https://twitter.com/mattwridley/status/1773649172849119583

Robert

nice expose of time domain reflctometry!

While I'd broadly agree with you on the "what if", the situation in the RAF / Air Ministry was that Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Sholto Douglas and others regarded Park as an uppity colonial and connived to have him removed (successfully in Dec '40) only to have Park brought back to sort the mess in Malta in '42

tomo,
It is fun to play "what if" games with history, but people are complicated and it's not possible to know how the alternative would *really* have played out. It might be that the rivalry between Park and Leigh-Mallory is what *made* one shine and the other dull. A recent played-out example was Scott Morrison who had done sterling work as Immigration Minister when Tony Abbott was PM and very quickly got the people-smuggling boats stopped. He did not shine at all when he rose to the top position.

On a completely different topic, this half-hour video presents a great picture of how electrical potential propagates in terminated and unterminated cables. He's plotting the measured potentials throughout the circuit, not just modelled them. It accords well with the picture I had formed in my head, but it's taken me years to build that picture. This one video would have made it intuitive (or so it seems to me, but maybe it only impresses me *because* of the time I've spent getting a feel for impedance matching).

MikeHig,
FWIW, your speculations sound very plausible to me. I like your thought experiment of their practice dog-fights against equally limited planes serving to make the problem seem less dire (until they're up against the real enemy). As for the "not invented here" aspect, that might also reflect British reluctance to accept that the industrial centre of the world had shifted (and would spell centre differently too).

In any case, I don't see "not invented here" as a compelling criticism. If nobody had reinvented the wheel, we'd all be using rolling logs. It was good that Shilling was working on a new carburettor design; the problem seems to have been much more to do with bureaucrats not understanding its importance.

Mailman,
I've mentioned it here before (I think in a COVID context), but the way they're pushing EVs on us is like the Goodies advert for Woofo dog food (or whatever it was), where the dog was offered a bowl of Woofo alongside bowls of barbed wire and broken glass. Even then, the dog needed to be pushed away from the broken glass before it settled for the Woofo.

On EVs, I thought this chat with James May covered it pretty well: that electric makes a lot of sense, but batteries not so much (but will depend on individual circumstances). I did like his pointing out that the worry is *not* range anxiety, it's recharging anxiety. Even if you only had 100 miles max range, you'd be comfortable enough *if* recharging was as widely available and quick as refuelling.

That is a big "if" though.

tomo,
The thing is that it isn't *only* the UK Labour Party that embraces this nonsense. Australian Labor does too but, worse than that, the other sides of both our parliaments aren't anything like far enough away from the same policies. The joys of consensus.

Good to laugh at the pollies doing dress-ups, but then hi-vis itself is largely theatre too. For many people wearing it, it doesn't affect safety, but might serve as a class marker.

I was chatting with a fellow last week who said it was funny doing some work at an army base, working with a team of army technicians. They insisted he wear hi-vis, but all the people he was working with were wearing camo.

Smart meters are a bit of a paradox. In order to do away with (say) quarterly visits by unskilled meter readers, you end up with (seemingly) biennial visits by licensed electricians to install equipment upgrades. Cheaper?

As for Oxford, you'd think a few people in the vicinity would realise that travelling three sides of a rectangle clocks up more miles than following just one. It is apt that "green" is a synonym for "immature", and also for "naive".