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Ronaldo47

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Everything posted by Ronaldo47

  1. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  2. I think it's sometimes not so much a question of taking decades to settle, but more of the fact that some types of quarried material, especially clays, might well be strong enough to support a slope when first used. However, changes in their chemical composition when exposed to the atmosphere and atmospheric weathering, make them progressively weaker, resulting in slumping.
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  4. I think it was mentioned above that the slip has moved further since the video was made and now blocks the tow path. In Italy, when it was found that the ground conditions were too longterm unstable for a cuttting for a new road, they built a cut & cover tunnel instead, constructing the tunnel walls in the cutting and then backfilling the earth.
  5. "Toe weighting" is a term of the art in Civil Engineering to refer to the weighty material put at the foot (specifically, the toe as it is right at the very end) of an unstable slope with a view to prevent it slipping any further. This is from a book on natural disasters. It is an extract from a passage that describes the geology of Folkestone Warren and the steps that have been taken to prevent damage to the railway line that runs across it.
  6. The clay in my part of Essex gradually decomposes and becomes weaker when exposed to the atmosphere. It was found that railway cuttings started to fail by slipping about a century after their construction. The problem was solved by constructing dutch drains down the sides of the cuttings to lower the water table, combined with toe weighting.
  7. The "Green Maritime Plan" explicitly states that the targets are not mandatory: "8. These zero emission shipping ambitions are intended to provide aspirational goals for the sector, not mandatory targets. " See my earlier post of 17th Jan 2024.
  8. It seems from the article that many of the electric boats are in fact hybrids. Reference is made to doing a day's cruising on "mainly" solar power, which according to posters on other threads, might be possible on a sunny day in mid-summer, but which is unrealistic for a narrowboat under typical English weather conditions .
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  11. Proper editing does take time. Like Winston Churchill's reported apology to the House of Commons for being about to deliver a long speech because he hadn't had the time to write a short one.
  12. Asymmetic reducers are available that allow a level invert to be provided. .
  13. I bought a spare filter for our cordless Dyson so it could be used without interruption. Cleaning our open fireplace hearth in winter means a lot of fine dust being caught by the filter. Putting the filter in a pint glass with some soapy water and agitating it, soon results in something that looks like Guiness without the head. Several changes of water are needed before it becomes clear.
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  15. What Kennedy should have said to say he was from Berlin is "Ich bin Berliner". By adding the "ein" he was saying he was a type of spicy bun, an illustration of the dangers of translating word-for-word.
  16. I see that they have acknowledged that the taller bollards would need larger foundations to cope with the greater bending moment that will arise when a rope is attached at the top of the bollard. So not a cheap upgrade.
  17. There's probably some legal requirement to use metric units in official documents.
  18. I remember that, when I was taking driving lessons in the late 1960's, the instructor said that "three-point turn" was a misnomer, as the requirement was just to turn the vehicle round using forward and reverse gears. I took my test in Cardiff, where the camber of some side roads was so great that the crown of the road was higher than the pavement. On those roads, doing a 3 point turn used to involve doing a hill start as well.
  19. I take my 1980's, and long discontinued, Bickerton folder with us when we go on the canals for lockwheeling and shopping. Folded, it fits its medium suitcase-sized carry bag and has a pedal with an integral sliding spanner to remove it when stowed. 10" front wheel and 12" rear wheel so not ideal for deep potholes, but being aluminium, easy to carry when unloaded. No luggage carrier, but it has hooks on the handlebars for hanging the carry bag on. I have used mine to transport bulky things like beer crates and even a boxed lawnmower, but have had no need to carry a cassette as all our hires have had pumpouts.
  20. This post cannot be displayed because it is in a forum which requires at least 10 posts to view.
  21. Spray foam for cavity wall insulation was in use by the mid-1970's. A work colleague who was into model railways, got a friend who was in the wall insulation business to come round and use his foam apparatus to make him embankments and other scenery. I Ieft that job in 1976, and had no further contact with the colleague, so it must have been earlier than that.
  22. I retained my minibus and 7.5T entitlements at age 70, which involved filing forms D2 and D4. There was no official fee for renewing by this route, but I had to pay £140 in total to my optician and GP for thrm to do the necessary examinations and complete the paperwork. You need to book a 30 minute slot with your GP, and it took all that time do do the examinations & tests and complete the paperwork. While your application is being processed, you do not have an actual licence but DVLA do (eventually) send you a letter confirming that you are entitled to drive all your original classes while your application is pending. As DVLA required additional medical tests (which they paid for on a private patient basis, no waiting months for an appointment), it took some 7 months before my licence arrived, but it was dated from its date of issue and not the date of expiry of the old one. I didn't bother at my next renewal and just did it on line. I had in the past made use of both the large minibus and the 7.5T entitlements, but deceded I wouldn't need them any more. There was a special box on the D2/D4 forms to tick for those who wanted their minibus entitlement specifically for charitable/community purposes, which I didn't tick, but I don't know what the effect of this is. I think it might have been relevant if your licence did not have this entitlement originally.
  23. In certain African countries, corruption is seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour. My late brother-in-law worked for UNESO for most of his working life in a senior position, and spent a significant amount of time working in various third world countries. He once remarked that, following the appointment of some people from African states to senior positions, they had organised well-paid sinecures for their relatives and claimed extravagent expenses. Things eventually got to such a state that the UK and the USA both withdrew their funding from UNESCO for many years until it had put its house in order. A couple of years BC (Before Covid) there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 about the problems that could be encountered with theft and corruption when doing business in Africa. One of the people interviewed was a senior Nigerian diplomat. He not only admitted that the problem existed, but was clearly positively proud of the fact that other african states admitted that the Nigerians were the best at it.
  24. I still have the dregs of a bottle of Johnson's Uranium Intensifier, a photographic chemical that some 60 years ago I used to intensify some underexposed photographic negatives. A chemist colleage later assured me it was perfectly safe, which I guess I knew as I used to slosh the negatives around in the solution with my fingers, and they are still all there and I haven't grown any new ones! I think I would have got more exposure to radiation had I lived in a granite house on Dartmoor. In the late 1950's, a cousin had a pen pal who lived in South Africa. Her father worked in a uranium mine, and she once sent my cousin, through the post, a matchbox full of lumps of uranium ore. They were crystalline and a dirty yellow colour, resembling irregular granulated sugar lumps. We often used to play with them when we visited.
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