Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

I fitted 5 speakers in every room of my house, in the ceiling. One subwoofer in the centre and 4 midrange in the corners. Oops, no boxes, half the sound into the attic and across to my neighbour's attic.

Me and a friend as kids used to dismantle JCBs from building sites. Er.... ones that were in use. Tonnes of switches off the dashboards.

ROFL, need a key to steal a Mini, just look up the number and buy one?

I once got into and started a Range Rover, then noticed a pair of gloves on the dashboard, looked in the mirror, and saw my own car behind me. I got out and into my car rather quickly. I guess they didn't have many types of key.

Same where I was a kid, but a permanent site.

More a case of they don't want the valuable scrap taken.

That's the biggest bullshit law I've ever heard. They've decided they don't want it once it enters the skip. I doubt anyone would ever get charged for something so absurd.

My uncle took a ladder from a skip in Yorkshire. I distracted the employee by asking him to show me where I could dump a car battery while my uncle put the ladder in the back of his 4x4.

Probably not. Although I did witness a 4x4 landing on a Renault Scenic. I went to the scrapyard to get a replacement boot for my Scenic, but there was a 4x4 on top of it, with it's wheel in the way of me removing the boot. I waved to the only guy working there who came over with a crane and lifted the 4x4 off it. But it swung and came off the chain, landing on the front half of the Scenic. He said "Oops! You didn't need any parts from the front did you?"

Should be used on all tracks, then perhaps trains could stop in the distance my car is required to by law.

Not even possible with the higher speed lines.

Not a chance given how much heavier any train is, let alone freight trains.

Do the math. A fully laden coal car weighs about 140 tons. I've never been bored enough to count cars when I stopped at a crossing but there are a lot of them. Let's say 30 for the sake of argument, 4200 tons plus the weight of the engines. Let's say 4 at 200 tons each. So, roughly 5000 tons traveling at 50 mph. That's quite a bit of kinetic energy to dump in 300'. I can hear snapping axles and see flying wheels.

The wheels and the rails are steel. A train can never have enough friction to stop at a short distance. The brakes can lock all the wheels but the train will still move forward due to inertia.

You don't have 4 for a 30 coal car train.

And you can't do 4 loco engines on a cogwheel train.

It would just rip the teeth off the cogwheet drive.

The reference was to the Mt. Washington Cog Railway. The wheels are for guidance but the motive power is a rack and pinion.

What's that got to do with the price of fish? It compares the signal recorded on the tracks to the quartz oscillator and adjusts the power to the motor accordingly. If you slow it with your finger the white "Quartz Lock" light goes out. The motor also applies an electromagnetic brake to slow the platter quickly when it stops.

Its amazing how ignorant Kinsey is. I think the thinks his watch will slow down as the battery runs out

How come I remember a whine on LW and I was born in 1975?

A picture of you doing this is now required.

When my friend insured his bike I fell about laughing. Insurance is for expensive things like cars I said. Then he told me he'd spent 3 grand on it. 3 times what I'd just spent to buy a car. Which went 113mph downhill. His bike didn't.

Is white or blue hottest? Filament lamps go white. Presumably if it starts with red, as you heat it up you get blue aswell, then eventually lose the red?

I'm sure you could get blue metal in a vacuum.

What if you caught gangreen?

Two things happened around those times.

As you heat something, it produces radiation more or less independent of what it is made of. Initially all the radiation is in the infrared, so we can't see it. Then it creeps into the red end of the visible spectrum and looks dull red, then bright red, then orange; when the "hump" of radiation is mostly in the visible spectrum it looks white to us. This is at 6000K which is the temperature of the surface of our Sun, to which our eyes are adapted. If you go on raising the temperature the hump moves out of the violet end and the light looks bluish as it has lost the red. This is why the star Sirius looks bluish, as its surface is 10000K.

Filament lamps are rather yellowish, as tungsten tends to evaporate much above 3000K; less for halogen lamps which can stand a higher temperature.

I think gangrenous tissue is black, not green. Anyway, you can't "catch" gangrene as it is just tissue which has died.

I dont think it is.

"Gangrene is death of body tissue due to a lack of blood flow or a serious bacterial infection."

So although technically the term gangrene refers to tissue death, its as likely to be an infection as not

I make fun of snowflakes scared of a bad cold.

Yeah, because masks are magical and only work one way. Here's a tip - put your mask on backwards, then the virus can't get in.

They're identical, there has only ever been one way of measuring it. Compare live and neutral. They just keep changing the name for marketing purposes.

Current going through your body gives you a fright and nothing more. I've had nine 240V shocks in my life, about half of them across my whole body. Just makes you jump. Only the weak die off, which is a good thing, future generations will be stronger. Our bodies need to learn to handle stuff we use every day.

I unearthed mine because if you're touching the chassis of the microwave, you're now much more susceptible to touching a live. Normally, touching only something live, you get a small tingle from capacitance of your body. But if you're earthed, far more dangerous. Especially to my parrot who chews cables.

If nothing in your house was earthed, you could never get a shock, unless you have no floor and live (livv, not lyve, I hate English) on the ground.

You touch it, feel a tingle, then fix it.

Of course you can let go. You do have control of your own body right? You have a brain in there somewhere which can override things?

Had that at a school I worked at. 20 PCs, for some reason if you switched them all on at once (as a class of kids tends to do). I thought the caps from live to earth were always connected?

The electrician refused to put less sensitive breakers in. He claimed the regulations stated schools must have more sensitive breakers than the houses where those very same kids live! I bought less sensitive breakers on Ebay with my own money, swapped them over, then sold the sensitive ones. The loss in Ebay fees and postage was approximately equal to the gain of the sensitive ones costing more. Problem solved.

A teacher challenged me on it, so I persuaded a boy to test it in front of the class. Plug with wire, exposed live, hold that. Touch the earthed heater. Tripped, he didn't even say ouch.

Can't you see the problem is the snowflake RCD? FFS get rid of it. These stupid things are stopping designers from using the ground for useful purposes. Like the "shower of death" used in Mexico which saps electricity away to earth.