Dave,

You were not alone with the Bic ball point.

We had the same set up - you were issued one of those yellow Bics to start with and when it ran out you had to hand it in to get another one. Only trouble was everyone had an identical pen to start with but, inevitably, someone ended up with two and another without. I will steal yours before you steal mine!.

One had to requisition everything; paper, pens, pencils - the lot.
If one was caught without a requisition form to requisition more requisition forms you were stuffed.

It took a long while for the powers to realise that 'flooding the market' was cheaper in the long run.

Geoff (YM)

Completely "Dickensian"! I couldn't believe it, Geoff!
Rgds.
Dave

That was the era when I started work. Perhaps not quite 'Dickensian' but certainly the latter end of the era.
I started in the Head Office and everyone was obliged to wear a suit. You could take your coat off but if you fronted the Head of Branch one must wear a coat.
Long, long time before shorts were allowed but the wheel has turned and shorts are no longer allowed outdoors - long pants, long sleeves, crash hats and those brim thingys that attach to them.
Geoff (YM)

In my middle school, we couldn´t take our blazers off unless it was >26 C and the Headmaster ordered it! We were also checked for hair 2" above your shirt collar, etc. etc.! Good training for J&A setup.
Rgds.
Dave

During the 60's I let my hair grow long (it was the in thing pretty much) and it stayed that way for many years.

My old man used to embarrass me about it. He was a World War Two infantry man in the Eighth Army and having crossed North Africa, gone up through Sicily and Italy he was wounded out as they moved North when Monte Cassini fell.

.... and the way he embarrassed me ? ...... He let his hair grow even longer !! (He was a bit mad, but being married to a mad Irish woman does that I think :D )

Not sure the stock exchange would accept tattoos 'on the floor', Bob.

Pa had a dragon on one arm and a heart with ribbon done 'Patsy' on the other. Patsy because it was a shortening of Ma's given name that he knew would annoy her the most!

Here he is (haven't one handy showing the tattoos):

One Reinsurer won't employ people with visible tattoos!
Rgds.
Dave

A tattoo in my case was the result of five pints of Double Diamond. Came back from my first trip to sea at 19 years old and I thought I was Long John Silver. :p

I had it done in that most nautical of cities ... Stoke on Trent .. :sweat:

I have two tattoos: An "M" on each bum cheek.

Depending whether I am on my front or back, it spells "MOM" or "WOW"!!

I suppose I should also have an M for MIMCO and a D for the Diamond D however I think my last berth's BS might have been misconstrued regardless of gluteal siting.

I did the same. If my old man had done that then, I would have said "far out!".

Some days just don't go according to plan ..... :brain:

Wasn't quite sure where to put this .. a news item.

Hate to see a ship in a fix like this ... :confused:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur...f-man-58342316

Wind up your Groan Meter Bob, this ones for you.

How did Vikings communicate over long distance?
NORSE CODE.

I hear that the crew are confined onboard because the Island welcomes only careful drivers.

Using sophisticated extrapolation techniques (a straight edge and AIS plot) it would appear that her steady course at 0021 would have taken her exactly to where she now finds herself.

Meanwhile more than 240,000,000 miles away, the second attempt got the core .... :)

The clarity of this pix is just astounding ....

And mad motorcyclists who ride their machines TTterribly fast.

This video is amazing too!


https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZEyAs3NWH4A

That's the bit I find really astounding. Getting those pix back to Earth given the difficulties of communications in terms of choice of routes and data rates.

Bashing a Morse key in the Pacific with a hope and a prayer to get Portishead to answer seems a bit trivial in comparison. :supercool:

On the subject of data links - Go back to the 60s, 70s.
Sporting events, not even the other side of the world, just the other side of the continent.
The pictures were as good as you could get with 405 lines interlaced.
The commentary on the other hand sounded like the commentator was sucking a lolly with his head in a bucket and the mike on the other side of a gymnasium.
Maybe they used ALL the bandwidth to get the pictures.

I have heard that a picture such as the one Bob put is is actually, maybe, thousands of tiny pictures. These are then assembled by a computer, with the error detection code and considerable AI components. BTW, they are not even transmitted in colour (grayscale) but are colourized by the programme based on instrument data from the surface!

While I am not au fait with the actual system used, something I have seen and been able to gather important information from are the scanning lasers to produce a "cloud" 3D model. The "model" is not physically comprised of faces, vertices, chamfers, fillets, etc. like I used to make in Autocad in order to produce moulds for, amongst other thing, Colgate toothbrushes, telephones or shampoo bottles, but is instead a collection of georeferenced points, think of millions of surveyors marks.

Rgds.
Dave

'... The commentary on the other hand sounded like the commentator was sucking a lolly with his head in a bucket and the mike on the other side of a gymnasium. ... '

Sounds like many of the (mostly female) newsreaders here in Melbourne. :cloud:

Its from Kabul. A piece of ceramic body armour with a NATO 5.56 round through it.

Some folk would have put a sheet of the Daily Mirror under the rock to collect all that dust from the drill.

That would be something if two green claw like hands with a dust pan and brush appeared from the side of the shot and cleaned up the dust. !!

:eek:

I can just remember the moon landing in 1969 (I was eight). I watched it on a 12" B&W Zenith TV, the only set in the house! How things have changed...



Makko has it just about right with how the pictures are transmitted and assembled.
Much as I love film, film can't do this.

Football anyone ? (soccer to our colonial cousins).

They didn't try golf first?

Is this the new home of Yeovil Town?

I've played on similar pitches, perhaps not quite as bad. Many teams in Antrim League Division 5 did not have perfect pitches and the local farmer usually had grazing rights on non matchdays, and you got changed behind the clump of bushes beside the goalposts. And you had a bath when you got home. Showers weren't invented in the mid 60's.
God times were hard.

You had a bath ????

LUXURY !!

God that bring back memories, I remember placing the ball on the penalty spot that was a cow pat :shock:

maybe we even played with each other :hippy: Dear God what am I saying? :jester:

Meanwhile, back on Mars:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSIwnOKJXuw

Fixing a wobbly helicopter from nearly a quarter of a million miles away. That's quite a ground crew ... :)

Helicopters fly because earth hates them.

If palm trees were meant to fly god would never have given us the balloon.

I'm the new guy, probably not my place to correct.
The nearest approach to Mars is 54.6 million kliks - 33 & 3/4 million miles.
The farthest distance is 410 million kliks - 250 & 5/8 million miles.
Average is 225 million kliks - 140 & 5/8 million miles. It's the moon that's roughly a quarter million miles.


I can recalibrate these distances to light-seconds should you wish. I gotta nice graphing calculator here. I maybe understand 12% of it's capabilities.
Never flown in a helicopter, never will. They're unnatural, unaerodynamic, unmechanical creations.

Different distance from Cornwall...

You're right, I got my zeroes mixed up. Mars is nearly 250,000,000 miles away at the moment. It's on the other side of the Sun.

Hence the delays in data comms.