Did you ever enter The Great Egg Race?
I once lashed together a 5-stage 100,000V Marx generator for an Open Week at the lab. The cap bank was charged up by someone rotating a handle which was geared up into an alternator from a scrapped mini. The alternator drove a pair of 12V to 10,000V inverter supplies which charged the caps. The switches were self-breaking spark gaps, so once the thing was at full charge it would spontaneously ‘erect’ (yup, that really is the technical term) and dump about 100 joules of electrical energy into a four inch air arc.
The nominal reason for doing this was to show people how a low power source (person turning handle) can be used to deliver energy to a store (the caps) and that that energy can then be released at very high power, albeit only for a very short time. The real reason of course was that a 100J air arc makes a very, very satisfying bang 
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What a fantastic feat / documentary.
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That too !
I learned this today and it’s quite cool.
This is the Great Lakes cargo ship M/V Stewart J Cort
It was the first 1,000ft cargo vessel on the Lakes (and has a ‘1’ painted on the bridge house to reflect this). That’s not the interesting bit though. It was built in Pascagoula, Mississippi… where you couldn’t actually build a 1,000ft vessel on account of it not being possible to go anywhere on the Mississippi with a ship that long. As such, they built the important bits and sent that on its way to the Great Lakes. The result looked adorable;
Once it arrived on site, it was cut down the dotted line, the cargo section was inserted and away it went.
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You might know that a few years ago the running of Audiojumble was handed over by its founder, John Howes, to his children Richard, Catherine and Michael.
I’ve just learned that Richard’s seven or eight year old daughter is being treated for a rare form of cancer and that Richard is fund-raising for the Royal Marsden in recognition of this. He’s put himself down to run something else - a half marathon in the autumn (that’s a scary thought - walking I can do but running even as far as the railway station would likely finish me off for the rest of the day !).
Anyway if you feel you might want to support him you can find out more here. He is one of the good guys.
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Jaysus, will ye stop doing that.
Just publish and be damned
Yeah, sorry I get paranoid about people googling their own name.
So, TIL that BiL’s mate, and now upstairs tenant, is besties with
and recently ended up having to cut her out of a latex bodysuit that was a lot easier to get into than it was to get out of.
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The previous one (that I remember) was down to me pressing all the wrong buttons while on the train.
I was laughing about MiL (85) complaining that the apprentice boys revving up outside her front window at 8am before heading off to Derry had seemed pretty quiet and she thought they were very considerate, before someone whacked the drum and they turned out to be, and I quote, “the loudest Fuck the Pope band I’ve ever heard”.
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Is she supposed to be famous?
Did you not Google her ?
Thx, still haven’t a clue.
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Worse jobs, I suppose
TIL 86, 87 in October.
Written by Pamela Stephenson
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