It's A Colloquialism Here In This Sceptred Isle
We managed to mangle the Cantonese phrase 'Kap Kap', meaning 'Quickly', back in the seventeenth century. Conrad imagines it's probably fallen out of use except by elderly curmudgeons like himself. Of course - obviously! - that has nothing to do directly with today's Intro, apart from the artefacts involved working at speed.
ANYWAY I need a picture that will really pull in the punters. Art!
Nothing to do with anything but so what
This is another popcorn-friendly tale from Quora. Original Poster was a lady working in an office, whose manager was replaced by Mister Misogynistic Bottomhole #1, who was always hitting on female staff and harassing them. She thoughtfully documented all the abuse in a journal, putting down the date, the time, the woman involved, what MMBH said. She informed MMBH's manager, who promised to take action.
SPOILER! He didn't. Not only that, he informed MMBH #1 of what OP had taken to him as an issue, thus making himself MMBH#2. Predictably, MMBH #1 took revenge upon OP, probably tweaking his moustache ends and cackling. Art!
Exactly!
It didn't end well for the MMBHs. OP, not a woman to be trifled with, sent her journal to HQ, where it was seized upon as detailed, consistent evidence of sexual harassment and abuse, confirmed by all the women OP had documented.
There was an investigation and both were fired. Not just fired, they were subsequently prevented from claiming their Unemployment benefit from the business. It gets worse; they were not given their severance payments thanks to the criminal nature of their behaviour.
Of course - obviously! - this is nothing to do with what I really intended to be the meat (no pun intended) of the matter in this Intro. Art!
We've already come across a recent case of traumatic amputation by table saw, where the end result bankrupted the company and shut it down. This kind of accident is, unfortunately, not rare,
Enter Steve Gass, an unlikely combination of patent attorney, physics doctorate and amateur woodworking hobbyist. Sounds like a mate of Matt Murdock. He came up with a system to protect operators from accidents with rotary saws, going so far as to test his prototype on himself, leading to a bleeding finger which nevertheless remained intact and attached to his hand. That's commitment. Art!
This is Jonathan Katz-Moses, a semi-pro woodworker who calmly announced that there are 4,000 table saw accidents across South Canada annually, involving amputation of fingers or hands, making it the most dangerous tool in the home or industrial plant. He chose to test his Sawstop with frankfurter sausages that approximated the diameter of a human finger or thumb. Art!
Here the terrified sausage is sadistically pushed, with all due speed, at the cutting blades -
Which instantly stops and sink beneath the table, too fast for the human eye to follow, because this is ultra-high speed film. Art!
How does it work? O I thought you'd never ask! There is a 3 volt current running through the saw, and when it comes into contact with flesh, the current drops, which is picked up by the saw's computer, and as you can see above, a 'brake' is propelled into the blade, stopping it dead. In 5 milliseconds. Art!
That small graze is the total extent of the damage. If it had been a human finger you'd be able to seal the deal with a small plaster. Art!
Yeah, I'll bet she's grateful
Steve, rather naively, him being a lawyer and all that, expected the timber industry to beat a path to his door (see under: "BANKRUPTCY") in the interests of 1) Enhanced safety, fewer severed limbs and fingers, thus a happier workforce, and 2) Avoiding expensive lawsuits.
It was not to be, so he and a couple of partners went into business with Sawstop.
What Was A Telex Machine?
I thought you'd never ask! This came up briefly in "O Canada!", so Conrad, being thorough, decided to inform you. As defined by the Ol' Collins Concise, it was a global telegraph system in which teleprinters were hired out to subscribers. A telex user could send a written message to any other telex subscriber across the planet, at a speed of about one word per second. Art!
Note that these systems operated in binary rather than telephone-based voltage, so they were incompatible and required separate cable infrastructure.
The inroads made by fax machines in the Eighties, to be followed by e-mails and text messages put the skids under the telex and it only exists in the niche market of marine communications. Art!
Put a pin in this one, we'll come back to it.
"German Strategy In The Great War" By Philip Neame
I was reading Ol' Phil's account of Ruffian weaknesses in the battle of Tannenberg, and he pointed out one that's been repeated many a time: that the Ruffians sent their wireless messages in clear; that is, without any kind of encoding or encypherment. This was a gift to the Teutons, who could intercept these messages and be fully informed about what their opponents were up to and where and when and why. Art!
The Ruffians didn't have much choice, they suffered a complete lack of personnel trained in codes and cyphers and you can't magically wave a war wand over a peasant and transform him into a signals intelligence trooper. According to Ol' Phil this state of affairs persisted for a year. Not sure if this is correct, will have to dig around and find out.
"City In The Sky"
Our Heroes are attempting to scare the living daylights out of Sir Richard Branson, and are doing a pretty good job of it.
‘Are we talking
about the end of the human race?’ asked Sir Richard, quietly. Mark shook his head.
‘No, Sir Richard,
not at all. Human beings are too
numerous, too clever and too adaptable to get wiped out. What the Big Crash will do is reduce human
civilisation to conditions as they were in, say, ten thousand BC.’
‘And it’s
unavoidable?’
‘It’s
unavoidable. Within a century.’
Sir Richard
distractedly poured a cup of tea and stirred in milk. He took a sip, made a face and added sugar.
‘There’s really no
way to avoid this Big Crash? None at
all?’
Mark shook his
head; Martin, not bothering if the interview came to a positive conclusion or
not, offered more detail.
‘You could only
prevent it if you had a time machine. Go
back a couple of hundred years and alter the development of technology, change
society, divert politics, basically change everything. As things stand, we have what Emilio – sorry,
Professor Bonetti – called the Principle of Convergence. All roads lead not to
He didn’t enlarge
on the Principle of Convergence, which constituted a complete chapter in the
Report, drawn up by ecologists, economists, logisticians and futurologists.
‘Okay, so the
human race faces an utter catastrophe.
An unavoidable crisis. What does
your “Human Salvation Project” offer to avert it?’
Mark had the grace
to blush, while Martin merely sniggered.
‘I’m sorry, I’m
sorry. We had the publicists create a
really impressive title, which we fondly imagined would catch people’s
attention.’
Nothing wrong with a little ambition, chaps.
Conrad Is Still Angry And Has Found The Reason
You will recall that my travel times back to The Mansion were spectacularly horrid on Monday and Tuesday? Two and a half hours and an hour and fifty minutes respectively.
Well, I have discovered the reason, I noticed it yesteryon and confirmed it this morning. Art!
See that little pink triangle in dead centre? That's pointing to the location of a set of roadworks, that have coned off one of the two lanes and caused a tailback of about a mile on Monday. There is so much traffic heading into Oldham, and coming off the M60 in both directions, that it's thrown a bag of spanners into the machinery, never mind a single one. Travelling into Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell this morning I could espy that they had excavated a great big hole that definitely wasn't going to get filled in by close of business, so I trammed it back to Oldham.
Your Humble Scribe is going to keep his eyes peeled on the bus ride in tomorrow and see if there's any prospect of the roadworks being gone by home-time. You might even get a photo if the stars align. If not, it's back on the tram again. Which is not too bad at 16:05 as it's off-peak and cheaper. The problem then is that you have to rely on First Bus supplying a 409 Rochdale-bound on time. Or at all.
Finally -
I have something of a surfeit of smoked sausage, so I'm going to look up a few Kielbasa recipes to take care of a few. Art!
Solid stuff
And with that it's time to scrape the bristles. Chin chin old fruit!
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