I'm left handed and right-eyed, but my left, non dominant eye has better vision. If I have my glasses with me I shoot light rifles and those with shaped grips right handed and heavier guns left handed. Without my glasses I always shoot left handed. I started left handed and then switched to this when I realised how much better I was using my dominant eye. I can cope with the bolt being on the right but shaped grips are just a pain in the backside. I tend to prefer Martini action as they're usually completely ambidextrous.

I'm left-handed and British, I drive a manual car and change gear with my left hand. If I've got only one hand on the wheel it's usually my right but I'm cool with both. I've driven the occasional left-hand drive car and after half an hour or so I'm used to reaching on my right for the gear stick, likewise on tractors with the stick in the middle. I don't think it makes a lot of difference.

What I find hardest to get used to is the position of the indicators (turn signals) when I change between cars. The majority (but far from all) of cars on the road in the UK seem to have them on the left and the wipers on the right, I drive an older british-made car with indicators on the right and wipers on the dash and I get that one wrong more often than anything else. The other one is strangely enough the throttle travel, after driving a friends car for a while I get in mine and think it's gutless and underpowered, right until I realise/remember there's a full two inches more travel on the pedal :-)

I like the digital photo frame idea for playing videos. Cheaper, less complicated and smaller than a laptop. I really wouldn't worry about powering it, throw the original brick in the box anyway but if we can't manage to provide a 12V dc supply in 25 years time we've got bigger problems.

Of course for storing video really long time put it on film and use the technicolour process - three monochrome prints will last far longer than a single colour print.

Having just spotted this post: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2980517&cid=40664271 which links here: http://lightsailenergy.com/tech.html I've realised someone's found a way to make it nearly isothermal.

It's actually a pretty good idea, it uses the latent heat of evaporation of water mixed with the air to store the thermal energy

If you can make it truly isothermal then your efficiency is as good as the adiabatic method but that's even more difficult to do. If you go isothermal then you deliberately cool the air as you're compressing it, allowing you to store a greater amount of air in the same volume for a given pressure. Imagine vast heat exchangers dumping that extra heat into the environment. But to re-gain that energy you have to expand it isothermally as well, similarly large heat exchangers pulling the heat back in from the environment. The whole thing runs at constant temperature and, in the ideal case, without thermodynamic losses.

Unfortunately isothermal processes tend to be slow to give the temperatures time to equalise which isn't good for power. It's also hard to expand air isothermally when you want that expansion to happen in a turbine, right where it's a pain in the backside to put a huge heat exchanger.

Accepted it's not a true transmission in the sense of a diesel-electric locomotive because there is energy storage, but every Joule that makes it to the wheels came from the petrol.

I suppose I was thinking more of a series-hybrid where the torque/rpm matching to the wheels is a function of the electric drive rather than the more typical parallel design of most production hybrids today where the motor and engine share a mechanical transmission. The former has big advantages in terms of being able to keep the engine in it's optimum rpm for maximum efficiency (or power, emissions, or any other parameter that is easier to optimise under constant rpm conditions).

More like IC with an electric transmission. Unless it's a plug-in hybrid of course.

Silver solder isn't much better in terms of heavy metal content. The good stuff that flows well and makes nice joints has got Cadmium in it. Safe so long as you don't grossly overheat it but another target for ROHS. In fact I suspect there are many other metals that might make good solders but are no better than lead in terms of heavy metal toxicity. And yes that should have been Pb-free as opposed to free from peanut butter or Phosphorus-Boron.

I'll produce prettier joins than I see in my OEM equipment - but only because I'll use real solder (with lead in) and the OEMs don't any more.

You don't need to re-encrypt the drive every time the key changes, you simply re-encrypt the file containing the randomly generated key for the drive.

This is a much better use for tilting trains. Camber the track such that the trains don't need to tilt at their design speed but if the train has to run much slower on that track then they can tilt the opposite direction and make things more comfortable for the passengers.

My grandfather did this for several years back in the 1970s, except it was two second hand non-deep-cycle car batteries. Enough for lighting but not a great deal else.

Nuclear reactors have been used in space before, the soviets used them in some radar satellites. The shielding isn't really a problem once it's in space so a reactor could be designed with just enough shielding to contain the initial radioactivity of the fuel without worrying about shielding the much higher radiation levels once the reactor is operating. The shielding that it does have could also be jettisoned fairly early on in the mission.

I will agree however that RTGs are much more reliable and as such are desirable for deep space missions where the power requirements are not too high.

I remember reading in some sci fi book about a vault that was sealed by attaching a chunk of a long-lived radioisotope to the back of a tight fitting steel door such that the heat released caused the door to expand and jam tightly into the frame. The idea was that it could only be opened by a fairly advanced civilisation that was capable of artificial refrigeration, plus of course able to recognise what was needed. I always found that an intriguing idea although anyone sufficiently determined could probably get in anyway

Don't suppose anyone knows what book that was? I've been trying to find it for years now.

Me too, I also search my pockets for my phone whilst talking to someone on it.