Aussies and beer.

If only this happened to me.

Amazon out of control.

Not the female kind, the retailer kind.

It’s not the ordering that’s at fault, it’s the delivery. I ordered four items yesterday and was given delivery forecasts for all four, of an estimated delivery slot of between the 17th and 21st. Now that’s a bad enough forecast in itself. Am I supposed to stay in for five days in a row? I think with all their money they are making, they can do better than that. However that’s not my point. Two items arrived this morning, four days adrift of the estimated delivery dates.

Does this mean that I have to stay at home for NINE bloody days now. I suggest that they tell their outside suppliers the delivery forecast dates and get them to adhere by them.

I personally think that they are in danger of losing customer satisfaction if they can’t buck up with their ludicrous forecasts.

Incidentally if Tesco’s, can not only name the day and give a two hour delivery slot in that day, then why can’t Amazon at the very least name a specific day.

Amazon. You’re pissing me off.

Santa Claus: An engineer's perspective:

 

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th. of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second < 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the Oflying¹ reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them; Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air resistance < this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth¹s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion Joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in a milli-second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G¹s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

(Shamelessly knicked from the comments @  Head Rambles

Christmas surprise

 

I wonder if Ryanair will take note.

Silly me.

At the moment this computer I’m writing my usual drivel on is situated on a table in the kitchen. This is because Mrs FE doesn’t like the sound of keys clicking and me swearing at the monitor, whilst she’s watching the X Factor. ( personally I think my screaming sounds better than any of the X Factor contestants).

However the computer has to be re-sited elsewhere as Mrs FE wants one of those big American fridges to take it’s place. A new venue has been found in a small bedroom, but a new desk will be required.

I’ve just spent an inordinately length of time scouring the internet for a suitable table to fit in the space allotted and was up to page 32 on  Amazon and beginning to despair at finding one suitable for my needs.

You’re probably wondering why that should be a problem? The answer is I was trying to find one with a shelf to hold my rather large printer. Could I find one with a suitable shelf? Yes of course I could, but I’m not paying £450 fucking quid for a desk!

Just in case I might find one eventually with a shelf I decided to measure the dimensions of the printer. Immediately I realised what a fuckwit I was. On top of this new printer was a small glowing blue icon in the form of a transmitting antenna. I’d completely forgotten that this new printer was WiFI and therefore doesn’t need to be near the computer at all.

Mind you Mrs FE and myself will never agree where the printer will have to be sited. (I wonder if it’ll fit on top of the fridge freezer?)

A plus side as pointed out by my kids and their partners. is the existing larder fridge can now become a dedicated ready use beer fridge.

I’ll drink to that.

Sign language.

Below is a simple set of chalked shapes. These shapes are used by a gang of burglars in Surrey to classify which properties are worth the risk of breaking into. So if you live in leafy Surrey it’s worth checking to see if you have any strange chalk marks on the front of your house. (I’m looking at you, Huw and Lizi).

A public service announcement from The Filthy Engineer

Wind turbines are……..

Crap. Today when we actually have some wind, most of the turbines are stationary. As an example this pic shows the output for a wind farm in Kent, rated capacity 59.8 MW. Look at what it’s producing. Sweet EFF all. In fact it is probably using power to enable the turbines to rotate slowly to protect the gearboxes from damage.

Temperature outside is 3 deg C at the moment.

SOURCE

Street Lighting

My local council is considering dimming or even switching some of the county’s street lights to save money. A position that I don’t think they have thought through.

Dimming:

All that happens in a simple dimming system is that you exchange lots of light and heat for less light and loads more heat. This defeats the object of saving power.

An ordinary resistor is a piece of material that doesn't conduct electrical current well -- it offers a lot of resistance to moving electrical charge. A variable resistor consists of a piece of resistive material, a stationary contact arm and a moving contact arm.

As the charge works to move through the resistor, energy is lost in the form of heat. When you put a resistor in a series circuit, the resistor's energy consumption causes a voltage drop in the circuit, decreasing the energy available to other loads (the light bulb, for example). Decreased voltage across the light bulb reduces its light output.

The problem with this solution is that you end up using a lot of energy to heat the resistor, which doesn't help you light up the room but still costs you. In addition to be being inefficient, these switches tend to be cumbersome and potentially dangerous, since the variable resistor releases a substantial amount of heat.

TFE note: There are no, dimmers fitted in my area as there was never considered  any justifiable cost.

Switching off:

Apart from the obvious dangers of  the running down of pedestrians on a more regular basis, there may be legal ramifications. Consider the 30 MPH speed limit in towns, villages and cities. There is more than just the signage to consider.

Scenario:

The Beak: “Mr Filthy Engineer. You were stopped for exceeding the 30 MPH speed limit. How do you plead?”

TFE: “Not guilty”.

(Stunned silence in court as everyone rushes out to get popcorn.)

TB: “Please state your reason for your plea as we have the statement from two Officers that you were at the time exceeding the limit”.

TFE: “I didn’t know there was a limit, your honour. I’ve never driven through that area before”.

TB: “Didn’t you see the sign”?

TFE: “Maybe that was when I had a sneezing fit.”

TB: “But didn’t you see the street lights?”

TFE: “There were no street lights”.

TB: “How can you say that? They are clearly visible”.

TFE: “Not when it’s raining, dark, and it’s a cloudy night. AND the bloody things are switched off”.

TB: (Consults clerk) “Case dismissed”.

.

Now to deliver.

\i must stop droning on about deliveries.

Lies, damn lies, and fiddled statistics.

“Science is not always a neutral, disinterested search for knowledge, although it may often seem that way to the outsider. Sometimes the story can be very different.”

This should be required reading for all those rabid anti smokers out there.

How times change.

Smoking and health have been the subject of argument since tobacco was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. King James I was a pioneer antismoker. In 1604 he declared that smoking was "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." But like many a politician since, he decided that taxing tobacco was a more sensible option than banning it.

By the end of the century general opinion had changed. The Royal College of Physicians of London promoted smoking for its benefits to health and advised which brands were best. Smoking was compulsory in schools. An Eton schoolboy later recalled that "he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking". As recently as 1942 Price’s textbook of medicine recommended smoking to relieve asthma.

The times they were a changing (Apology to Bob Dylan).

Then we had the Doll and Hill study.

These strong opinions for and against smoking were not supported by much evidence either way until 1950 when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill showed that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer.

But were their study results correct?

Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, had noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, "even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer."

I’m not going to further plagiarise the document but suggest that smokers and anti smokers both have a read of the article. I think as an antismoker you may be disturbed, if not slightly guilty about your persecution of smokers. I leave you with this:

But the continuation of Hammond’s work, with its demonstrated faulty methodology, was used by the Australian authors to deduce that smoking causes premature death to the extent of 17,800 per year in Australia. Their conclusions should be compared with the results of a survey by the Australian Statistician in 1991 of 22,200 households, chosen at random. This showed "long term conditions", including cancer and heart disease, to be more common in non-smokers than smokers.

Hah.