Exactly – that’s the limit for a Centaurus Sea Fury. Nothing more than that. It gets progressively (exponentially) harder as you go faster – where it becomes ‘very hard indeed’ is entirely subjective. Designers tend to identify the maximum theoretical speed of their design as the speed which is ‘very hard’ to exceed- c.f. Lockheed and all the nonsense at the time about the P-38 hitting some aerial speed limit at a lot less than 520mph level speed (in fact it was an aerodynamic oversight that Lockheed never publicly admitted to) Those drag curves are a moveable feast – including those defined by prop design.

Paul. You applaud someone bringing a subject up when they agree with your world view, then say it’s not something you care about when someone who doesn’t agree with your world view speaks. That says more about you than the subject.

What is a shame is how blinkered intelligent people can be – especially when it comes to nationhood.

Regarding self-governence – if you or anyone can point to how you have been oppressed or undemocratically put upon by anyone outside of our own independently acting Government then ‘remoaners’ would accept it. But no-one really has. So all that is left is a rational analysis of pros and cons. Eventually only those who’s nationalism is stronger than their willingness to approach the subject with brain engaged will be left in the Brexit camp. We are not there yet.. plenty of smart Brexiters are still thinking about it.

You missed my point. Remoaners want to be wrong for the sake of our economy – something that does affect our everyday lives in a way that the humdrum regulations necessary to maintain a shared trading block and business community do not.

Found it. Oxford Living Dictionary.

Like many perjoratives, it isn’t recognised by the target but those who use it have a shared idea of what they mean by it. I am sure it’s not fair.

To explain ‘little Englander’ – it’s someone who thinks the thing they are most proud of is much bigger than it really is.

Yes, but.. . what am I or any other remoaner denying? The glorious future laid before us now?

John, you clearly know nothing about our research-centred HEI’s. They are international institutions that provide research positions to people largely regardless of the nation in which they recieved their education up to that point. So your tedious repetition of your untruth that we are at the bottom of an OECD education table is irrelevant. And you and I and anyone else who cared about this silly claim when you first made it know that we are only bottom of any table if you put the bar for inclusion in the table just below the UK score.

Paul, they do. The high level of funding is provided through specific programmes which divide into schemes and calls. These are unweildy and complex and a system that just about works to get the money to the right places and people has been arrived at only recently. It can not be re-invented instantly to channel treasury money the same way, even if the will was there to do so.

I have better things to talk about. But you might be surprised at the rather good reaction the oversized EU sticker on my van gets. French people tell me, unfairly perhaps, that leavers are stupid, I have nothing to add to that opinion, never mind repeat ad nauseum. Brexiters heads are getting buried deeper and deeper into the sand. A little bit of outside perspective only highlights this.

My company, among lots of other things, writes software that helps researchers find funding. Without funding a researcher cannot work. He or she has to eat, live somewhere etc. There is indeed no magic money tree for any of this. There is currently quite a lot of the necessary money available in the UK and a significant proportion of it is from the EU. It has nothing to do with anyone speaking English, and everything to do with the quality of our institutions combining with the level of funding sources. Which we are about to reduce. Stupid? As I say, I have nothing to add when a local says that. Except that maybe plenty of smart people voted leave as well.

It doesn’t make leaving many such complex yet co-operative systems of mutual dependency and benefit for some vague notion of national self-determination any less apparently silly to foreign people. What can I say? Just reporting opinions.

Not calling anyone stupid personally, so can you lay off the personals please?

By the way I am sitting outside a French farmhouse with a view of the Pyrenees in tbe moonlight. The locals just think the English are a bit more stupid than they thought before.