pumpkinstrokemarrow

In tracing this post, more bother with the blogsearch. Ask the thing for slime mould and get nothing. Ask it for mould and get something else. Having found the relevant post the hard way - well not so hard. One can scan for the rare pictures quite quickly - and find that the phrase I should have been looking for was slime moulds. So that, I think, is a reasonable cause for complaint. A proper search engine would strip all search terms down to their cores. So that David, david and davids would all reduce to david. OK, so this is not so straightforward with more complicated words - for example irregular verbs - but it is easy enough for regular nouns.

Get back to an interesting picture in today's DT of what appears to be a farmer smoking a cigar while working his laptop on top of a bale, with tractor and dog looking on. Well, not exactly looking on: the dog has clearly found something more interesting than the laptop to gaze at. And to be fair to the DT, the caption says nothing about the scene reproduced being a farmer, even if it has been constructed to give that impression. Leaving aside the disgraceful fact that we have an image of someone smoking a cigar in a family newspaper which might be seen by children, it seems that the POW has been sounding off about how dreadful it is that country dwellers do not have as good access to Broadband as us townies. Now this is all very sad, but what on earth do they expect? If you live in the country you cannot expect all the amenities which can be conveniently provided in a town. You can't have it both ways. One wonders how much longer they will get the benefit of daily deliveries of post, something else which must cost a fortune. All these subsidies and they have the cheek to tell us subsidising townies that we shouldn't get any say in their affairs.

Acquired some interesting factoids in Jersey. More later, but one for now is that the most tricky part of the millenium wheel was the axle, something which had not crossed my mind. It seems that it is very hard to make steel of the required dimensions with the required characteristics. The stuff does not scale up in quite the way the average lay person - like myself - might have thought. You can make a propeller shaft for a super tanker OK. A steel shaft maybe six inches in diameter and twenty yards long. Now this is taking a fair amount of torque stress (if that is the right term) but very little flex stress - of the sort that the millenium wheel axle will take (think of a rod suspended at its middle with a heavy weight hanging off each end) and which will need to be rather bigger in consequence. Which is where the problems began. It seems that this part of the job was hawked around a number of engineering companies before it was finally taken on by a Japanese outfit. Maybe the same people as make propellers for big windmills - although the problem here is a little different. The propeller has to turn the axle to drive the alternator. In the case of the millenium wheel, the wheel can just spin on the axle - most of which need not be round in section at all. A square bar with a round bit at the end would do.

The company in question being Mitsubishi (http://www.mitsubishi.com/) whose name I am sure I have seen on windmills. And a search of this site for windmill does get some results. Searching for millenium wheel london does too - and it turns out that while they are building - or have built - an even bigger wheel for Singapore, they do not claim the credit for ours. Despite it being a rather nice search facility.

I am clearly an engineer who lost his way on leaving school.