Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

In an emergency, there was a very great temptation to force the dial to return more quickly than the spring-and-governor mechanism returns it, so you dial the 999 more quickly. I'm not sure what the upper limit of the acceptable pulse rate was for a typical exchange.

That's odd. Mine (horizontal) are like this: ==> <== ==> <== ==> <== etc (42 breakers total) With the arrows pointing in the on direction.

Ed

I carry no life insurance on myself or the wife.. Waste of money. We are both over 70 and have enough in the IRA and SS to lve like we wsnt even if one of us die. Maybe more if one dies as no more medicine to buy.

Sounds unlikely given that they must have noticed that the sky and grass arent the same color

I'm not

Really? These pictures suggest varying shades of orange:

Even the dark ones are best described as "rust", which is a shade of orange.

My company has "key man" life insurance on me. In case I lose the keys, I suppose.

English is great fun. One word can mean many things. I wonder what the record is.

I guess you speak differently in some tiny places with ancient dielects.

Here's a really good book about the history and decline of the British empire.

Just their electrical outlets were enough to doom the Empire.

$3000 was estimated relative to a guard rail on a road in Louisiana.

One chemical was banned in the US, at a cost of about a billion dollars, the ban expected to save about 0.001 lives.

That feature eliminates incompetent newbies. It's particularly effective when the newbie decided a Hayabusa is a good learner's bike.

There is something to be said for the tiered permit system.

I'm not an accountant so I rarely have the need to enter a lot of numbers. The row on top is good enough. I don't know if I would use it even if it were on the left.

Long guns, right handed. Hand guns, left handed. Bows either. I've got right handed recurves and a left handed compound. Musical instruments, right handed. Knives, I'll let you guess. Or maybe there's one in each hand.

Mouse, definitely left handed if nothing more that to screw with people trying to use my computer.

That was designed to prevent cats from dialing the emergency services. At least the US went for 911.

After you read that, read this:

That style is what is used almost everywhere except in the usa.

Most of the empire doesn't use those sockets.

all you need.

Probably apocryphal, but in the American civil war, the Confederate farm boys had a piece of straw tied to one foot and hay to the other and were drilled as 'Hayfoot!Strawfoot!' etc.

They did know straw from hay, but not left from right. So the story goes. Probably a lie. Most stories are.

Mmm. some are more left wing than others.

I am not sure if this trumps that.

"In 1978, the DOE set about deciding what to do about this waste tank. The simplest solution would be to pour cement mix into the tank to convert its contents into a large block of cement. This would eliminate any danger of leakage. The principal danger would then be that groundwater could somehow penetrate successively through the clay barrier, the concrete vault, and the stainless steel tank wall to dissolve away some of this cement. Each of these steps would require a very long time period. For example, although the sides of swimming pools and dams are cement, we note that they aren't noticeably leached away in many years even by the soaking in water to which they are exposed; moreover, groundwater contact is more like a dampness than a soaking. If the material did become dissolved in groundwater, all the barriers to getting into Lake Erie outlined above would still be in place and would have to be surmounted before any harm could be done. Even this remote danger could be removed by maintaining surveillance — periodically checking for water in the concrete vault and pumping it out if any should accumulate. The cost of converting to cement would be about $20 million, and a $15 million trust fund could easily provide all the surveillance one might desire for as long as anyone would want to maintain it.

If this were done, what would the expected health consequences be? I have tried to do risk analyses by assigning probabilities, and I find it difficult to obtain a credible estimate higher than 0.01 eventual deaths. It would be very easy to support numbers hundreds or thousands of times smaller.

However, this management option is not being taken. Instead the DOE has decided to remove the waste from the tank, convert it to glass, and bury it deep underground in accordance with plans for future commercial high-level waste. This program will cost about $1 billion. Spending $1 billion to avert 0.01 deaths corresponds to $100 billion per life saved! This is going on at a time when the same government is turning down projects that would save a life for every $100,000 spent! That is our real waste problem.

One last item deserves mention here — the radiation exposure to workers in executing the plans described above. It turns out that exposure is greater in the billion-dollar plan that was adopted than in the plan for conversion to cement, by an amount that would cause 0.02 deaths (i.e., a

2% chance of a single death) among the workers. Since this is more than 0.01 deaths to the public from the conversion to cement, the billion-dollar plan is actually more dangerous.

I have met the government officials who chose the billion-dollar plan, and have discussed these questions with them. They are intelligent people trying to do their jobs well. But they don't view saving lives as the relevant question. In their view, their jobs are to respond to public concern and political pressures. A few irrational zealots in the Buffalo area stirred up the public there with the cry "We want that dangerous waste out of our area." Why should any local people oppose them? Their congressional representatives took that message to Washington — what would they have to gain by doing otherwise? The DOE officials responded to that pressure by asking for the billion-dollar program. It wasn't hurting them; in fact, having a new billion-dollar program to administer is a feather in their caps. Congress was told that a billion dollars was needed to discharge the government's responsibility in protecting the public from this dangerous waste — how could it fail to respond?

That is how a few people with little knowledge or understanding of the problem induced the United States Government to pour a billion dollars "down a rathole." I watched every step of the process as it went off as smooth as glass. And the perpetrators of this mess have become local heroes to boot."

I rest your case for you.

AIUI it is not mandatory to fit these to existing installations.

Our house was perfectly legal before we had it re-wired. It had actual wire fuses, and rubber coated wiring running through the thatched roof.

The new wiring has all the modern features.

Andy

It's a trade-off. More shocks with 240V; more fires with the higher currents required at 120V.

Andy

My car (Right hand drive, built in Japan) has the indicator switch on the off side, so I can flick it with my fingers while my other hand is on the gear stick.

My wife's car follows the European convention that the indicators are on the left. Which is correct for the rest of Europe where they are all LHD and drive on the right, but wrong for the UK.

I often turn on the wipers instead of signalling. I never signal the wrong way. It's not up for right, it's clockwise. (Or anticlockwise!) The same way you will turn the wheel when you turn the corner.

Andy