When I look at nutrition labels, I'm never sure whether to be amazed at how many calories are in our food, or impressed with how efficiently our bodies use calories.

The "best before" date is actualy a "tastes optimal if opened before". It's a guestimate, based on experiments. It has nothing to do with food spoiling, so they can afford to approximate.

Usually, there are some tests before launching some new product line with different sealed containers sitting there for different amounts of time at room temperature or fridges. For dates a year or more away, they guess using science. Petri dish cultures, for example, can help them extrapolate future dates just by watching the bacteria growth rate.

They don’t really know, thats why some food spoils faster than the date. They just know how long the food has until its freshness or “perfect flavor” is left until its not in a sellable quality

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My experience is that only sometimes works. Often the jack is so sloppy, the cable just falls out. Other times the sound is so garbled I can't even understand the dialog.

Your eyes contain 4 different types of light sensors. The first 3 see color and the 4th sees shades of gray.

In order to "respond" to light, the sensors use chemicals that interact with the light color they see. So chemical X responds to Green colored light, chemical y to Red and chemical Z to any light, but only responds in shades of gray.

Long story short, the gray chemical, chemical Z gets destroyed by bright light, any kind of bright light melts it away and your eye needs to build more up before you can see gray-scale.

So if you're in bright light and then suddenly go into the dark, you have no chemical Z and it needs to restore over a short few minutes and then you can see in the dark at least a little bit.

Fun Fact: Red light does NOT destroy chemical Z. This is why military aircraft and vehicles that operate at night use Red lights in the cabins before dumping the soldiers off into a battlefield. You can leave the vehicle with full night vision intact.

Adjusting to bright light is different, a muscle in your eye just squeezes the eye-hole tighter reducing the amount of light that gets through into your eye in the first place. It happens pretty dang quick.

because every operating part on a plane my be new / rebuilt within the last 2 years...but the passenger ops section could be 20 years old with little more then some chair back and pad and arm rest replacements .

You get on those plans without the screens in each row , you know you got on an oldie

You could probably get a stethoscope and pull the end off, then just place the tube on your phone speaker to get the same effect. It was very hollow sounding. I did enjoy a handful of movies with them on the flights, so they worked enough.

Just to add: this is not just the EU making rules for rule's sake

Remember europe is TONS older than the US. Plenty of twisty old roads and villages, far less straight, some really constrained routes.

Excessive length means trucks simply couldn't access some areas.

I see dual jacks only rarely - but I carry a 2-to-1 adapter, just in case. These days if the seat has dual jacks there are almost always fairly good free headsets; my carryon has a collection of them. Still, I prefer my over-the-ear Senn PX550 noise cancelling headphones - I wear them even when all I want is quiet. They are BT to my phone and laptop, but wired to the IFE. Looking forward to using them completely wireless. Every 20th flight I leave the ]{}}#%^ cable plugged in. Cables are cheap and Amazon can sometime deliver to my destination hotel before I get there.

I find it odd that USA still uses and sometimes require to swipe the card and sign the paper when in Brazil even escorts have cc machines with contact less tech. Some are very small and uses the seller phone for Internet.

I thought this was what OP was talking about.

There is a notice on the A1 to avoid Kimbolton village because of overhanging bodywork. Around Norfolk many villages are difficult with a long Cab on an Artic.

What stops it is that they do, in fact, verify authenticity and even places a hold on your account immediately. They're talking complete bollocks.

The reason why contactless has limits is because of the lack of a pin. If you steal a card, you can use it up to certain amount of times for a certain amount of money before you need to do a pin transaction. The limits are there to stop a genuine but stolen card being used too much without a PIN.

Haha - yeah, my experience was similar. There was music, but I was in no position to assess the sound quality other than to think 'that sounds tinny' as they shoved my head into the loud clanking machine.

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3.5 has been around so long cell phones don't have them anymore

Mainframe systems maintained tape record indices ( after reading them from tape) in RAM or "drum" disk for just this reason. Read Knuth on efficient tape database searches, if you have a kink for antique software engineering. But bear in mind I was working on IBM 360 and 370 mainframes, followed by Data General minicomputers in the 80s.

It was to have a proprietary jack for the headphones so people would not steal them as they would not work on any other device. Same reason why they still sell those adapters so you can plug your own headphones instead of the ones provided by the flight company.

Also safety. COE in a Highway-speed accident is much more likely to cause major injury or death as opposed to a tug with more engine in the front to absorb the force of a collision.

Two main reasons. Firstly because it discourages the theft of headphones, and secondly because the second jack often carries a noise cancellation signal.

I didn't realise that. Although scania did a bull nose that I used to see quite often a few years ago

More suited, yes, but also it's mandated by European law. That's the actual reason.

Another factor i don't see mentioned in comments here is maneuverability. Euro trucks have practically zero overhang in front of the front wheels, and a very short wheelbase, allowing much tighter turning.

A lot of (especially historic) cities in Europe are full of turns which would require US trucks to do multi-point turns to clear

US regulations limit the length of semitrailers, but not of combinations (a combination being a tractor and a semitrailer).

EU regulations limit the overall length of a combination.

Cab-over-engine trucks are more compact, but harder to service and less comfortable. Since US law doesn't require truck-trailer combos to be a certain maximum length, making the tractor more comfortable and easier to service is the natural outcome.