pigsty

This, like other demographic factors such as age and even occupation, is based on actuarial data. Basically, they know whether women in general are more likely to cause payouts than men, whether young drivers are more likely than middle-aged, and whether rock stars are more likely than vets. The result is that every man, every young driver and every rock star pays more on average than every woman, middle-aged driver and vet. And they would, of course, describe this as your other half's insurance being cheaper. They don't know drivers' personal circumstances, except for previous claims and motoring convictions, so how many goes you needed for your driving test, or how many times you've wound up another driver and got away with it, don't figure. You could, I suppose, volunteer that information, just to see what it does to your other half's premiums. And to see if she thanks you. Or you could say you're female next time you renew ... Oddly enough I think this is one of the few aspects of insurance that's reasonable. It's hard to see on what other basis they could set up the starting point for working out everyone's premiums. There are millions of drivers to insure, so going into everyone's fine detail to give them a customised quote would probably end up more expensive for everyone. On the other hand: you pay premiums; you suck it up and pay more when they tell you Oh, it's awful, we have to put prices up; then you make a claim and they make you pay still more. They do it to recover what they paid out on your claim - which will be a lot less than you've paid them so far. So, basically, what all those premiums bought you wasn't the cost of the repairs, or whatever. They got you nothing but the right to put in a claim and be charged more in future. Hence: scam. It's not just cars, either. My gas service price has just gone up because I needed a new control box. All the premiums I've paid them so far could have bought the thing twenty times over, but I still have to pay more. At least with a car there's a chance that you could smash the thing up completely and cost the insurance so much that you end up ahead. Hardly likely with your central heating, and they wouldn't cover it even if you could.

"Mobile Fires Platform"? Isn't that a big long ladder on the back of a lorry?

I think you may have got someone on the other end of the line who was making up any old twaddle, just so they could avoid saying "It's because insurance is a ruddy great scam and nothing will stop us taking every opportunity we can to take your money off you." That, and nothing else, is every insurance company's only "corporate vision". And the only thing that drives the treatment of specific types of insured item is the amount of money they've had to pay out on them in the past - they always jack up their customers' premiums to make sure they end up, overall, not losing a penny. This is why I didn't bother to claim when some twerp in a lorry removed my wing mirror last month. He'd shot away before I could get as much as the name of the firm off the back doors, so it was going to be my policy I'd claim on. Even at the price of a replacement (another scam) the effect of my excess and increased premiums would have cost me the same in no more than a couple of years. Why bother? Well done for getting much lower premiums off someone else. Bet they don't last, though, now that they've got you and they don't feel any need to reward your loyalty.

Chaps, could we have just one live question at a time, please? Right now I have no idea which the current question is.

Okay, here's something unhelpful. I've just found a photo of a Sikorsky S-40. It has fairings on all four engines, and no cowlings or Townend rings - nothing at all to muck up the passage of air past the cylinder heads. And the S-38 before it had the same set-up. Both had Pratt & Whitney engines, so it can't be something odd about Wrights. Just what is going on?

My team's just lost again - four-one down on aggregate. I wonder if they'd play better on grass?

So would I, if my fingers had been doing what they were told ...

It's high summer (judging from the greenery) and near noon (judging from the length of the shadows) and the camera is pointing roughly north-west (judging from the angle of the shadows). There's just fields in the background, and a low hill. This all suggests it's not far from the point where the two runways cross. Exactly where will be tricky, because that picture is nearly 60 years old and there's been a lot of new tarmac laid since then. TSR.2 was 89 feet long. The nose is just about over the red marking and the tail a little inside it, I think, though the rear of the arc is indistinct. Say about a hundred feet?

Bang on, I'd say. You really have to be picking nits to spot the slight difference in angle between the 7 and the 4.

Looking at a few images of WG774, while it's true that the whole serial ought to be inside the elevator actuator, it's not as far in or as small as that placement diagram suggests. And as that has at least five differences from the panel line layout on the plastic you've shown (and that's just the bit that we can see!) I wonder if the diagram is more wrong than the decal. There's still something wrong with the spacing: the W and G are a bit too far apart, and you could almost slip a 1 between the second 7 and the 4. So maybe you can salvage it by cutting the decal apart and kerning it more accurately.

Many airshow displays, even now, put absolutely anything in front of any aircraft, just to be impressive. Actually being able to use them is secondary. The first picture you put up has a lot of stuff on the LH side that seems to be arranged in front of something off-frame, and it's quite possible that it was a generic BAC display where not much of the weaponry was associated specifically with either aircraft.

No, it would need a generator on the front end, and the other end wouldn't be pointed. Plus, can you imagine flying a Lightning and actually giving your fuel to someone else? D may be some sort of machine gun in a pod. That dark thing on the front looks like a protruding muzzle.

A, B and D I'm not sure, but C looks like a practice bomb carrier.

Plus, any term with a dotted line under it has a link to a definition: simply pause the cursor over it and the definition will appear. Some are a bit of a surprise - you might get some interesting ideas for your Annual General Meeting - but they're helpful.

A husband and wife are trying to decide what the most painful thing in the world is. "It's obvious," she says. "Everyone knows it's childbirth." "Nah," her husband replies. "A kick in the fork is much worse." "How d'you work that out, then?" "Well, no matter what happens, a couple of years after giving birth, a lot of women say Ooh, I'd really like another little one." "So?" "Well, you never hear a man saying Ooh, I'd really like another kick in the fork, do you?"

I thought this rang a bell ... Polikarpov I-15s often had the same sort of fairing, and their engines were derived from the Wright R-1820, so it wouldn't be just a Pegasus feature. And the I-15 had more of a Townend ring than a full cowling - whereas the I-15bis had a full cowling and no fairing. The I-15's fairing was a lot smaller than the ones on the Wellington at the top of this thread. It leaves the cylinder heads uncovered, and as they're the hottest part of the engine, I wonder whether the idea was to enhance cooling there. The holes in the fairing would still admit some air to the cylinder bodies. But that doesn't explain the bigger fairings on the Wellington, which had full cowlings. Both its engines and the Valetta's were from Bristol, of course, and had collector rings at the front of the cowling. Could that have affected cooling such that a fairing would be needed? A little bit of me asks ... how?

They've all been shown the door.

My kettle is four feet high and it's stopped working. I've got a bit of a problem with scale.

"Right then, Mr Jenkins, your reincarnation papers have come through, and ... you'll be going back as a mayfly. Have a nice day."

Snooker news: a revolution in aids for long pots is on the way. They say the rest is history.

Some people like two eggs for breakfast, but that's too much. For me, one egg is un oeuf.

A blonde driver is pulled over by a blonde traffic copper. "May I see your licence, please?" the copper asks. "It's in here somewhere ... oh, where did I put it - ah," and she pulls a mirror out of her handbag and looks into it. "Here it is, officer." The copper takes the mirror, looks at it, and hands it back. "Sorry to have bothered you," she says, "I didn't know you were a copper too."

As I get older and portlier, a beard becomes a more attractive thought. It'll hide a multitude of chins.

That might be why there are combustion chambers missing, and the "nacelle" certainly makes it a bit neater and keeps the dust off. Plus there are labels on some parts - so I'd buy this. On the Fiat G.80 - it had side intakes, which would fit an engine like the Goblin with its own split intake. If the Ghost could be fitted with a single intake, so could the Goblin in principle; and many aircraft with intakes on the sides have conventional engines with a single intake. However, I've found a cutaway of the G.82, and its engine does look to have a split intake. So that takes us back to this mystery thing being a Ghost. I don't think it's an Orpheus. That had axial flow, whereas this thing clearly has a centrifugal compressor, a feature only of the earliest engines. One possibility we shouldn't discount: it's not a real engine. It might be a lash-up of parts from various types, put together as a training aid for general principles of jet engines, rather than How To Fix This Engine.

I think he was saying it's a Ghost. The Goblin had a split intake - so did the Ghost when fitted in a Venom, but it had a single intake when fitted to, say, the prototype Comet. However ... what would a Ghost be doing in a nacelle like that? The most likely application is actually the Volvo RM2 version from the SAAB J29, but that's not a J29 fuselage. Are the petrol pumps in the background any help? They're labelled Benzine, so it's not likely to be in the UK.