old man emu

I put in 8 tomato plants and 9 pumpkin vines. The poor things are really suffering in the high heat. They droop pitifully by late afternoon, but seem to pick up overnight if they get a good drink in the afternoon. I decided to steal a march this morning and watered them before it got hot. In the morning there is a cool breeze from the north-east, but it swings to the north-west around lunchtime and blows up to 15 kts until sunset. That's what dries out the plants. I reckon that they are just trying to survive and haven't given a thought to getting bigger.

Euramo Port is what they drink at the pub with no beer.

That's so true. Try to find a public loo in the Sydney CBD. You'll find more hen's teeth in rocking horse poo than public loos.

That's Gender Equality. Pete! What ya' cookin' for dinner. And don't forget to shower, shave and put on a snappy outfit for when she gets home. Women don't like to come home to a dowdy husband.

Can you indicate which are EVs? Obviously the Tesla is an EV. The GWM ORA R 1 supposedly has a kerb weight of 990 kg with a 28.5/33 kWh (Ternary lithium) battery. That's a "tiny" battery. It also has a published top speed of 102 kph. Obviously that's OK for urban use, but too slow for long distance travelling. Not that cruising at 100 kph is not a good way to cover a lot of ground. I set my cruise control at that and drive for hours. However, when I need to overtake, I can get up to 140 kph really quickly and complete the task spending the shortest time possible on the wrong side of the road. NOTE: For a while I have been thinking about calculating the distance it takes a 22-wheeler with speed limited to 100 kph to overtake a grey nomad travelling at 90 kph. It's an interesting time/distance problem.

Someone wrote in the thread about barren grape vines that the answer could be found by a Google search. I immediately was reminded of the song about Barney Google, the grandfather of the inventor of that ubiquitous search engine.

If you are in an area with commercial vines, maybe you should report this to the local Government Agronomist. Hopefully you'll be baying at the moon, but early warning is essential in containing introduced threats to agriculture.

I think the Baby Boomers will tend to live longer lives due to a couple of reasons. Generally their health is better than their forebears/ This is due to medical advances and better nutrition whilst growing up. In the realm of better health, a lot of Boomers gave up smoking in the 1990s/2000s. Whatever damage it might have caused to their lungs may have fixed itself due to the body's replacing itself over time. Random Breath Testing must be given a gong for reducing personal alcohol consumption from pre-RBT times. One cannot discount the fact that from the time of the Boomers, few spend as many years doing hard physical work. Men have their labour-saving devices as well. I suggest that a major cause of Boomer deaths will be the secondary effects of Type II diabetes, but the knowledge is there to defeat that - just look at the Food thread here. One thing that Boomers will not be able to overcome is the damage to our skin from overexposure the sunlight as children. Melanomas will be the Boomers' Grim Reaper.

Shouldn't this be in the Gripe thread?

Of course I have! Where do you think I got the inspiration to create the Cistern Chapel? The book is sort of a talk by Lem Putt, which starts off with: YOU'VE heard a lot of pratin' and prattlin' about this bein' the age of specialization. I'm a carpenter by trade. At one time I could of built a house, barn, church, or chicken coop. But I seen the need of a specialist in my line, so I studied her. I got her, she's mine. Gentlemen, you are face to face with the champion privybuilder of Sangamon County. As Chic Sale wrote , Lem Putt -- that wasn't his real name -- really lived. He was just as sincere in his work as a great painter whose heart is in his canvas; and in this little sketch I have simply tried to bring to you recollections of a man I once knew, who was so rich in odd and likable traits of character as to make a most lasting impression on my memory. If you can't find a copy of the book, here's a link to it in pdf format https://www.toiletrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Specialist-by-Charles-Sale.pdf

Yeah, but ... My question is a simple request for the weight data of battery packs in the various kWh categories.

What are the weights of typical EV batteries? There would have to be a range of weights to suit the other dimensions of the vehicle. You don't put a V8 in a Mini. But then .....

The boy stood in the prisoners' box, Picking his nose like fury. Rolling it into little balls, And flicking it at the jury. And again: The boy stood on the burning deck Wishing he hadn't been born. His father said, You wouldn't have, If the Frenchie hadn't torn.

A Four and Twenty, or a Sergrants without the seasoning sensation of rodent droppings or domesticated hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta, would be a bland disappointment.

There are two dishes which originally were made from the leftovers of the Sunday roast. If the roast was beef, the ensuing dish is called "Cottage Pie". If it was lamb or mutton, the dish is "Shepherd's Pie). The apostrophe denotes that it is a dish that would be commonly made by someone who had easy access to sheep. Similarly we have"Ploughman's Lunch", an English cold meal based around bread, cheese, and fresh or pickled onions. The good old Cornish pasty, while associated with that most wonderful of Counties, derives its name from Vulgar Latin "pastata "meat wrapped in pastry" from Latin pasta "dough, paste". A recipe for shepherd's pie published in Edinburgh in 1849 in The Practice of Cookery and Pastry specifies cooked meat of any kind, sliced rather than minced, covered with mashed potato and baked. Neither shepherd's pie nor cottage pie was mentioned in the original edition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management in 1861, perhaps due to matters of social class. More recently "shepherd's pie" has generally been used for a potato-topped dish of minced lamb. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, "In keeping with the name, the meat should be mutton or lamb; and it is usually cooked meat left over from a roast". So if your daughter has given up a date with Tom Cruise for a Sunday Roast Lamb, there's not likely to be any leftovers, so you'll have to get some minced meat from the butcher. And with the price of lamb these days, it won't be shepherd's pie but cottage pie you'll be making.

I'm not wearing the blame! You posted a funny sign about transport infrastructure construction. I injected a comment in the same vein. Spacey took two words and created a question using them. I just tried to enlighten him. IT'S ALL SPACEY'S FAULT!

The consensus opinion around here is that I'm a big unusual, but I swear there's no bats in the belfry.

Oddly enough, it's got to do with stopping distance. A "light rail" train apparently can stop in a shorter distance than a "heavy rail" train. A basic reason for this is that a "light rail (LR)" train has fewer carriages and even when crowded with passengers, would be lighter than a "heavy rail (HR)" train. In order to stop any moving object, you have to remove the energy it possesses due to its motion, K.E. = 1/2 m v^2. That is done by using the friction of the brake linings to convert the energy of motion to heat. If an LR has less mass than a HR, then it is clear that less energy has to be dissipated. Interestingly, if the stopping distance of an LR and a HR was tested on the same length of level track from the same speed by applying the brakes to immediately stop their wheels from rotating, they would both stop in the same distance from the point of lock up. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the stopping distance of a sliding object is solely dependent on the friction between the object and the surface. I'm assuming here that the steel in a wheel of as LR is the same as a HR giving the same friction, and I can't see why it would not be.

At night, my place is invaded by tiny insects drawn to the lights. I try to kill them with insect spray, but I think that only works if they drown in the liquid. The chemicals don't seem to do anything but add an aroma to the room. So how efficient is the process of people walking through the cabin of arriving international flights spraying insecticide?

Isn't the requirement to keep the cylinder upright simply a preventative method to stop the cylinder becoming a jet-propelled device if the "bung" on top fails, a la Jaws? What's wrong with this picture?

The same could be done for batteries of greater physical size. Speaking of the method of manufacture, I believe that one cause of lithium battery fires is not the chemicals themselves but the failure of the membrane that separates them. If that membrane fails, a short circuit occurs, and that is what produces the heat to begin the fire.

This morning two boring machines met under Sydney at Five Dock to complete the hole for a tunnel for the light rail which is to connect Parramatta to the Sydney CBD. https://caportal.com.au/tfnsw/sydmetrowest/map

With so much produce being imported, I wonder how much "fruit fly" inspection is being carried out on the wharves. How did the fire ants get in? Or that parasite of bees. Seem the countries we export to can ban our products for the flimsiest of reasons, but it's an open door policy here.

Getting back to battery power packs. From what I've seen of the inside of one of these EV battery packs is that they are just a whole lot of single batteries, each about the size of your long finger, connected together. It makes me wonder why they can't make each battery the same size as the 6V battery you use in a Dolphin torch. If 1.5V batteries can be made in sizes from AAA to D, why can't lithium ones?

Makes one wonder about the quality of the lithium cells going into Chinese made EVs.