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

Nothing *requires* a license. Some things you're *supposed* to get one, but you can use it without. It's the difference between law and rule. I can't break the law of gravity, but I can break the "law" (actually should be rule) of speeding.

Not sure what you mean? What's wrong with CB on lorries informing each other of pigs?

Drones?

Would you get jailed if you set it to 4.1 watts?

I didn't think about it either.

But this makes it totally clear.

No, this explains it, if you live in the northern hemisphere where most clock makers live. Switzerland, which is famous for clocks, is in the Northern hemisphere, where sundials go clockewise.

I did see, in Prague, a synagogue with a clock whose numbers went "couterclockwise" like the url above, but that was undoubtedly an elaborate joke, a take-off on the fact that Hebrew is written right to left. Well, I think it would only require one more gear and these big clocks are individually made anyhow, I think.

https://origami.watch/prague/ As usual wikipedia has an article:

You had me doubting here for a bit, and I do know one vertical sundial that's about 100 years old, but then I decided that even though clocks are usually vertical, all but that one of the sundials I know are horizontal, and I think they would have used horizontal northern sundials to go by, since there were a lot more of them (afaik) regardless of the expected orientation** of the clocks.

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And the largest block of Amazon shares at 11.1%.

What if you paused after the first four digits to check the number?

"Licence" is a funny word. It means freedom. But when an activity is "licensed" it means that you need special permission to do what you could previously do anyway.

The same with passports. Once, you could go wherever you liked in the world without any documentation. However, it might be a bit dangerous, so the King issued documents to encourage Johnny Foreigner to be more respectful. My passport says, "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary." (Presumably King Charles will honour the request of his mother.)

Since WW1 (I think) we have needed a passport to /enter/ a foreign country.

More recently we have needed a passport to /leave/ the country, at least by air.

And now we have "visas" (which just means "seen") that we have to have to /enter/ a specific country, as well as the passport.

Yep. You need a dog license to do dogging...

But not to go dogging, fortunately.

English is wonderful. Words have many different, sometimes opposite, meanings, and many words are available for mosty any concept or object.

Good point. So they are just like wall toggle switches for lights.

Edison invented a lot of switches, etc. but I don't know if that included toggle switches or circuit breakers. If it did, he may have set the pattern. At any rate, up since more like On to me. Off is looking DOWN at the floor, your eyes mostly closed, you're almost asleep, and that is a lot like OFF.

Looking UP is like being ON, lifting your head, looking around, paying attention. Like a conductor raising his baton just before the music starts. Like a starter raising his arm to shoot off the starter pistol before a race.

On the other hand, Down is like pointing at the ground and saying Stand here, Don't move. That is OFF.

I've been to Edison's laboratory in West Orange New Jersey. I went in the 70's when it was just like he left it the last day he worked there, shortly before he died in the fall of 1931. It still had the same stalks of goldenrod leaning against a wall, that he was trying to use to make artificial rubber. It still had all the chemicals in jars, but a few years after I was there, they decided some of those could explode, and they cleaned the place up some. I dont' know how much.

I visited his house too, which is nearby, and that was nice, but not exceptional since I've been to other houses from the period. He bought the house in 1886. I don't know how old it was at the time.

I think they are both still open for tourists, and the lab is much more interesting. He had a small lab in what is now Edison NJ, but I can't rememeber if that took tourists or not. If it did, I was there.

I've also been to the site of his first commercial power plant, in lower Manhattan near Wall St, near the East River, but I think that is just a plaque on the wall.

I can think of no time I've accidentally fallen on a switch.

No they aren't, I've never seen a switch operate that way round, unless it's been put in upside down. If you install it with "TOP" at the top (written on the inside), the switch goes down for on.

That's a stupidly complicated way of thinking about it. We write from left to right, and top to bottom. Most things in life follow that pattern. The accelerator for more speed is on the right, and the brake for less speed is on the left.

Out of spite?

That's got me thinking, I expect a slider like that (eg a graphic equalizer on a stereo) to be up for more (turning up the amount). But an on/off switch to be down for on. I think I also expect less effort to be required to turn on a light than on, since you're fumbling about in the dark for it. Mind you nobody has manual lightswitches in their house anymore do they?

Same here, and my friend (when he was about 14) tried out his big brother's motorbike. Thinking he would slow down by pulling the top back, he accelerated very quickly into a wall and went flying through the air.

I disagree. You don't want positive feedback for braking or acceleration (which is what we have with the current convention). Imagine you wish to speed up a little, you pull it back a bit, your bodyweight is pushed back by momentum, and you accelerate out of control and fall off. Or you brake slightly, get pushed forwards and slam the brakes on fully, causing you to fall off.

Don't motorbikes have cruise control nowadays?

I use Windows 99% of the time, but I get caught out in Windows, not Mac and Linux, because of so many other things in everyday life where right means more/on/yes/affirmative.

I looked up the reasoning behind the Windows way and it's ludicrous. Apparently some people actually read the buttons and would prefer to only have to read one, the most often used one. I just get into the habit of left or right being the one I want, but get it wrong about half of the time (not through chance but because half the time I think logically and half the time I remember which way stupid Windows is.

My parents's (logical apostrophe use there) mixer tap in the kitchen always soaks me. The two knobs are at the sides, the axis horizontal left/right. But to turn them on you turn them towards you. So one is clockwise and one is anticlockwise. Of course I always turn them anticlockwise for on and clockwise for off. So every time I turn off one of them I instead turn it from slow to full and get soaked.

Both mine are hot on the left, which presumably because we say "hot and cold water".

I never look at those, I just remember which side is which, why waste brain power?

My parents's old one was like that, but not very stiff. It was a 3 inch long chrome lever pointing forwards when set to 50% hot. You lifted it to turn it on, but it was almost impossible to turn it on slightly. The kitchen floor was always wet, nobody could get the hang of it. I should of dismantled it and seen if I could tighten it.

I've never understood the need for hot water in a sink, are your hands that girly you need to keep them warm?

Don't they have twist grips on derailers? (However you spell that, my newsreader doesn't know)

The only good place for a reverse thread. Or simply make the screw pull up the washer against something above it.

Even with the colour coding present? Was he blind?

Could of just mandated short sleeves for mixing desk operaters.

But red?! Hot IS red.

My French car has "R" at the bottom of the petrol guage. Odd, since I'm used to seeing F for full and E for empty. No French word meaning empty begins with R, so maybe it's R for red/rouge as in "red line", but I associate that with too many revs.

On that note, it has no red line on the rev counter. It has a limiter luckily, which limits way before the top of the dial. I think it limits about 5000, whereas the dial goes to 7000. Unusual, normally you only have 1000 more revs displayed after the red line.

That's cause you're in the Eastern Hemisphere. We're in the Western one. The Eastern one must be a lot like the Southern one where things are upside down.

You're such a sweetheart. You give out crap, you get crap in return.

I don't know what all that proves. Mine is a lot more direct.

Do you want someone to explain what he meant? I thought it was obvious.

Nonsense. Our public libraries are already socialized, our paved streets, almost all major highways, our street lights, our sewers at least those that collect water from the streets, the vast majority of bridges, our public schools, most sports stadiums, the agencies that verify our drugs and inspect our food, our police and fire departments. the cost of our armies and navies and air forces, and other things are all socialized, and none of that has hurt us.

I'm not especially into adding much more socialized stuff but it's a reasonable choice that the majority may choose to make. It's in no way a threat to humanity and none of the things below will result from a little more or even a lot more. When many people have far more than than they need and some have little to eat and no decent place to live, we should help those without.

When my father graduated high school in 1910, high school was free. Now having only a highschool education won't even allow one to get a decent job, yet almost no post-high school academic or job-training education is free. We've made little progress in 113 years.

Talk about navel gazing, the two lilnes above and the two lines below are just a bunch of meaningless blather.