Questions

[wellinghall]

For mathmos and physicists:
(1) What is the force generated by a three-pound pheasant falling from sixty feet?

For medicos:
(2) How will the human head and neck react when this pheasant falls on you?

(No, this didn't happen to me. It did, however, happen to my father!)

For economists:
(3) Just how does the UK's current economic situation lead to a weak pound?

For Anglo-Saxonists:
(4) What is the current thinking on when Beowulf was composed and written down?

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

3. In the simplest of terms, UK interest rates are a) very low and b) could still go lower* and money supply could well go higher. Interest rates are the reward for holding a currency, and so if the reward is low there is less incentive to do it. Hence demand for sterling is lower. At the same time, the government is taking steps to increase the supply of Sterling (cash injections into banks, guaranteeing loans etc). If demand for a commodity falls and supply increases, the price of that commodity will fall. In this case, the commodity is Sterling itself.

It's worth pointing out that a 'weak' pound at the moment is definitely a good thing. It has the advantage of helping exporters by making their goods and services cheaper overseas. It has the disadvantage of making imports more expensive and so can be inflationary - but there are very few inflationary pressures in the economy at the moment. We should all be grateful that this government never joined the euro - if it had, we would have been saddled with a higher interest rate and a currency that was too expensive.


* Lower than the euro-zone base rate, but not as low as the dollar or the yen. However, the dollar and the yen rates won't go lower and sterling rates could.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thank you (it was the oversupply point that I hadn't quite got).

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

1. What would lava lamp manufacturers know about pheasants...?

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

:D Yes I got that one

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

1) 1.35 kg * 9.81 m/s^2 * 18.5 m = 245 Joules of gravitational potential energy converted into kinetic energy. Of course, some of that will be lost to drag, but not (I suspect) very much. To talk of force is slightly inaccurate, because we don't know the length of time over which the impact took place, but the impulse (the total energy transferred) will be about 245 J. (The impact speed, assuming no drag, is 19.05 m/s, or about 40mph.)

2) That may well depend somewhat on things like the angle at which the head is being held (which will control how much elasticity is available in the neck). Since the typical weight of a human head is around 5kg, the change in energy (of your head) is roughly equivalent to emergency stopping from 20mph[1] - but that isn't an ideal comparison because it's a different direction (and the neck's responses in different directions are not the same, for obvious reasons), and because the rest of your body is accelerated when you emergency stop. I suspect the answer is that serious injury is unlikely, but IANAE.

[1] four times the mass, so half the velocity to retain equal KE

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

4. The Translator's Introduction to my edition, published 2002, says, "The poem called Beowulf was composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium." The Preface says, "The range reflects the current lack of consensus among Beowulf scholars and signals that (for the purposes of his translation) Heaney prefers to remain noncommital about the issue. For much of the twentieth century, there was a rough consensus favoring an earlier date of composition, often expressed as 'early eighth-century', but since about 1980 the issue has undergone extensive scrutiny, which has in some cases cast doubt on the earlier certainties and in others found new advocates for specific periods within the larger span." So, um, yes: there doesn't seem to be anything helpful in the way of 'current thinking'.

There is one surviving manuscript. "Palaeographers have determined from characteristics of the scribal hands that wrote the text that the manuscript was copied down in the late tenth century or perhaps the first decade of the eleventh."

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks!