What made you happy today?

[C8RKH]

Wow is that the usual quality of Google's grammar / English?

Wondered what Colin was up to these days.....

 

[Bibs]

It's a screen shot of an email. Some of the stuff further along was covered by the NDA!

 

[Dan E]

I have worked with them a bit the past, never had a meeting with less than 6 people mind and that has been up to 15, played a bit of table tennis then marvelled at their invoice system which is truely brilliant. 

[Jacques]

Hmm.... Some scumbags broke into my garage together with a number of other garages last night. One got away with some items (not from me), and the other got caught with his arms full of things from my garage, coming out of it, into the arms of the police. Outcome? I spent 550 gbp and a full 13 hours getting the biggest Locks, brackets, hardened metal plates etc. I could get my hands of, installing it all, and cleaned everything up from the big mess he left. Him? The police let him with a warning, and off he went, to make the next break in.

Sometimes one get to think that there is no such thing as Justice neither in this World, nor in a court of law. Will I thank fraulein Merkel and her swedish accomplish? No.

Still: I got my things back, but got lifted for a fair bit of Money by the shops. (reverse)  Shoplifting? 

Instead I will send a nice thought upwards and buy my alert neighbour a nice box of chocolate.

Kind regards,

Jacques.

[LOTUSMAN33]

A little medieval.....?

Feel for You Jacques as been the victim of theft, glad you got your stuff back though.

Dave

[mdw]

Did the timing belt on the GTM this morning , what a piece of cake  the K series is compared to an esprit belt.  None of that setting the tension by frequency either.  Just drain and flush the coolant tomorrow then start it up.   

[Kimbers]

After doing "Stoptober" I am gonna get shit faced on Saturday! Wohoo!

[100th_Idiot]

It's silly but something about Rachel Riley wet and getting sprayed in the face appeals.

Innuendo Bingo

[andmac]

Took delivery of my second Lotus, an excel se to keep the turbo esprit happy.

May be posting in what made you unhappy topic in a couple of hours when I pick the wife up from work and she discovers another Lotus outside

[ChrisJ]

@andmac - welcome to the club - they do go well together.

We do need some pictures though - maybe before your wife sees it

[johnpwalsh]

What made me Happy Today. It's been a busy week. One Elan M100 ( Blue) off to Darlington to a first time Lotus owner. One Elan M100 (Green)  going off to France this morning to another first time owner. And yesterday we delivered an Excel up on the beautiful shores of Loch Ness, to a nice guy who already own's an Esprit .

Very pleased, as she is going to have her restoration completed and be sitting alongside the Esprit. Mind you his wife wasn't home to see it at that point.

So that's all four now gone over the last three month's. But hell, I miss that Esprit.

 

Good luck Andy and I hope you enjoy the car.

[Loose Cannon]

Heard my Esprit's engine run for the first time in 10 months. The bog-roll list of jobs is down to just over a dozen little things. On the road next week.

[Bibs]

[Mark Blanchard]

No booze for a month now.  After many years of heavy drink I decided to knock it on the head.  9 pints to get merry, blood pressure at 180 and the parotid glands swelling was the sign.  Feel much better now.  Though not posting so much drunk garbage anymore, just garbage.

[Bibs]

Good effort, well done. Your local offie must be feeling the pinch...

[Mark Blanchard]

Cheers Bibs.  Yes, Tescos 4th quarterly results maybe down.

[C8RKH]

In London for the ATP finals with my wife. part of a treat for her birthday. just watching Murray warm up...  C'mon Andy...

[molemot]

This should cheer most of us up...and the Great Chocolate Eating season is upon us!!! Take the opportunity to increase your cognitive abilities...

 

THE MAGICAL THING THAT EATING CHOCOLATE DOES TO THE BRAIN.....

In the mid 1970s, psychologist Merrill Elias began tracking the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in the state of New York. The goal was fairly specific: to observe the relationship between people's blood pressure and brain performance. And for decades he did just that, eventually expanding the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to observe other cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and smoking. There was never an inkling that his research would lead to any sort of discovery about chocolate.

And yet, 40 years later, it seems to have done just that.

Late in the study, Elias and his team had an idea. Why not ask the participants what they were eating too? It wasn't unreasonable to wonder if what someone ate might add to the discussion. Diets, after all, had been shown to affect the risk factors Elias was already monitoring. Plus, they had this large pool of participants at their disposal, a perfect chance to learn a bit more about the decisions people were making about food.

The researchers incorporated a new questionnaire into the sixth wave of their data collection, which spanned the five years between 2001 and 2006 (there have been seven waves in all, each conducted in five year intervals). The questionnaire gathered all sorts of information about the dietary habits of the participants. And the dietary habits of the participants revealed an interesting pattern.

"We found that people who eat chocolate at least once a week tend to perform better cognitively," said Elias. "It's significant--it touches a number of cognitive domains."

The findings, chronicled in a new study published last month, come largely thanks to the interest of Georgina Crichton, a nutrition researcher at the University of South Australia, who led the analysis. Others had previously shown that eating chocolate correlated with various positive health outcomes, but few had explored the treat's effect on the brain and behavior, and even fewer had observed the effect of habitual chocolate consumption. This, Crichton knew, was a unique opportunity.

 

Not only was the sample size large--a shade under 1,000 people when the new questionnaire was added--but the cognitive data was perhaps the most comprehensive of any study ever undertaken.

The chocolate effect

In the first of two analyses, Crichton, along with Elias and Ala'a Alkerwi, an epidemiologist at the Luxembourg Institute of Health, compared the mean scores on various cognitive tests of participants who reported eating chocolate less than once a week and those who reported eating it at least once a week. They found "significant positive associations" between chocolate intake and cognitive performance, associations which held even after adjusting for various variables that might have skewed the results, including age, education, cardiovascular risk factors, and dietary habits.

In scientific terms, eating chocolate was significantly associated with superior "visual-spatial memory and [organisation], working memory, scanning and tracking, abstract reasoning, and the mini-mental state examination."

But as Crichton explained, these functions translate to every day tasks, "such as remembering a phone number, or your shopping list, or being able to do two things at once, like talking and driving at the same time."

 

In the second analysis, the researchers tested whether chocolate consumption predicted cognitive ability, or if it was actually the other way around--that people with better performing brains tended to gravitate toward chocolate. In order to do this, they zeroed in on a group of more than 300 participants who had taken part in the first four waves of the MSLS as well as the sixth, which included the dietary questionnaire. If better cognitive ability predicted chocolate consumption, there should have been an association between the people's cognitive performance prior to answering the questionnaire and their reported chocolate intake. But there wasn't.

"It's not possible to talk about causality, because that's nearly impossible to prove with our design," said Elias. "But we can talk about direction. Our study definitely indicates that the direction is not that cognitive ability affects chocolate consumption, but that chocolate consumption affects cognitive ability."

What's going on?

Why exactly eating chocolate is associated with improved brain function Crichton can't say with absolute certainty. Nor can Elias, who admits that he expected to observe the opposite effect--that chocolate, given its sugar content, would be correlated with stunted rather than enhanced cognitive abilities. But they have a few ideas.

They know, for instance, that nutrients called cocoa flavanols, which are found naturally in cocoa, and thus chocolate, seem to have a positive effect on people's brains. In 2014, one concluded that eating the nutrient can "reduce some measures of age-related cognitive dysfunction." A 2011 study, meanwhile found that cocoa flavanols "positively influence psychological processes." The suspicion is that eating the nutrient increases blood flow to the brain, which in turn improves a number of its functions.

Chocolate, like both coffee and tea, also has methylxanthines, plant produced compounds that enhance various bodily functions. Among them: concentration levels. A number of studies have shown this, including one in 2004, and another in 2005.

Experts have known about the wonders of eating chocolate for some time. A lot of previous research has shown that there are, or at least could be, immediate cognitive benefits from eating chocolate. But rarely, if ever, have researchers been able to observe the impact of habitual chocolate eating on the brain.

The takeaway isn't that everyone should rush to stuff their faces with the magical sweet. "I think what we can say for now is that you can eat small amounts of chocolate without guilt if you don't substitute chocolate for a normal balanced healthy diet," Elias said.

The research, he says, isn't finished yet. There are more questions to ask, more answers to pursue.

"We didn't look at dark chocolate and lighter chocolate separately," he pointed out. "That next study could tell us a lot more about what's going on."

"We also only looked at people who were eating chocolate never or rarely versus once a week or more than once a week," he added. "I'd really like to see what happens when people eat tons of chocolate."

 

(Culled from the Washington Post)

[hyteck9]

I am happy... I have been celebrating for almost a week straight.!!!!

I finally got the patent approved on my new engine design.  :-D

*dances a happy dance*

Have a look...   ask questions...  

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&p=1&S1=20160326952.PGNR.&OS=DN/20160326952&RS=DN/20160326952

 

[Clive59]

Can we get pics too? Sounds very interesting

[hyteck9]

1 minute ago, Clive59 said:

Can we get pics too? Sounds very interesting

There is an "Images" button on the patent site.. and you can use the yellow arrows on the left to scroll thru them...  Let me see if I can just extract a few and post them here to save time..

[Barrykearley]

2 hours ago, hyteck9 said:

I am happy... I have been celebrating for almost a week straight.!!!!

I finally got the patent approved on my new engine design.  :-D

*dances a happy dance*

Have a look...   ask questions...  

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&p=1&S1=20160326952.PGNR.&OS=DN/20160326952&RS=DN/20160326952

 

Wow well done  

what HP does this achieve ??

[hyteck9]

I only have an aluminum model proving it fits together so far.  I do not have the tools and tech or shop to fully test it at this time.

Edited November 22, 2016 by hyteck9

[Barrykearley]

Fingers crossed for you. If there's any promise in it - I'm sure a car manufacturer will buy it up and shelve it....... we had a family friend years ago who did some clever stuff with cyclinder heads achieving 100mpg - that was bought up by BP and hidden from the world

[hyteck9]