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I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2
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Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 94,759 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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This is from The Onion
This isn't
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0096. Here, I estimate the theoretical maximal active consumption rate (ACR) in humans, using 39 years of historical data from the annual Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. Through nonlinear modelling and generalized extreme value analysis, I show that humans are theoretically capable of achieving an ACR of approximately 832 g min−1 fresh matter over 10 min duration0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭
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The humble Jerrycan has been with us since the late 1930’s and came about as a pre WW2 German government proposal to provide a 20 litre fuel container for the military. Hence the name as “Jerry” was a shorthand usually pejorative name for Germans among the allies. A company by the name of Muller in Schwelm Germany came up with the winning design in 1937.
Allied fuel cans were pretty dire. The British ones got the nickname “flimsies”. Made of thin tin plate, with lots of seams and leaked like a teabag. This caused some serious logistical issues with fuel losses as up to 20% of fuel was being lost in this way(the Brits found a better use for them when empty as makeshift tea stoves). The German design on the other hand…
The text reads "Fuel 20 litres, flammable" with the year of production below and the factory logo below that. Most also had Wehrmacht stamped below that again and a production run number.
This design had some very cleaver features. At the top you find three handles as the government placed a requirement that a man should be able to carry two full cans or four empty cans. It also meant that men could carry cans in tandem and made it easier to pass cans along a line of men. Built to be stackable and easily strapped to vehicles.
The main can itself was made from two stampings of decent gauge steel with a single welded seam that was recessed to protect it. The X on both sides allowed for expansion and contraction in different temperatures. The inside and outside were coated with a fuel and corrosion resistant plastic taken from of all things the German beer barrel industry.
The captive cap featured a built in spout and a cap that required no tools to open and close and when open the cap slides back so it stays out of the way while pouring. They were also lockable with a wire or pin. Inside the spout there is a tube, which takes air from the raised rear hump so the fuel(or water) pours smoothly without glugging. This air pocket also allows the can to float when full off setting the weight of the can itself.
A couple of non Germans who saw one before the war recognised its importance and tried to interest allied governments, oddly to little initial interest. This changed soon enough as allied troops saw them and started using the captured “Jerry’s” cans and the British were the first to copy it and quite sensibly made millimetre perfect copies. The Americans for some reason didn’t and decided to reinvent the wheel and went their own pretty crappy way, only retaining the three handles and overall size and general shape of the German design. The US cans had crimped seams and more of them and a flat bottom so were much more prone to leakage and corrosion(some were galvanised to offset this and still leaked). The US lid was different too and required tools to open and close it and a separate funnel to pour. Not ideal.
These simple cans became vital to the war effort. First for the Germans and then for the allies. In 1944 after the allied invasion of Europe a lack of them had actually held up moving forward as though they had enough fuel at the rear they were running out of cans to get it to the front. In France the allied forces even enlisted the help of the locals and children to collect discarded cans from ditches and fields giving out prizes of chocolate and the like. In one month they had collected nearly one million of the things and had field stations that would repair and refurbish any damaged ones.
Mine was made in 1943 by the company in Schwelm that came up with the design. It’s an example of one that was collected and refurbished by the allies, panzer grey* originally, repaired seam and overpainted with green. Still fuel tight and in use to this day(the inner lining still looks brand new). When I got it it had been painted red at some time down the years. Hit it with paint stripper and that came off no bother, the underlying paint wasn’t even touched by the modern safer paint stripper.
So there you go, the humble jerrycan and a masterpiece of industrial design.
*German cans came generally came in either panzer grey or sand colour for desert troops. I’ve seen the occasional one in red. The water/wasser cans also had a painted white cross to avoid any confusion. There were also tags that could be attached to the handles to denote type of fuel. Red with an embossed circle(so you could feel it in the dark) for petrol, black with an embossed D for diesel. Sometimes they have stencilled painted "Heer" for army, or 20l.Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59240
Yeah. All it needed was a new rubber seal in the cap and the new ones fit it so... I've seen examples that were dragged out of ditches in France with only surface rust, a bit of a rub down, a new paint job and back in service. Mad.
Like many things since the interwebs they've become "collectables" and some can be mad money. The ones with SS stamped on them go for many hundreds of quid, for those lounge room nazis that are into that sorta thing. They're even faked which tells you enough about the market.
The company that originally made the SS cans is a Czech company still going today(Sandrik) and in the 90's they did a run of the SS ones using the original presses which sold like hot cakes. Ironically and weirdly the Israeli Defence Forces of all people buy their metal jerrycans from the same Czech company.
Nazi example:
Israeli example:
Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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The humble Jerrycan has been with us since the late 1930’s and came about as a pre WW2 German government proposal to provide a 20 litre fuel container for the military. Hence the name as “Jerry” was a shorthand usually pejorative name for Germans among the allies. A company by the name of Muller in Schwelm Germany came up with the winning design in 1937.
Allied fuel cans were pretty dire. The British ones got the nickname “flimsies”. Made of thin tin plate, with lots of seams and leaked like a teabag. This caused some serious logistical issues with fuel losses as up to 20% of fuel was being lost in this way(the Brits found a better use for them when empty as makeshift tea stoves). The German design on the other hand…
The text reads "Fuel 20 litres, flammable" with the year of production below and the factory logo below that. Most also had Wehrmacht stamped below that again and a production run number.
This design had some very cleaver features. At the top you find three handles as the government placed a requirement that a man should be able to carry two full cans or four empty cans. It also meant that men could carry cans in tandem and made it easier to pass cans along a line of men. Built to be stackable and easily strapped to vehicles.
The main can itself was made from two stampings of decent gauge steel with a single welded seam that was recessed to protect it. The X on both sides allowed for expansion and contraction in different temperatures. The inside and outside were coated with a fuel and corrosion resistant plastic taken from of all things the German beer barrel industry.
The captive cap featured a built in spout and a cap that required no tools to open and close and when open the cap slides back so it stays out of the way while pouring. They were also lockable with a wire or pin. Inside the spout there is a tube, which takes air from the raised rear hump so the fuel(or water) pours smoothly without glugging. This air pocket also allows the can to float when full off setting the weight of the can itself.
A couple of non Germans who saw one before the war recognised its importance and tried to interest allied governments, oddly to little initial interest. This changed soon enough as allied troops saw them and started using the captured “Jerry’s” cans and the British were the first to copy it and quite sensibly made millimetre perfect copies. The Americans for some reason didn’t and decided to reinvent the wheel and went their own pretty crappy way, only retaining the three handles and overall size and general shape of the German design. The US cans had crimped seams and more of them and a flat bottom so were much more prone to leakage and corrosion(some were galvanised to offset this and still leaked). The US lid was different too and required tools to open and close it and a separate funnel to pour. Not ideal.
These simple cans became vital to the war effort. First for the Germans and then for the allies. In 1944 after the allied invasion of Europe a lack of them had actually held up moving forward as though they had enough fuel at the rear they were running out of cans to get it to the front. In France the allied forces even enlisted the help of the locals and children to collect discarded cans from ditches and fields giving out prizes of chocolate and the like. In one month they had collected nearly one million of the things and had field stations that would repair and refurbish any damaged ones.
Mine was made in 1943 by the company in Schwelm that came up with the design. It’s an example of one that was collected and refurbished by the allies, panzer grey* originally, repaired seam and overpainted with green. Still fuel tight and in use to this day(the inner lining still looks brand new). When I got it it had been painted red at some time down the years. Hit it with paint stripper and that came off no bother, the underlying paint wasn’t even touched by the modern safer paint stripper.
So there you go, the humble jerrycan and a masterpiece of industrial design.
*German cans came generally came in either panzer grey or sand colour for desert troops. I’ve seen the occasional one in red. The water/wasser cans also had a painted white cross to avoid any confusion. There were also tags that could be attached to the handles to denote type of fuel. Red with an embossed circle(so you could feel it in the dark) for petrol, black with an embossed D for diesel. Sometimes they have stencilled painted "Heer" for army, or 20l.
You don't happen to have any Allied paraphernalia do you?
Wibbs: oh no that kind of thing wouldn't interest me at all0 -
Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59240
Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »You don't happen to have any Allied paraphernalia do you?
Wibbs: oh no that kind of thing wouldn't interest me at all
actually I do. I've a US can knocking about the place. Just in this case the Jerry one is by far the best and the original of the species. Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59240
Feck off!And here is Wibbs' audio book with bonus pics:D Mad that the allies alone manufactured 20 million of the things, and god knows who many the Germans made, they had 12 or 15 factories cranking them out. I do recall reading of some chap high up in the US military saying that the jerrycan was one of the most important military items they had and would have been in real trouble without them. Irony all over the place that a German invention would be one of the things that would ultimately lead to Germany losing.
What has long fascinated me is German industry and inventiveness during the war. A) they kept the industries going even at the hight of the allied bombing, in fact production of some things went up(largely because of Albert Speer. Opportunistic slither of a nazi when it suited, bland derivative architect, but incredible at organising production).
some of the crazy stuff they came up with was years, even decades ahead of the time. I mean just look at this thing:
That's a Horten flying wing in 1943. Being towed by a 30's truck, with 30's propeller planes in the background. It looks like something from a science fiction film and not real. Like a 90's stealth plane had fallen through a time warp. And they got it to fly without computers and developed a pressure suit and ejection seat for the pilot and it was mostly made with wood because of shortages of materials.
The more you read the background the more you see that in the little death and personality cult around Hitler he kept everybody guessing so all the manufacturers eager to please him and get lucrative contracts were more free and pressured into coming up with really out of the box thinking. This also caused major problems because he might OK a project but then insist on sticking his oar in and they'd have to go along with it. EG the ME 262, the first operational jet fighter. Well he insisted it had to carry bombs which added weight and lead time and delayed it for many months. A good thing for the world because if they hadn't been delayed and had entered service in any numbers the allied bombers and fighters would have been in real trouble.
They even came up with the first assault rifle, though in that case the head of the company didn't want to show it to Hitler thinking he'd think it a bit out there. Someone lower down did show him and he loved it, but again there was a year or more delay in getting it made in any numbers. If they had big numbers of assault rifles capable of laying down withering fire and at some distance in the hands of their army at D-day instead of mostly bolt action rifles with the odd sub machine gun, again the Allies would have been in real trouble.
Mad postscript to the above rifle. A hoard of them was found a few years ago in Syria of all places and pressed into service by various groups.
See what I mean? It looks like a modern assault rifle. 70 years old.
Speaking of nazis... sorry "naturalised and loyal true blue American citizens"(don't mention the war and the slave labour under Werner Von Braun...) who did mad engineering and were very important in getting the US to the moon(fair play to the Soviets who mostly did it on their own).
Well not really. They planned the missions so that they would always be in sunlight for the duration. The same lunar rover was almost an afterthought and was resisted by some in NASA. The final design which had to be folded up and stuffed into a port on the side of the lander descent stage and had to be able to be unfolded by two guys in pressure suits was a kind of private project of a couple of NASA engineers who made a little model of it and its folding tech and showed it to Von Braun who OK'd it.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »The Apollo 17 Lunar Rover had a top speed of 11.2 miles per hour 18.0 km/h and had a fender repaired with duct tape. So you could keep in sunlight.
As long as the batteries lasted.Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59240
He was also an old guy(over 50) and unusually for pre farming humans had lost most of his teeth to decay. There was also the prevailing notion that the "missing link" was an apish primitive thing, far from God's grace kinda thing. That primitive notion survived until quite recently too. Then they discovered that we had some of their genes and they started to look more like us with every reconstruction.The typical Neanderthal slouch was due to the first skeleton discovered having arthritis.
They went from this:
To this:
Funny that.
That said their skull dimensions are way outside the range of any modern person. You can see that in the woman on the right. Very long skull from front to back. We're more like a football shape, they were more like a rugby ball. No chin, large brow ridges and their mid face is drawn forward whereas we're much flatter of face.
Pretty much all Neandertal adult males so far found have arthritis to some degree. Plus every single one of them so far found sustained bone injuries in life, some of them really traumatic. Whether this was down to violence from others or their up close and personal hunting strategies is not clear, though the standard of care they got after such injuries suggests the hunting angle. One guy had a blunt force skull fracture that almost certainly left him blind in one eye and deaf on one side and one of his arms was amputated and one of his legs was fecked too and he survived at least a decade after those injuries.
When the first skulls were discovered in Europe they were explained away as some modern person who was suffering from a deformity or illness. Because science at the time didn't allow for non humans in the past they described what they expected to see(whereas an average neighbourhood GP of today if shown a skull would immediately spot something was up). A common human failing. Darwin helped inspire the idea of an evolution of humanity so that changed the expectations and more and more and different pre humans were found, particularly in Asia, where most scientists thought we'd come from, rather than Africa. Darwin himself had quite impressively and prophetically suggested that because of Africa having more species of great ape that there was were we likely came from. The Africa origin of humans didn't really become mainstream until the middle of the 20th century.
It was a professor in Galway who gave Neandertals their name.Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 94,759 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 92996
He was also an old guy(over 50) and unusually for pre farming humans had lost most of his teeth to decay.
...
Plus every single one of them so far found sustained bone injuries in life, some of them really traumatic.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »Neanderthal genome analysis suggests they may have had a lower threshold for pain than most modern humans.
Until 200 years ago we didn't have effective painkillers or anaesthetics.0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,313 Mod ✭✭✭✭ Join Date:Posts: 59240
Well we kinda did, or at least we had a few herbal concoctions that would do a fair job of reducing pain. Even alcohol would do the trick. Going way back hunter gatherers are also herbal specialists and usually have a fair medicine bag of stuff to treat illnesses. This was the case even as far back as Neandertals. Researchers have for a while now looked at the tartar preserved between the teeth of ancient humans(when it hadn't been cleaned away by earlier researchers) and the stuff preserved in it. A few years back a bunch of researchers looked anew at Neandertal tartar from a group in Spain and another in Holland IIRC and with the latest tech kit. They found some interesting things in the DNA and other stuff extracted.Capt'n Midnight wrote: »
Until 200 years ago we didn't have effective painkillers or anaesthetics.
The Dutch folks were almost exclusively meat eaters like we think of Neandertals, however the Spanish folks were damn near vegetarians, which came as a surprise and showed they were just as locally adaptable as us diet wise(previous humans weren't nearly so much). Both groups had distinct mouth bacteria ecosystems going on and different to modern humans, at least westerners, the Spanish had more of the bacteria that cause tooth decay(plant based diets are more likely to cause this). One Spanish guy had an abscess on his tooth and he alone of the group had a couple of interesting differences. He had the DNA for willow, likely willow bark which contains the active ingredient in aspirin and he also had a fair chunk of the DNA from of all things the fungus that gave us penicillin. Yeah, mad or wha? So it looks like he was being medicated by the wise woman of the tribe or whomever and they had found out through experience which special blend of herbs and spices did the trick. Another bunch again in Spain consumed chamomile, likely as a relaxant. They also consumed other herbs that were very bitter(like willow bark) and had the same "ah jaysus that's bleedin rank Liam" sensory pathways as us, so again likely medicinal.
There was also a hint of something else going on when they looked at a particular bacteria found in the mouth. The Neandertal one shows up at around the time we first met them and got jiggy. It gets passed from person to person from food sharing and very much by things like kissing, so maybe we gave it to them after a snoggette behind a tree after the cave nightclub had called last orders. Yer wan on the right above looks pretty even by today's standards. To me anyway so...
They were also into collecting and refining pigments likely for body adornment(though some could be used as part of a fire starting kit). Interestingly the pigments they seek out are all dark(except for mica for extra sparkle to look fabulous) which makes sense if they were pale skinned like modern Europeans. If you look at modern people like say Native Australians who are very dark skinned their body paint palate is towards whites and pale colours. Dark colours wouldn't be nearly so blinging. Like I'd be the whitest guy at Dracula's book club and the Aborigine body art would be lost on me. They also used jewellery in the form of pendants and necklaces using shells and even eagle claws and feathers. So they must have been quite a colourful people. We would have presented a sight to them too of course. Slightly taller and much skinnier dark skinned people with faces that would have looked almost childlike to them and tech like sewn and fitted clothing and light long distance spears. One Neandertal in what is present day Iran was actually hit and injured by one of those spears, so it looks like it wasn't always nice to meet you. He survived the injury which would have punctured a lung(tough buggers) but died in a cave roof collapse a few weeks after.
Oh and they also invented the first compound glue from tree sap, something that required very particular temperatures and an anaerobic environment to work. Modern researchers can just about manage to make about a teaspoon full at best, whereas they seemed to be able to rattle it out in quantity and with apparent ease.Many worry about Artificial Intelligence. I worry far more about Organic Idiocy.
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