signaturefish

It's pretty easy to non-destructively lift a wax seal off of paper, with a sharp, hot knife and a bit of practice. You can then read the letter and reseal it with a touch more hot wax or the back of a heated spoon (to melt the back of the original seal).

Not that I've ever done that, as a courier, in a live-roleplay game, ever. Repeatedly ;D

Depending on the security level of the letter, of course, a non-letterlocked letter might be pretty readable even if sealed. A simple letter where the seal authenticates the sender but doesn't protect the contents might simply be folded in three and sealed closed - you can bend and flex such a letter without breaking the seal to read most of it. A more important letter being _protected_ by a seal might be folded into an ersatz envelope and then sealed on the join ... but that's most of the way to a basic letterlock.

So, like all communications there's a tradeoff between complexity and security, and whether you're using the seal merely to authenticate the sender (which was pretty common) or also to protect the contents.

That /is/ how "we" do it with trains. The difference is that long-distance truckers generally live in their cabs for weeks on end, so they can't easily hand it off to another driver.

Wow, that's a stronger signal than I thought. Maybe I'll give it a go with a whip the next time the ISS passes over me.

I believe you can hit it with an HT, although the Youtube videos I've seen of doing it have been an HT with a hand-held Yagi cabled in in place of the usual whip antenna. A resonant dipole would probably pick it up - as others have said, the signal's fairly powerful.

Satellite comms is something I want to play with, personally, so I welcome this news. Need to get my Foundation license (UK) before I can go two-way, though.

Agreed. It's absolutely reasonable for a politician (for example) to get into power and discover that for some reason they can't do the thing they promised to do, but I'd love it if they'd just briefly say so and why, rather than brushing it under the carpet and assuming noone will remember what they said while they were campaigning.

"I know I said I'd increase funding for schools by 20%, but that budget is controlled by local authorities rather than by my office - I'm going to increase funding to local authorities by X% instead and ask them to fund schools" - that kind of thing (although, you know, you'd hope they'd know about the funding infrastructure before making promises).

737-Max's problem started in the engines, from an informed outsider's perspective (it was an attempt to graft an engine with too large a nacelle to an aging airframe design). The sensor failure precipitated the crash, but it was not the only thing at fault.

I believe Godot is still lacking an ads component, yes - it's an open-source game engine, and ads aren't really a priority for the development team. Which, of course, means there's a gap in the market for an easy-to-use capable ad plugin, I guess...

Re the "physical space" argument, battery-electric systems tend to come up a /lot/ heavier than an equivalent ICE drivetrain as I understand it, and are in different places in the vehicle. The engine/motor becomes smaller and lighter, the fueltank/batteries become larger and heavier. The mass balance and overall mass changes, which will change the vehicle's crash characteristics and handling.

Agreed that they're not black-boxes and there's a lot of assumptions you can carry over, though. The NCAP rating of the donor vehicle won't be valid any more, but all that tells you is how well its siblings survived destructive testing - it's likely to perform similarly.

TLDR: it's not quite that simple, but assuming you're not driving like an idiot it'll probably be fine.

With the exception that she died a year ago :( I do like her work, though - her metabooks (writing about the process of writing fiction) are quite good, and her translation of the Tao Te Ching is really well done.

Engineering logbooks are a great idea (and electronic/mechanical engineers have been doing it for a while - because it works!).

I use a spiralbound notebook and a fountain pen for mine, because I find the change of tools helps me to think about the project I'm logging on a meta level. I tried doing it in a textfile and it didn't work so well for me, but people are different.

The problem for the Land Rovers is not that they can't handle the weight of all the infantry gear, it's that they can't handle the weight of their modernisation package.

They're soft-skinned light fast patrol vehicles, originally specced for use behind friendly lines and in Northern Ireland - up-armouring them for a modern battlefield, improving their radio gear and extending their range adds a lot of mass. It got to the point where the weight of the extra gear risked breaking an axle if they drove off-road at one point, iirc.

Thankfully the REME engineers are actually listened to when they say "this is provably unsafe, look", so they're getting new vehicles at long last.

The original paper is at [ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2018.0016... ].

I haven't read it yet, but it looks like interesting stuff: TMR always felt like a stepping stone to somewhere else, and if this technique generalises, then this might be that somewhere...