Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 3]

[Rich_W]

Who is the voice over guy for this advert and is he actually German or can he just do what non-Deutsch speakers think is a German-esque voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-aW1P6bCgw

He does Porsche as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WicTA0x6jE

[mp3manager]

Why isn't Stephen Hawking fat?

[talksthetorque]

mp3manager said:

Why isn't Stephen Hawking fat?

Motor Neurone Disease attacks the nervous system and brain, so the motor signals do not get to the muscles. If the muscles do not get used they shrink.
Motor Neurone Disease can also affect the muscles that you swallow with, meaning that a feeding tube may need to be used ( I don't know if Hawking has this)

Just because you have an electrically propelled mobility vehicle does not mean you have to be fat - despite what you might see outside your local Greggs

[Speed addicted]

talksthetorque said:

mp3manager said:

Why isn't Stephen Hawking fat?

Motor Neurone Disease attacks the nervous system and brain, so the motor signals do not get to the muscles. If the muscles do not get used they shrink.
Motor Neurone Disease can also affect the muscles that you swallow with, meaning that a feeding tube may need to be used ( I don't know if Hawking has this)

Just because you have an electrically propelled mobility vehicle does not mean you have to be fat - despite what you might see outside your local Greggs

This, my mum had MS (it also destroys the nerves), she just wasted away slowly.

I’d imagine Hawkins has a feeding tube inserted into his stomach, it’s far safer as it avoids a choking hazard.

In both MS and MN it’s quite often pneumonia that’s the final cause of death, you can’t swallow properly and inhale saliva and other things then get infections in the lungs.

[eltawater]

Rich_W said:

EDIT TO ADD QUESTION
How do Argos keep their stock control so good. It's pretty rare not to have something in stock. Yet you don't see fleets of their lorries delivering constantly through the day on a "just in time" logistics process.

Edited by Rich_W on Friday 19th January 22:06

There's a few things which fit together to make this work.

Most "normal" Argos stores consist of the public store which is pretty small and a decent size warehouse behind the counter. The warehouse has floor to ceiling shelf racking for all the products. Sometimes a store will have a two floor warehouse with a conveyor between them.

Stock control is more or less managed locally on a store by store basis and each product sku has it's own catalogue number which helps immensely. The warehouse shelves and aisles have a designated location label, sometimes down to an individual drawer.

For optimal use of storage, products are stored wherever there's a gap, thereby neatly avoiding the problem of wasted shelf space.

When stock is received into the store as part of a delivery, it gets booked in by a team of "put away" staff armed with headsets. For every item they put away, they find a space for it and relay the aisle and shelf coordinates back via the headsets to be booked into the store stock allocation. This has the side effect that batches of the same product e.g. 5 breville toasters may be placed into 5 different locations across the warehouse. But that's ok as it's making optimum use of the storage space and it's very rare that someone would buy 5 toasters at once. A vast number of product ranges are fairly small and so can be packed into odd gaps everywhere (think small toys, cables etc).

When you as a customer perform a stock check for a toaster at a given store, you really are asking in real time whether there's enough of that item within the store stock tally. When you place the reservation, the tally count is decremented in real time.

When you come into the store and pay for your item, at the same time as your receipt being generated at the till, a collection ticket is raised for a member of staff. These used to be paper tickets with the aisle / shelf location for each item on your collection order, but nowadays is done via an automated voice picking system which reads them out to the staff over their headsets. The collection staff will then scurry around the warehouse picking all your items and placing them onto those little shelves behind the counter for the counter staff to hand over to you. When the collection staff retrieve your item from the shelf location, they confirm it back to the automated voice picking system via their headsets and this keeps the stock control system refreshed.

Reservations which are not collected within a certain number of days are automatically released back into the stock tally on the system. There's no need for the product to physically move on the shelf until a customer comes to collect it.

Because the warehouse is accessible by staff only, you don't often have the problem of stock going missing as you would in a normal store where a customer may pick up a loaf from the bread aisle and then abandon it on a shelf in the drinks aisle where no one else will touch it.

This general stock management principle is supported by another known as hub and spoke. A designated larger hub store in a region will hold a lot more stock of certain lines. There exists a delivery service which can then move some of this stock to a smaller spoke store on demand. So the big delivery lorries only need to deliver to the hub and you then have little vans taking reserved products to the smaller spoke sites on a daily basis.

If you check stock for an item on the argos website, you'll notice this when it says that your item can be collected immediately at this big store in town, or first thing tomorrow at your smaller regional store. Quite often it's more convenient to pop into your small local store in the morning than it is to do battle with school run traffic to visit the big town store now. A great benefit of this is that it allows stock to become accessible to where it is most convenient to a customer.

Edited by eltawater on Wednesday 24th January 00:42

Edited by eltawater on Wednesday 24th January 00:47

[227bhp]

RATATTAK said:

227bhp said:

You've always wanted to know the answer to that? 

It depends on the state it's in, it's all in the prep.

Many thanks for your informative comment

It was less vague and more informative than the question.

Edited by 227bhp on Wednesday 24th January 01:52

[eltawater]

My social media feeds are constantly inundated with endless petitions hosted on sumofus / change.org / 38degrees demanding an end / a start / a wibble to something.

Does anything ever arise out of these or are they designed merely to make people feel like they've happily protested with any output just quietly allowed to fade into the ether?

[The Don of Croy]

eltawater said:

My social media feeds are constantly inundated with endless petitions hosted on sumofus / change.org / 38degrees demanding an end / a start / a wibble to something.

Does anything ever arise out of these or are they designed merely to make people feel like they've happily protested with any output just quietly allowed to fade into the ether?

You will feel empowered as a citizen activist when you boldly make your mark by adding your name to one of these petitions.

About six months later you've forgotten all about it.

Life goes on and you look for a new way to 'stick it to the man'.

[RizzoTheRat]

eltawater said:

<Interesting Argos stuff>

I'm surprised it's done by voice rather than staff scanning barcodes on items and shelves. Is that a management thing to ensure someone's monitoring the overall system or some other reason?

[eltawater]

RizzoTheRat said:

I'm surprised it's done by voice rather than staff scanning barcodes on items and shelves. Is that a management thing to ensure someone's monitoring the overall system or some other reason?

Bar codes aren't used as everything has a catalogue number. Look at anything you purchase from Argos and you'll see a sticker somewhere with a 6/7 digit code.

Bar codes are pointless in Argos as the customer has already passed the catalogue number over to the till person when placing their order. The till person doesn't scan the product as you would in a traditional checkout and the customer doesn't physically get hold of it until the staff member has picked it from the shelf.

[FiF]

Additional to Argos, if you have 5 items, spread over several shelves, does the system make any attempt to stock rotate, i.e. pick the oldest item next time it's ordered. That of course might mean staff member walking right past other items, or does it 'know' where they are in the warehouse and set the nearest item in aid of efficiency.

Realise that stock expiry dates isn't the same issue for Argos as it would be in groceries, say.

[SpeckledJim]

FiF said:

Additional to Argos, if you have 5 items, spread over several shelves, does the system make any attempt to stock rotate, i.e. pick the oldest item next time it's ordered. That of course might mean staff member walking right past other items, or does it 'know' where they are in the warehouse and set the nearest item in aid of efficiency.

Realise that stock expiry dates isn't the same issue for Argos as it would be in groceries, say.

I think you've answered your own question there.

If an old 'something' was in any way different to a new 'something' it'd have a different SKU.

[eltawater]

FiF said:

Additional to Argos, if you have 5 items, spread over several shelves, does the system make any attempt to stock rotate, i.e. pick the oldest item next time it's ordered. That of course might mean staff member walking right past other items, or does it 'know' where they are in the warehouse and set the nearest item in aid of efficiency.

Realise that stock expiry dates isn't the same issue for Argos as it would be in groceries, say.

No rotation as far as I'm aware. As you say, expiry dates aren't an issue. I'm not aware of any pick routing algorithm either, although things may have changed since I left two years ago.

There's an overriding aspiration to minimise pickup time where possible so that you don't leave the customer waiting. Any additional computation time introduced between someone paying at the till and the request being passed onto a staff member to pick would be too much of an overhead, especially given that it may only be a matter of seconds between the different shelves.

I'd recommend watching some of the collection staff the next time you're in store and you'll see some of them nattering away into their headsets

Inline product refreshes tend to remain the same SKU / catalogue number (e.g. a packaging change) so sometimes you'll get them mixed in and a bit of pot luck to what you get coming back on the collection. However, the stock levels aren't normally deep enough for this to become a common issue.

Model refreshes ala the Samsung Galaxy J5 2016 vs the Samsung Galaxy J5 2017 will have a different catalogue number as they're fundamentally different product lines.

Edited by eltawater on Thursday 25th January 13:05

[V8mate]

I'll start in here before starting a new thread...

Anyone know anything about how the high voltage (national) grid works?

Picture the scene: beautiful, rolling English countryside; carefully enhanced by the presence of strings of high voltage cables between the big metal 'men'.

If I build a (reasonably significant) power generation facility by the side of those cables, is it easy for the grid folk to pop a sub-station of some kind there too, to tap straight into that cable run?

Or is the load from where those cables originate and where they are heading, carefully balanced, such that no new input interventions along the route can be made?

[Matt Cup]

Subscription based collector magazines.... Having seen this advert it got me wondering has anyone ever bothered to complete one of these or something similar or do they hope that you get fed up of waiting and stop sending the issues out?

http://www.buildtheroutemaster.com

https://youtu.be/Dw4kQ12XaEQ

You are looking at spending just under £1200 for that!

Also I seem to remember a R/C Subaru which was ££££ but you could buy the entire car off the internet for a couple of hundred quid.

Edited by Matt Cup on Thursday 25th January 20:13

[Dr Jekyll]

When and where did the expression 'doing my head in' originate? I don't recall hearing it before the early 90s.

[DoctorX]

Matt Cup said:

Subscription based collector magazines.... Having seen this advert it got me wondering has anyone ever bothered to complete one of these or something similar or do they hope that you get fed up of waiting and stop sending the issues out?

[utl]http://www.buildtheroutemaster.com[/url]

https://youtu.be/Dw4kQ12XaEQ

You are looking at spending just under £1200 for that!

Also I seem to remember a R/C Subaru which was ££££ but you could buy the entire car off the internet for a couple of hundred quid.

Think there was a thread about this in the Models section. You need to subscribe and hope they don’t bin it half way through. They always look good, not sure what the reality is.

[gazzarose]

V8mate said:

I'll start in here before starting a new thread...

Anyone know anything about how the high voltage (national) grid works?

Picture the scene: beautiful, rolling English countryside; carefully enhanced by the presence of strings of high voltage cables between the big metal 'men'.

If I build a (reasonably significant) power generation facility by the side of those cables, is it easy for the grid folk to pop a sub-station of some kind there too, to tap straight into that cable run?

Or is the load from where those cables originate and where they are heading, carefully balanced, such that no new input interventions along the route can be made?

This is essentially the problem that the national grid and local electricity boards are working through at the moment with the advent of all of the solar and wind farms popping up around the place.

The original canker runs would have been sized and designed for the supply being at one end and the load being at another. Think of the way you would get from London to Lands end. The roads leading out of London are huge, ie the M4, allowing lots if traffic out and then as the traffic turns off to various destinations the roads get progressively smaller until you end up on single lane roads in the far end of Cornwall. Now imagine that magically Landsend and London switch places, it would be chaos.

It's the same with the farm that originally had just a small farm house and a barn and lots if fields. Now fill those fields with solar panels and the bit of spindly wire that kept the lights on in the house is no longer up to the job. As you move back up the line towards the main grid Uhv lines then the task is easier, just needing extra substations. The problem being that mostly the farms with loads if spare fields, and the wind turbines on tops of mountains, are mostly in outying areas. My father is a fitter for Western power and alot of the work they are doing is upgrading or running new lines to generating sites.

[V8mate]

gazzarose said:

V8mate said:

I'll start in here before starting a new thread...

Anyone know anything about how the high voltage (national) grid works?

Picture the scene: beautiful, rolling English countryside; carefully enhanced by the presence of strings of high voltage cables between the big metal 'men'.

If I build a (reasonably significant) power generation facility by the side of those cables, is it easy for the grid folk to pop a sub-station of some kind there too, to tap straight into that cable run?

Or is the load from where those cables originate and where they are heading, carefully balanced, such that no new input interventions along the route can be made?

This is essentially the problem that the national grid and local electricity boards are working through at the moment with the advent of all of the solar and wind farms popping up around the place.

The original canker runs would have been sized and designed for the supply being at one end and the load being at another. Think of the way you would get from London to Lands end. The roads leading out of London are huge, ie the M4, allowing lots if traffic out and then as the traffic turns off to various destinations the roads get progressively smaller until you end up on single lane roads in the far end of Cornwall. Now imagine that magically Landsend and London switch places, it would be chaos.

It's the same with the farm that originally had just a small farm house and a barn and lots if fields. Now fill those fields with solar panels and the bit of spindly wire that kept the lights on in the house is no longer up to the job. As you move back up the line towards the main grid Uhv lines then the task is easier, just needing extra substations. The problem being that mostly the farms with loads if spare fields, and the wind turbines on tops of mountains, are mostly in outying areas. My father is a fitter for Western power and alot of the work they are doing is upgrading or running new lines to generating sites.

So is that a 'maybe'? There's a chance that I'm at the right end of the action to provide a welcome input?

[gazzarose]

V8mate said:

gazzarose said:

V8mate said:

I'll start in here before starting a new thread...

Anyone know anything about how the high voltage (national) grid works?

Picture the scene: beautiful, rolling English countryside; carefully enhanced by the presence of strings of high voltage cables between the big metal 'men'.

If I build a (reasonably significant) power generation facility by the side of those cables, is it easy for the grid folk to pop a sub-station of some kind there too, to tap straight into that cable run?

Or is the load from where those cables originate and where they are heading, carefully balanced, such that no new input interventions along the route can be made?

This is essentially the problem that the national grid and local electricity boards are working through at the moment with the advent of all of the solar and wind farms popping up around the place.

The original canker runs would have been sized and designed for the supply being at one end and the load being at another. Think of the way you would get from London to Lands end. The roads leading out of London are huge, ie the M4, allowing lots if traffic out and then as the traffic turns off to various destinations the roads get progressively smaller until you end up on single lane roads in the far end of Cornwall. Now imagine that magically Landsend and London switch places, it would be chaos.

It's the same with the farm that originally had just a small farm house and a barn and lots if fields. Now fill those fields with solar panels and the bit of spindly wire that kept the lights on in the house is no longer up to the job. As you move back up the line towards the main grid Uhv lines then the task is easier, just needing extra substations. The problem being that mostly the farms with loads if spare fields, and the wind turbines on tops of mountains, are mostly in outying areas. My father is a fitter for Western power and alot of the work they are doing is upgrading or running new lines to generating sites.

So is that a 'maybe'? There's a chance that I'm at the right end of the action to provide a welcome input?

It does depend on how large a contribution you could be making. Most add ons are things like solar and wind farms, but I'd imagine a full fat nuclear station would need a bit of rejigging of the grid. I do know it won't be cheap. As far as know all the work would be paid for by the generating station builder which could range from tens of thousands to potentially millions. There has been a new wind farm build on the mountains above my parents house and the electricity board have laid miles of new overhead and underground cables so that wouldn't have been cheap.