patronising digital advert

[brightside S9]

Thomas Newcomen understood that 300 years ago.

[J G Miller]

Australia, Canada, New Zealand.

[J G Miller]

On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:16:17 +0100, Dennis@Home explained:

So use Ogg Vorbis then ;)

Or if you have the disk space, FLAC.

[J G Miller]

Yes because in the mind of that person, their scope of understanding of IT skills was limited to switching on a computer, knowing how to click on the start button to get to Internet Explorer, Outook and Office, and being able to create a document in Word or a spreadsheet in Excel.

[J G Miller]

You have failed to consider the quality of the MP3 files themselves.

Files encoded at 320 kbps may sound near CD quality, but the usual

128 kbps most certainly will not.

[J G Miller]

I thought that was David Vincent in 1967-1968? ;)

"it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found.

[Java Jive]

Popcorn before cooking is a seed, but the thing that makes it a little different is that the skin of the seed is virtually impermeable.

To cook it, you place a small amount of oil or fat in a saucepan, just enough to almost cover the bottom (so that it will, just, cover the bottom when heated) and enough popcorn to just cover the bottom of the pan. You then cover it with the saucepan lid (vital!), and put it over the heat. Within a minute or two, the pan starts to tremble and roar as all the popcorn pops. Once this is truly over, remove from the heat and pour the popcorn into something like a colander. Serve with sea-salt.

So, that's how you cook it, but why does it pop? The seed contains small amounts of water vapour, which on heating turns to steam, cooking the 'flour', or whatever you want to call the contents of the seed, and, building up pressure until it ruptures the seed casing and turns it inside out, all in a moment.

The thing here is that gas and air, strictly the oxygen in the air, are only explosive if mixed in the right quantities, and what exactly are the 'right quantities' depends on the chemical formula of the gas used.

When you initially light the flame, it just burns like any gas cigarette lighter, or like a gas cooker flame, only rather more weakly because it isn't under pressure and doesn't have an optimised burner outlet. As the gas is burned from the hole in the lid above, it is replaced by air coming through the hole in the base below, until, when the right quantities are reached ... BOOM!

This has already been well explained by Ray Milne.

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[Zero Tolerance]

"Are you over 75? Yes? Well, you know how you don't have to pay for the TV licence any more? That's because we're turning the TV off soon. Confused? Use the extended support network which we assume you have, or listen to Radio 2 instead. Good-bye."

[Zero Tolerance]

I don't know if I agree with that. She wasn't portrayed as being senile at all - she was extremely confident and domineering. Any smiling by the sales staff was firmly in the "Oh god, what a nightmare" vein.

Similarly, not confused, just people with the intelligence to realise when some things were beyond their skillset.

If you want patronising, look at the Orange "phone trainers" adverts. "You're so thick you can't even use your mobile, so we've hired some six-year-olds to show you how." ISTR there was a considerable backlash about that.

[Brian Gaff]

Sorry? I was asked the question and as I'm supposed to be the font of all knowledge around here, I thought I'd ask here!

Brian

[Roderick Stewart]

You couldn't do that now. Modern domestic gas is heavier than air. It used to be possible to fill a huge plastic bag with the stuff and send it floating off into the sky, but it's no fun any more.

Rod.

[Bill Wright]

We get this over and over again, and I wonder, Brian, if it makes you a bit self-conscious. Would it be a good idea if you amended your signature thus?: Blind user, so no pictures please, and my reading system dictates top posting.

Bill

[Clive George]

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message news: [e-mail]...

Natural gas isn't heavier than air. CH4 = 16 or so, compared to air at about

29, so slightly under half the density. (g/mol, 1 mol = constant volume).

LPG - propane at 44 and butane at 58 are heavier, hence problems in boats with them.

The tin thing still works.

[james]

In message , Bill Wright writes

Well meant but I know what my answer would've been! JF

[Java Jive]

Really, I'm very surprised to hear that. I wonder what the different formulae were/are.

That *has* to be a good thing. Plastic bags that end up in the ocean get mistaken by turtles for jellyfish. They try to swallow them, and choke to death.

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[Max Demian]

So how does he know what to reply to?

[J G Miller]

On Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 20:43:19h +0100, Java Jive pondered:

Town gas (synthetic gas) consists primarily of hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (C0), plus varying proportions of nitrogen (N2) and carbon dioxide (C02).

Natural gas (earth gas) consists primarily of methane (CH4).

A mercaptan (foul smelling sulfur compound) is added to both town gas and natural gas as a means to quickly alert people of gas leaks.

Town gas is sold by the therm and natural gas is often sold by the cubic metre, since town gas may have differing energy properties due to fluctuations in its composition.

[J G Miller]

A better question is, why bother to quote the previous article at all?

[Terry Casey]

flour mills?

However, the experiment would fail if you filled the funnel with cotton wool ...

... unless you know of a way to carry out the same experiment for cotton using materials commonly found in the average household ...

... I know that 7lb biscuit tins aren't around any more but my timescale reasonable matched that of the original post ...

[Andy Champ]

... and for anyone who wants to see it in action, I can thoroughly recommend Crofton Beam Engines.