46 minutes ago, MigL said:

You may be a bit too critical of the UK; it has its fair share of 'quaint'.

I was born in York, the UK's 'quaintest' city, and know of what I speak.

Spaces such as this are invariably populated by supermarkets, banks, fast food franchises and similar commercial ordure. No sense of community whatsoever.

29 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

I was born in York, the UK's 'quaintest' city, and know of what I speak.

Well, I wouldn't call York 'quaint'; it is larger than the city I live in.
Although it does have many historical attractions ( for myself, at least ).

As opposed to Poznan ( also with its many historical attractions )

Maybe you should get out to visit some of the smaller towns of a few thousand people, where everyone knows everyone else.
That's where you find a real sense of 'community'; and every country has them.

Big city life often forces a certain amount of detachment between inhabitants.
In some BIG cities, people live, work, shop, and get their entertainment in their hi-rise building.
Downtown Toronto ( one hour away ) is one such city; I don't like that kind of life, so I don't live there.

Incidentally, I was born in a little town in South-central Italy, of 4000 inhabitants

Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi - Wikipedia

which I would definitely call 'quaint'.

Oh, and today I learned where you were born, and you learned where I was born.

Edited April 4Apr 4 by MigL

TIL about the deep scattering layer, aka false bottom, in the ocean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_scattering_layer

“a layer in the ocean consisting of a variety of marine animals. It was discovered through the use of sonar, as ships found a layer that scattered the sound and was thus sometimes mistaken for the seabed”

Well Chester has the arcades similar to those shown in Poznan, as does La Rochelle in France.

Chester has also just been voted The Uk's most welcomeing city.

https://www.chester.ac.uk/about/news/articles/new-rankings-hailed-as-chester-named-most-welcoming-uk-city-and-makes-global-top-ten-/

As can be seen from the second picture they galleries are two level.

Today I learned that CERN has an 'anti-matter factory' and they have actually shipped anti-matter for experiments, to other facilities by truck.

As we approach the end of our visit to Poland, Mrs Seth and I decided to take the plunge tonight and ordered a dish of veal sweetbreads as a shared starter course.

Flambéed and served in a rich creamy mushroom sauce, they were quite delicious.

TIL that today is World Quantum Day.

https://worldquantumday.org/

Our cats, Eliza "do little" Vat and Louisa May Allcat, may or not be attending the nearby events.

On 4/8/2026 at 11:57 PM, sethoflagos said:

As we approach the end of our visit to Poland, Mrs Seth and I decided to take the plunge tonight and ordered a dish of veal sweetbreads as a shared starter course.

Flambéed and served in a rich creamy mushroom sauce, they were quite delicious.

Oh yes sweetbreads are very good. I've had them on a couple of occasions and thought they had a slightly similar taste to that of liver, though far more delicate. But it seems they can be two types of offal: either the pancreas or the thymus gland. I can understand why the former might have a taste similar to liver but, not really the thymus gland.

(By the way, the reference to thymus glands reminds me of the idiotic story of a man allegedly strangled by his own thymus gland in cold weather, posted on another forum by a nutter who specialises in posting daft questions and asking, mock-innocently, if there is any truth in them. )

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Oh yes sweetbreads are very good. I've had them on a couple of occasions and thought they had a slightly similar taste to that of liver, though far more delicate. But it seems they can be two types of offal: either the pancreas or the thymus gland. I can understand why the former might have a taste similar to liver but, not really the thymus gland.

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.

TIL that German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued in 1801 that there cannot be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.

He argued this in his doctoral dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum by saying such a planet is not needed because of well, Plato's numerology. The entire work was heavily anti-Newton.

By the 1790s astronomers were excited by what we now call the Titius-Bode law: take the sequence 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52… and you get a pretty good fit for the spacing of planets in the solar system from Mercury through Saturn, except there is nothing at 28, right between Mars (16) and Jupiter (52). A group of German scientists was organizing a hunt for that "missing" planet in 1800.

Hegel, fresh in Jena and trying to get a teaching license, thought the whole hunt rested on bad philosophy of number. In Section III of the dissertation he wrote:

"Since this progression is arithmetical and follows not even the multiplication of numbers by themselves (i.e. the powers), it has nothing to do with philosophy."

He then turned to Plato's Timaeus, where the Demiurge builds the world-soul from two geometric progressions - powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8) and powers of 3 (1, 3, 9, 27). Hegel tweaks the list to 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 16, 27 (he swapped 16 for 8, probably to get a smoother spacing) and said:

"Timaeus does not apply these numbers to the planets, but reckons that the Demiurge shaped the Universe according to the schematic relationship of those numbers... If this series should be the truer order of nature than that arithmetical progression, it is apparent that there is a great gap between the fourth and fifth places, and that no planet is wanting there."

Hegel was showing that an empirical pattern (Bode's law) is not necessary, because you can find another badass pattern that fits the known planets just as well and leaves the Mars-Jupiter gap empty.

The bottom line? Ceres was discovered on January 1st, 1801 - just as Hegel was finishing his dissertation.

Edited Wednesday at 08:54 PM5 days by Otto Kretschmer

I learned that hydrofoil boats are not only faster with smoother ride, they use less energy. But I also learned that their use is limited where there are things in the water, like floating logs washed down rivers or animals like whales and dolphins. Will we get better radar/sonar to navigate those shifting hazards? And drones come to my mind as a way to track the hazards.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/15/fast-hydrofoils-floating-logs-canadas-ferry-electrification-challenge/

12 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I learned that hydrofoil boats are not only faster with smoother ride, they use less energy. But I also learned that their use is limited where there are things in the water, like floating logs washed down rivers or animals like whales and dolphins. Will we get better radar/sonar to navigate those shifting hazards? And drones come to my mind as a way to track the hazards.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/15/fast-hydrofoils-floating-logs-canadas-ferry-electrification-challenge/

For some reason it seems to be only the Italians that have exploited this, in their aliscafi on the Italian Lakes (and Emilio Largo’s Disco Volante in Thunderball)

I remember someone once made a hydrofoil bicycle, with a propeller driven by pedals, which could just about beat a sculler in a racing shell. The snag was it had to be launched artificially, as the energy barrier to getting it up on its foils was too much for the athlete pedalling.

The Italian navy contracted Boeing and a couple of Italian naval defense companies, in the mid 70s, for a missile armed, hydrofoil, fast patrol boat.
Only a few of the Sparviero ( sparrow-hawk ) class were produced for the Navy ( and some under license in Japan ), but its larger brother, the Pegasus class, intended for NATO standardization, failed to go on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparviero-class_patrol_boat

Edited Thursday at 08:22 PM4 days by MigL

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.

12 minutes ago, toucana said:

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.

In my limited experience, trying to repair anything with a spring-loaded mechanism is fraught with danger. There is often some kind of mechanical advantage issue, whereby the spring needs to be very powerful to exert force at what is in effect the wrong end of a lever. Fiddling with such things is a recipe for taking your finger off or something.

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

In my limited experience, trying to repair anything with a spring-loaded mechanism is fraught with danger. There is often some kind of mechanical advantage issue, whereby the spring needs to be very powerful to exert force at what is in effect the wrong end of a lever. Fiddling with such things is a recipe for taking your finger off or something.

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

30 minutes ago, toucana said:

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

The example I was about to mention. I tried to fix one, had the tape spring burst out into a giant snarl that seemed to cover the entire workshop area. I wound up (haha) just screwing a cleat on the side of the vacuum to wrap the loose cable onto. My general experience with vacs is that auto-rewinds are built to fail within the first year.

7 minutes ago, TheVat said:

The example I was about to mention. I tried to fix one, had the tape spring burst out into a giant snarl that seemed to cover the entire workshop area. I wound up (haha) just screwing a cleat on the side of the vacuum to wrap the loose cable onto. My general experience with vacs is that auto-rewinds are built to fail within the first year.

The best vacs imo called 'Henry's' have a manual rewind on the top.

59 minutes ago, toucana said:

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

So are removable oven doors.

Maybe this topic will get all us oldies fessing up to various mechanical amateur repair experiences. I’m reminded of James Thurber’s comments on psychological traumas inflicted by early motor cars:”Yonder toddles an ancient who once tried to crank an old Reo with the spark advanced…”

22 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

The best vacs imo called 'Henry's' have a manual rewind on the top.

And in my opinion. +1

13 minutes ago, exchemist said:

So are removable oven doors.

Never seen an oven door with springs, except microwave ovens and they tend to have a sturdy mechanism.

But if you like a spring reasembly challenge try reassembling a sprag clutch.

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

”Yonder toddles an ancient who once tried to crank an old Reo with the spark advanced…”

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

6 hours ago, StringJunky said:

The best vacs imo called 'Henry's' have a manual rewind on the top.

Excellent (and nicely low tech) feature. Now to check today's tariff report to see if the UK can affordably send one over... 😃

15 hours ago, exchemist said:

Maybe this topic will get all us oldies fessing up to various mechanical amateur repair experiences. I’m reminded of James Thurber’s comments on psychological traumas inflicted by early motor cars:”Yonder toddles an ancient who once tried to crank an old Reo with the spark advanced…”

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.

On 4/16/2026 at 11:20 PM, exchemist said:

For some reason it seems to be only the Italians that have exploited this, in their aliscafi on the Italian Lakes (and Emilio Largo’s Disco Volante in Thunderball)

I remember someone once made a hydrofoil bicycle, with a propeller driven by pedals, which could just about beat a sculler in a racing shell. The snag was it had to be launched artificially, as the energy barrier to getting it up on its foils was too much for the athlete pedalling.

Hydrofoils ran regular services on Sydney Harbour for a couple of decades, up into the 1980's I think, ultimately replaced with catamarans. I think there were a few collisions with floating debris, that didn't stop the service, but I don't know to the extent that played in choosing the catamarans to replace them. Seems to me a high speed catamaran - any vessel at any speed - would be at risk too. Hydrofoils may be the better at lowering their working surface area to reduce drag and maximise speed but catamarans do well too. Hovercraft have the least of all I suppose but they have other problems.

30 minutes ago, toucana said:

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.

I am somewhat intrigued by the bit about the spark being advanced. I seem to recall the spark advance was controlled pneumatically on my old Morris Minor (1961 model) by a diaphragm in the distributor, connected to the low pressure in the inlet manifold. But I have a faint memory of being in an ancient vehicle, perhaps a school bus, in which there was a control on the dashboard with "advance" and "retard" on it, presumably so the driver could alter the ignition timing manually. Seems rather extraordinary. Was this common in the early motoring era and why was it done? I wonder if it was before fuel ignition quality (knock rating) was standardised.