Amen. Once I hired a qualified electrician to install a RCD after the meter to protect the whole house in one go, a few days later, I had some strange problems with the electrics in my house and so I asked my dad who knew a little about electrics to have a look - the electrician had wired live and neutral the wrong way round, bypassing the protection given by the RCD, MCBs and the fuses in all plugs.

My car that has a conventional diesel engine uses electronic injectors. No electricity = no injectors = no fuel = no running. The engine alone has 3 separate computers required to run the engine.

Gasoline/petrol is a powerful solvent. Diesel is not as strong. If you look in the engine of an old diesel that has done high miles without oil changes, you will see tons of crud inside. Put petrol in, all crud gets dissolved, passes through the fuel filter and it's goodnight to expensive common rail injectors.

My previous 2001 Opel Astra had an Isuzu 1.7 litre diesel engine designed in the 80's[1] with a distributor type fuel injection system. It could run fine on a 50% petrol, 50% diesel mix, but would require a new fuel filter before refuelling and no more petrol for a few more tanks after that. Using biodiesel was possible but had to have a filter change every time I filled up the first few times. Running 100% petrol would work but would destroy the engine quickly.

My current 2005 Opel Astra has the exact same engine but with a common rail fuel injector system. If I ever accidentally put petrol in, I'm going to disconnect the battery and forbid anyone from even turning on the ignition as the primary fuel pump in the tank is electric. Biodiesel cannot be used here.

[1] gets 70mpg and emitting 119g/km CO2 before you say it should be junked

Diesel in the UK is a lot more expensive than petrol, that hasn't stopped a huge surge in diesel cars on our roads....

My friend recently brought a second hand family MPV made by Citroen built in 2005 that has a 2.0 litre diesel engine with 4 cylinders & 16 valves giving around 320 horsepower and 500lb.ft torque and it's not even the sporty version!

My first thought was "Awesome! Ferrari developed a car with a gas turbine engine!" Imagine my disappointment when I realised they meant "gasoline"...

Interesting bit about the Skye bridge here in the UK - after ridiculous tolls, the government decided to buy the bridge and abolish the tolls even though they paid many times more than the actual cost of the bridge.

The problem with this car colour counting game is that I just think to go to Autotrader (I'm in the UK) and look at the cars for sale - they show how many cars of each colour is being sold. So:

362,941 cars currently for sale

Black: 75,777
Blue: 65,412
Green: 9,804
Grey: 46,167
Silver: 89,634
White: 23,617
Red: 32,050
and so on.

So that ruined the game for me...

Not exactly. I have a milk bottle in front of me and it says "1.136 litres, 2 pints". I've yet to see a milk bottle to contain exactly 1 litre. Ditto for the other sizes.

I'm a Brit born in the 80s and I don't understand pounds, ounces, feet and inches at all - and barely understand pints but that's only because that's what they serve in the pub. Whenever my parents talk to me using imperial units, I always have to convert them to metric. The only imperial unit I use daily is miles for driving, but even then I often use km - my GPS is set up for km and I think of fuel efficiency in litres per 100km. Also, I'm a skydiver and am forced to use imperial units because it's linked to the aviation regulations. That's pretty much it.

My experience is that anyone born before the 70s think in mainly imperial units, and anyone born afterwards think in mainly metric units, it's related to the metrication in education in the 70s.

It's painfully annoying when people mix units though, my dad was dictating size of wood to me once - "3 inches by 5 inches by 2 metres" "Dad!" "But that's the units the shop sells by!" and he's right. We need to get off our collective butts and either use 100% imperial or 100% metric not this annoying mix of two.

That's not a good comparison. I mean, in the past, you could access the Internet on dial-up modems, coaxial networks and the like. Do you see them around nowadays? No. What you're describing is what is in use today and slightly different to each other such as HTTP is entirely software and Ethernet is entirely hardware. Laptops, desktops, tablets etc are equivalent devices that in theory can do the same thing (watch video, send emails etc).

"Most skydivers are pretty physically fit"

You've not visited my dropzone then, and obviously don't know me!

25%+25%+75% = 125%?

Pumped storage is not a new idea. For example in the UK we've got Dinorwig power station which was built in 1974 in anticipation of all the nuclear power stations that was going to be built. As it didn't happen, Dinorwig was re-purposed to be a peaking power station, and to be used in case the National Grid needed a black start.

Dyson? Regular? Really?

I got a Dyson upright and it died after a year - it constantly got blocked needing disassembling and cleaning once a week. It eventually died by blowing dust out of its exhaust and I gave up with it after 3 hours of trying to find the problem. It couldn't cope with anything more than light dust. That was a heavy maintenance vacuum cleaner. I also hated not having a bag as emptying the cylinder in my wheelie bin would generate a lot of dust. I eventually emptied the cylinder directly into a bag before binning it.

I then got an Henry as cleaners in nearly every commercial premises I've seen use one and I thought "Pretty much all companies use the Henry vac and their cleaning demands are much greater than domestic demands so they should be hardy" so I got one. Cost me £80 ($130) for a HEPA version including 30 free bags. I've abused it heavily, including accidentally knocking it down a flight of stairs, and regularly vacuuming up building rubble. It's now 7 years old and still works fantastic. The design has barely changed in 32 years for a good reason! It got blocked only once which took me 5 minutes to clear. It's missing a couple features I'd like to have, but I'm not complaining.