John Macilree MRAeS

Transport consultant interested in aviation & transport technology. Past President of @aerospacenz Live with wife Wendy & 3 dogs. RT ≠ endorsement. 317.72ppm

[John Macilree MRAeS @macilree]

@beauti_animals Canada.

That photo was taken in Quebec City.

[John Macilree MRAeS @macilree]

@renabaddie_ 116

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

You were told mathematics began with the Greeks or the Arabs. 🤔

Three carved chalk drums from a Yorkshire grave might prove otherwise. 🥁🇬🇧

In 1889 they were found buried with a five year old child. For 130 years nobody knew what they were for. ⏳

Then in 2018 researchers measured them. The proportions appear to encode a standard unit of length. 📏

Wind a cord ten times around the smallest drum and you get the “long foot”, about 32cm. The same unit researchers believe was used to lay out Stonehenge. 🪨

A fourth drum later turned up over 200 miles south in Sussex. Same measurements. The chalk ones were likely replicas of working tools carved in wood. 🪵

Not in a king’s grave. Not in a treasury. Buried with a small child, so the knowledge would be remembered. 🕯️

British people were measuring the world before England had a name. 🇬🇧

Long before we had a name, this island was measuring the world.

Help us make sure that our history is never forgotten again. 👇🙏

👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Winston Peters @winstonpeters]

The incident at Khandallah yesterday was concerning, and our thoughts are with those on board.

The network is designed with multiple layers of safety. If a train passes a red signal at Khandallah, it is diverted to a runoff line to prevent any risk of collision with another train. The carriages also appear to have responded as designed — while the images are alarming, two critical safety systems appear to have functioned as intended.

The facts will be determined by independent investigators. That is TAIC’s role, and its findings will be made public as is appropriate. We encourage TAIC to complete its investigation promptly and thoroughly.

[VisionaryVoid @VisionaryVoid]

The Mother Who Smelled Something Wrong.

In the spring of 1934, a Norwegian woman named Borgny Egeland walked into Oslo University Hospital with a question that no doctor in the country had been able to answer. Her two children, Liv, age six, and Dag, age four, had been born normal and then stopped developing. They could not speak. Dag could not sit without support. She had taken them to doctor after doctor for years. None of them could tell her why.

What none of them had noticed, or asked about, was the smell. Borgny had been noticing it for years: a sharp, musty odor in her children's urine. She mentioned it to a physician colleague of her husband, who happened to know of an unusual doctor at the university hospital. His name was Asbjørn Følling, and before becoming a medical doctor he had trained as a chemical engineer. He agreed to see the children mainly, as he later admitted, "because I did not want to be hostile to the mother."

Følling ran the standard battery of urine tests in his improvised attic laboratory. All came back normal. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added a few drops of ferric chloride, a routine reagent used to detect diabetic ketones. The solution was supposed to turn purple. It turned a vivid, unprecedented green. He checked the medical literature. No one had ever recorded this reaction before. He checked both children's samples again a week later. Green again. Over the next six weeks, working mostly alone, Følling processed twenty-two liters of the Egeland children's urine under an inert nitrogen atmosphere, filtering, isolating, purifying, until he identified the unknown compound: phenylpyruvic acid, a substance never previously found in a living human body.

He then screened 420 intellectually disabled patients at institutions across Oslo. Eight more tested positive, including two siblings. Five months after Borgny first walked through his door, Følling published his paper identifying a previously unknown inherited metabolic disease. He called it oligophrenia phenylpyruvica. The world would rename it phenylketonuria, PKU. Today, every baby born in the developed world is tested for it in the first days of life, and a simple dietary adjustment begun at birth prevents the intellectual disability entirely. Untreated, the condition destroys the developing brain. Caught in time, children with PKU grow up without any impairment at all.

Asbjørn Følling received the Fridtjof Nansen Prize, the Anders Jahres Award, and the Kennedy Foundation Award. He received honorary degrees and state honors across Europe. He did not receive the Nobel Prize. In the words of his field, he is "by many considered the most important medical scientist never to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine."

He found the answer in the smell no one else had asked about.

[Kelly Eckhold @kellyenz]

Nice bit of analysis.

[Kelly Eckhold @kellyenz]

Here comes the rise in shipping costs that industry commentators have been expecting.

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[John Macilree MRAeS @macilree]

@Simi_2210_ 42

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[John Macilree MRAeS @macilree]

@brownliberite I see the old Danelaw line.

[Matt Cartoons @MattCartoonist]

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's Telegraph
Buy a print of my cartoons at https://t.co/ILFJjPmckx
Original artwork from https://t.co/bVPAkgE34y

[Charestiste🇨🇦🍁 @RealAlbanianPat]

Hudson's Bay Company went from a British Territory owning much of Canada to a stall inside Canadian Tire

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Trump has just destroyed the US beef industry. No country in their right mind is going to import US beef.

After Trump cut funding for Screwworm monitoring programs, the dangerous flesh-eating parasite has been found in US cattle for the first time since 1966.

[Gawain Towler @GHWTowler]

Matt, yet again

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

In 1979, the mullahs tortured the Shah's favourite horse to death.

The horse, Azar, was paraded in the streets. They broke his legs, cut his tongue out, and then shot him in the head in front of a large crowd.

Iran is occupied by demons from hell.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

“The concept of ‘social justice’ has been the trojan horse through which totalitarianism has entered.” - Friedrich Hayek

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

A symptom of something deeply wrong.

[Joseph Mooney MP @JosephMooneyMP]

Exactly