Member postings for Farmboy

Getting everything 'connected' is only the first stage. Next step will be the implanted chip at birth so the people will be under control too. I know it's true 'cos I read it on the interweb . . .

I'm not actually deaf, my hearing is quite good but I do have tinnitus which makes it hard to discriminate particular individual voices or sounds. For reasons I don't fully understand, if I use 'proper' headphones (not the little earbuds) the music seems to be inside my head, bypassing the noises in my ears, and I can even pick out individual instruments in an orchestra.

I'm sure my condition is largely due to working with noisy machinery in the days before ear defenders were readily available, but the worst ear is the one I used for many years to listen to radio 4 through an earbud while working.

Mike.

Almost exactly reflects my experience, and I found it didn't seem to make any difference which phase I used at the 3-phase end. I was streaming a live CCTV camera through about 50 metres of overhead mains cable with a similar distance through internal wiring.

Mike

"Is it possible to machine a lathe more accurate than the one you machine it on?"

Surely the underlying principle behind all human development for a couple of million years . . .

Having now downloaded and started to read the BHI paper it seems my trial-and-error findings are worth even less than I thought The apparently intact section between breaks is only around half of what I assumed so distortion probably accounts for most of the difference. There are in effect several centres, each relating to only a part of the segment.

But I enjoyed the exercise

I still agree with MichaelG that it is almost impossible to acurately reverse engineer the full disc from this small segment but I had to try, within my limits, to explore things further, purely for my own satisfaction.

Since I have very little understanding of statistical analysis or trigonomotry I resorted to basic geometry as originally suggested by Neil. I loaded the photo into TurboCad and drew a cross-hair over the apparent centre of every tenth hole from 2 to 72. I then drew a series of overlapping chords spanning sets of 20 holes (2-22, 12-32, etc.) and drew radius lines. Next I drew arcs centred on the intersections of various pairs of radii. The arc which apeared, to my eye, to most closely follow the holes has its centre a little below the one originally marked on the photo. Using this new centre I then measured the angular displacement between 2 and 72, which was 71.36 degrees. I believe this gives an angle per step of a little over 1.0194, suggesting a full circle of just over 353 holes.

I'm certainly not qualified to challenge the experts but I would suggest that the marked centre on the photo is at least open to question. Given the range of possible results found by different experts perhaps this is not surprising.

Mike.

Lacking even an O-level in maths I have played around with the photo in TurboCad, measuring angles by visually centreing the cross-hairs on the holes ( the harder I try, the harder it seems to get ) and using the centre of arc marked on the photo since I didn't feel capable of re-calculating it. Most of my somewhat cruder findings are at least in the same 'ball park' as MichaelG's results. However, by selecting different groups of 20 holes I found it just possible to get the hole count up to 354. The variation in apparent hole size and placement is a limiting factor.

My thoughts, for what they're worth, pretty much agree with MichaelG. There are just too many variables to allow accurate extrapolation from the sector to the full circle. For that to happen we need to know that there is no image distortion at any of the stages between the original x-ray and the viewing device we are using, and that the actual mechanism was not distorted by physical damage or corrosion. We also need to be sure that the hole spacing was actually intended to be regular in the first place, although it is hard to imagine why it wouldn't be.

As for making the original, I think it would be fair to assume that there were many simpler earlier mechanisms on which they developed their skills. By the time of the Antikythera machine there were possibly many skilled craftsmen capable of achieving the required accuracy. I would imagine they had also developed some fairly sophisticated measuring devices, even if they were not widely available. A couple of thousand years earlier, the Egyptians were obviously capable of some pretty accurate design and marking out, albeit on a larger scale!

Mike.

Good old BBC

Surely there can't be many people who think these are nails . . . apart from journalists, obviously.

Sadly it is probably irrelevant to most people today

Looking back to the original posting, I would suggest the laser cutters didn't make such a great job either. They don't look like 8 x 16 to me

I had an unusual experience travelling home yesterday evening. It was still quite warm so I had the aircon on in the car, but the windscreen was slowly misting up. I increased the fan speed which only made it worse . . . until I realised the misting was on the outside, caused by a combination of the high air temperature and humidity and the chilling of the 'screen by the air conditioning. A burst of warm air from the heater dispersed it quickly, but it's something I have never before experienced in 50 years of driving. Maybe I never had such an efficient air conditioning unit before

Not really model engineering but perhaps a good illustration of the 'dewpoint' effect which causes rust on machines and has been discussed on the forum many times.

There's scope for a lot of serious time-wasting, trying to work out how (and, indeed, why) ancient people shifted so much masonry over great distances. Not to mention how they managed to erect somewhat irregular sized massive stone pillars so that the tops were almost perfectly aligned, then fit stone lintels on top with mortice and tenon joints!

Once you've worked all that out you can move on to Baalbek and work out how they quarried and moved stone blocks weighing 800 tons or more.

Believe me, I've tried . . . most avenues of research end up with giants, aliens or magic

The 2-Litre Vitesse Mk1 rear suspension taught me to brake before the bend and accelerate through it. Really wish I'd kept my convertible, such a great little car to drive.

Just a thought, as I've never seen anything like it: If used in the conventional way, held in the left hand and cranked with the right, the chain comes out at the top so the device would rise with whatever it was lifting; the opposite to any conventional winch I've seen. Could it have been used to pull something down?

Might be worth checking out PCSpecialist. It's a couple of years since I used them but they still seem to have a good assortment to choose from. If you 'customize' to your requirements they build to order so might be a few weeks delivery time.

I don't object to advertising, I just choose to avoid it wherever I can, but I do object to people covertly harvesting information about my browsing and shopping habits, and even more strongly object to people harvesting information from my contact list, etc.

I try to keep things as secure as possible but privacy doesn't really exist any more in the 'digital age'.

Just a word of warning to anyone thinking of buying one of the cheap mini-laptops available for around £150. Some of these have only a 32Gb SSD as the primary drive and 4Gb of RAM. Many people, including my partner, have found that Windows cannot install the mandatory updates due to insufficient space on these machines, even though I moved all the installed apps/programs to the secondary SD card drive so that the primary drive only holds the operating system. The only way to update these would seem to be to download the latest ISO file and do a clean install.

Mike.

Reliability issues aside, the ZX81 was more than adequate for controlling something like a central heating system, with just 1k of memory and machine code I could understand. I was in the process of adapting one for an automated cattle feeder just before I gave up keeping cattle a few years ago, and the program used nowhere near 1k of memory.

The Pi sounds rather like a sledgehammer to crack a nut in such circumstances. It has as much RAM as around two million ZX81s and the processor runs about a thousand times faster

But, if there was enough free time in my life, I would love to play around with a Raspberry Pi . . .

Don't think they had degrees, but many of my ancestors were Master Primary Carpenters

The workshop manual for my mini-digger says you should fully extend and retract all the rams several times to expel air after working on the hydraulic circuits. In a lifetime of working with farm machinery that always seems to work for me. I guess the seals are oil-tight but not air-tight.

Mike.

Having followed this thread with interest, I just had a thought to throw into the mix: the flat shape of the 'anchor' suggests it might have been designed to build into brickwork, i.e. set in the mortar between courses. Probably way off the mark but the best I can come up with so far . . .

Mike.