Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 5]

Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 5]

Author
Discussion

FiF

44,097 posts

251 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
98elise said:
P-Jay said:
Thankyou4calling said:
Legoland.

I’ve not been but they have huge Lego models of houses, people, trains etc.

Are they totally constructed of Lego bricks or are they just big lumps of something then clad in bricks to look like a person, house, car or whatever??

Just intrigued.
Most of the rides / buildings etc are big fibreglass (I assume) facades like Disney World, they do however have a large impressive model village that's made of real Lego.

"I’ve not been"

Lucky you, it's terrible, but then I think the same about most theme parks. Eurodisney being the absolute worse.

Why anyone would willingly pay hundreds of pounds, if not thousands if you really mad and go to Florida to spend hours stood in queues is completely beyond my comprehension. I challenge anyone to go to Eurodisney and look into the faces of their fellow man and see anything but misery, it's the ultimate marketing blag.

Okay, the rides are good, but seriously, 90s mins of being crammed into a line of people for 3 mins of excitement, why?
You're doing it wrong. We visit Florida when it's off season, and queues are about 20 minutes, sometimes less. There have been times when there are no queues at all. It's cheaper and the weather is better too. Avoids the hurricane/storm season and it's not oppressive heat.

Best deal I got was Virgin flights, villa and car for £1800 for the 4 of us.
Have to say we went off season too. The weather was great, though the day we decided to have as a beach day was just too effing blisteringly hot. As for queues, in both Disney and Universal on a number of the rides it was a case of 'do you want to stop on and go round again' or you were shown a short cut to cut through to the end of the miniscule queue and thus avoid the long walk out and back in again.

I forget which park it was but daughter and I stayed on for several trips round on a whitewater rapids raft ride as we were already soaked. Mrs F not wanting to go on that ride had just as much fun standing on a bridge over the rapids, and literally hosing us down with a water gun for a dime a go. Weather was such that we were dry again after not too long. Try that in a Paris February.

Tbh Disney et al leave me cold these days, and Disneyland Paris can just FRO.

RammyMP

6,776 posts

153 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
FiF said:
98elise said:
P-Jay said:
Thankyou4calling said:
Legoland.

I’ve not been but they have huge Lego models of houses, people, trains etc.

Are they totally constructed of Lego bricks or are they just big lumps of something then clad in bricks to look like a person, house, car or whatever??

Just intrigued.
Most of the rides / buildings etc are big fibreglass (I assume) facades like Disney World, they do however have a large impressive model village that's made of real Lego.

"I’ve not been"

Lucky you, it's terrible, but then I think the same about most theme parks. Eurodisney being the absolute worse.

Why anyone would willingly pay hundreds of pounds, if not thousands if you really mad and go to Florida to spend hours stood in queues is completely beyond my comprehension. I challenge anyone to go to Eurodisney and look into the faces of their fellow man and see anything but misery, it's the ultimate marketing blag.

Okay, the rides are good, but seriously, 90s mins of being crammed into a line of people for 3 mins of excitement, why?
You're doing it wrong. We visit Florida when it's off season, and queues are about 20 minutes, sometimes less. There have been times when there are no queues at all. It's cheaper and the weather is better too. Avoids the hurricane/storm season and it's not oppressive heat.

Best deal I got was Virgin flights, villa and car for £1800 for the 4 of us.
Have to say we went off season too. The weather was great, though the day we decided to have as a beach day was just too effing blisteringly hot. As for queues, in both Disney and Universal on a number of the rides it was a case of 'do you want to stop on and go round again' or you were shown a short cut to cut through to the end of the miniscule queue and thus avoid the long walk out and back in again.

I forget which park it was but daughter and I stayed on for several trips round on a whitewater rapids raft ride as we were already soaked. Mrs F not wanting to go on that ride had just as much fun standing on a bridge over the rapids, and literally hosing us down with a water gun for a dime a go. Weather was such that we were dry again after not too long. Try that in a Paris February.

Tbh Disney et al leave me cold these days, and Disneyland Paris can just FRO.
We went for Christmas a few years ago, I hate Disney but generally I enjoyed the holiday. Her in doors made us go to Magic Kingdom on Christmas Day, it was horrendous, far too busy. My memory of that day was sat at a table outside a restaurant people watching, every one of them looked miserable!

The weather was cracking and the water parks were dead.

coppernorks

1,919 posts

46 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Why is breakdown recovery free in a roadworks section ?

V8mate

45,899 posts

189 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
coppernorks said:
Why is breakdown recovery free in a roadworks section ?
Because the contractor will have to have provided it as part of securing permission for their works plan to ensure that any breakdowns are removed quickly.

You can't have a vehicle blocking an already reduced capacity route for nine hours while they're waiting for the RAC.

Clockwork Cupcake

74,585 posts

272 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
V8mate said:
coppernorks said:
Why is breakdown recovery free in a roadworks section ?
Because the contractor will have to have provided it as part of securing permission for their works plan to ensure that any breakdowns are removed quickly.

You can't have a vehicle blocking an already reduced capacity route for nine hours while they're waiting for the RAC.
Exactly. I would have thought this was bloody obvious.



RosscoPCole

3,320 posts

174 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?

Doofus

25,825 posts

173 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Because then we'd only be able to go to bed on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

And we'd only get a leap year every ten years.

But at least April would only have 25 days.

RosscoPCole

3,320 posts

174 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Doofus said:
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Because then we'd only be able to go to bed on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

And we'd only get a leap year every ten years.

But at least April would only have 25 days.

I meant that a 24 hour day would be 10 metric hours so a metric hour is 2 hours and 24 minutes.

glazbagun

14,280 posts

197 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Mainly cultural. The French tried to introduce decimal time during the revolution, but it never caught on. Hours and minutes are pretty ancient and 60 is really easily dividable which was plenty good enough in the slow days of old. I think some computing fields may use metric time in terms of just counting seconds.

Clockwork Cupcake

74,585 posts

272 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
glazbagun said:
I think some computing fields may use metric time in terms of just counting seconds.
I've never come across such a thing. We'll use milliseconds, nanoseconds, clock ticks, and all sorts, but they all come back to seconds.

Are you thinking of epoch time, for example where a datetime can be represented as a decimal number corresponding to the number of seconds since midnight on 1st January 1970, perhaps?

(Other Epoch times are available. Microsoft use one that is the number of 100 picosecond ticks since a date whose value I would have to go look up)

Edit: oh I see what you mean now. A decimal number of seconds. Yes, we do that. But that isn't metric time - it's still seconds.


Edited by Clockwork Cupcake on Monday 21st June 21:36

Abdul Abulbul Amir

13,179 posts

212 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Clockwork Cupcake said:
V8mate said:
coppernorks said:
Why is breakdown recovery free in a roadworks section ?
Because the contractor will have to have provided it as part of securing permission for their works plan to ensure that any breakdowns are removed quickly.

You can't have a vehicle blocking an already reduced capacity route for nine hours while they're waiting for the RAC.
Exactly. I would have thought this was bloody obvious.
But it's only recovery to outside the roadworks area so you'll get dumped on the hard shoulder a few miles up the road.

Clockwork Cupcake

74,585 posts

272 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Abdul Abulbul Amir said:
But it's only recovery to outside the roadworks area so you'll get dumped on the hard shoulder a few miles up the road.
Yes, I've always assumed that was the case.

As V8mate says, it's all about quickly getting an obstruction out of an area of reduced capacity; it's not some altruistic public service. smile

glazbagun

14,280 posts

197 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
Clockwork Cupcake said:
glazbagun said:
I think some computing fields may use metric time in terms of just counting seconds.
I've never come across such a thing. We'll use milliseconds, nanoseconds, clock ticks, and all sorts, but they all come back to seconds.

Are you thinking of epoch time, for example where a datetime can be represented as a decimal number corresponding to the number of seconds since midnight on 1st January 1970, perhaps?

(Other Epoch times are available. Microsoft use one that is the number of 100 picosecond ticks since a date whose value I would have to go look up)

Edit: oh I see what you mean now. A decimal number of seconds. Yes, we do that. But that isn't metric time - it's still seconds.
Had a google and think I was thinking of Unix, yeah- just how many seconds since 1970. Decimal time (10 hours of 100 mins of 100 seconds) is what the French tried. 1624310926 seconds since 1970 (says google, I didn't count them!) is metric.

The second is no longer a fraction of a mean solar day but the caesium standard, so time is now effectively free of its solar origins, even if we still use the same words as we did before. It makes the news every so often when we get a leap second added. Apparently it's a PIA as the precise rotational speed of the earth is apparently unpredictable which surprised me.

Clockwork Cupcake

74,585 posts

272 months

Monday 21st June 2021
quotequote all
glazbagun said:
Had a google and think I was thinking of Unix, yeah- just how many seconds since 1970. Decimal time (10 hours of 100 mins of 100 seconds) is what the French tried. 1624310926 seconds since 1970 (says google, I didn't count them!) is metric.
I don't want to be pedantic, but an large number of seconds is not metric, it is just a large number of seconds. You can divide that by 60 to get a decimal number of minutes, but that's still not metric.

The system that the French tried is, though.

Anyway, I think we're broadly in agreement plus I'm off to bed now. smile



Edited by Clockwork Cupcake on Monday 21st June 23:38

Halmyre

11,204 posts

139 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
Our company uses 'decimal' time when logging your hours, so 8.3 would be 8 hours and 18 minutes. This goes right back to the days of stamping a time card, you'd see people walking a bit slower as they approached the machine, waiting for the clock to tick over into the next 'block' of time.

V8mate

45,899 posts

189 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
Halmyre said:
Our company uses 'decimal' time when logging your hours, so 8.3 would be 8 hours and 18 minutes. This goes right back to the days of stamping a time card, you'd see people walking a bit slower as they approached the machine, waiting for the clock to tick over into the next 'block' of time.
A previous employer of mine did that. 37 hour week equated to 7.4 hours per day for payroll purposes (and 7 hrs 24 mins for those with an eye on the door)

anonymous-user

54 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
Abdul Abulbul Amir said:
Clockwork Cupcake said:
V8mate said:
coppernorks said:
Why is breakdown recovery free in a roadworks section ?
Because the contractor will have to have provided it as part of securing permission for their works plan to ensure that any breakdowns are removed quickly.

You can't have a vehicle blocking an already reduced capacity route for nine hours while they're waiting for the RAC.
Exactly. I would have thought this was bloody obvious.
But it's only recovery to outside the roadworks area so you'll get dumped on the hard shoulder a few miles up the road.
No, you won't. There will be a recovery area with welfare and a suitable waiting/loading area for breakdown trucks.

captain_cynic

12,023 posts

95 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Because multiples of 12 are more divisible.

12 can be divided into 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and itself. 10 can only be divided into 1, 2, 5 and itself.

As we tend to divide time quite a bit it makes sense to keep it on a base 12 system.

Time keeping units (second, hour, day, et al) are considered SI units.

V8mate

45,899 posts

189 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
captain_cynic said:
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Because multiples of 12 are more divisible.

12 can be divided into 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and itself. 10 can only be divided into 1, 2, 5 and itself.

As we tend to divide time quite a bit it makes sense to keep it on a base 12 system.

Time keeping units (second, hour, day, et al) are considered SI units.
I've never understood why, but when I do mental arithmetic, it has always used a visual calculation based on a clock face.

I wonder if that's because there are, as you say, so many useful factors of 12?

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

261 months

Tuesday 22nd June 2021
quotequote all
captain_cynic said:
RosscoPCole said:
Why isn't time metric? I understand why there are 365 days in a year, but why 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds? Why not 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds?
Because multiples of 12 are more divisible.

12 can be divided into 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and itself. 10 can only be divided into 1, 2, 5 and itself.

As we tend to divide time quite a bit it makes sense to keep it on a base 12 system.

Time keeping units (second, hour, day, et al) are considered SI units.
I think the real question is. "Why don't we have base 12 for everything?".

OK I know it's supposed to be to do with counting on fingers, but someone, may an early abacus maker, should have said 'why stick to 10 beads, let's make it 12?'.

But apparently even the words 'eleven' and 'twelve' derive from words meaning 'one left over' and 'two left over'. Even the romans who didn't really have number bases counting in 5s 10s 50s etc.