Member postings for Bill Phinn

I think it's safe to say that leaving school with no qualifications doesn't automatically mean that you aren't very intelligent, just as making billions of pounds through business ventures doesn't automatically mean that you are.

I can sense you're almost certainly not implying that Google Translate is a meaningful guide to a translation's accuracy, but just in case you are, please see here.

That is a translation site manned by humans, and they actively welcome people wanting to check a Latin translation for accuracy.

If anyone wants a more authentic translation, the following will serve:

simul et usus ero alea satis prospera, podicem meum prae pulvere non videbis.

I wouldn't say any subjects I did at school were surplus subjects. Slightly unusually perhaps, I took Latin O level and Latin and Greek A Levels, then went on to do a degree in something I didn't even have an O Level in: Biological Sciences.

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 16/07/2019 23:45:06:

... I am at a loss for appropriate words of contempt [but would be interested to know what others think]

There's sure to be an emoji you could have reached for there, Michael, which would have kind of done.

Seriously, early in my senior school career, when I was unable to entirely shake off junior school habits, I was marked down in English essays for occasionally punctuating text with pictures in order to ram home my poorly articulated point. Since my pictures were lousy anyway, I quickly learned to do without them and focus on conveying meaning with words alone.

As a legacy of that, I'm grateful to be able to feel absolutely no spontaneous need to resort to emojis, but I have occasionally been known to use one in order not to risk looking unfriendly.

I think this last point may partly account for their popularity; young people usually strive to be accepted by their peer group, and a tipping point was possibly reached some time ago for young people when not using emojis in texts etc. between acquaintances would have been felt to be at odds with in-group protocols and uncool, and therefore not using them at all came in practice not to be an option, or at least not a good survival strategy.

Emojis may all just be a passing fad, or they may be yet another sign of the end of civilization as we know it. If their now widespread use went hand in hand with a general upsurge in articulateness I'd be completely positive about them. Instead they are too often an ersatz form of communication indolently resorted to by the linguistically and cognitively impoverished.

Ah well, onwards and downwards.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 17/07/2019 02:30:02

Thanks for the link. The launch is awe-inspiring. The things humans can do!

I remember watching the landing with my parents, brothers and sister, dressed in my pyjamas and almost too tired to stay awake. My mother was knitting a strangely misshapen but endearing red doll for my sister. She called it "Moonie". We still have it somewhere.

Resting heart rate today is around 54bpm (used to be 42). Under stress can get into the high 190's. Not been above 186 for a year or two.

When AI can give coherent and unplagiarised A grade answers to essay questions on literary topics such as those I faced in A Level French:

"Discuss Flaubert's use of symbolism and irony in Madame Bovary".

"In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, how did Charles Bovary's personality persuade Emma to marry him and contribute to her downfall?"

"In what ways is Madame Bovary a realistic novel?"

then I will be prepared to change my present view: that there are significant limits to the ways in which AI can, and forseeably will be able to, substitute for or even merely help human beings.

Perhaps, though, you were being ironic.

Martin, while you're at it have you considered extending the vertical stanchions with spacers in order to increase the available daylight? I know a number of bookbinders who have adapted their copy presses in this way, and I'm sure you could do a better job of it than most bookbinders, and for very little extra cost.

I don't know how much daylight your copy press has got, but from the look of things about 3.5 inches. This is really very little space for bookbinding purposes. As I'm sure you know, books are placed between wooden pressing boards before inserting into a press of this kind, and the pressing boards will already account for around 1.5 inches of that 3.5 inches.

An earlier frog chorus was Aristophanes', in his comedy of 405 B.C. called simply Βάτραχοι - "Frogs"

Edited By Bill Phinn on 20/06/2019 17:34:22

I think it's unlikely to be a factor in the low stock levels. China's steel production hit record levels in May, and, though there are curbs on pollution in certain areas, these curbs are not widespread enough to be having a serious impact on overall manufacturing levels.

Costs of certain raw materials, however, (iron ore, for example) have increased lately, so profit margins are down. Given the current U.S.-China trade war and the uncertain consequences of the political situation in Hong Kong, it's possible that the golden age of abundant and affordable far eastern machine tools may be on the verge of a decline.

I think the question has been answered satisfactorily already, but I'll add my two penn'orth.

In the days when I used to ride motorbikes (ranging from 50cc to 1000cc) I always blipped the throttle on change downs (for reasons given here), but only ever used to blip the throttle when stationary on the rare occasions when there was a temporary fuel/carb/ignition/breathing problem that meant the engine wouldn't idle steadily and was at risk of cutting out.

As Barrie says, two strokes benefit more than four strokes from being blipped at idle. My memory is hazy, but my feeling was that doing this minimised the chances of the engine "bogging" when power was suddenly called for when you became mobile again. Certainly bogging is sometimes a problem with two stroke garden machinery (which I have a quite a lot of), but I've learned to adjust the factory carb settings to minimize this and create virtually instant throttle response from idle on all the two stroke equipment I own.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 03/06/2019 19:30:34

Thanks for the great link, Alan.

The well polished, impeccably articulated commentary complements the machinery. I particularly liked the neat advertising slogan "The world turns on Colchester lathes". Advertisers were clever with words at one time.

It occurs to me it might be helpful if there were a dedicated thread or subforum for vintage machining videos - assuming this would give them the extra exposure some of them deserve.

It would be nice to know how many of the machines depicted are still going strong 60 or so years later.

I'm smitten by the beautifully proportioned tailstock on your example, Alan.

I confess I have a thing about tailstocks (as Larry Grayson once remarked to Slack Alice).

Iain, I've got the non-sliding version of this, which I bought a few years ago now. I've used it mostly for timber and only very occasionally for cutting metals (aluminium, brass and thin steel).

It is not designed to cut through 60mm steel bar routinely, but will cope with the sort of thinner calipers you mention, though even here you must expect the teeth to wear faster than they would if only softer materials are cut with it.

If I were wanting to cut 60mm steel bar on a regular basis I would probably invest in a good quality powered hacksaw or a dedicated metal-cutting chop saw.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 30/05/2019 21:50:30

I remember seeing those. They're both worth watching.

A poignant illustration of the immediate human cost of the accident and the deadly effects of attending a fire caused by a reactor core blowing is recent footage taken in the basement of Pripyat hospital showing the still highly radioactive clothing stripped from the firefighters who were taken there for emergency treatment.

Chernobyl (the event) had a big impact on me.

At the time of the accident I was on a working holiday in Scotland. Just at the time when maximum fallout was wafting over the British Isles I was climbing Ben Lomond and other Scottish hills and soaking up the radioactive rain. Then I had a motorcycling accident on the way back from the Highlands and had to be hospitalised in Dumfries, during which time I had several powerful x-rays and scans, and drank plentifully of the local irradiated milk, which no-one really knew at the time was irradiated.

Later the same year I was hospitalised again for several weeks, this time in an ICU, and had more x-rays and scans during that stay than most people have in a lifetime.

As for the series, my brother is a graduate in Russian who spent a lot of time in the country in the 80's and beyond, and his testimony, added to what I know myself of the Soviet era, tells me the programme-makers have tried hard to create a period-look and done it fairly successfully.

Whether Chernobyl (the event) is responsible for the primary immune deficiency and other autoimmune illness I suffer from (and that nobody else in my family does) I don't know. But you have to wonder.

Adrian, my go-to taps are Presto HSS

I would be interested to know what taps (i.e. brand/range) Andrew prefers and who the "professional tool suppliers" are he buys them from.

Always were, Neil; specifically apex predators of the ursine variety, namely forebears.

🐻

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/04/2019 23:11:48

Yes, I suppose this is inevitable as we get more and more used to seeing a newly compounded word. I wonder whether anyone writes "girl-friend" any more? Or "to-day" or "cup-board"?

One bugbear (or is that bug-bear?) of mine is the word "predate". Having read widely in ecology in my youth I got very used to understanding the word "predate" to mean to "prey on". "Pre-date" was the other word. Now, they're both "predate". A useful disambiguation has been squandered.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/04/2019 19:44:29

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "source", Michael, but the four character company name cut into the side of the piece is 北京精雕 (Beijing Jingdiao), which just translates as "Beijing fine engraving". Their website is here, and they have an English version too.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 20/04/2019 19:57:54

Your comments may or may not be correct if you're talking about state aid. However, in 2017 alone British people as individuals (i.e. people like you and me) gave £10.3 billion in private charitable donations. https://www.cafonline.org/docs/default-source/about-us-publications/caf-uk-giving-2018-report.pdf

Perhaps you'd be good enough to acknowledge therefore that, contrary to your rather too sweeping assertion, the UK in the form of many ordinary British people does in fact give substantial amounts of money "to help the starving" and with no "strings attached".

Edited By Bill Phinn on 17/04/2019 01:29:20