Found this old friend

I haven't posted anything here for years but I found the access details while clearing out old data from an old Filofax and decided to see if the page was still live. Surprisingly, it was.

Engineers, Architects and Surveyors.

My in-laws are, in the current idiom, 'downsizing' their home and a lot of accumulated bits and pieces are going in the process. One of these is a book with the wordy title of  "Thomas Farnolls Pritchard of Shrewsbury. Architect And 'Inventor Of Cast Iron Bridges' ", by Julia Ionides, architectural historian, who is a friend of my in-laws. They have given me this book, which is a history of Pritchard's work as an architect on the Welsh/English border in the 18th century. I'm a Civil Engineer, so my particular interest was the chapter on Pritchard's bridge designs, including the one for the world's first cast-iron bridge, Iron Bridge, in Shropshire. Iron Bridge is a landmark both in the area and in engineering history, having been described by the great Engineer, Thomas Telford, as forming ' an era in bridge building'. Pritchard had previously been appointed as 'Surveyor' for a bridge in Shrewsbury and the author describes him as '...one of the early architect-engineers...', hence the title of the post. Oh, and my father-in-law is a retired Chartered Surveyor!

Health and Safety is more than a killjoy phrase

When some people hear the phrase 'Health & Safety' they think of activity they regard as normal being stopped by bureaucrats. I'm sure some of the stories we read about are exaggerated and I'm also sure that some guidance is over-interpreted, but safety really matters. It matter so much that being 99.9% safe is not safe at all. The picture is from the Twitter feed of Andy Furlong, Policy Director at the Institution of Chemical Engineers. It shows Frazer Mackay, a senior Director with Foster Wheeler, the global process engineering company. He was speaking at a Process Safety conference in Edinburgh on 8 May 2014. Would you like to be the person who has to drink that glass of water?

Get your professional logo

If you a registered with the Engineering Council in the UK as a Technician or an Engineer, you can now download the appropriate logo for you personal use on email signatures, stationery or blogs like this one.
Get yours here: https://ws.engc.org.uk/logoorders/

If you ever wondered what a tall tree looks like lying on its side...

100 mile an hour winds in central Scotland today - power downs bridges closed, cars overturned on motorways, bits of roof flying around, and a 100 foot/30 metre tree uprooted on a main road.
I was driving along Ravelston Dykes in Edinburgh trying to avoid branches and other greenery the wind had blown on to the road when I passed a junction that was more than usually busy. The photos tell why. This is no Japanese tsunami or mid-West tornado, but to see a mature tree with a diameter of around a metre just flattened is enough to persuade me that Nature Rules, OK?
I spoke to the man who owns the house on the corner, who was understandably pleased that the tree fell away from and not into his garden
Hope to get to tomorrow with no reports of people being hurt.

Brave new electoral world

Two weeks since that election and the political map of Scotland has changed dramatically and, perhaps, for good.
The system that was designed to produce coalitions and minority governments has somehow contrived to provide us with an overall majority of 9 and a re-elected SNP government. As Mark Twain said in the phrase oft-quoted in politics, 'The people have spoken, the b***ards'.
The psephologists will be picking over the results for months, but in the real world the rest of us will be wondering what it means for our daily lives while the recession continues to affect our pockets and our jobs.

Election

The polls have just closed in Scotland, at the end of the fourth Scottish election since the Scottish Parliament was [re]established in 1999. Predictions were for the Scottish National Party to gain the biggest number of seats, but the electoral system almost ensures no overall majority, so it will be an interesting couple of days until all of the votes are counted.