True, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing, right?

(To be fair, I love France and a high proportion of the French. It's just the Parisians who are the problem, as all non-Parisian French would agree).

Exactly. I remember my dad installing a solid state dimmer in the extension to our house in about 1973, and they were common then. The only problem was that he found it quite difficult to source as he needed a pretty high power one (750W or 1kW - something like that). We also had a couple of wire-wound linear rheostats which were probably about 1kW capacity each, and which my dad used for amateur theatre lighting and these things were huge - about a foot long and about 4" square in section. They also needed a lot of ventilation to keep cool.

I'm sure you're right. If every human had exactly same distribution of rods and cones, of identical sensitivity, and with exactly the same frequency response curve, for humans only, then yes. But only for humans.

Imagine you have a surface which appears to be exactly the same colour to any number of these perfect human observers.

It could either consist of a magic pigment which absorbed all light frequencies apart from one specific frequency for that colour. In that case, it would excite the red, green, and blue cones at a specific level, depending on how the specific residual reflected frequency interacts with with frequency response curves of the RGB cones.

Or it could consist of a large number of red, green and blue dots of various reflectivities (or sizes: I don't think it matters), each of which absorbed all light frequencies apart from the specific frequencies of red, green or blue which trigger the R G or B cones, most likely at the centre and most sensitive part of the their frequency response graph.

These two surfaces are illuminated by white light (e.g. light from the sun or a tungsten lamp which emits a full range of frequencies within the visible spectrum).

Subjectively, the two surfaces look identical, but the frequencies being reflected from either of them are clearly extremely different. If the eye worked like the ear, the first surface would sound like a single pure note (as from a celestial ultra-high-frequency flute) while the other would sound like a chord, and probably a not-very-harmonious one at that. But the eye is basically an ear with only 3 cilia in it (and a more sensitive general "loudness" detector to represent the rods, but since there aren't really any in the fovea which is the part of the retina where your colour vision is most acute, we can ignore this).

To anyone (or any species) who doesn't have the exact standard setup of RGB cones I described above, the two surfaces will almost certainly look very different.

So, any objective assessment, if it can work, can *only* work for a specific physiology. And then there are all the other points raised in the thread about surface reflectivity, specular effects and so on, which make it even more difficult to do so.

I am concerned by your lack of degustatory discernment.

That looks spectacularly good, and untainted by hash browns that seem to have infiltrated themselves in their southern counterpart.

Ironic, really, since my theory is that hash browns were first imported into England, and hence the Full English, through the agency of the well known Scot, Ronald MacDonald.

They really aren't. In terms of delivering current to an appliance, they are ok, but in terms of safety (other than the danger caused by the pins sticking up if you leave one on the ground, and then walk around with bare feet) the British ones are vastly better.

It's too easy to poke objects into US sockets, they don't grip the plug well enough to support the weight of power adapters, the cords themselves often only have a single layer of insulation. British plugs are designed so that if they are stuck halfway in, you can't get access to a live pin even if you poke a metal object between the plug and the socket, and it's highly advised against to mix phases in the same room, whereas (at least in Canada), it's not unusual to have a dual socket wired so that the neutrals are effectively the centre tap, and the live (hot) pins are on separate phases 180 degrees apart. So you think you're dealing with a 120V outlet but it's actually got a supply of 240V to it. That's off the top of my head.

I've done a fair amount of electrical work both in the UK and North America (Canada, which has has similar electrical hardware and regs to the US).

I'm not saying that advising replacing the cord is wrong, but it just reminds me that in the UK, for many years, appliances weren't sold with plugs attached. They all came with a power cable with bare wires stripped at the end, and you had to buy a plug separately and attach it yourself.