input in favour of metres

After a shaky start to the day when Edgar (after what is fast-becoming (again) the norm of a heavily-disrupted night's sleep) slammed his front teeth into mine, chipping a wee bit off the biting edge of my left front upper incisor (though possibly only expanding an existing slight chip) things improved to the point of getting everyone out on their bike or bike seat to pop to the gallery for a look at things and a cake. No-one got sunburnt, no pieces of bicycle were stolen whilst parked and (so far) no-one has been sick, even after a haggis supper and a few laps of the hill to counteract it, though it's not me that's been being sick for the past few nights.

I can't remember exactly which aspects of torque, work, levers, pulleys and gears were taught in which subject out of craft/design/technology, (applied) maths and physics, though can remember looking at problems represented in terms of forces acting on weights attached to ropes through pulleys in the classroom we were usually in for applied maths. Newton metres were probably covered in CDT (which was definitely where we learnt about the orders of lever and the calcuation of torque) whereas I can clearly hear Mr Saxton talking about Joules in a physics lesson in the physics lab. Perhaps getting it from three sources (as well as having been a keen user of gears for many years via Lego and bicycles) helped make things nice and easily-graspable but it seems easy enough to have a certain amount of work to be done, being able to represent that work in terms of energy, borrowing the Newton metre to represent the energy required instead of the Joule and then explaining the input required in terms of Newton metres which then makes it simple to show the relationship between Work = Force * distance and how applying a lesser force over a greater distance can achieve the same amount of work as a greater force applied through a lesser distance. There's obviously usually not enough time to stop and explain this to people you pass in the street who have their gears the wrong way round and are thus finding it difficult to get up hills but explaining at length and with live demonstrations seems to have worked. Nicky was using her gears correctly this time, anyway.