Lucy... Let Be

Posted elsewhere on the subject but it does appear with each subsequent revelation that what should have been on trial was not so much a neonatal nurse, as the NHS 'trust' (sic) involved, the Cheshire Police Constabulary and criminal justice system.

But the author speaks here for someone who was never really given the chance to do so to the extent she ought to have, because that's how the establishment like it.

Ed. Colin did plan on contacting the Thirlwall Inquiry at contact@thirlwallinquiry.co.uk to ask if they'd help whitewash his garage... but doesn't want to be imprisoned for sixteen life terms.

Schooling Squared

French schoolchildren use squared stationery from the get-go, the British lined. For a long time I did not so much go to bed early like Marcel Proust, but wondered why?

When I look at this tho' I can see its proportions at a glance ~ and we shall build one, Gromit!

Probably the reason Airbus is headquartered there though, and not here. Nor are we in the UK ever likely to change, our decisions taking decades before finally being... ruled out.

Digital Commoner

Enduring popularity of the guy on the left perhaps explained by the fact a picture's worth a thousand words, though I've put them here because that on the left has the title 'Drone for Human Carriage' and the other 'Drone Adapted for Human Carriage', which muddies the waters.

Today's round-up of downloads from the Digital Commons shows each is a perennial favourite however, along with the pictorial key-pad and a means of extending range among quadcopters by use of a 'free' wing that is able to adapt to the airflow under forward motion. I'll amend it in due course in order to clarify the method as against the means.

It was though downloaded in Kiev this past month ~ like the self-launching boat ~ and it's always gratifying to see downloads from Washington and Whitehall besides Silicon Valley and that place the US Army is based whose name I cannot recall.

The key-pad relies upon us recognising faces in place of numbers for passcodes, so that's a no-brainer as software evolves because anyone can spot a numeral but that can't be said for your grandmother rather than mine... or your cat for that matter.

So keep up... down loading.

Chinese Whisper Jet

Mentioned the other day the enduring success of smaller jet engines in the shape of turbo-props for regional airliners and miniature turbojets originally evolved for the modelling community but since co-opted for personal air vehicles.

Troubling Ukraine as I write an altogether faster form of drone, powered by such and capable of 300 m.p.h. plus even saddled with a warhead.

Germany pioneered the tech that was inevitably replicated by the Chinese at a lower cost. When I worked in Shanghai I was struck too by how I might buy a new 'boxer' type of motorcycle ~ with or without sidecar ~ for a fraction of the German original.

The reason? Captured during WW2 by advancing Russian forces they would first be reverse-engineered there before being shared with China.

Thus everything German ~ or from anywhere else for that matter ~ is not so much turning Japanese, turning Japanese (you'd really think so) so much as Chinese.

Lego, Legas, Legat?

This I like a lot... though perhaps not to the extent of the 9000+ piece Titanic that measures 1.35 metres. Unlike much else amongst Lego I suspect the demographic purchasing each differs considerably from the regular, not least because of price.

My own intro to Lego stretched only so far as plastic brick, window-frame, base and roof. And having been based flying from Billund as the museum was being built, I know that prior that the original bricks had been wooden.

Kind of ironic that what Lego produce now would be impossible without assistance from digital computers for both design and manufacture ~ whilst Concorde flew off the back of analogue computers that stretched to its fly-by-wire control system: the first fitted to an airliner, in fact.

A common misconception is the word was derived from Latin, but is actually Danish for 'Hurry up and invent the internet'.

New Sales Leeds

Wherever you go, whatever you do, be curious.

Here at Manchester's newest air terminal I spot from the gate lengths of polymer I'm sure I've seen elsewhere; and the elsewhere was watching it being loaded into a container for export to the US.

It stems from Leeds, a place which besides bequeathing us Grand Theft Auto was a place where a family man set up a factory in 1984 to produce rolls of plastic film.

Bouncing back from a flood five years later that almost literally sunk the business, they couldn't help noticing the cardboard rolls the film was stored on were prone to damp, which wrote off the entire product.

And so they created machines to extrude polymer (plastic) tubes instead. Meantime Coca-Cola asked them to supply 10,000 polymer pallets, which was how they found there were endless uses for plastic tubing.

And as ever it met a need, for the steel barriers protecting their own equipment and walkways were proving costly to repair and not tremendously good at sustaining impacts. The polymer version proved to be, to the extent it is now exported to 64 other countries beside the US.

It's used at Heathrow, as appears on the website, but they've omitted to include the use at Manchester ~ I'm guessing because the new Terminal 5 at LHR preceded T2 at MAN and they've yet to catch up.

So I've done that for them, haven't I?

A-Safe, it's called.

Parting Shot

Belatedly politicians here UK ~ most of whom can't change a light-bulb without the manual ~ have noticed UK-funded university researchers take the first chance they can to develop their ideas in the US. And who could blame them?

The government had a body it funded in the shape of the British Technology Group (or BTG) that underwrote such research besides funding ideas from the likes of me, albeit without the same sort of success as monoclonal antibodies or MRI technology.

In fact I met Margaret Thatcher's minister for technology off the back of it and may he rest in peace*. It did not stop her ~ or her devil's spawn in the shape of Tony Blair ~ from shutting it down.

Its piss-poor substitute was NESTA, which describes itself as a UK charity devoted to sustainable living, fairer starts and healthier lives viz. bollocks. It was funded at the outset by vice in the form of gambling revenue drawn from the National Lottery; whereas now despite advertising as a charity, it still draws upon government grants from the likes of us.

We R.I.P'd Graham Barker on these pages recently, and so we'll leave the last word to him regarding, shall we?

Funny how we live on in our digital traces, though...

* Ed. Although it sounds like he was killed in a drive-by shooting by the author, we should point out it was 'Big-Tech Tony' who fired the fatal shot.