Whatever you feed the birds with remember that the local vermin populations will inevitably be drawn too. We feed peanuts, sunflower seeds without hulls, fat balls and coconut shells and some mealworms. We gave up on mixed seeds because individual birds would pick out and reject a lot of them onto the ground to get to their favourites. Some people swear by nigella seeds but our local flocks don't like them. To cut down on the vermin we now bring indoors all the feeders every night. We saw mice and rats clearing up the dropped seeds and the rats can easily climb up the steel structure of our feeder. I tried grease on the lower sections but it was washed off by rainfall over a relatively short time. I suggest that you buy a selection of small bags of seed mixes and watch for which ones are eaten quickest by your local bird visitors.

The resulting split ribbons would be extremely narrow though, is there a use for such things in the USA? At first look it made me think of making perforations across a paper tape for "tear off" tickets.

You have put your finger on the most likely cause of any clots that might possibly form - but it isn't happening in any significant numbers. The EU are behaving like a newly divorced partner - still trying to settle old arguments. Declaring that the UK developed vaccine is to be stopped during further investigation is a cover up of the failure to order enough early on. There are supply shortages that European governments are trying to cover up under this temporary ban. Their incompetence is further revealed by the less reported fact that they are threatening "reciprocal repercussions" against the UK whilst claiming that our government had put a ban on supplying them with the "banned" vaccination. Yet again the EU are in such a confused state that they issue contracting messages at the same time and are convincing in the UK that we will be better off without them. Instead of being a "Union" the EU has degenerated into a "tug-of-war" with 20 odd countries all pulling in different directions.

At the risk of bringing down howls of "socialist" upon myself, I have to say that living with the NHS in the UK removes fear of the financial burdens of health treatments. Private medecine does exist here but is used only by the wealthy. My family dentist informed me that he was going to change to private practice and it would "only be £x per month". No I replied it will be "3 x £x per month!". He hadn't realised that a married couple with a single child was going to have to pay three times the charge. I also told him that the charge only kept us on his list, every actual visit and check up/treatment would each cost extra (up to 6 visits if 6 month check up). Needless to say we moved to a NHS surgery and haven't noticed any change in the quality of treatment.

So many of you are underestimating the level of stupidity that exists amongst us. There is a recording of a Welshman complaining, over the telephone, to the local supermarket he'd bought a frozen pizza from for his dinner. He was annoyed that there was no topping on it as shown on the box. The customer service operative asked him if he had "turned it over to check the other side?". All that you can hear is the squeal of surprise that came from the Welshman. It was the speed at which the supermarket employee asked the question that implies that it wasn't the first time they'd heard the complaint that shocked me most.
Another example was when a young factory operative lost a finger in the machine he operated. On returning to work, following visit to hospital, he was accompanied back to the machine by the Head of Health and Safety who then asked him to explain what had happened. "I'll show you what happened!" said the youth who immediately stuck another finger into the machine and lost that one too.

So many of you are underestimating the level of stupidity that exists amongst us. There is a recording of a Welshman complaining, over the telephone, to the local supermarket he'd bought a frozen pizza from for his dinner. He was annoyed that there was no topping on it as shown on the box. The customer service operative asked him if he had "turned it over to check the other side?". All that you can hear is the squeal of surprise that came from the Welshman. It was the speed at which the supermarket employee asked the question that implies that it wasn't the first time they'd heard the complaint that shocked me most.
Another example was when a young factory operative lost a finger in the machine he operated. On returning to work, following visit to hospital, he was accompanied back to the machine by the Head of Health and Safety who then asked him to explain what had happened. "I'll show you what happened!" said the youth who immediately stuck another finger into the machine and lost that one too.

What is true at one scale for a semicircle holds true at any other scale. The arc of a semicircle meets the diameter at 90 degrees, and begins to deviate immediately, but the right angle still exists. If a target was placed at the end of the diameter and a bullet was measured to have struck it at a right angle it would still have travelled in a curve as all projectiles do under gravity. It might be helpful to look at a definition:

"Angles are formed by two rays (or lines) that begin at the same point or share the same endpoint. The point at which the two rays meet (intersect) is called the vertex."

It doesn't state that the lines have to be straight lines.

At the same scale of the Earth at the Equator the arc of the circle will turn through a single degree over 69.172 miles and I'd guess that most tools for setting out buildings, until recently, have not been constructed to that level of accuracy.

On a semicircle the curve of the circle meets the end of the diameter at 90 degrees. Should the semicircle be at a scale say as large as the Earth, then someone standing at the end of the diameter wouldn't question that there was a right angle and would need an extremely accurate method of measurement to detect the curve. The question leads one to consider the situation from a different viewpoint and is an excellent teaching tool but I'm not sure that 7 year olds are generally ready to take it on board. I'm not surprised that a Professor has difficulty with this question as he has been trained to apply the language of mathematics to find an explanation that can be expressed in numbers. The Greeks had a similar problem with the concept of infinity when explaining a hare chasing and overtaking a tortoise. They calculated arithmetically that the distance between the two would get shorter and shorter but if this can be done repeatedly into infinity then the hare never actually catches the tortoise. Similarly I've seen mathematicians struggle with the following question: if a rope is stretched across the top of two posts (each 2 feet tall) that are 4 feet apart then how close together do the posts need to be moved towards each other for the rope to dip down and touch the ground? They have come up with all sorts of formulae to arrive at the answer whilst a non-mathematician will quickly tell you that the need to be moved together! Another way to "fox" a mathematician is to ask him "How far can a pack of hounds chase a fox into a wood?" the answer is "to the middle". Once the fox has passed the middle of the wood the hounds are chasing it out of the wood but of course this isn't easily expressed in a mathematical form.

you could try looking through some Youtube reviews of current laptops. I've just replaced my workstation PC with a "Creator" one. The professional graphics reviewers surprised me in that many seem to becoming disillusioned with the Applemac options. It would appear some users are becoming tired of their developing needs being ignored by Apple whilst the greater number of Windows software sources remain competitive. The computer sector now only plays a relatively small part in Apple's business - the far greater portion is phone based. I was quite shocked at the apparent trend as I always thought that the graphics industry were fully bought-in to Apple.
PC manufacturers such as Asus and MSI, who sell games PC's, recognised that their high speed products can lend themselves to photographic and video production and have several "creator" machines on sale. I hope that is useful information to you and your choices. My wife and I operate both Windows and AppleMac Pro and have no bias either way.

Quicken was withdrawn from the UK market around 2005 leaving our household with the 2002 version. I had doubts whether it would install on my latest laptop last week but it seems fine so far. I had to copy all the files from the installation disks I'd kept to a memorystick (CD/DVD drives appear to have joined floppy disks in the global landfill site). Autorun didn't work, as expected, but after finding the startup.exe file it ran fine. I was prompted to register the installation but there is no online facility to do so in the UK and I declined. It may raise itself again down the road I suppose but I don't see any restriction on use. We have tried alternative money management applications but none of them work as well as Quicken does for us. I very strongly dislike the adoption of subscription fees for software and agree with you Jerry that it makes you prone to whatever price hikes that a company wants to apply. They frequently quote their costs as "only $/£x.xx a day" which is only correct if you use the application everyday; the important cost is per use. If you use it once a month the cost is the annual subscription divided by 12 not 365 and that doesn't appear attractive to me! A recent post on this site pointed out how these subscriptions mount up and can make computers a costly item on the household budet.

On my daily commute I used to see a Renault car owner with our UK registration "BON 50lR", thereby wishing us all a goodnight. I prefer the witty ones to the childish humour ones.

I've seen a TV programme on animal behaviour showing crows using straws and twigs as tools to extract grubs from rotting wood. The most impressive was a clip from Japan where crows were carrying walnuts to traffic lights at a road junction, as cars came to a stop they placed a walnut in front of a wheel and ate the kernel after the lights changed and the cars had moved off. Maybe using a "sledgehammer to crack a nut" but crows are capable of observing actions and results to achieve their own goals.

A definition of an English gentleman?
Someone who might be able to play the accordion but would always choose not to. Leave it to those Johnny Foreigner chaps especially those dreadful French.

The causes for Japan's economic decline are well documented and can be researched online. It was the result of reckless lending by their banks during a bubble that burst when the Gov't increased interest rates. Instead of letting the banks fall they were propped up by the Gov't who poured good money after bad on these "zombie" banks. This happened in the early 1990's onwards and ought to have been a warning to banks across the world but we all know what happened in 2008 don't we? It would appear that no matter how well industry and commerce perform the "financial wizards" can sabotage everyones' efforts.

After two hours trawling the stores my wife's patience snapped. "You are making this trip miserable, you aren't any help and you could show at least some interest in what I'm buying for our holiday trip!" she said in exasperation.
I leant forward and in a lowered voice replied "Darling, we are in the middle of the Ladies Lingerie section. How much interest can I show before they throw me out?".