So do I have to go into the woods to find them myself? or what

Yes, it's like a pilot light on your water heater or oven. Once it's lit, it remains lit, as there is one long continuous combustion rather than repeated small explosions like in an internal combustion engine with pistons.

/* With turbines, it's actually that once they get up to self sustaining speeds of rotation, the compression they achieve is enough to ignite any fuel that is sprayed into the combustion chamber, which then expands and turns the blades on the way out of the engine, which continues to turn the compression blades up front, which maintains (or ads to) the speed of rotation. It's actually a very neat process to me.

The way they start up multi-turbine aircraft is basically by hooking up a small portable turbine that pushes air through the first engine on the aircraft, which begins turning the compressor on that engine until it achieves ignition and becomes self sustaining. Then, they disconnect the portable engine, and close some vents in the running engine and shunt the spare airflow to the next stopped engine, which gets that one turning until IT achieves sustaining speeds, and so on.

I've never heard anybody say "cuckoo land" either.

Man, I thought the offices in the basement of my 4 story office building were bleak, but working in a MINE seems.... soul deadening.

A great point! Yes!

Consider this, you have a director who makes your first movie. The first movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, and is a huge success. Now, the director wants triple the salary to make the 2nd movie. Do you pay it? Or do you hire someone else at 1/3 the cost, and just tell him to try to make the tone consistent?

Also, directors are artists. Many artists don't want to spend 10 years making the same product over and over again. You do one movie, you get the experience, and then you move on to something new.

Generally things like this were discovered through trial and error, being done by LOTS of people, in many different places, over a LONG period of time. Pre internet, pre movie theaters, pre entertainment, people had a lot of free time, and not a whole lot to do with it, and so they tried making stuff to see what would happen.

Another thing is that until recently, a lot of things that require exact temperatures or demanding environments simply DIDN'T get created.

Modern thermometers use a variety of different methods and sensors to determine the temperature, but some of them include, thermocouples, Resistance Temperature Detectors (RTDs), thermistors, and Solid State sensors. These all use the ideas of voltage, resistance, and current to determine what the ambient temperature is.

The technology is a lot more complex than something like a bimetallic spring and some mercury, but if you're interested there is good reading about it!

Digital thermostats are WAY more accurate, and react a lot faster than analog thermostats. Old analog thermostats also need to be calibrated semi-regularly, as even bumping against it wrong can throw off the metal pieces inside that are used to react to the temperature in the room.

I don't know what you're referring to when you say that they "fuck up" all the time, but there isn't really any widespread issue with the accuracy or reliability of a digital thermostat, and certainly nothing related to the mechanics of actually reading the temperature of your home. Hell, they can even account for being in direct sunlight by subtracting the warmth they gain from the light. Analog thermostats can not.

This is how most/all thermostats worked before the recent digital ones. It's always neat to me, looking back and seeing purely mechanical solutions to problems that we solve digitally now.