TT- Heath Robinson

Tractor Tuesday President Tbay has taken the advice of her local MP, Liam Fox, to heart and is out exporting her taste buds in Menorca. I expect soon we will see Rusty & Co driving speed boats out to shrimp farms rather than carting mushroom compost behind John Deere tractors. Rusty will only have to slightly adapt his beard to give a bit more of a Capt Ahab look - gives the customers more confidence and one can charge more..

So while the boss is away I can take the opportunity to take tomorrow off and post my TT today, an opportunity which arose early this morning after Flash's walk. Stopped off at the agricultural workshops to get a diesel filter. They didn't have one on stock so thought as the part was ordered for tomorrow  I might also get the other leaking parts ordered for the  front loader hydraulic arm seals. To save myself the work of demounting the arms, returned home and drove the JD up to them to let them do the work tomorrow or Wednesday - I said no hurry, they should concentrate on the professionals out & about in the continuing 30°C weather driving and breaking their equipment.

The Blip shows what an ingenious farmer does when he has a 70hp tractor, puts a mower on the front and then two butterfly mowers on the rear - then adds conditioners  to break the cut grass and let it dry quickly. He puts all of this on a trailer and adds a separate diesel motor to run it. While the tractor looks big and powerful to me, I was told 70hp is not up to the task. I couldn't get any real detail but got the impression it was considered by "others" to be a bit of a Heath Robinson construction. I think the farmer is the one on the left. Extra photo shows a bit more from the rear. On the machine there is a sign stating:
"LW8000 Motor Mower Conditioner. Unique in the World".

Well to survive in the global marketplace, we in Europe do need to concentrate on specialist, high tech inventions and our engineering skills, so one shouldn't knock him.

Tomorrow children go back to school in Bavaria. Germany has staggered school holidays. The state of Bremen in the north, had for instance holidays from 23 June to 3 August. I have been following the recent debate in the UK on Grammar schools. German schooling is determined individually by the 16 states but there is generally a three tier secondary education system which regularly gets criticised as it tends to follow the social class of the parents rather than the talents of the children - one level where practical (eg crafts) is the main aim, a level where practical and theoretical (eg clerical) is balanced and the top level where the university candidates are schooled  Level 1 uptakers have gone down by almost 50% since 2000, level 2 stayed constant and the top level is increasing.

One perhaps needs to worry that this could mean Germany will lose it's renowned engineering/craftsman base. I listened to an interesting interview with a prominent German Astrophysics professor and TV broadcaster - he suggests the school system is much too loaded on detailed learning of theories and  formulas most of which would never be used in the real world. He advocates children should be encouraged to do arts, music and sport, get their brains loose and open and questioning: if the theory says the maximum height of a hydrostatic water column is 10 metres, how come water gets 30 meters up in to a tree? He asks what the news media would be like if the journalists had an engineering education, would we have more facts? The same applies to politicians - would we have people looking for solutions rather than pointing blame? What would happen if we left nature in the hands of lawyers, marketing executives and accountants?

I wont get in to Lesch's ideas on the pending Water Wars or why the Greeks, southern Italians, Spanish and Portuguese will be migrating to northern Europe, let alone what is brewing in Africa. But he does believe we can still do a lot now to lessen the effects if we work together and not on a nationalistic basis and says Germany should continue to take a moderator role in Europe as it has in the last decade or so.