Test Equipment Anonymous

tggzzz wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2026 6:12 pm Well, well, well. For a while now I have been presuming "the lights will go out", due to any/all of
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People claim I'm too pessimistic; I hope they are right. But I've been to IET talks by the engineers responsible for energy supply, and they confidently state the lights will go out. Interesting questions centre on when and why!

Pessimistic or realistic?

We came within a gnat's whisker of having widespread blackouts last winter, which was fairly mild. A 62/63 winter (not off the cards) would certainly have caused severe problems, misery and deaths.

Energy supply is long term but has recently been decided by here today, gone tomorrow, politicians (who seem to do nicely for themselves, and so are insulated from the consequences) and are mainly concerned with virtue signalling. I have the impression that most of them don't have a grasp of maths or physics to the standard of a bare 'O' Level pass, which with a measure of common sense, is all that's needed to get the big picture, and know what's practical and what's obviously hopeless.

I don't believe this forum should be sullied by political discussions which quickly become rancorous. I don't mean politics in the sense of Con/Lab/Green/Reform/Republican/Democrat etc, but in the broader sense of an argument about the way power and wealth is gained and distributed. In that way I believe we are being palmed off with a political and economic settlement we wouldn't agree to as an honest proposition, but is being imposed under a false prospectus by people who are ideologues, or just don't have much of a clue.

An 81/82 winter would be bad enough The 47 and 63 winters were extreme, but are extremes more likely with climate change? There's a reasonable change this year will see a strong El Nino, and let's not think about reductions in the AMOC

The, ahem, UK "Great and the Good" are pretty clueless about many things. Formal education has often been a low priority for them; IIRC Queen Elizabeth II didn't go to school. The priority has been to learn about how to retain and use power; after all, education can always be purchased when necessary.

Once I visited a trade show in Germany, and went to the Siemens stand. The salesmen stopped paying close attention to me, and there was a man wandering around the stand, but not looking interested and looking distracted. A few minutes later Helmut Kohl appeared on the stand. My immediate thought was there's no way a UK PM would sully themselves by visiting a trade show

Famous example of "The Two Cultures" was the Phillips Hydraulic Computer (a.k.a. MONIAC or Financephalograph), now on display in the Science Museum.

Economists are as much to blame as the politicians who find it convenient to listen to them. Our working lives have been overshadowed (?blighted?) by the Chicago school of economics since the 1970s. Even if its influence is waning, it isn't clear whether we will ever be able to recover from the effects.

tggzzz wrote: ↑Fri May 15, 2026 8:43 am The priority has been to learn about how to retain and use power; after all, education can always be purchased when necessary.

Well, yes. When I was teaching, we would often discuss what changes should be made to the degree we ran. And in making changes, we had to consider what we were trying to achieve for the graduate at the end of it. We found we always came back to a few basic premises:

Primary school: Reading, writing, 'rithmetic.
Secondary school: Learning and regurgitating; very little analysis.
Tertiary education: Changing the way you think; making you question everything. Giving you the tools to question.

Tertiary education is a waste of time for the over-privileged; they might start questioning whether they deserve their privilege.

I was interested to see the Phillips hydraulic computer.

To secondary education, I'd add "learning how to learn". That is, of course, anathema to those who want the masses to simply follow the path chosen for them.

As for QE II, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were educated at home like many girls from wealthy families at that time speaks for itself - and avoids raising the question of "why?".

As for a hydraulic computer, 40 years ago I recommended against replacing hydraulic logic with a microcomputer. Difficult when the environment involved BASEEFA and ATEX