Early attempts to prove an intra-city monorail capacity, as an alternative to Elon Musk’s vision of a managed urban traffic solution offered through his Boring Company, proved to be inadequate in dealing with the weight of the average SUV combined with the weight of its’ average American driver.
It had been two days since someone had stolen Yusef’s taxi from outside his apartment, and without a lot more cash than he could lay hands on there was no chance of him renting a replacement. Fortunately his grandfather had recently died and left his favourite grandson an old motorcycle and a roomful of mouldering furniture; after a blinding epiphany and with the aid of a roll of duct tape Yusef was mobile and back in business within hours.
In retrospect starting on his self-build project for the new family home in November was probably a mistake, but George wasn’t going to let the weather stop him. His pride in coming-up with a solution to the delay in finishing the family bathroom was short-lived when his wife, after seeing him trialling the “facilities”, took the kids and left for an extended visit with her mother in Florida.
Needs must…
For months, curators at a museum at Manchester in the UK have been wondering why an ancient Egyptian statue in a sealed display cabinet had been rotating on its glass shelf, without any outside assistance.
As is usual with anything old, Egyptian & vaguely related to the dead, there were claims that it was cursed by an Egyptian god, or that the spirit of its owner had entered the statue, causing it to shudder. Others put forward more expansive explanations, suggesting that an alien-generated magnetic field was behind the statue’s movements (amongst other things).
Prosaically, a British engineer has now solved the riddle, discovering that tiny vibrations from passing traffic & footsteps from passersby & museum visitors were causing the 3,800-year-old stone figure to rotate.
“The statue was spinning due to vibration of the display case,” a spokesman for the museum said yesterday. “We installed an accelerometer & found that vibrations from both road traffic & footsteps outside & within the museum, were the cause.”
It seems that the 25 cm statue was off-balance & especially susceptible to vibrations.
“With an object of such hard material on a glass shelf, the level of friction between the two materials is very low. It doesn’t take a lot to make it move,” the spokesman said.
The statue, of a man called Neb-Senu, was an offering to Osiris, ancient Egyptian god of the dead & ruler of the underworld.
I shall sleep easier now.
With kind permission from Randy Glasbergen.
ThursdayAgain 
You must be logged in to post a comment.