Stat Ins

Views appear to have doubled over the course of a month, although so far as I am concerned where only two or three are gathered in my blog, I shall be with them.

That said, even they might be bots scraping the flesh off my literary bones... as I became aware during my recent appearance at the Edinburgh Festival.

All's Well that Drones Well

No drama, just having to switch the lat for the ski on that port pontoon. Hour's work and what else are you going to do on a Bank Holiday afternoon under an overcast?

Ed. Sit and eat?

GTA 6 Spoiler

The action takes place in a 'rust-belt' city where visitors risk their lives after Mrs T and her gang of ruthless 'Tories' destroy the local steel-works and torch every one of the community facilities they lay siege to.

In release 6, high-speed chases between Police and gangs like the 'Neets' feature head-ons in graphic detail issuing from drives down one-way streets. Join a funeral afterwards, powering up your Uzis and saddling uninsured quad-bikes for all the fun of the wake! Set a few of your rivals' rides on fire, then bake a cocktail-sausage in the embers!

Not over yet though, for you'll ram a Dodge into the front-end of your opponent's terrace, before setting a family home ablaze with your Molotovs! Gasp in awe as gamer Andy Burnham spawns 200 officers in reply from South Yorkshire Police!

Finally, cruise the Pennines on the '62 in the sunset to treat a blogger to that richly-deserved knuckle-sandwich and fries!

Ed. Bring it off! But Colin would like to add he has fond memories of operating the Teesside to Heathrow shuttle and visiting the local museum, where that first steam-locomotive used to be before it was removed to Shildon for its own safety.

Kit Cat #5: WTF?

Meanwhile back at the Assembly Hall ~ and this is pure Boeing ~ I discover I've not so much ordered two starboard pontoons, as built them.

Cast round like Basil Fawlty looking for someone to blame, settling on calling the universe out:

Colin            What the fuck... why've you done this to me?

Universe       Ha ha ha... it's what I do, man! You been listening to Goethe again!

After an interlude banging my head on a wall I decide to list one online amongst the personals: 'Starboard pontoon in same-sex r'ship WLTM port pontoon for days at the seaside. No smokers'.

Ed. Colin is taking a long break and yoga-class as he's not yet forgiven the universe.

Kit Cat #4: Keep Railing

The universe has been on again to say if I look around the garage it has for me an ideal block of wood for resting the pontoons on whilst fitting the seat-rail.

I'd have liked this to be a whole lot shorter and matching the individual seat length but that would have required (a) knowing how many seats there need be and where to put them and (b) driving screws in from the reverse side prior to lining with foam because the screws need to be driven into timber and not insulating foam.

Accordingly they are fitted post-production as regards the uprights, whereupon we can fix them to the vertical post at either end thereof.

Although it adds weight and detracts from the aesthetics, it is a practical solution to making the watercraft a modular construction to which a range of accessories might be fitted. They might include seats, battery-packs, avionics bays or things those not at the seaside purely for the ice-cream may want to fit.

Kit Cat #3: Universal Truth

The philosopher Goethe said when you set out on a proj, that the universe conspires to make it happen... or at least it did before he got run over.

But there I was back in the workshop, planning to fit the seats to my creation mwah ha, mwah ha, mwah ha ha ha ha ha... when I get a call from the Universe.

Because I was just wondering how far up two-foot high pontoons each seat would need to be fixed, such that my elbows perched nicely upon them?

The conversation went like this:

Colin            Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Universe      Are you able to speak, because I have to do the health and safety?

Colin            Yes, I am.

Universe       See that garden chair over there you sit on drinking beer?

Colin            Hold on, I'll get my glasses.

Universe       No, it's too early to drink, but if you measure it I made it 24" for you.

Colin            Oh thanks. What can I do for you?

Universe       Tell Elon Musk he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Nepalling

I've still a passing interest in geology, which I studied to a greater or lesser extent at university in Sheffield. We would look down microscopes at slivers of rock under UV light and ask what we were doing with our lives.

But glaciers are the sort of thing you don't pay attention to until they're knocking at your door; as they did in the last ice age when Britons lived on top of hills because there was nowhere else to go unless you liked ski-ing.

They are big though, and not something you want to be near when bits break off ~ as they are beginning to do with alarming regularity. They also however feed ways of life downstream that has existed for practically centuries and upon which we've come to increasingly rely.

There used to be a formula amongst Fleet Street as I recall when calamities would be reported were a Briton involved, three Europeans or a hundred plus from some other part of the world... or something to that effect. Or as John Donne would have said, 'Ask not for whom the bell tolls, but get yourself a cappuccino instead.'

Accordingly the focus has been on the drying out of the Colorado River basin, driven by a paucity of snow in recent years in the Pacific north-west of the USA. Snow will either melt, or accumulate to form glaciers under pressure of its own weight besides temperatures remaining stubbornly low for long enough.

But I flew a spell in Cambodia at Siem Riep where you could see the jungle temple that Lara Croft brought into every home; or drink a pint of lager in town for 25p and treat yourself to a fried scorpion on a stick.

To vary this routine we'd cruise the Tonle Sap, a giant lake that disappears and reappears each year with each monsoon. Here we'd learn that there are over four hundred types of rice ~ not just Uncle Ben's ~ and enjoy cocktails that proved to be an endless supply of rum and coke.

But these water-courses relied not so much on the rain falling during that monsoon so much as snow-melt from the Hindu Kush... I think that was it, though it may have been a restaurant I went to in Manchester.

Flying when in Türkiye though I'd hire a car days off and visit any number of Roman towns, invariably a few miles inland from the seaside whereas once they will have been on it. Walking there, what stands out is that lack of water flowing where once it must have done practically everywhere: like Venice in Vegas on a power-cut.

For what does for civilisations everywhere is not so much what we might guess, so much as a simple lack of water.

Have a good weekend.

Only one in the pic, but flying over China you have to ask what's with the blue roof?

Serf's Up

Went to get your backer-board panels Monday morning last and fell victim to a siren call from McDonalds for a breakfast burger... and spotted this exiting the retail park.

The royal family owns much of Cornwall, besides stately piles around London and elsewhere. I thought they owned the entire foreshore of these islands too, but apparently half of it belongs to local councils, the National Trust or the military.

They do own the seabed as far as the twelve-mile territorial limit, though' that's a moving target with sea-levels set to rise by upto two metres by 2100.

How that works legally is therefore a mystery, as since the time of Magna Carta the extent of property has been fixed by the Land Registry or similar and its borders not allowed to drift. 

As they own the Registry too, however, that shouldn't prove a problem.

Dolly Parton R.I.P.

The queen is dead. I'd a young lodger in Mitcham while setting out on working life in and around London, and he'd always been a huge Elvis fan: unusual in someone so young at the time. He told me how at home he'd gone downstairs in tears, hearing that Elvis was dead.

His father asked him what was wrong, and he said 'The king is dead.' to which his father replied, 'What... the Duke of Edinburgh?'.

Ed. The Duke of Edinburgh was the husband of the late Queen Elisabeth in the UK.

Oh, Come On!

Dronehenge

We don't really know why these people ~ at least as intelligent as the Neanderthals ~ should have erected such a structure in their back garden, but during the summer solstice it points the way to the local Aldi store. These structures could mark the site of ancient rituals, though they could also represent a futile waste of time and effort.

Kit Cat #2

Here are the uprights, and they are made in the same way as the decks. They could have been three-sided as they share an edge with each deck, but sometimes it is easier to use modular construction techniques even should it add extra weight.

The majority of the drones currently in production are not built by robots but human beings, for a number of reasons. Humans are cheaper to employ, faster to set up in manufacture and able to run away should bombs rain down upon their factory. And if you're a dictator, they're also easier to replace.

The first means of industrial mass production anywhere in the world took place in the UK ~ naturellement Rodney ~ and involved rigging-blocks for the largest naval force in the world. There is a picture of one below, and again they'd be made from wood and produced by hand.

So in a funny way, what goes around comes around.

Rebus

As Reno is alight and the Colorado empties out, UK agricultural production fails year on year and Europe burns... spare a thought for London's bus-drivers as all 1500 of them go out on strike today.

They're not allowed to talk about it under Labour's abuse of anyone providing labour but it is all about the fact that legislation forbids carriage of animals in temperatures above 30 degrees centigrade, but not bus-drivers. This has been exacerbated by the fact that there are so few public conveniences left that drivers are effectively denied any means of hydration.

Thatcher would have loved this, and will have been sorry not to have been around in order to send in legions of baton-wielding policemen to beat the shit out of them. She will however be resting peacefully in her grave knowing London Corporation's buses are run by Arriva with focus on shareholder and management remuneration.

But as much as anyone to blame is Thomas Heatherwick's pretty-pretty re-working of the classic Routemaster. Designs are epic when they introduce something new, whereas nowadays as often as not we're happy with re-hashed Minis and Beetles not because we're post-modern so much as the fact we revel in our cultural decline.

Seen side-by-side in this image borrowed from Wikipedia, the older bus was open at the back end, meaning you could get on and off at will. Arriving near school I'd leap from this platform every day wondering how high a speed I could withstand on re-entry. In reverse order, fellow passengers would hold London trains' doors open in an effort to accommodate races between departing trains and tardy commuters.

All that has gone, and Thomas' efforts have concentrated upon three main things:

(a)    The elimination of all means of ventilation

(b)    A maximum of greenhouse-effect in order to raise temperatures

(c)    Windows that can't be opened by anyone anymore

At a stroke, therefore, he's provided any number of bus-drivers with one.

Nonetheless as you see, as with our own efforts foam and plywood are involved in developing even the largest forms of transport. 

Ed. Colin is bitter as he wrote Thomas Heatherwick years ago and never got a reply.

Kit Cat #1

Meantimes boats don't build themselves, do they Gromit? I've decided to build this as a pair of identical pontoons to be connected by the intervening seat or seats and here I've laid out the pair of decks ~ or wings ~ as they'll appear on the watercraft.

We're looking at the underside here and they comprise a picture-frame, based on a quarter-inch laminated backer-board beneath and insulation foam above. The foam will be on the underside and so it does not require a second skin.

This in turn allows for different thicknesses of foam to be applied: here the spars are three-quarter inch (18mm) square, whereas the foam is inch-thick or 25mm. I ran a bead of adhesive around the excess foam except on inside edges, as these will abut the uprights.

There might have been a time I'd have worked on during summer evenings but with advancing age comes retreating ambition. Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote how our lives are like a river: a babbling brook at birth, a torrent in youth and middle age, serene expanse like the Mississippi approaching the sea and its demise.

Whatever book I read I can only generally recall one fact, as here. Of Solzhenystin's voluminous tome about the Gulag I can only remember the bit where he goes for a crap. This suggests that reading, as Faust said, is a waste of time.

Ed. He did like blogs though.

Donald Sheppard R.I.P.

A few days back we found ourselves complaining, didn't we, about tailbacks on the M6 when the chances were the motorist or one of three truck drivers fell asleep; it being around 04:00 a.m. But the motorist in question sadly passed away and so we mount a tribute among these pages.

Not three days later the same motorway was closed in both directions for a single lorry (truck arch.) fire that was confined anyway to the hard shoulder. The thinking must be that motorists on either side of the central reservation will be stopping for a gawp and will run into the back of each other, producing a cascade of crashes that would keep us there until at least Christmas.

The answer would ideally be for a select few of us to establish a civilisation on Mars, but absent that then in the interim driving and all else should be done by robots... and as I write, once such just broke the world's 100m sprint record.

But you may wish to bury your loved one among these posts, which will last for all time... or at least 'til Sergey Brin needs one. Available on our merch pages, you can book both an attractive headstone and a funeral oration drafted by AI.

Visiting the deceased is more easily done by laptop and you may refresh your floral tributes for a small subscription that we promise will cost no more than Netflix.

Below is our offering aimed at petrolheads, featuring a lasting 'lamboleum' for the whole family!

Ed. ChatGPT drew it, Miss.

Dimestoppers

Is this your vehicle? Were you proceeding south at the traffic-lights at the entrance to Old Hall Street on Friday 21st August around 11:00 a.m. and were you showered with money?

I pull up at the lights on the inside lane and on the central reservation is a homeless man with a sign that reads something like 'I've no money so give me yours instead'.

Your honour, I stare fixedly ahead pretending to have spotted interesting clouds in the sky, but realising it would be me in a year or two, I reach for a new pound coin ~ the one with with a harder rim than previous ~ and toss it toward the man with a cry of 'Here's a quid mate'.

At this point the vehicle pictured in the CCTV drove up the outside lane and the coin bounced audibly and visibly off the bonnet, ricocheted off the windscreen and given the length provided by an estate, careened off the roof as a parting shot.

I wound the window up, appearing to have spotted an interesting cloud. The coin in question came to rest in the hatched area between the signals, given the impetus provided by the estate.

My feeling is the homeless man, my cries drowned out by traffic, had the impression I had been shouting abuse at him whilst throwing whatever came to hand.

On reflection I view the whole incident as something of a shit-show, but it did keep me amused for the rest of the day and therefore I consider it a pound well spent.

It would though form the basis of an ideal primer for the Oxbridge entrance exam if you would forward this extract during proceedings?

A trucker stopped at the lights spots a homeless man to whom he throws a pound coin. The coin chips a passing vehicle in multiple places and the vagrant feels he was subject to verbal abuse. Liverpool City Council disposes of the belongings of its homeless on a daily basis, in an effort to ethnically-cleanse its city-centre.

Who is to blame: the trucker, the vagrant, the council, the motorist or the trucker's parents? How would Seneca feel if his chariot were struck by a flying denari?

50 marks

Smiley Myrus

My doctor warned me not to watch videos of this kind before bed-time, but I wonder if you like me are trying to figure out whether a wind-machine might have been used in the making?

I'm thinking that yes, on that day in Malibu ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it had to be used in the absence of Nature coming up with the goods.

Exhibit A: flowers waving around in the foreground with no back-up from the rear

Exhibit B: spliced footage from the same shoot, the wind dropped to a dead calm

Exhibit C: a dog who's ears aren't flapping in the wind... for it's been turned off

I have contacted Miley to check, and to offer a chance to meet me over a pint of ale and bag of pork scratchings at a pub of her choosing next time she's in Manchester. Or at least a badge.

The Eyes Have It

The last four CEOs at Boeing provided themselves remuneration to the tune of a half billion dollars whilst the company's losses mounted, but as that's the MO in business during the period of decline in the West, it's hardly a surprise and likely what Rome was doing prior the 'goths turning up at the gates of Rome.

But put on the spot by one Senator Hawley, at the point at which he is asked about that (see the Netflix doc, #2 in the UK currently), the pupils dilate in a fight or flight response.

One thing about flying airliners is that once the departure's been dealt with and the autopilot's plugged in the options are (or were) to review the papers, eat your fried breakfast or talk shit with the co-pilot. And ideally all at once.

But flying with a Turkish co-pilot ~ who admittedly would be more likely to view the events of 9/11 from a Muslim perspective ~ he was of the opinion that it had been a deliberate act orchestrated from within the USA.

I suggested that if he watched the president's reaction to the news whilst listening to a class of school-kids, you can see that same response... and it can't be faked because it springs from a part of the brain that reacts before we're aware of it. Hitting a low bridge once at 40 m.p.h. I asked myself who was screaming like a Neanderthal; before realising it must be me because no one else was there.

Now many years on, the thinking amongst the people who think paedophiles spring from Pizza Huts is that the president would not have known because he would not have been involved. And the scary thing is, that looks like it might even be true.

What do you think? Could the Earth be flat, or our Moon really made of cheese? Let me know in the comments below... you sad bastards.

Ed. The following reconstruction may have been digitally altered.

bide a wEE

Prior that thatched woman with the hair, utilities used to be straightforward whether it were gas, electricity, telephones, water or what were known as the 'rates' or local council tax. Now they are uniformily expensive, fairly shit (literally in the case of the water utilities), in your face on TV all of the time and not least requiring that regular churn at the expiry of the contract.

In an effort to deter me from leaving one they practically doubled in price on expiry, EE has let me know what I'll be missing... as pictured below.

This is like, were Suzuki to hear I was considering a change of car, describing those benefits I'd be missing as (a) wheels on each corner and (b) one inside for pointing it in whichever direction I should choose.

And isn't that Meghan Markle who's sorry to see me go? They do use Kevin Bacon at every turn, whose forthcoming slasher movie can be seen at theatres near you or by livestream hereabouts if ever he appears at my door.

Ed. That's not going to happen Colin, is it, unless he falls from space?

Tekever Takeover

We've seen how heavy-lift drones are doing the heavy-lifting on the front line, but in addition to that there is the reconnaissance that allows for bombs to be dropped on targets like SAM anti-aircraft equipment at a greater comparative cost.

You'd like to think that after the Spitfire and Mosquito the UK could do this itself but instead they have turned to a Portuguese firm, which itself has funded the supply of such drones to the tune of $250 million.

Did you know however that they are manufactured under licence hereabouts before they are returned to Portugal, re-assembled and signed off prior to being driven to the front line in a low-tech Ford Transit van?

By such means the UK government has pledged £1 billion in the effort to shift some 150,000 of such drones over there in the coming twelve months. If that sounds like a lot, bear in mind the Ukraine alone deploys upto 10,000 per day.

If there is one thing war gears up more than any other, it's production lines.

These aircraft are snapped together like Airfix, something Boeing hoped to cut costs with at a non-union plant using anyone who could wield a spanner. Sections were, if you watch the Netflix doc, an inch out: okay for trousers but less so for airliners.

Blue Sky Thinking

We saw recently, didn't we, how contrails help reduce the transparency of the skies, so that they will never again be as blue as they were ~ or we like to think they were ~ during our childhood? Well turns out they increase global warming considerably, that veil they produce serving to trap solar radiation and warming the atmosphere.

They've even got their own interest group at contrails.org where you can order tee-shirts and spray-cans of shaving-foam to create your own trails in the class-room.

But now Google, guardian of this blog, has underwritten a project intended to ask pilots to ascend or to descend so as to stop producing these contrails at all... or at least in one small patch of sky.

They are produced in the first place by a process called sublimation, when the hot gases emerging from jet-engines freezes so quickly that they miss out the bit in the middle we learned about at school called the liquid phase... altogether. Had they not done so, the vapour would simply evaporate rather than form reflective ice-crystals.

All depends though on the temperature of the outside air, and the only way to alter that is to climb or descend into colder or warmer air. Note to pilots, the atmospheric temperature does not continue to fall with height but eventually stays put at the levels Concorde flew at, and rises briefly beyond. Back at space, however, you must not go out without a coat on.

Nonetheless as commercial aviation is set to double in the near future, all of this is about as effective as trying to mitigate global sea-level rise with dessert-spoons and buckets.

Shanwick is a conflation of Prestwick (Scotland) and Shannon (Ireland) and sounds like it should be pronounced without a 'w' but with an 'Ahaaar' at the end of it... but isn't.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

Netflix's doc as ever a valuable insight in this case into regular oversights related to Boeing product, and specifically the 737. Introduced in 1967, or just ten years after the Trabant to put that into context, it would be possibly the most reliable airliner to be built until such time as Boeing appointed Jack Welch's proteges as CEOs... when it would become perhaps the least reliable.

Withdrawn from service after two fatal crashes within five months, it was described on its re-introduction by Michael O'Leary as the most reliable airliner ever: when a clown like that says so, you know something's amiss. As with the Air Alaska flight above, when the stargazers would be delighted once it had shed a door or two mid-flight.

Welch prided himself at GEC on sacking ten percent of 'least performing' employees on a regular basis, which made him something of a saint to financiers but a bit of a cunt to everyone else. His proteges, rather than design a new aircraft from scratch, decided to keep upgrading what they had, which is when the problems started. For example, imagine running with the Trabant but adding everything to it that we hope for in a modern car?

And the problem with the firing thing was that the bulk of those were sourced from the quality department... employees with decades of service sacked at a moment's notice and their tires slashed instead of the carriage-clock. They went better, driving one whistleblower to suicide in a hotel parking lot prior to testifying. Organisations do exaggerate evil besides excellence, though, as I've suggested here before.

So when you get on a Boeing, chances are nothing amiss is likely to happen but do bear in mind that unlike with Airbus, any number of the people who built it viewed the process as fairly shit, and the product they build not one they'd want either they or their family to use on their next holiday... as the documentary suggests.

Ed. Thatcher had her own Jack Welch in the shape of British Airways' Lord King, who was known as Baron King of Wartnaby to her and as the warthog to everyone else. For 'warthog' again, read 'bit of a cunt'.

DRA, DRA Rasputin...

President Putin today said of the UK's support for Ukraine that (a) he's very angry and (b) has a nuclear weapon. This is because the long-range strikes hitting corner-shops nearby appear to be provided almost exclusively by UK drones like the ULTRA up there or ~ if not Molloy Aeronautics ~ the HYDRA seen down there.

Thing about humans is, we were designed for tangible threats viz. world on fire, not an issue but great TV; my house on fire, an issue as I've no TV.

Therefore we go on about climate change and how concerned we all are, but aren't really until there's no water emerging from the tap.

Likewise, war with Russia is not something to exercise any of us until a Russian drone lands on a Tesco warehouse and sends our burgers up in flames.

The reason we have a representative democracy in the UK as elsewhere is, as with the death penalty, the government feels it is more enlightened than the rest of us and should 95% of the populace not want to go to war with Russia, it doesn't matter for it will all work out well in the end; or at least until those big mushroom clouds start popping up here and there.

It's a great question though ~ appeasement or war ~ isn't it? Do we let apparent bullies do their worst, or fight back... ideally by getting others to do it for us first?

Was Nietzsche right, and does war reinvigorate a culture? Or does it simply ruin plans we had for the coming weekend?

Discuss... all night in an underground shelter.

Ed. Today's blog-post was sponsored by the Russian embassy, and I'd nothing to do with it.

Vertical (Taking) Flight Society

As a paid-up member I was taken aback to read it's membership has declined by some 10% in recent years, which they attribute to:

(a)    Government travel restrictions (Ed. on the gravy-train?)

(b)    Aerospace market contraction

(c)    Declining research funding

(d)    The 'bowling alone' effect

(e)    An ageing workforce

I would add that its location in the US, formerly a benefit, will be of declining value. A look at the expo in Shenzen if nothing else (the size of fourteen football fields) will convince most of us that the real innovation in vertical flight is all taking place with drones, and practically all of that in China. DARPA's heavy-lift challenge was entirely welcome in this regard, but looked like a village fete in comparison.

The VFS has too been bank-rolled by the military-industrial complex, with members in the US and Europe with a sour-grape 'not invented here' purview of what is going on with drones. This in turn means ~ they paying the piper ~ there has to be wholly more articles on incremental improvements to conventional means of flight than on any other. Which is of great interest to the aging community referred to above, but of little or no interest to my fourteen year-old son.

Organisation of the UK chapter, from which I was ejected for suggesting we meet at bars on Harley-Davidsons and sleep with menstruating women by way of induction, is a case in point. Organised by one man in Glasgow and one in Liverpool, invariably they arrange meets in London ~ because that's a half-hour from Farnborough where most of the MIC is based.

But to a great extent it is down to the digitisation of every means of doing anything. For what makes driverless taxis worth reviewing is not the car so much as what is making it tick ~ and as that's a series of charges on a silicone chip it doesn't make for good copy. I headed up training in full-motion simulators that were literally the front end of airliners; but what I did is done nowadays by a company called LOFT which relies on VR headsets to do much the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

Do I have a remedy? Yes, but it is to relocate to Atlantic City, rebrand as a Vertical Fight Society and let the academics have it out in a cage whilst we place bets during a global livestream.

Ed. And can we have this published among correspondence in 'Vertiflite' please?

Crash Investigation Investigation

Are crashes really worth investigating, aside from the cracking TV series they make? 

I'm throwing that out there because yesterday the main arterial road between the south of this great nation and its northwest ~ not least Scotland ~ was closed all day northbound. It was also closed southbound as screens were erected, because we all love a pile-up. Note to government, robotic cars don't.

But we've already the lowest productivity in the developed world, and diverting cars and trucks through Little Snoring all day won't have helped. But the fact there was one fatality and several injuries involved in this collision involving three trucks and a car required an investigation.

At the end of the day, however, it is difficult knowing how anyone will benefit. The dead won't be coming back, the insurers will be paying out regardless and anyone sent to prison in the UK as a consequence will be out sooner than expected and will emerge a criminal if not already: especially as nobody will be hiring them afterward. 

A full twenty percent of accidents occur due to one or other driver nodding off, the bulk of these at the circadian witching hour of 03:00 a.m. The accident here took place at 04:10 a.m. and it is much harder to attribute blame to the sleepy driver than it is to the drunk or drugged-up, for like an ice-bullet it leaves no trace. 

Offset that against a knock-on effect of billions of pounds and countless cats kicked at home by people like me who've had a bad day. As Jason Arday's case proved we already treat each other as inhumanly as possible, and I foresee a day when rather than investigate scenes we'll bulldoze wreckage out of the way and treat motorists involved as road-kill.

Now turn your papers over children, and:

"Is this a world that you would want, or anyone but Colin would want? Discuss."

                                                                                                            10 marks

Ed. Colin is bitter for he applied for a job at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and failed, principally because his executive summary on the set investigation read 'Shit happens, mate.'

Air Wear

What do tricks and golf balls have in common? Surface textures designed to help fill the void behind each in order to move more efficiently, or farther in the case of the latter. These vortex generators produced swirls in the air that help fill that gap that would otherwise create suction at the rear.

The treatment below is rather more of a quandary, but sidewinds squeeze into the gap between cab and trailer creating drag, and I'm guessing this is less of an issue if there's an 'air curtain' between the two made of high-energy swirls of the same?

All a bit of a green box-ticking exercise in view of the fact a fifth of trucks on roads are running empty, but beats doing nothing at all.

Flower Power

There's a man round the corner keeps a spectacular display of dahlias going through the summer. But here's the thing: he can't see it except when he's tending it as his garden and house are the other side of the fence.

The important thing is, it makes me feel better and if you could all do something to make me feel better each day then the world would be a better place for me mainly.