Saw a lovely road sign yesterday evening.............

Overhead sign on the M5 at Exeter.  "Sign not in use".  It's been like that for years.

I was once somewhere in France and came to a t-junction: One way the sign read 'Toutes Direction' (All Directions) and the other way the sign read 'Autres Direction' (Other Directions).
I sat there, baffled...

There is more than one road French junction signed that way!

I can't pin it down, but I have a dim recollection of somebody, somewhere, sometime, saying that he could see the need for maybe 8 computers worldwide.

Fulk said:

I can't pin it down, but I have a dim recollection of somebody, somewhere, sometime, saying that he could see the need for maybe 8 computers worldwide.

Click to expand...

http://freakonomics.com/2008/04/17/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-really-see-a-world-market-for-about-five-computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_motto

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."  Apocryphal quote attributed to Charles H Duell of the US Patent Office in 1899.  https://patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everything-that-can-be-invented-has-been-invented.html  So no need for patent and IP lawyers any more then!

Suppose it could sort of apply to Petzl as they seem to be stuck in a perpetual groundhog day trying to re-invent the Croll...

I believe that also in ~1899 a famous phycisist advised a young man not to study physics, because everything in physics, apart from the problem of black-body radiation, had been tied up.

Fulk said:

I believe that also in ~1899 a famous phycisist advised a young man not to study physics, because everything in physics, apart from the problem of black-body radiation, had been tied up.

Click to expand...

That is often misattributed to Lord Kelvin. Kelvin is a source of many interesting quotes, often contradictory. It is true that he went astray when he calculated the age of the Earth on the basis of cooling time, not taking account of radioactivity and deep mantle phase transitions. I think my favourite is "In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting."


He also said "When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery ", something I often think about when down some sordid little hole near Blaenavon.



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