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Robert

nice expose of time domain reflctometry!

While I'd broadly agree with you on the "what if", the situation in the RAF / Air Ministry was that Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Sholto Douglas and others regarded Park as an uppity colonial and connived to have him removed (successfully in Dec '40) only to have Park brought back to sort the mess in Malta in '42

Mar 29, 2024 at 5:02 AM | Unregistered Commentertomo

tomo,
It is fun to play "what if" games with history, but people are complicated and it's not possible to know how the alternative would *really* have played out. It might be that the rivalry between Park and Leigh-Mallory is what *made* one shine and the other dull. A recent played-out example was Scott Morrison who had done sterling work as Immigration Minister when Tony Abbott was PM and very quickly got the people-smuggling boats stopped. He did not shine at all when he rose to the top position.


On a completely different topic, this half-hour video presents a great picture of how electrical potential propagates in terminated and unterminated cables. He's plotting the measured potentials throughout the circuit, not just modelled them. It accords well with the picture I had formed in my head, but it's taken me years to build that picture. This one video would have made it intuitive (or so it seems to me, but maybe it only impresses me *because* of the time I've spent getting a feel for impedance matching).

Mar 28, 2024 at 10:56 PM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

Robert / Mike

the bureaucrats and "Colonel Blimps" might have sunk us = close run thing.with the Luftwaffe (who had their own issues with both). If Trafford Leigh Mallory had been in charge of 11 Group rather than Park I reckon the outcome would've been different.

The activities of Max Aitken during WW2 are an interesting rabbit hole :-)

- as are the antics of his protege Pamela Churchill (who she?) - the biography is, in its own way as revelatory as the Horsepower Race. Astounding life .... Stranger than fiction. £5 on a s/h copy won't be wasted I've passed on 3 copies over the years and enjoyed the what!!, bloody hell! and pfffff! noises the "borrowers" made :-) While Beatrice Shilling was squashing bugs around Brooklands, Ms Digby was going as fast and hanging on in an entirely different milieu ...

Robert - you are correct about Hi-Viz - imho - it has its uses - and one of those is absolutely to dress up the lower orders as to be immediately identifiable...

Mar 28, 2024 at 8:04 AM | Registered Commentertomo

MikeHig,
FWIW, your speculations sound very plausible to me. I like your thought experiment of their practice dog-fights against equally limited planes serving to make the problem seem less dire (until they're up against the real enemy). As for the "not invented here" aspect, that might also reflect British reluctance to accept that the industrial centre of the world had shifted (and would spell centre differently too).

In any case, I don't see "not invented here" as a compelling criticism. If nobody had reinvented the wheel, we'd all be using rolling logs. It was good that Shilling was working on a new carburettor design; the problem seems to have been much more to do with bureaucrats not understanding its importance.


Mailman,
I've mentioned it here before (I think in a COVID context), but the way they're pushing EVs on us is like the Goodies advert for Woofo dog food (or whatever it was), where the dog was offered a bowl of Woofo alongside bowls of barbed wire and broken glass. Even then, the dog needed to be pushed away from the broken glass before it settled for the Woofo.

On EVs, I thought this chat with James May covered it pretty well: that electric makes a lot of sense, but batteries not so much (but will depend on individual circumstances). I did like his pointing out that the worry is *not* range anxiety, it's recharging anxiety. Even if you only had 100 miles max range, you'd be comfortable enough *if* recharging was as widely available and quick as refuelling.

That is a big "if" though.


tomo,
The thing is that it isn't *only* the UK Labour Party that embraces this nonsense. Australian Labor does too but, worse than that, the other sides of both our parliaments aren't anything like far enough away from the same policies. The joys of consensus.

Good to laugh at the pollies doing dress-ups, but then hi-vis itself is largely theatre too. For many people wearing it, it doesn't affect safety, but might serve as a class marker.

I was chatting with a fellow last week who said it was funny doing some work at an army base, working with a team of army technicians. They insisted he wear hi-vis, but all the people he was working with were wearing camo.

Smart meters are a bit of a paradox. In order to do away with (say) quarterly visits by unskilled meter readers, you end up with (seemingly) biennial visits by licensed electricians to install equipment upgrades. Cheaper?

As for Oxford, you'd think a few people in the vicinity would realise that travelling three sides of a rectangle clocks up more miles than following just one. It is apt that "green" is a synonym for "immature", and also for "naive".

Mar 27, 2024 at 11:40 PM | Unregistered CommenterRobert Swan

Oxford Gulag

https://twitter.com/OxLivSts/status/1772654752972898603

Mar 27, 2024 at 4:18 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Smart Meters

https://twitter.com/AndrewOrlowski/status/1772905152946589941

Mar 27, 2024 at 12:51 PM | Registered Commentertomo

https://twitter.com/clim8resistance/status/1772645011735163292

Putting "Frank Spencer" into a hi viz jacket, a hi viz hard hat, safety gloves and safety spectacles and boots (the don't seem to ever show the boots) does not make him a crane driver. This role playing panto is going to crash and burn - OK, maybe not burn - as that's deemed haram.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/03/26/daily-mail-eulogise-about-floating-wind-power-but-forget-about-the-cost/

Mar 27, 2024 at 12:37 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Mike / Robert, one of the refreshing things about Calum Douglas's work is the refreshing quantity of human context + detail that he provides from his explorations of primary sources, beyond the numbers....

I have to say that I also devour any videos involving Eric Brown that surface. A pal of mine attended a Farnborough talk by Eric maybe 20 years ago that was videoed and that was a transformational experience for me... having been raised on a diet of grimly self serving, highly selective RAF establishment steaming BS. The fact that Callum reads and speaks technical German helps too!

- as for The UK Labour Party, their energy policy initiatives are so farcically divorced from engineering reality that I'm lost for words beyond potty mouthed expletives... Jonathan Swift's sunbeams and cucumbers seems close...

Mar 27, 2024 at 12:19 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Robbo said "The farm hands of a century ago were replaced by the tractor which freed their descendants to attend uni."

Its like back in the day when everyone changed from horsies to vehicles BECAUSE vehicles were just better, easier, more efficient etc. No one went around shooting all the horsies to force everyone to move to automotive power!

However we have the exact opposite of that happening today. Everyone is going around shooting the horsies to force everyone to move to something that is just sh1t and will leave everyone worse off than before!

Mar 27, 2024 at 11:40 AM | Unregistered CommenterMailman

Robert/tomo; yes, that talk was very enjoyable and informative. It's a shame he didn't take a couple of minutes to incorporate a bit more of her background as she was clearly a "character".
I'm a member at Brooklands and was interested to learn that she was the second of only 3 women to lap the track at over 100 mph, in 1934 (wiki). The track was notoriously rough, as witnessed by the famous picture of John Cobb at speed in the massive Napier Railton with all 4 wheels off the ground! It must have taken some bravery and not a little strength to ride a 1930s bike around there at high speed.
Wrt to the Merlin carburettor, clearly there was a degree of "not invented here" at play. However I would also speculate that the negative g issue was seen as a mere irritant by the RAF until they encountered injection engines. Prior to that, any practice dog-fighting would have been against similar aircraft so there may have been an in-built assumption that all planes behaved in the same way.
The Bendix carburettor was - speculation again - probably developed for the very high altitude performance required for the American bombers and, later on, the accompanying fighters. Despite extensive reading about WWII aviation over many decades, I've never seen mention of the difference between Packard-engined aircraft and those with RR Merlins yet it must have been very noticeable to pilots who flew both. Packard Merlins were fitted to some marks of Spitfire so it must have been noticed.
Thanks again to tomo for putting me on to Douglas' book (the Secret Horsepower race) which is quite the best book on WWII aviation that I have read. We will always wonder what difference a fuel-injected Merlin would have made.....the technology had been developed in Britain well before the war, mainly by Ricardos.

Mar 27, 2024 at 10:36 AM | Unregistered CommenterMikeHig

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