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alan2here: Well done, well done, and unexpected effect, too! I presume they were all free to turn, none fixed? I had only two of the magnets I needed to hand for my build, thinking I had others tucked away somewhere.After a lot of searching I remembered I had given the others away to a young experimenter fifteen years ago. Now if I can source some more....... (commercially, magnets of a similar type cost about £30-£40 each!) Silly thought...If each magnet "twitched" faster than the previous, they would induce a higher voltage in an adjacent coil, down the line. Relatively high voltage eventually produced from a slow moving input with no mechanical gearing, just magnetic gearing. Did not expect that.

And just what made you think such a world shaking event would not be political? What else but the political machine would have the power and control to either hush it up or publicise it. Difficult to imagine it happening in a non-political vacuum. Did you not know that all our politicians are in fact alens. They do not take kindly to illegal aliens from our our own planet, let alone extraterrestrial ones

Try this: http://www.fieldlines.com/. If you cant find anything or anyone to help you there, or the related sites, you are searching for the impossible.

I am having some quiet laughs imagining that they land in, say Cuba, Somalia Lbya, Iran or North Korea. The apoplectic reaction of Americans would be awesome to behold. The aliens would probably be deemed savage and undemocratic for failing to land in "the right place", and be quietly zapped by the black ops boys to save humanity.

........And you think that terrorism is justifiable in support of animal rights.

Take a long cocktail, drink without first removing stick. This, according to a continental drinking joke will certainly give you the "blue eye", but perhaps with also some red blotches.

But then why have I got only one mouth, one anus and one ...errr.. you know what. One is symmetrical too, you know, as long as it is in the middle. Might be fun with two of the other things

A line of magnets was, I seem to remember, the first case to be considered. As to friction, by using deliberately constricted bearings individual magnet friction could easily be introduced as a deliberate experimental variable, and the line of magnets kept rather short. I think straight lines/circles and friction are red herrings that do not affect the principles under consideration.

Both Aardvark and I proudly admit it. So if two of us admit it, and most dont, that is an awful lot of europhobes under the bed. Be afraid, Brussels, we are on your case!

Both Aardvark and I proudly admit it. So if two of us admit it, and moat dont, that is an awful lot of europhobes under the bed. Be afraid, Brussels, we are on your case!

She is dumb enough to be, apparently, an expert in the activity that presumably brought the big brains into existence. Or were they conceived asexually? That would be really brainy.

Wow, that is really difficult. Even Pythagoras was stumped...or was he?

Since when has staunch nationalist become a sneering term of logical dismissal? You seem to use it as freely as you would Nazi, Fascist, and even fundamentalist. Until you tear up your passport and disown your own country, you are one too.

When talking to a fully veiled Moslem woman, you put a sack over you head to show equality. (I can think of more than a few non-moslem women who should, at least in public, be fully veiled to avoid frightening children and horses).

I agree in principle with Severian. There are many more examples that annoy me. As originally envisaged and sold, it was a good thing. It has evolved into a bad thing. It is now a career oportunity for bureaucratic jobsworths. I have the gut feeling that it is evolving into a control and command system. Was that not communism? The old unreconstructed left wingers and fellow travellers I have known were all in favour of the European union, as they saw it as essentially an anti-capitalist system. Certainly the restrictive measures pouring out of Brussels dont in practice make trade any easier, even though their own publicity strives to say the opposite. Since when did an army of entrenched penpushers understand the real needs of enterprise? By the way, the latest edict is that it will be illegal to make any references to systems other than metric. This will please some, but guess who is making the biggest protest? The U.S. because it will be inconvenient and costly for their industry. So for once I say "Go, U.S.A.!

I reckon it is much simpler than all the above: Without the septum, when you inhaled, your nose would close, like a flap-valve: when you breathed out, it would make a noise like a whoopy cushion. Why two nasal orifices? Olefactory focussing and backup facility of course, so you can tell who has farted, and when I am digitally unclogging one nostril, I can still breathe through the other. Are there not some animals, seals and camels for example, that can open and close their nasal flaps at will?

double post, sorry.

IMM: You always argue you points well (and at great length, yawn) and at last you have said something with which I agree. Perhaps a compromise is in the wind. Would the statement "Not all purposes to which animal testing is put are worth the lives and health of the test animals." find some grudging favour with you? As regards cosmetics, may I presume you are now as freshfaced and cosmetic-free as the day you were born?

That was me. I said that because the move towards an oligarchic megalith/monolith is not obvious to many people (possibly because they dont understand what it means). It seems to be a bureaucratic monster with the thinnest of democratic veneer on it sufficient to fool enough people for as long as it takes until it is too late to reverse out of it. Handcuffed forever to the Napoleonic dream. Just how democratic was that? It wont be as easy to banish the new monster to the Isle Of Elba.

[quote=Dak; why not? Because as any woman will tell you, and luckily for many men, biggest is seldom best.

You also pack more power within a reduced effective blade operating diameter. Fixedwing conventional aircraft also used contra-rotating props for the same purpose. Not twice as efficient, but a useful compromise nonetheless. Consider that the "Jolly green giant" also employs counter-rotating rotors, they just dont share the same shaft.

Agree. And was not the original america a continent full of statists, fighting local civil wars, and was it not necessary to to employ ethnic cleansing to rid the continent of the troublesome original inhabitants? And then a murderous country-wide civil war was necessary to shoehorn all those round pegs into a federal square hole. The EU is an entirely different animal, although there does seem to be a hidden agenda moving towards european federalism. This creeping federalism is why I am a Europhobe. Free trade? Yes. Reduction of the threat of another war? Yes. The creation of a monolithic european superstate? No thanks.

I had the impresion, perhaps wrongly, that a big criticism of the experiment that gave rise to this thread lay in the aparatus that measured total input power against output, and whether this arrangement itself gave rise to error. If there is a mysterious unknown force at work, and its effect is minimal, there must be no doubt at all concerning input/output measurement. Personally,I would be convinced only if as input, something as simple as a mechanical constant torque device provided input, and a similar device showed output. For example a descending weight on a string around a drum for input, and a similar drum/string/weight as output. But then left to itself, the system would, surely, either hang in equilibrium, or drive in either direction depending on weight differential. There is nothing in a string of magnets that has an inherent quality of directionality, surely, unless perhaps we consider what to me is the unresolved question of whether the forces of attraction are greater than the forces of repulsion perhaps.

The spaghetti breaking illustrated shows only single sticks. When breaking a handful of long spag in half to fit my economy saucepan, 95% break into 2 pieces. By the laws of chance, one must, after many such operations, break as nearly exactly in half as makes no difference. The moisture content also affects snapping behaviour, as does speed. I therefore cry flawed and incomplete experiment, and skewed results. Did the research budget run out, or was there something interesting to watch on the telly instead? I shall, as with my spag, use a generous sprinkle of salt when considering his other work.