John Bickerton

@AndyatAuto We kill 3 people each day on Britain's roads. This is much better than it used to be, so we accept it. There's no other technology which is this dangerous, or needs so little qualifications. A little tech to oversee the people on the motorway who are distracted is a good thing.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are electronic, sensor-based technologies that are designed to increase vehicle safety and improve the driving experience by reducing human error. Using cameras, radar, LiDAR, and ultrasonic sensors, these systems monitor surroundings for hazards, providing alerts or taking automatic corrective action, such as emergency braking or steering assistance. Today my car performed a phantom emergency stop, which is not uncommon. The car industry has a love/hate with this technology which is largely mandated on them. It adds cost and weight and reduces reliability; on the other hand it’s part of the roadmap to autonomous cars. I’m interested in your view point - should we?

@thomasforth How do we contain the response to "when will prices come back down again?", because that's not how inflation works.

Tea is cheap. And so is lard. Retvrn. Back Britain. 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧

Beautiful.

Five career tips for mechanical engineers: 1) If it sounds too good to be true, 98% of the time, it is, thousands of clever people spent their lives researching how things are now, incrementally. Success is almost entirely by small steps, and not whacky tricks. 2) We are all VERY stupid, drop your ego, nobody is more despised in an engineering firm than the loud mouth who everyone on the shop floor knows is full of s**t. All you have to be is smarter than you were yesterday, and be happy to throw your calculations in front of everyone for scrutiny. 3) I do not really like the "university" idea in terms of how it has become thought of, getting your bachelors, masters or doctorate is just the start. I can tell you that in nearly every major project I do, I spend sometimes weeks reading the work of other people before I decide I know what to do. Almost never, unless it is a very trivial problem, do I say, "oh I have a degree I know what to do". Every day for the rest of your life is "literature review day". Never does it end, and if you step off this elevator, you can become so lost you may never get back on it again. 4) If you have a very difficult disagreement at work, its up to you to prove you are correct with data and numbers. Even if you KNOW you are right, you must do the work to prove it to everyone else, being right is only the first part of the job, persuading everyone else that your idea is the best path forward is the next part, and if you really CANT prove it, you may have to accept that being right within the confines of your own mind is not sufficient proof in the real world. In other words, if someone else has an inferior idea to you, but explains it with greater clarity, you deserved to lose. 5) If you spend one month, deeply intensively researching ONE specific technical problem, with all your effort, you will find that you graduate to the pantheon of mechanical engineering, where you and a select band of fellow devotees can all gather and agree you still don't know the answer. All you have to do is realise that your worst answer is now better than 99% of everyone else`s answer. You are now to those people who didn't spend that month researching the topic, an "expert". Which is just someone who is wrong to a smaller degree than most people on one specific question. If you can do all these things for years, and work hard, people will start asking YOU for advice, and you will need to remember that "working hard worked", and all the clever nice things people ever said about you, were because YOU worked hard, and never once stopped reading.

@PookyD81 @harrym_vids It's been dry, but regardless of the time or season it's not a Harry's video unless you grind a sample to test the moisture and then express disappointment at the weather. Even if you're just growing on some lamb. 😆

Doing a @harrym_vids impression by surveying the wheat with dog in tow

@creatingdesire - it's International Ray Day, many happy returns to the king of desire. Sorry about the misprint thing with your age on the bus, I'll speak to my livery guy and reset it to a more believable number 🎉🎂🎁🎈🎉

@5054magazine Stress finds the easiest route out, so often the answer is to weaken other bits rather than strengthen the problem area. Interesting shot 👏

@johnbickerton Very good. Snap taken by the engineering student who was developing the monocoque as his degree project. Lots of stress in the corners of the toe board according to his models. The rear pontoons acting as giant levers?

Proper scoop. What's this? Pic may have been taken on a Saturday....

@aohereng They'll fit the same - ensure the bush matches the shock, not the axle. You may need to remove the steel bush cups on the axle, they're only spot welded. Whether the damping is the same is anybody's guess, no published numbers for damping rates for factory or aftermarket parts.

Land Rover folks. Are the shock absorbers on a 90 ( pre-defender ) the same as a defender 90 ? Thanks.

@LUDENClassics Is that a Peerless?

Give me the classics over a modern Lamborghini any day

@Doritos my 7yo has been thinking about square crisps, and he's obsessed with Minecraft. He'd like to know what happens if he gets a square Dorito but it's broken into two triangles?

Intermittent but green, clean power is cheap power. Storage is our next big hurdle.

@thomasforth I was paying north of that (via a broker) to run several bus depots, and I've a friend with an SME in an industrial unit who pays similar.

@johnbickerton Where do you get 40p/kWh from? Never known any company pay anything near that. This is where it takes the data from if you let it access the internet. gov.uk/government/sta…

I downloaded the new Deepseek model to run locally, gave it the Games Workshop annual report, and asked it, using reasonable assumptions, to estimate the percentage of the companies revenue that was spent on industrial electricity.

@thomasforth But would the economist have used the average domestic electricity price, or a more reasonable 40-55p/kWh that industrial premises tend to incur? Some big tolerances in these calcs.

I'd be very impressed by either answer from an economist who worked with me, or if I'd done it myself. It's interesting that they're very slightly different, but I did ask a very slightly different question.

@kavoszek could you drop me a message please, ref the bus fire you posted about last week?

@AndyRCowell There was a fresh coat going down when I arrived home last night...

Fresh snow & sunshine. Only one way to experience the Peak District at its finest, a round trip from Derby via Wirksworth/Ashbourne/Buxton & Bakewell.

@Only9built When the trailer doesn't appear in the mirror you'd hoped to see it, you start wondering if the whole road is 18 metres wide...

@johnbickerton sounds lively..

Rearrange into a well known phrase.. "This soldiers of f*ck a game for."

Tomorrow it's cheaper to heat your home with electricity than gas, even without a battery or heat pump. As we grow our renewables, we'll have greater capability but more cheaper, greener electricity 🌲🌍

A day out for an engineering consultant - a tray of tools (inc hammer obvs), an EV charging cable, a hi-vis and a shirt in the car.