If you can’t see the humour in a Sir Jeremy Clarkson type exaggeration…

Fair comment…..but I think one-or-two of us around here find it difficult to tell when you are joking! 🙂

Yes, the subject no political party, even those in opposition, dare mention!

Maybe we should reserve judgement until paramedics are working to save the life of one our own children and we ourselves have behaved in a more rational manner.

The vast majority of the population of the Earth would agree that ‘praying’ at that moment would be a good idea.

This woman did all she could to assure that the maximum number of people were praying for her son…

…is that so irrational?

From the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8422978.stm

“A Eurostar spokeswoman said: ‘We have managed to get 500 passengers on to a Javelin high-speed train to Dover Priory and from there we bussed then on to a ferry to take them on to Paris and Brussels.

They were the most vulnerable people, who needed to get back home to France and Belgium.’

No arrangements were in place for Britons stuck in France, she added.”

Are there no ‘vulnerable’ Britons then? :confused:

That involves brains and money :rolleyes: in the UK they do not synchronize :diablo:

…or in France; the locomotives are based on the TGV design I believe.

It should have been factored into the design and apparently was as this is the first year that there have been problems with the Eurostar trains and it is surely not the first that temperatures in England have been between -2°C and -8°C in the winter!

Logically, something else must have changed (other than the weather) to cause the problems this year; any ideas?

Couldn’t they just be attached to ‘bungs’ intended to keep the salty air (or water!) out; the firing-ports in the wings being sealed in the traditional way?

The actual problem is quite simple; how long does it take an object to cool from one temperature 35°C to another 30°C.

(I can’t remember the exact numbers but I’m not going to sit through that again, sorry if I get them wrong but the principal still holds.)

The problem is complicated by the fact that an object cools at a different speed depending on how hot it is relative to its surroundings (in this case 20°C).

So as the object cools the speed that it cools changes too (rate-of-change) so the object will cool faster between 40°C and 35°C than it will between 35°C and 30°C.

Now if we know how long it takes for the object to cool between 40°C and 35°C, in this case 10 minutes, it is possible to calculate how long it will take to cool between 35°C and 30°C.

This is possible because nothing else about the object has changed, such as its mass or its surface area, so these things are constant (and are governed by the expression KA in the example).

The lecturer uses two methods to solve the problem, the first uses an average rate-of-change to get an answer (14 minutes), the second uses a more accurate method that uses calculus to get the answer (14.096 minutes, IIRC).

I would use the first method…..because I ******* hate calculus! 😡

Made perfect sense to me…..and his accent is easier to understand that one of my Thermodynamics lecturers, who was Korean. 😀