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

The Natural Philosopher is cut from the same cloth. "97% confidence limits" is just meaningless jargon.

Only a total idiot would try to dress up a fatuous assertion about "left wing conspirators" by trying to make look vaguely like the conclusion of a statistical study.

People do talk about 95% confidence limits - two standard deviations away from the mean includes 95% of a normal distribution, and three standard deviations include 99.7% - but the 97% number is clearly bogus - imperfectly-recalled window dressing.

How come I remember a whine on LW and I was born in 1975?

A picture of you doing this is now required.

When my friend insured his bike I fell about laughing. Insurance is for expensive things like cars I said. Then he told me he'd spent 3 grand on it. 3 times what I'd just spent to buy a car. Which went 113mph downhill. His bike didn't.

Is white or blue hottest? Filament lamps go white. Presumably if it starts with red, as you heat it up you get blue aswell, then eventually lose the red?

I'm sure you could get blue metal in a vacuum.

What if you caught gangreen?

Two things happened around those times.

As you heat something, it produces radiation more or less independent of what it is made of. Initially all the radiation is in the infrared, so we can't see it. Then it creeps into the red end of the visible spectrum and looks dull red, then bright red, then orange; when the "hump" of radiation is mostly in the visible spectrum it looks white to us. This is at 6000K which is the temperature of the surface of our Sun, to which our eyes are adapted. If you go on raising the temperature the hump moves out of the violet end and the light looks bluish as it has lost the red. This is why the star Sirius looks bluish, as its surface is 10000K.

Filament lamps are rather yellowish, as tungsten tends to evaporate much above 3000K; less for halogen lamps which can stand a higher temperature.

I think gangrenous tissue is black, not green. Anyway, you can't "catch" gangrene as it is just tissue which has died.

I dont think it is.

"Gangrene is death of body tissue due to a lack of blood flow or a serious bacterial infection."

So although technically the term gangrene refers to tissue death, its as likely to be an infection as not

I make fun of snowflakes scared of a bad cold.

Yeah, because masks are magical and only work one way. Here's a tip - put your mask on backwards, then the virus can't get in.

They're identical, there has only ever been one way of measuring it. Compare live and neutral. They just keep changing the name for marketing purposes.

Current going through your body gives you a fright and nothing more. I've had nine 240V shocks in my life, about half of them across my whole body. Just makes you jump. Only the weak die off, which is a good thing, future generations will be stronger. Our bodies need to learn to handle stuff we use every day.

I unearthed mine because if you're touching the chassis of the microwave, you're now much more susceptible to touching a live. Normally, touching only something live, you get a small tingle from capacitance of your body. But if you're earthed, far more dangerous. Especially to my parrot who chews cables.

If nothing in your house was earthed, you could never get a shock, unless you have no floor and live (livv, not lyve, I hate English) on the ground.

You touch it, feel a tingle, then fix it.

Of course you can let go. You do have control of your own body right? You have a brain in there somewhere which can override things?

Had that at a school I worked at. 20 PCs, for some reason if you switched them all on at once (as a class of kids tends to do). I thought the caps from live to earth were always connected?

The electrician refused to put less sensitive breakers in. He claimed the regulations stated schools must have more sensitive breakers than the houses where those very same kids live! I bought less sensitive breakers on Ebay with my own money, swapped them over, then sold the sensitive ones. The loss in Ebay fees and postage was approximately equal to the gain of the sensitive ones costing more. Problem solved.

A teacher challenged me on it, so I persuaded a boy to test it in front of the class. Plug with wire, exposed live, hold that. Touch the earthed heater. Tripped, he didn't even say ouch.

Can't you see the problem is the snowflake RCD? FFS get rid of it. These stupid things are stopping designers from using the ground for useful purposes. Like the "shower of death" used in Mexico which saps electricity away to earth.

It's a f****ng expensive response. Do you know how much fusewire costs me?

I have an 8000 volt trap for mice and rats. They look so funny cramped up and stretched out.

Hahahahahah!!! You stupid pathetic wimp. Gotta be safe..... oh, the thing you spent loads of cash on just costs you even more cash. Put. In. A. Fuse.

Yeah, more cost. Obviously the more devices you have the more they cost.

Because neutral is oh so dangerous.

But those shows are never in the real world. It used to amaze me that painters could get the perfect finish while they were applying paint when people were still sanding down the walls/plaster in the same room

- until the camera got too close. :)

or

Have you been into a carpet shop recently - 50 shades of grey is an under estimate. And then there are the various shades of silver (more grey).

What about the coloured bathroom suite - I think the one I had was called champagne but really it was a baby poo colour. At least with white sanitary ware it's more obvious where to clean.

Is that a good idea? I used to live in a place where the bog was piss colour. Er, fawn.