It's a Vespa 150 TAP, one of about 800 made for the French airborne forces. They were intended to be airdropped with a second Vespa carrying ammunition, and despite the appearance, were never intended to be fired on the scooter; the gun was removed from the scooter and placed on a tripod, the sighting scope attached,…

Depends on the plastic container. The trick is making sure that the only part of the container exposed to the fire has water on the other side of it, which will keep the container's temperature from exceeding 100°C until the water has boiled away. So if you have a plastic container that's rated for holding boiling…

Flywheels for energy storage have gone around a couple of times already. They suffer from a number of inherent problems that has kept them out of large-scale use. A rigidly-mounted flywheel will inherently lose energy over time due to bearing friction — 20%-50% of their energy in two hours, just from the effect of the…

The findings about making the cannonballs travel slower for increased 'shrapnel' effect explains the benefit from double-shotting a cannon. The charges for a cannon were standardized according to the ball weight the cannon threw, so doubling the projectile mass would split the muzzle energy between the two…

My first-year chemistry teacher in high school, Mr. Swift, did a thermite demonstration in front of the class. He set up a ring stand with a small crucible — IIRC, about an inch tall and half an inch across at the mouth — filled with thermite, and a magnesium strip for the fuse, with a bucket on the base of the ring…

For modern pronunciation, yes; take it back to Middle English (say, around the time of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'), and the trailing 'e' would be pronounced, making it 'The Old-uh'. One of the things lost in the accumulation of language shifts over the centuries.

The problem with the peanut butter wasn't so much it going rancid, but that the start of the masquerade was delayed, and the peanut butter softened from the wearer's body heat, and was dripping off the costume, creating a hazard both onstage and backstage, as people were slipping on the patches of peanut butter. The…

Since Google bought Motorola, don't they technically already have the hardware out, in the form of the Motorola Xoom 2?

The problem is that routing, a fundamental underpinning of the Internet, didn't exist back then. If you wanted to send someone email, you had to know the "bang path" between your host and theirs. There was a common backbone, so generally you just described your email address with the path from where it left the…

Download as ePub and use Calibre to convert it into the format you want?

E-publishing also has the potential to end a problem which has been going on for some time — the compression of the midlist, where midlist authors (writers who sell consistently, but not quickly) get smaller advances and smaller print runs from publishers (a smaller print run means that the publisher doesn't have to…

As I understand it, natural selection controls the speed with which a mutation caused by genetic drift spreads through a population.

There is inevitably some handwaving as to whether we've actually measured the greatest depth, from what I understand; yes, we've made measurements of the depth in the Challenger Deep, but I don't believe that the geographical resolution of those measurements is small enough that we can say for certain that, between…

"Dilettantes talk tactics, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics."

The northern hemisphere also gets a bump in "official" languages due to an obscure technicality. Every single Indian reservation in the United States is technically a sovereign nation. In 2010, the Federal Register issued an official list of 565 tribes that were "Indian Entities Recognized and Eligible To Receive…

A strip of package tape gives you enough width to wrap around the sides of the magnetic block, and it gives a reasonably sturdy plastic surface between the magnet and your knives. If you're concerned about glue residue when you eventually have to change the tape, use painter's tape instead; not as durable, but it…

Modern submarines are designed for optimum water flow around the hull when submerged; this results in compromised surface performance — if you watch video of a modern submarine at speed on the surface, you will notice that the bow wave comes over the top of the hull some distance toward the sail before falling off to…

This one always gets a smile as I drive I-5 through downtown San Diego...

Good thing that the papers and paper currency in the safe aren't flammable, then... Oops.

The train? When the TSA has started sending out VIPR units to search people at train stations?