Own Branded Cola Ranked

1. Tesco Xero Cola (50p) has an extra taste I couldn't put my finger on. Reminiscent of Cola flavour sweets. Not at all unpleasant
 

2. Sainsbury's Cola Zero(47p). Not at all unpleasant.
 

3. Aldi Vive zX Cola(47p)
 

4. ASDA Diet Cola (60p)
 

5. Morrisons (79p) for the Low Sugar variety are the most expensive and definitely not the best, but far closer to the best than it is to the worst.
 

6. Lidl Freeway Cola.(47p) Tasteless. If you drink it with your eyes closed,  it tastes like fizzy water. It is only disappointing if you drink it with your eyes open because the mind expects flavour but this is lacking.

 

Liverpool Echo Control Freaks

The Echo seem to be trying to secure its position as a reliable wall of silence. Not content with taking money from Google to help it destroy independent local magazines, it has apparently now started attacking a local college and threatening to  sever links with it if it continues to have one of its critics as a student.

As part of her journalism course at Liverpool Community College, Helen Wilke was sent to do 2 days of observation at the Echo. The first day passed off uneventfully, however, the 2nd had hardly gotten started when she was called into the office of the editor Maria Breslin and apparently told that she wasn't welcome.

Not content with this when the College tried to find a way around Helen not completing this essential part of the course. They were allegedly told that the Echo would end its association with the college if Helen remained on the course.

Anyway, read the full details in The Post.

Several people claim to have approached various people & parts of  Reach PLC, the Echo's owners and none of the claim to have received a reply. If any company other than the Echo tried this in Liverpool the Echo would be all over the story but not in this case. Neither has the rest of the media said anything, except for the independents.

It looks like the Echo subscription to the Old Boys club is paying off well and the walls of silence in Liverpool are holding up well.

What say you Sally?

AI is good but not at what you think.

One of the problems with AI is that you can never really be sure that it has learnt what you wanted to teach it, the same can be true of animals.
One thing that people have tried to train Dogs and AI to do is to identify tanks so that they can be attacked and destroyed. In 2 cases I'm aware of it has gone wrong and in nearly the same way.
In WW2 the Russians trained dogs to find tanks and hide under them, little did the dogs know that they were carrying bombs with timers on them. The dogs were well trained and back at base they worked flawlessly, unfortunately, the dogs hadn't learnt to ID tanks in general but Russian tanks specifically because that's what they had been trained on.
When they were let loose on the battlefield the dogs sought out the nearest Russian tank, not the nearby German tanks and hide under them. It was already going to be a bad day for the dogs but it was now also a bad day for the Russian tank crew.
In the 70s and 80s, the US trained computer AIs to identify tanks hidden in satellite & aerial pictures, and the AI's got very good at it. However, as the easiest way to get pictures is to take photographs of your own side's tanks so they only really learnt to ID hidden US tanks.
While training a soldier to recognise tanks, in general, could be done, with these pictures, training AI could not because it is very difficult for them to go from a specific case to a general one.
While a human can cope with the idea of a tank as a concept, to a dog or AI it is just a collection of angles and shapes, and each design philosophy tends to have its subset of angles and shapes.
When it comes to people's opinions of architecture similar things happen, each person picks out what they use to identify good and bad architecture. To an aesthete or architect, the lines of a Georgian building are unmistakable, the regular patterns, the window size and the minimal decoration. Producing a pastiche of such thing should be and is easy, Bath is covered in them and the vast majority are disliked.
The reason they are disliked seems to be nothing to do with the architecture because that is virtually the same, the haters must be picking up on something else. Frequently these modern buildings are described as soulless, which is a description levelled at all modern buildings.
However, it doesn't seem that this soul resides in the architecture it resides somewhere else. The algorithm that is being used by some to identify bad architecture is not using the architecture in its deliberation but something else.
Recently I had a nose around Bath and talked to a couple of locals some of the schemes slagged off looked like very good pastiches but I think there were a couple of clues. In modern buildings, the quality of the stone is very good, it might not be genuine stone as it might have been processed to make it more uniform, the older buildings virtually all have flaws in the stone.
A lot of these flaws look like they would have been visible when it was first used whilst others are a product of weathering, exacerbating previously unseen flaws. In the image below the lower parts of the building seems to be far older than the upper parts. Whether this is true I can't say, the building looks to have had a significant rebuild and the contrast is clear.
I don't believe a lot of the people who object to new buildings of any style modernist or not are objecting to the architecture instead they are subconsciously picking up the cues about age and basing their critique on that. This means that no building will ever live up to their standards because they simply aren't compatible with new buildings.
We see a greater acceptance now of brutalist architecture, sure there are still lots of people who slag it off and call any building they don't like Brutalist, but more and more buildings are being seen for themselves rather than their date of birth. I think this is down to weathering and not to a change in taste.
This begs the question is it worth building anything to blend in and I think the answer is very rarely. These Georgian buildings were radical in their day and if we want to keep to their spirit modern building should also be radical and with equal ambition for longevity.

The building below is new, a fine pastiche and hated.

How to make a Quad spool gas turbine

The Garrett ATF3 is one of the most unusual triple spool jet engines there is. In most triple spool engines all 3 shafts are concentric. That is, the high-pressure shaft is inside a hollow intermediate shaft which is inside the low-pressure shaft. In the ATF3 the intermediate is still inside the low, but the high-pressure shaft, while colinear with the other 2 it is behind them.

Below is a fairly typical twin-spool design. Notice how the inner spool is rotating faster than the out. It is this different rotation speed that leads to the increase in efficiency, but it does add weight and complexity which puts up the cost of production and maintenance. A 4 spool of this design would be unlikely to give a sufficient increase in efficiency to offset the costs.

From K. Aainsqatsi

As you can see from the ATF3 below, the front section outlined in green is very similar to the twin-spool engine but where the combustion chamber is the hot gas is piped off to the rear of the engine, turned through 90 degrees and through a centrifugal compressor. Only then does it hit the combustion chambers. From there it flows through the high-pressure turbine before flowing backwards through various turbines, turning 180 degrees and exiting, mixed with the bypass stream.

It is slightly unorthodox here as the turbine driving the low-pressure compressor is actually at a higher pressure than the one driving the high pressure.

The back-to-forward flow helps keep the engine length down and minimises losses from the hot gas. The centrifugal compressor and reverse flow combustion also help keep the length down but make the entire thing rather wide.

The original Whittle engine had a very similar arrangement for very similar reasons, and on small engines, centrifugal compressors are not unheard of.

ATF3

 

Base drawing from here

Quad spool and beyond

To make a quad spool all you would need to do is replace the front twin spool with a triple spool or convert the aft section to double. In theory you could get pent or oct spool engines before hitting the 3 concentric spool limit.

I can only assume the benefit still isn't worth the extra weight and complexity.