1st at UTC 18.11, shortwave radio-hams in France and Italy noticed that a new ‘Numbers’ station had begun broadcasting in Farsi on 7910 KHz. The broadcasts began the day after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran by US and Israeli forces on Saturday 28th February. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmbTpxAM7Q Numbers stations are enigmatic radio broadcasts that consist of nothing but a human voice reciting cryptic groups of numbers. They are widely believed to be communication channels used by intelligence agencies to transmit instructions to field-agents in foreign countries. The numbers are copied down by agents equipped with shortwave receivers, and decoded with the help of a one-time pad. Provided that the one-time pads are never reused, the encryption is unbreakable. Numbers stations have been extensively used by western intelligence agencies from the Cold War period onwards, but Iran has no history of ever having used them up to now - which makes the appearance of a brand new Farsi language Numbers station all the more remarkable. Article 111 of the Iranian constitution provides detailed instructions on the succession plan to be followed in the event of the death of the Supreme Leader, but the decapitation attack carried out by Israel and the US appears to have killed many of the Iranian officials who would have been in charge of carrying out the succession plan. This raises the possibility that the activation of this new Farsi Numbers radio station might be part of a Doomsday contingency plan. Faced with the death of their leader and the imminent destruction of their state, Iran’s surviving military leaders have already launched widespread and indiscriminate missile and drone attacks against infrastructure and civilian targets in many neighbouring countries of the middle-east. The worry must now be that the new Numbers station might be sending instructions to activate whatever sleeper agents and terrorist assets Iran possesses throughout the whole of the middle-east and Europe. This could mean not only a sudden spate of fresh gun attacks in western capitals, but the nightmare scenario of a ‘Fourth Protocol’ attack ( c.f. the 1984 Fredrick Forsyth novel) involving chemical, biological or improvised radiological weapons. Not for the first time I fear that the US may have underestimated its opponent.

Known as a "Fifths Tuning" because you are tuned in perfect fifths from the bass string upwards. Some tenor banjo players recommend using C.G.D.A instead - they say the fingerings flow slightly more naturally if you are playing fiddle tunes.