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#31
Politics / Re: Keir Starmer
Last post by zorkan - July 17, 2026, 12:34:23 PMYou know, when I saw him parading with that creep Peter Mandelson I suspected his time was up.
I wish Burnham well, but the job might be too much for him.
He could retire here:
https://www.burnham-on-sea.com/
I wish Burnham well, but the job might be too much for him.
He could retire here:
https://www.burnham-on-sea.com/
#32
Politics / Re: Keir Starmer
Last post by Recusant - July 17, 2026, 05:12:28 AMI'd think that his time as mayor of Manchester gives some clue. Whether he'll manage to take that national is the question. There's more to life than xenophobia and austerity.
#33
Politics / Re: Keir Starmer
Last post by zorkan - July 16, 2026, 12:28:13 PMHe's now gone.
Goodbye.
Burnham is next PM, but nobody knows what his policies are.
Goodbye.
Burnham is next PM, but nobody knows what his policies are.
#34
Laid Back Lounge / Re: Petrol head thread!!!
Last post by Dark Lightning - July 15, 2026, 02:27:18 PMToo true!
#35
Laid Back Lounge / Re: Petrol head thread!!!
Last post by billy rubin - July 15, 2026, 01:09:51 PMthere is a special place in hell for people who wire somethg all in one colour
#36
Laid Back Lounge / Re: Petrol head thread!!!
Last post by Recusant - July 15, 2026, 06:16:38 AMQuote from: Dark Lightning on July 15, 2026, 01:39:47 AM. . . The electrical tech, in order to save money, bought one large spool of black wire. . . .
That's demented. #37
Laid Back Lounge / Re: Petrol head thread!!!
Last post by Dark Lightning - July 15, 2026, 01:39:47 AMHey, that's pretty cool, bringing light to that old Honda! That wire color reminds me of the time I was building some electronic equipment. The electrical tech, in order to save money, bought one large spool of black wire. These were scanners that had +/- directionality in 3 dimensions, with limit switches. Of course, it was crunch time, and I was under a table in the dark-ish pushing wires into sockets on the connectors. Turned the thing on, the controller went up in smoke, and the monitor went dark. Turns out that I had put -12VDC on a 5V logic circuit. President of the company asks, "What can we do to avoid this?", to which I responded, "Don't make me work in the dark, and I'll also go up and buy the other 9 colors of wire we should be using to help the poor customers troubleshoot these things when something fails". I was a "consultant", and it wasn't much later that I was told my services were no longer required. About 3 weeks later they called back and asked for help. 
#38
Laid Back Lounge / Re: Petrol head thread!!!
Last post by billy rubin - July 15, 2026, 12:43:33 AMwell, today was a good day.
i have an ancient little honda, a 1971 100cc scrambler that i bought ages ago to teach the kids how to ride motorcycles. it worked well. too well, maybe, because the two youngest boys took it joyriding in the creek and broke the unobtainable plastic headlamp shell.
stuff like that is not common these days, and requires some searching.
anyway, i found a headlamp shell for sale in indonesia and bought it. it eventually arrived with no drama, and i installed it carefully. carefully is important, because the headlamp shell is also the junction box for wiring harnesses from all over the bike, and everything had to be disconnected and put back together right. i labelled all the wires, and carefully put em all back where they were supposed to go-- i thought--but when i was done, i had no headlight. and whats worse, if i turned on the switch the fuse would blow.
clearly a moment of brain fade on my part during reassembly.
but if you didnt turn the headlight on, everything worked fine, and since i didnt want my ten year old out on the roads after dark any way, i left it that way. put some tape over the switch to keep him from monkeying with it.
fast forward now to this year, and the 10 year old is pushing 22, and wants to take the little honda to a motorcycle rally across the state to putt around the campground on. would like to have a headlight for nighttime debauchery, too.
so i said, no time like the present to teach him some automotive wtroubleshooting. so we looked up a wiring diagram on the internet and opened up the headlamp shell to find my long ago mistake. got out the VOM and started looking for electrons.
years ago i had numbered everything i took apart so i could put it back together right. we looked and looked, but all the numbers were plugged correctly into each other. some 15 multi-wire circuits to high beam, low beam, instrument cluster, taillight, turn signals, and of course the associated switch gear. and all in ancient 6-volt primitive connections.
i was about to give up and call it a day when i noticed that circuit number 7 was all green wires, for ground (honda actually uses a separate set of wires to ground all the energized components, unlike the brits, who just assumed that everything would run back to the battery through the frame and bearings and so on. which they wouldnt).
but in that ground circuit there was a multiconnector of three green wires and one blue wire, connected together.
thats odd, i said,. the only blue wires in there lead from the headlamp switch to the headlamp, and then another wire goes to the high beam indicator in the instrument cluster. so there is no reason for a blue wire to be connected directly to ground, and since it is a high beam feed, the fuse would blow every time you turned the lights on. which was what was happening.
so i pulled the blue wire out of the green wire multi-connector and plugged it into the headlamp's blue wire multi-connector, and nothing happened. then i turned on the headlamp switch, and the headlamp lit up.
bingo. problem solved.
like ten years ago i had plugged that single blue wire into the ground connector, bypassing the entire headlamp circuit, and ensuring that the fuse would melt every time you turned the lamp on. now thats its fixed,we have a high beam without issues.
still no low beam tho because the old 5-1/4-inch sealed beam lamp has a burned out low beam filament, but the OEM bulb is still available over the net, even though the little honda is 55 years old.
so it was a red letter day. i had already scrounged new side covers for it from singapore, and they arrived a week or two ago and fit perfectly. so theres nothing left to do on this machine except clean it off.
its not much for high performance, and tops out at about 35 or 40 mph, and the fish-oil shocks were worn out thirty years ago. but for a farm bike to use to check on animals or to run down the fencelines, its perfect. if i get registration again, i can even take it town.
not on the interstate, tho. i aint that stupid.
i have an ancient little honda, a 1971 100cc scrambler that i bought ages ago to teach the kids how to ride motorcycles. it worked well. too well, maybe, because the two youngest boys took it joyriding in the creek and broke the unobtainable plastic headlamp shell.
stuff like that is not common these days, and requires some searching.
anyway, i found a headlamp shell for sale in indonesia and bought it. it eventually arrived with no drama, and i installed it carefully. carefully is important, because the headlamp shell is also the junction box for wiring harnesses from all over the bike, and everything had to be disconnected and put back together right. i labelled all the wires, and carefully put em all back where they were supposed to go-- i thought--but when i was done, i had no headlight. and whats worse, if i turned on the switch the fuse would blow.
clearly a moment of brain fade on my part during reassembly.
but if you didnt turn the headlight on, everything worked fine, and since i didnt want my ten year old out on the roads after dark any way, i left it that way. put some tape over the switch to keep him from monkeying with it.
fast forward now to this year, and the 10 year old is pushing 22, and wants to take the little honda to a motorcycle rally across the state to putt around the campground on. would like to have a headlight for nighttime debauchery, too.
so i said, no time like the present to teach him some automotive wtroubleshooting. so we looked up a wiring diagram on the internet and opened up the headlamp shell to find my long ago mistake. got out the VOM and started looking for electrons.
years ago i had numbered everything i took apart so i could put it back together right. we looked and looked, but all the numbers were plugged correctly into each other. some 15 multi-wire circuits to high beam, low beam, instrument cluster, taillight, turn signals, and of course the associated switch gear. and all in ancient 6-volt primitive connections.
i was about to give up and call it a day when i noticed that circuit number 7 was all green wires, for ground (honda actually uses a separate set of wires to ground all the energized components, unlike the brits, who just assumed that everything would run back to the battery through the frame and bearings and so on. which they wouldnt).
but in that ground circuit there was a multiconnector of three green wires and one blue wire, connected together.
thats odd, i said,. the only blue wires in there lead from the headlamp switch to the headlamp, and then another wire goes to the high beam indicator in the instrument cluster. so there is no reason for a blue wire to be connected directly to ground, and since it is a high beam feed, the fuse would blow every time you turned the lights on. which was what was happening.
so i pulled the blue wire out of the green wire multi-connector and plugged it into the headlamp's blue wire multi-connector, and nothing happened. then i turned on the headlamp switch, and the headlamp lit up.
bingo. problem solved.
like ten years ago i had plugged that single blue wire into the ground connector, bypassing the entire headlamp circuit, and ensuring that the fuse would melt every time you turned the lamp on. now thats its fixed,we have a high beam without issues.
still no low beam tho because the old 5-1/4-inch sealed beam lamp has a burned out low beam filament, but the OEM bulb is still available over the net, even though the little honda is 55 years old.
so it was a red letter day. i had already scrounged new side covers for it from singapore, and they arrived a week or two ago and fit perfectly. so theres nothing left to do on this machine except clean it off.
its not much for high performance, and tops out at about 35 or 40 mph, and the fish-oil shocks were worn out thirty years ago. but for a farm bike to use to check on animals or to run down the fencelines, its perfect. if i get registration again, i can even take it town.
not on the interstate, tho. i aint that stupid.
#39
Science / Re: Tyrannosaurids and Other B...
Last post by Recusant - July 14, 2026, 05:44:24 PMThis one is pretty cool. Based on reexamination of fossils of small dinosaurs, it appears that Tyrannosaurus rex laid large clutches of relatively small eggs rather than smaller clutches of larger eggs--a revision of the hypothesis regarding their reproductive strategy.
"'Vanishingly Rare' Discovery: T. Rex Hatchlings Were Smaller Than a Cat And Born by The Dozen" | ScienceAlert
The paper is open access:
"Hatchlings of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Evolution of Dinosaur Reproductive Strategies" | Biology
"'Vanishingly Rare' Discovery: T. Rex Hatchlings Were Smaller Than a Cat And Born by The Dozen" | ScienceAlert
QuoteJurassic Park was wrong. Again.
In the second movie, hunters find an infant Tyrannosaurus rex and use it to lure the adults into a trap.
But in reality, that baby would have been much smaller, about the size of a cat. And it probably wouldn't have been alone – the nest may have been absolutely crawling with dozens of them.
It likely wouldn't have been very useful as bait either: Its parents probably would have considered losing a baby or two as just part of the process, and wouldn't have cared enough to push a research trailer off a cliff.
So why are we updating our understanding of T. rex's childhood?
In a "vanishingly rare" discovery, paleontologists have found and closely examined fossils of tyrannosaur hatchlings. The remarkable findings are published in the journal Biology – and the implications go way beyond everyone's favorite dinosaur.
"Going through museum collections, my colleagues and I have discovered the first remains of hatchling tyrannosaurs," announced Nick Longrich, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in the UK.
[. . .]
Longrich and his team set out to investigate these fragmented fossils gathering dust in storeroom drawers, expecting to find adult specimens of small dinosaurs. Instead, ironically, the work led the team back to the big guys.
One of the small bones appeared to be a third metatarsal – the middle foot bone – of a theropod dinosaur. But on closer inspection, it didn't look like it came from a fully grown animal.
"The surface of the bone was incredibly porous," Longrich says in a video on his YouTube channel.
"And this is the result of all these little microscopic blood vessels creating this dense network of blood vessels. And these nourish the bone as it grows. So they're providing blood to the bone cells as they deposit bone tissue and remodel the bone. And this is typical of an immature dinosaur."
When the bone was compared to others of its era, the researchers realized only one species fit the characteristics they were seeing.
"This is the foot bone of a very, very tiny T. rex. This is the smallest T. rex that we've ever seen," said Longrich.
After that find, the team began to look more closely at other small fossils of bones and teeth, and realized that many could also be attributed to tyrannosaur hatchlings.
[. . .]
The goal of reproduction is obviously to make more of yourself, and in a general sense, organisms use one of two broad strategies to get there.
They either have lots of offspring, quickly and often, so that it doesn't really matter if some (or most) of them don't live very long – there are plenty of backups. Organisms that use this method, such as rodents, are known as r-strategists.
The other method is to have fewer babies, but invest heavily in making sure they survive. These are the K-strategists, and that group includes whales and, of course, us.
[. . .]
[T]he new discovery that tyrannosaur young were small and numerous suggests they had more r-strategist tendencies than we thought.
[Continues . . .]
The paper is open access:
"Hatchlings of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Evolution of Dinosaur Reproductive Strategies" | Biology
QuoteAbstract:
Tyrannosaurs were giant predatory dinosaurs that occupied the apex of Late Cretaceous food chains. Little is known about the early life and reproductive ecology of tyrannosaurs due to the extreme rarity of hatchling and juvenile fossils.
We report bones of hatchlings (<1 yr) for Tyrannosaurus rex and Gorgosaurus libratus, weighing ~2.5 kg and ~2.4 kg, respectively, i.e., <0.1% of adult mass. Clutches were likely large. We conservatively estimate ~20 eggs in a small adult T. rex versus ~30 eggs in the largest T. rex, and clutches of ~15 eggs in G. libratus; larger clutches of 50 or even 100 eggs are not impossible.
This suggests an r-selected reproductive strategy. Synchrotron scans reveal Haversian bone remodeling, suggesting that tyrannosaurs moved soon after hatching. Hatchling tyrannosaurs' small size and precociality suggest limited parental care; teeth of hatchlings show wear suggesting that they fed on relatively large vertebrates.
Tyrannosaurs had proportionately larger offspring than most reptiles, but relatively smaller hatchlings than Eumaniraptora and birds, suggesting retention of a primitive reproductive strategy intermediate between that of basal diapsids and birds. Multiple dinosaur lineages evolved large eggs independently, suggesting an evolutionary trend towards increased parental investment.
#40
Science / Re: Tyrannosaurids and Other B...
Last post by Recusant - July 14, 2026, 05:43:41 PMThis one is pretty cool. Based on reexamination of fossils of small dinosaurs, it appears that Tyrannosaurus rex laid large clutches of relatively small eggs rather than smaller clutches of larger eggs--a revision of the hypothesis regarding their reproductive strategy.
"'Vanishingly Rare' Discovery: T. Rex Hatchlings Were Smaller Than a Cat And Born by The Dozen" | ScienceAlert
The paper is open access:
"Hatchlings of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Evolution of Dinosaur Reproductive Strategies" | Biology
"'Vanishingly Rare' Discovery: T. Rex Hatchlings Were Smaller Than a Cat And Born by The Dozen" | ScienceAlert
QuoteJurassic Park was wrong. Again.
In the second movie, hunters find an infant Tyrannosaurus rex and use it to lure the adults into a trap.
But in reality, that baby would have been much smaller, about the size of a cat. And it probably wouldn't have been alone – the nest may have been absolutely crawling with dozens of them.
It likely wouldn't have been very useful as bait either: Its parents probably would have considered losing a baby or two as just part of the process, and wouldn't have cared enough to push a research trailer off a cliff.
So why are we updating our understanding of T. rex's childhood?
In a "vanishingly rare" discovery, paleontologists have found and closely examined fossils of tyrannosaur hatchlings. The remarkable findings are published in the journal Biology – and the implications go way beyond everyone's favorite dinosaur.
"Going through museum collections, my colleagues and I have discovered the first remains of hatchling tyrannosaurs," announced Nick Longrich, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath in the UK.
[. . .]
Longrich and his team set out to investigate these fragmented fossils gathering dust in storeroom drawers, expecting to find adult specimens of small dinosaurs. Instead, ironically, the work led the team back to the big guys.
One of the small bones appeared to be a third metatarsal – the middle foot bone – of a theropod dinosaur. But on closer inspection, it didn't look like it came from a fully grown animal.
"The surface of the bone was incredibly porous," Longrich says in a video on his YouTube channel.
"And this is the result of all these little microscopic blood vessels creating this dense network of blood vessels. And these nourish the bone as it grows. So they're providing blood to the bone cells as they deposit bone tissue and remodel the bone. And this is typical of an immature dinosaur."
When the bone was compared to others of its era, the researchers realized only one species fit the characteristics they were seeing.
"This is the foot bone of a very, very tiny T. rex. This is the smallest T. rex that we've ever seen," said Longrich.
After that find, the team began to look more closely at other small fossils of bones and teeth, and realized that many could also be attributed to tyrannosaur hatchlings.
[. . .]
The goal of reproduction is obviously to make more of yourself, and in a general sense, organisms use one of two broad strategies to get there.
They either have lots of offspring, quickly and often, so that it doesn't really matter if some (or most) of them don't live very long – there are plenty of backups. Organisms that use this method, such as rodents, are known as r-strategists.
The other method is to have fewer babies, but invest heavily in making sure they survive. These are the K-strategists, and that group includes whales and, of course, us.
[. . .]
[T]he new discovery that tyrannosaur young were small and numerous suggests they had more r-strategist tendencies than we thought.
[Continues . . .]
The paper is open access:
"Hatchlings of Tyrannosaurus rex and the Evolution of Dinosaur Reproductive Strategies" | Biology
QuoteAbstract:
Tyrannosaurs were giant predatory dinosaurs that occupied the apex of Late Cretaceous food chains. Little is known about the early life and reproductive ecology of tyrannosaurs due to the extreme rarity of hatchling and juvenile fossils.
We report bones of hatchlings (<1 yr) for Tyrannosaurus rex and Gorgosaurus libratus, weighing ~2.5 kg and ~2.4 kg, respectively, i.e., <0.1% of adult mass. Clutches were likely large. We conservatively estimate ~20 eggs in a small adult T. rex versus ~30 eggs in the largest T. rex, and clutches of ~15 eggs in G. libratus; larger clutches of 50 or even 100 eggs are not impossible.
This suggests an r-selected reproductive strategy. Synchrotron scans reveal Haversian bone remodeling, suggesting that tyrannosaurs moved soon after hatching. Hatchling tyrannosaurs' small size and precociality suggest limited parental care; teeth of hatchlings show wear suggesting that they fed on relatively large vertebrates.
Tyrannosaurs had proportionately larger offspring than most reptiles, but relatively smaller hatchlings than Eumaniraptora and birds, suggesting retention of a primitive reproductive strategy intermediate between that of basal diapsids and birds. Multiple dinosaur lineages evolved large eggs independently, suggesting an evolutionary trend towards increased parental investment.