Covering information that shouldn't be caught out in the open.
Covering information that shouldn't be caught out in the open.
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April 2006
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April 30, 2006 Only in America Spotted today, on Interstate 5 in San Diego:
I used to make wisecracks along the lines that the reason they can't find Osama in Afghanistan is because he's driving a cab in New York. After seeing this, I realize that although the chances are slim, they are definitely nonzero.
April 28, 2006 Separated at birth
Microsoft's resident psychopath, Steve Ballmer, and Young Frankenstein's Peter Boyle. And still more (“What did you get from the monster?” “I got his disco moves.”)
Howard Dean's got nothin' on this guy. Boys, bring in the net... No, not the Internet!
April 27, 2006 Leave it to a machine to misinterpret. I figured I'd give “Google Ads” a shot. Those are the things appearing over in the left-hand column, below the hit counter and “Other Diaries.” So far, the readers of this blawg seem completely oblivious to Google's feeble advertising attempts. Which is just as well. I'm pretty much immune to advertising myself, so I'm not surprised by the non-turnout. I'm going to leave 'em up for a few more weeks but right now, it seems the only people who have ever clicked on the ads are myself and one other person, weeks ago to see if this stuff actually works. One reason nobody's terribly interested is because this is niche marketing, and given the vagaries of machine intelligence, it's usually aimed at the wrong niche. Have a look at the following ads, automatically posted by Google to go with the April 24 entry. Remember that column was about bizarre inventions, like “spanking machines” used for lodge and fraternity initiations. And of course a Fuzzy Wonder Goat. Somehow, Google must have cogitated on such hot-button words like “beatings,” “spanking,” “electric shock,” “kicking user's buttocks,” “Three Frenchmen and a Goat,” “dog leashes,” and “Abu Ghraib” to select the following ads:
This is just great. First, we have:
Immediately followed by
And if prayer doesn't do the trick,
If you think about it, there's a whole economic system in microcosm represented there. Google ads rotate. Given some of the keywords in the April 24 entry that their engine might use to place ads, we might yet see some interesting products and services offered over on the left. The thing is, just mentioning the ads only reinforces Google's algorithm to think that yup, that's what this site is about, so it concentrates even more of them here. I see the latest iteration leads off with an ad for “custom window coverings” (presumably so the neighbors can't see what you're doing with your Fuzzy Wonder Goat), “child care products,” “preventing child drowning” (in case you pour on the child care products too heavily), “kids and guns” (in case drowning doesn't work).
April 24, 2006 The beatings will continue...
Digging on Wikipedia recently, I looked up the history of a certain college fraternity (no, I wasn't a frat rat). Which led to a history of pledging and hazing, which led to some truly amazing examples of American ingenuity. Recorded by the U.S. Patent Office, no less. (The U.S. Patent Office search engine is one of the more useful tools on the Internet, but finding one's way around is tricky and you may need to download a special reader plugin). For starters, there's Pat. No. 654,611, of 1900, for an “Initiating Device.” The patent description reads
How secret can an organization be if their initiation device is blessed with a patent, drawings, and description? More about those jolly fellows from Illinois, the De Moulins, in a moment. Not ones to rest on their laurels – or electrodes – the fun-loving De Moulin brothers (hey, by any chance, did they sing as the Mills Brothers?) also patented No. 920,837 of 1909, “Combined Lifting and Spanking Machine.” Ooh, these guys were getting creative:
Anudder brudder, Erastus De Moulin, appears in the application for 953,411 of 1910, “Trick Weight Lifting Machine.” Same basic idea. More recently, there is U.S. Patent No. 6,293,874, issued in 2001, for “User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user's buttocks.”
Note the remarkable decline in creativity. They don't teach kids anything in shop class anymore. This is so obvious, it underscores that these days, the Patent Office will hand out papers for anything. Now, if they had used some microprocessors, some servo motors, and maybe a USB port, it would at least not look so... Medieval.
About those De Moulins. They even had a catalog of these things. Apparently the last one issued was dated 1930, after which the product line fell victim to the Great Depression (how can you have a depression with that much hilarity available?) There are actually people who collect the De Moulins' gadgets, and even a book, Three Frenchmen and a Goat. I mean, who can resist the Fuzzy Wonder Goat?
And whatever became of the company? They're still in business, making marching band uniforms and the like. From their web site:
I dunno, I would think that a self-inflicted electric shocking paddle would do that, too, and on a smaller payroll.
Ah, for the days of the De Moulin family! Now, that was American ingenuity! But look how far we've sunk. These days, some weekend-warrior rent-a-cops from West Virginia think they're being creative with dog leashes and some digital happy snaps. Amateurs! Hayseeds! Send a De Moulin spanking machine (the kind with the exploding cartridges) to Abu Ghraib, and you'll get results, by gum!
April 23, 2006 Energy crisis? What energy crisis? Well, yesterday was Earth Day, the President is on a tour of California, so among other things it was a good time to appear topical and tout hydrogen power as a replacement for gasoline/diesel in motor vehicles. (“Bush pushes hydrogen fuel on Earth Day”)
That's platitudinal steer manure for the consumption of the... uh... consumers. Ain't gonna happen anytime soon, and here's why. Where is the hydrogen supposed to come from? Some proponents say we can make it by electrolysis of water. Good luck. That takes electrical energy. Lots of it. Next time there's a brownout during a heat wave, think about how much “excess generating capacity” is available for splitting water molecules. After a week-long brownout, can we expect “hydrogen stations” to run out, leaving commuters stranded at home and bringing the economy to a grinding halt? It might be different if we had abundant energy from nuclear power plants. Or other large-scale, clean generating methods. But those aren't happening because nobody, including the greens who are singing the praises of hydrogen power or fuel cell power or whatever the latest fad is, wants them in their back yard. See their resistance to large-scale solar or wind power. More here. California is actually putting a lot of conventional generating capacity online, but it never seems to be enough. Now, imagine if that generating capacity is asked to provide not only electricity for present-day consumers, but also to carry the load for making motor vehicle fuel. Take a look at how the plants are fueled. There's a lot of hydro power in the mountains, but you can only dam up so many streams (and guess what, here comes the Sierra Club...) Most of the load is carried by fossil fuel plants burning oil or natural gas. California gets nearly 62% of its electricity from fossil fuels (and the two creaky old nuke plants make up another 13%). The remaining 25% are from hydro and “renewable” resources.
And of course oil is the problem in the first place. Burning oil in one place just so you can transmit its energy in the form of electricity, to some other location where it is used to split hydrogen molecules from water, doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a systems standpoint. The laws of thermodynamics are going to make sure that this is not a good idea. Natural gas – methane – is often proposed as a power source for large stationary plants as well as NGVs (natural gas vehicles) and as the feedstock for producing hydrogen. Where does our methane come from? It turns out that right now, the U.S. is doing pretty well when it comes to methane. In 2004, imports accounted for about 15% of U.S. natural gas consumption, and most of that – 85% – came from Canada. With the rest coming from Trinidad & Tobago (11%), Algeria, (3%), Australia, Nigeria, Qatar, and Oman (none more than 0.35%), in that order. But if we're going to be using a lot more of the stuff to power vehicles, where are the methane reserves? As Gomer Pyle would say, surprise, surprise!
So if we need a lot of the stuff, and if that turns out to be more than we (and the Canadians, who may or may not appreciate the sudden attention) have available, we're right back to dealing with people who don't like us. Europe and the Western Hemisphere have less than 21% of known reserves. Is there a way out? Sure. Build nukes. Build wind farms if you can, or solar farms. Stop making so many babies. Stop encouraging other countries to make even more, by buying all their cheap manufactured goods (and services) so they can all drive cars instead of cows and be fat and happy and horny and boink away like... like... Americans. Put in place some serious fuel economy and emissions standards (if SUVs are going to be used as personal cars, make them meet the rules like cars – but that won't happen because GM and Ford are losing money in the US market as it is, and they're dependent on high-profit, high-dollar SUVs). Re-examine Carter's ineffectual “moral equivalent of war” and this time run it like you mean it. This is not the way to do it (Pat Oliphant, 1977):
And there may be another way. The United States has plenty of energy. Enough to last hundreds of years. This is not news. Only, it's not in a socially acceptible form. It's called coal. That means people going underground, doing hard work, risking their lives and their health, or large-scale strip mining. (See NIMBYs, solar energy, wind farms, and nukes to see how that's going to go over). It means putting in place expensive aftertreatment to burn the stuff cleanly in powerplants. Gasoline and diesel can be made from coal, if one is desperate enough. In WW2, the Germans used the Fischer-Tropsch process to make fuel for the war machine after their primary source of oil, the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania, were temporarily bombed out and eventually overrun. Of course they couldn't make enough of it at any price, hence abandoned tanks at the Battle of the Bulge and jet fighters standing around with dry fuel tanks. The problem with FT is it's still more expensive than buying the stuff from our dear friends in the Middle East, even at today's prices. It could be justified in wartime, but that's about it. Now comes news out of Rutgers that they may have found a catalytic process to carry out FT coal gasification. (See also Science Magazine abstract. Even if this particular process doesn't pan out, it appears that if we want to, the solution for independence from foreign sources for liquid hydrocarbon fuel may be at hand. But in the long run, do we want that? The big deal right now is global warming. Every fossil fuel combustion process generates carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming. Chemically, there's no way around it. When you put in HC molecules and O2 together and light them off, what has to come out is H2O + CO2. Has to. Water vapor and carbon dioxide. Every carbon atom going in results in a CO2 molecule coming out. There are some schemes to bottle up all the CO2, stuff it into empty underground caverns (former oil wells), and put a cork in it, but that doesn't sound all that practical. Ultimately, if we really need to get away from fossil fuels entirely, there are few answers with our current state of knowledge – and the state of activism against darn near everything. Nuclear energy is the most attractive of the bunch. With lots of nuclear energy, we can still have portable fuels for mobile applications, in the form of hydrogen. But to be independent of fossil fuels, that hydrogen has to be made by means that don't just relocate the fossil fuel consumption to some upstream facility. My feeling is, natural gas to hydrogen isn't the answer. And all of this – wind farms that don't look pretty and kill birds, nuclear plants that generate nuclear waste and may do a Three Mile Island, or worse, Chernobyl number if run by fools, strip mining that ruins large chunks of planet, fossil fuels that make CO2 , global warming and lead to dependency on unpleasant people, all of these are just manifestations of the four laws of thermodynamics:
Or, in other words, TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The best you can do is look for a cheap grubstake.
April 22, 2006 Hey, cosmic muffins, guess what, it's... EARTH DAY!!! (Miscellaneous rants) Yeah, whatever. The tipoff was today's Google theme:
This topic couldn't come at a better time. How many of the “environmentally aware” among us are driving great hulking SUVs, because maybe, just maybe, they might have to haul groceries on the way home from work? I know the navel-gazing New Agers next door don't give a rat's rectum when they drive their soove. In case anybody has been living in a cave and hasn't noticed, gasoline prices are shooting up at a prodigious rate. As usual, whenever this happens, the fuel industry has all sorts of explanations.
1. Even as the gasoline supply dwindles, crude oil stocks are way up. At record levels even on the Gulf Coast. See Point #3. 2. Ethanol is another slab of pork for the agricultural lobby, midwestern soy and corn growers, and the big lobbying machines of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and the like. It's all smoke and mirrors, and a way to force gasoline consumers to buy soybeans, whether they like/need them or not. Or, if you will, it's just another form of taxation, followed by a handout to a special interest group. The politics and history of oxygenated fuels are well covered in this article in Salon. There's enough blame to go around, no matter what political party one subscribes to, no matter if one hugs trees or tires.
My master's thesis was on combustion processes, specifically as they occur in diesel engines. Later work in industry involved gasoline engines. The most valuable lesson I learned in years of engineering education and employment is TANSTAAFL: “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.” Followed by “Beware of unintended consequences.” (Actually, I can probably trace these back to high school days, and reading science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein; TANSTAAFL was a recurring theme in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and unintended consequences fit right in with a line from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long: “Beware of altruists, they may have other nasty habits.”) That Salon article said it, but I've known it since this began in the early 1990s: Putting “oxygenated fuel” in a modern, fuel-injected car with three-way catalytic converter doesn't do squat for emissions. The official rationale behind this is that the oxygenate will “water down” the gasoline, forcing the car to run a little bit leaner, and the extra oxygen would help emissions, especially carbon monoxide. But every modern car – say, anything built in the past 15 years, which is the vast majority of the fleet on our roads – has a three-way catalytic converter to reduce all three major types of emissions – hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), and oxides of nitrogen (NOx). Those converters have to run at near-stoichiometric (big word for chemically ideal) fuel/air mixtures, or the converter will be destroyed. Too rich or too lean, and there goes your most important pollution fighter, the catalyst, to the tune of several hundred dollars. To run at that perfect mixture point, cars with three-way catalysts also have one or more oxygen sensors which sniff the exhaust stream and then twiddle the fuel injection to make the ingoing air/fuel ratio near the optimum, near-stoichiometric point. So what happens if you put in an oxygenated fuel? Oxygen sensor says “hey, there's too much oxygen in the exhaust, I have to put in more gasoline to compensate.” So you wind up burning more gasoline for the same job. At the pump, we're told we have to pay more for this super-duper “reformulated” gasoline, because It's Good For Us. But the additives have lower energy value than the gasoline they displace, so we are paying more for fuel with less energy content. That means we need to burn more of it to do the same job (moving a vehicle for X miles against Y pounds of air and road resistance at Z speed). When we switched over to oxygenated fuel more than a decade ago, just about everybody noticed an immediate drop in their fuel economy, to the tune of about 10%. (If one did the math, given the known energy content of gasoline and MTBE in BTU/gallon, the numbers worked out as expected simply from an energy standpoint). So the oil companies get us twice: they get to charge more for stuff that actually has less gasoline in it, plus, they get to sell more of it because of its reduced energy content. It's like a bartender who charges extra for watered-down drinks because he uses Perrier instead of tap water. What else happens when you put in oxygenated fuel is this: the soybean / corn growers / agribusiness lobby gets a piece of the very lucrative energy pie, which they otherwise could not access. Formerly, this was the MTBE lobby, which managed to ram their “wonderful idea” through Congress, despite any calls for reason on the basis of actual emissions reduction, and despite early reports that the stuff was carcinogenic and even tiny traces would ruin ground water supplies. That is the ostensible reason why it's being replaced by ethanol. How much ethanol is actually being added? A couple of percent, it turns out. But remember, they get to charge extra for that. And gee, guess what, there's an ethanol shortage! Wonderful. Here's the Wikipedia overview of the legislation that mandates this, the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
3. There have been no new refineries built in the United States for at least 25 years. But that doesn't bother the NIMBYs driving SUVs. This is the same mindset that keeps us from getting new nuclear power plants (none built since Three Mile Island in 1979).
4. Fuel stations don't need to do anything special to “draw down” their tanks. They get fresh deliveries every few days.
5, 6. If it isn't Nigeria, it's Iran, or Venezuela, or Mexico. Or the North Slope or ANWR. Or hurricanes, or cold winters. There's always an excuse to be found, if one looks hard enough.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even his hopelessly inept predecessor Gray Davis, have been pleading with the Federal government to get rid of its idiotic fuel oxygenate mandate. To no avail. Gotta keep the agribiz lobby satisfied. There are voices out there that realize this is all bogus, but they can't get through. See this editorial in the Orange County Register.
That earlier Salon article summed it up nicely.
Unfortunately, I think the phrase “in this case” is superfluous. It seems that more often than not, legislation is written and passed for reasons completely different from those stated on the package label. Jeff Duntemann asked about biodiesel and people using waste deep-frying oil from McDonalds to power their diesel cars. The biodiesel boondoggle is the same as the ethanol boondoggle: midwestern agri-interests have managed to get a low percentage of soy-derived oil mandated as an additive for all diesel fuel sold in some Midwestern states. Only there's a few problems: when the stuff turns cold, as in Minnesota winters, it basically turns to wax in the fuel system. And any water in the system (biodiesel has an affinity for water) compounds the problem. But what about the people who claim to run their VW diesels on waste french fry oil from McDonalds? Hey, the exhaust even smells like french fries. Well, there's a slight problem there. This only works as long as the amateur environmentalist draining McD's waste drums doesn't have any competition. Take an eyeball guesstimate of how many gallons a restaurant goes through in a day, and then guesstimate how many gallons were used by cars driving to that restaurant. Plus all the cars who drove past without stopping; they need fuel too.
In other words, even if we poured every last ounce of fry oil into vehicles, it would only satisfy 1.3% of the U.S. demand for diesel fuel and heating oil. But that's OK. True Believers have never been really good with numbers; it only matters that one truly believes. Another pet of the Greens is solar energy. But if you build collectors big enough to replace a fossil fuel powerplant, out in the desert, say, you'll be destroyin' the ecosystem, because tortoises and coyotes and cacti don't do well in the shade. Or put in an industrial-size wind farm, and they'll say you're turning birds into burger. One can go to Home Depot and get a quote for a solar energy system that will “take your home off the Grid.” Right. Check the price, check your current monthly energy bill, figure that the price might double or even triple over the life of the system, and calculate how long before that solar energy system is amortized. Last time I checked, in my case, it was about 30 years. I won't be in this house, or maybe even on this planet, in 30 years, and I doubt that home buyers will pay extra for photovoltaic collectors on the roof. Meanwhile, you have 30 years of wear and tear and maintenance. Computer-based controllers for the system, battery storage (hey, where do all those lead-acid batteries go, anyway?), potential hail damage, and who knows what-all else. Here's just one example of a vendor who works with Home Despot. And here's an article in Popular Mechanics which has a more optimistic assessment of the payoff period for a solar installation. The great thing about fossil fuels is also their greatest curse: they're basically cheap, and come out of a hole in the ground. When you no longer own all your own holes, that's when the problems start.
April 16, 2006 Happy Easter! Now, onward to things mechanical.
Airplane and engine musings I was browsing the web site of one of the finest aviation artists working today, Lou Drendel. I've seen his work for at least the past 30 years, particularly in Squadron/Signal publications like ...And Kill Migs and Mig Alley, illustrated works on American fighter aircraft of the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. One painting caught my eye, as it captured the Hawker Tempest of one Pierre Clostermann, a French ace flying for the Free French Air Force and the British Royal Air Force in World War II.
I remember that name, and that particular plane. I remember WW2 planes – Allied or German – by their buzz codes, and JF-E is one that appeared often and prominently in my books and models. I just looked up Clostermann, and it seems that he passed away only a few weeks ago. He had a colorful career. Here he is with his favorite Tempest, “Grand Charles” – “Big Charles.” Must have been an inside joke. No doubt it's explained in his book, The Big Show (ISBN 0304366242).
Back when I was in college, I was fascinated by the engine that powered the Tempest and its predecessor, the Typhoon. It had a bizarre layout, described at some length by the late, great automotive and engineering writer LJK Setright in his book Some Unusual Engines. Both planes used the Napier Sabre. The Sabre was an H-24 engine: two flat-twelves stacked on top of each other, like a letter H on its side, seen fron the front. It had two crankshafts that were geared together to a central output shaft. A cutaway showing the engine in all its complexity is here. Strangest of all, they had no poppet valves; instead, they had single-barrel sleeve valves (not the double sleeves used in some 'tween-wars automobile engines such as the various Knights, Minerva, and some Mercedes). That it worked at all, with so much mechanical stuff going on, is remarkable. That it (eventually) worked well in the Tempest and Typhoon, under wartime conditions, is incredible. Later, the English BRM auto racing team tried to design their own, much smaller H-16 Formula One engine (with conventional poppet valves) and failed miserably. The team's entire sordid history of failed engines is recounted here. BRM has ever since stood for “Bad Racing Management;”
Napier seemed to go out of its way to design engines of unusual configuration, and make them work well. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, where they had a lot of prewar aircraft piston engines just standing around in a gallery circling their collection of ceiling-hung airplanes. Most I don't remember (what ten-year-old kid remembers oddball engines), but the one that sticks in my mind is the Napier Lion, which had what its makers called a “Broad Arrow” configuration – three banks of four cylinders forming sort of an upside-down peace sign when seen head-on. Even to a kid, not (yet) trained in engineering, it looked odd.
These aircraft engines powered some historically significant machinery and land speed record holders between the wars, including Sir Henry Seagrave's 1927 Sunbeam (the first car to exceed 200 mph, at Daytona):
Sir Malcolm Campbell's Blue Birds: the 1928 model (206 mph at Daytona):
Seagrave's 1929 Golden Arrow, clearly showing the Napier engine shape (231 mph at Daytona):
and Campbell's 1931 Blue Bird (246 mph, Daytona):
Napier Lions were also used in the Supermarine racing seaplanes of the 1920s before Supermarine ultimately switched to Rolls Royce Merlin V-12 power.
In France, Lorraine-Dietrich produced its own family of W-12s, such as the 12Ed of 1922, which powered the first nonstop Paris to New York flight in a Breguet BRE-19 (1930, three years after Lindbergh's NY-to-P flight).
and the later 1929 Courlis engine. Oddly enough, that W-12 configuration is back, sort of. But not in the three-bank layout used by the Napier Lion. Just a couple of weeks ago, I tested a another proud British name, a Bentley Flying Spur, with a 552-horsepower, six-liter twin-turbo engine. They call it a W12, but it's really more like a VV12 – a pair of narrow-angle, Volkswagen-practice V6 engines joined at the crankshaft. Only today, Bentley is owned by Volkswagen and the Bentley engine is based on a VW block. In cutaway, the VW progenitor looks something like this:
All assembled, it looks like this:
The same basic design is used in Bentleys, Volkswagen Phaeton, and Audi A8l 6.0. The same principle – joining a pair of V engines with a common crankshaft – is used to make the Bugatti Veyron 16-cylinder, by combining a pair of narrow-angle V8s (VW also owns the Bugatti name).
Another oddball Napier layout was the postwar Deltic, used in British railcars and torpedo boats. It had three crankshafts, and three banks of opposed cylinders in a triangular layout (hence the name). See that Wikipedia entry for a neat animation. Note phasing difference; the two pistons in a given cylinder don't reach their respective top centers at the same time.
Meanwhile, back in the war, another British company was enjoying some success with a sleeve valve engine of its own: the Bristol Hercules. This was an air-cooled radial, installed in British bombers. If the cranks and gears of the H-24 Sabre seemed daunting, the Hercules reached a new level of complexity:
Again, they got it to work. Not only did it work, but it stayed in production into the 1950s, and in service into the 1980s, on aircraft such as the postwar Franco-German Noratlas military transport, sort of a European C-119 Flying Boxcar. Setright reports that it achieved the longest recommended time between overhauls of any aircraft piston engine, at 3000 hours. I recall one German engine overhaul shop owner, who was still working on them in 1986, telling me that their biggest problem was cold starts in winter; thick oil and the huge oil film area on the sleeves made cranking difficult.
Nonweb references: Some Unusual Engines, LJK Setright, Mechanical Engineering Publications Ltd and Society of Automotive Engineers, 1975; World Encyclopedia of Aero Engines, Bill Gunston, Patrick Stephens Ltd., 1986 A History of Aircraft Piston Engines, Herschel Smith, Sunflower University Press, 1986
Speaking of airplanes, knowing I have a pilot's license, a friend asked me what I think of a crate called the Flight Design CT. The answer: not much. It's a German design that's glued together in the Ukraine. I don't like plastic airplanes unless they fit on my bookshelf. It's not even licensed as a proper airplane; there's some sort of FAA loophole for not-quite airplanes, called Light Sport Aviation. Considering it comes in somewhere north (with radios, shipping, and registration, far north) of $90K, I can get a lot more (used) airplane for half that – a real airplane, made of metal and rivets, not 'glass and glue, with a real engine, capable of carrying some real load and flying in real airspace. Point of reference: Real airplane:
Not a real airplane:
(Hey, it's Easter, that looks like a cross between an Easter egg and a lawn dart. It fits...)
I looked up the accident record at the NTSB web site. Two incidents; one an obvious pilot error (ground looped in crosswind), the other is a bit more worrisome:
That sounds like the nose-high flare attitude blanked out that tiny tail, he added power, it started to swing right for whatever reason (not engine torque reaction; that would make it swing left), but he had no rudder authority. Checking the German “Aerokurier” magazine, the past December issue says the company is bringing out an “improved” model called the CTSW 2006, with “improved slow-flight characteristics” and that “less experienced pilots will have an easier job of landing.” You can bet 100 percent that this is due to the Tennessee mishap, above. Yup. Sure enough. This says that for 2006, they made the tail surfaces bigger. And beefed up the landing gear. Seems they've been breaking its legs in Australia. Classic, textbook failure mode of an awkward design solution (hole drilled right through a stressed member, aggravated by screw threads as stress risers). At least in Australia, the things now have to be crack-checked or -tested after every 25 hours of flight instruction, 100 hours of private use, or after every hard landing. The engines have collected a few airworthiness directives as well – for a gearbox bearing problem (again, geared engines just add more stuff to go wrong) and snapped starter mounting bolts. Sure, ADs – airworthiness directives – are a fact of life for any airplane. But for a supposedly simple crate like this, they're coming kinda fast.
The topic was engines. This thing uses a Rotax engine. (See also these specs). Not my idea of a suitable aviation powerplant. If Napiers and Bristols were quirky, this is just plain contrarian in design. It's 1352 cc (83 cubic inches) so it has to scream its little lungs out to make its 100 rated takeoff horsepower. That of course means it needs a gearbox to bring its screaming 5800 rpm back down to where a propeller can use it. That means added weight, hung way out front, and added complexity. Compression ratio is a high (for aircraft)10.5:1. It has both types of cooling: air for the barrels and water for the heads, assuring there's even more ways it can go wrong. Working a tiny engine that hard is not a good idea when you can't just pull over and phone the Auto Club for a tow. Cessna 150s and 172s and their antedeluvian Lycoming or Continental engines may have all the sex appeal of a 1966 Chevy Biscayne, but they're solid, simple, reliable, easy to work on, have slow-turning (read: lightly stressed) engines, and they're cheap. European flying is different. Their priorities, philosophies, budgets, and the social ramifications of private aviation are different. Been there, done that, don't care for it.
April 14, 2006 Dig-it-all ramblings Well, I held out as long as I could. I 've been shooting 35mm film since I got my first real camera in 1971, a Zeiss Icarex with (fortunately, as it turned out) the Pentax 42mm lens thread and clunky-looking but removable finder options. I chose the Icarex because of the mystique of German optics, and because as a kid I used to hang around the Adler Planetarium in Chicago – and if their Zeiss planetarium projector used Tessar lenses for that stunning night sky, then a smaller Tessar lens was just good enough for me.
That saw me through high school, did yeoman duty for my science fair project which got some significant scholarship grants, and served me well until about 1989 when I had to get a more modern, more versatile camera for professional reasons – photographing cars for magazine stories. At that time I opted for a Nikon F3, 35-135mm zoom lens, MD-4 motor drive, and SB-16 flash. Later I got a Nikon 400mm f/8 mirror lens but I'm not especially thrilled with its performance. Uneven field illumination.
That's a pretty comprehensive package. I have to say that with its electronics, the Nikon is less reliable than the all-mechanical, all-manual, plus match-needle photocell light metering on the Icarex. It's been back to Nikon in Torrance a couple or three times. I think in all that time the Zeiss has been in the shop once, because of a well-known design problem – the curtain shutter tends to drag in some parts of its travel, at some shutter speeds, creating light and dark vertical bands in the image. (Ever wonder how a focal plane shutter works? Found a great explanation of that, and how different shutter speeds are achieved). The Nikon, like the Zeiss, is still a working camera. I use both for astrophotography. The Nikon has some advantages, but also disadvantages (needs battery power to hold shutter open) so at times I use the Zeiss. I've even found a way to strap a Nikon DW-4 6x magnifying finder
in place of the Icarex' removable finder. (That shows it being used as intended, on a Nikon). Typical results with the F3, showing what's still possible with film, may be seen on my astrophotography page; see M42 image, a stack of five of various exposure times with the Nikon. When I want great images taken with a quality lens on a stable, permanent medium, I'll still shoot film – while I can still buy it. Currently my film of choice is Kodak Elite Chrome 200. As for “permanent medium,” I think the long-term stability of 35mm emulsions on a decent film base is well established, while the permanence of “digital media” is not at all a sure thing. CD-ROMs have been known to go bad in a decade or so even in non-harsh storage environments. And I know the photo printer people make claims for their inks and papers ranging from decades to centuries, but that has yet to be proven. Probably the single greatest threat to permanence of digital image media is the rapid (rapid compared to a geological timeline) evolution of storage formats. For example, a single CD-ROM could store all of the 5¼” floppy disks I've ever created. And I still have a stack of them, with old XyWrite word processing documents on them. But having them is academic since I no longer have a working computer with a 5¼” floppy drive that can read them and transfer them to that imaginary single CD. We've seen the same obsolescence in personal audio media; turntables could play 33 1/3 rpm LPs, 45s, and maybe ancient 78s, but when prerecorded media shifted to CDs, there was (at first, and for a long time to come) no effective way to transfer one's record collection to CD. You had to go out and start a new collection by buying CDs. The record companies, of course, loved that setup. (And they wonder why people get perverse pleasure in ripping off music). Now, of course, one can take turntable audio output, feed it into a computer sound card, record it on the hard drive, and then burn a CD with music in CD audio or MP3 format. (In the history of the CD-ROM, consumer CD/DVD burners are a relatively recent phenomenon). One can even fix the inevitable clicks and pops of vinyl using inexpensive software such as Goldwave. Turntables are not completely dead, of course. Michael Covington just wrote about his recent turntable purchase on his diary (April 13, 2006 entry). Audiophiles maintain a market for high-end turntables for their large investment of vinyl recordings, and there are those with golden ears who claim vinyl just plain sounds better. I have to agree that many CDs just sound artificially “bright” to me. Decent turntables can be found used on ebay. My personal choice is the British-made Rega Planar 2, still in production after nearly 30 years, outstanding customer support from what is basically a cottage-industry shop, and made mechanically bog-simple so electronic gimcracks won't mysteriously fail in a mere decade or two. In real-money terms, it's more affordable now than it was when I bought mine in 1980.
So anyway. I finally broke down and bought a digital camera – a Kodak P850.
It has 5.1 megapixels, a 12x optical zoom Schneider Kreuznach Variogon lens (digital zoom is kind of useless anyway); can take RAW format images, and has all sorts of manual controls to override its normal automatic functions, and can do neat tricks like time lapse and three- or five-exposure bracketing of a shot. Last night, fooling around, I shot this at maximum zoom (432mm equivalent), 1/1000 sec., ISO 100, f/3.7, handheld. (The Variogon lens design has an interesting history).
That's a single shot. What I should try is a stack of five or ten, processed in Registax. It's been cropped; the original frame would look something like this:
The P850 is about right for the amount of money I wanted to spend ($330, shipped, from Beach Camera in New Jersey). The next level up in terms of capability is the Nikon D50, but even at twice the price of the Kodak, those are not especially good for deep-sky astrophotography (and the Kodak is admittedly completely unusable for that, so I'm not even tempted to try). For a real dual-purpose (conventional and astronomical) digital camera, I'd have to step up to a Canon, at least the EOS 350 Digital Rebel or better yet the Canon D20a, and those are more expensive still. Right now, Canon has the better sensors. Nikon needs to catch up, but it doesn't seem to be able to do so. For years, I've noticed that the automotive photographers I work with shoot Canon almost exclusively. Anyway, this looks like it's going to be fun.
April 12, 2006 Demoting Osama While browsing some already-forgotten financial website this morning, I got the following animated pop-up ad:
So he's been demoted, from the world's most wanted with a price of $25 mil on his head, to a cartoon figure worth the price of a kiddie toy. Does this mean if we airdrop thousands of XBoxes on Afghanistan, somebody will turn him in?
The Trees on Mars Another case of pareidolia? For some time now, noted science fiction author [Sir] Arthur C. Clarke has claimed to see trees in Mars Global Surveyor images. Like this.
There's only one problem: image scale. These “trees” would have to be on the order of one mile in diameter. And then there's the Martian spiders, which have nothing to do with David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust incarnation, but may be another manifestation of the “tree” phenomenon.
I dunno. I'm less inclined to see evidence of life in pictures like this. To me, it all looks like Barstow, California, and there's no life there. We'll probably know more once the latest Mars Reconnnaisance Orbiter gets into a lower orbit and starts taking images with an order of magnitude better resolution.
April 11, 2006 Stop the presses! Another face on Mars! And this just in: NASA has discovered... a face on Mars!
And it's a classic Smiley Face at that. Proof that hippies have converted a VW Microbus for interplanetary travel! Space truckin', to the max! Man, are VWs tough, or what? There's lots more at that space.com site, including such obvious messages from intelligent life as
and this “mile long translucent worm,” “discovered” by the original “face on Mars”crank, Richard Hoagland:
Hey, I'm no geologist, but even I can see that those are most likely lines of sand dunes in gullies – like these. (See April 2 entry on anaglyphic Mars images). Here's more proof that hippies drove a Microbus to Mars; we know those old VW engines are sturdy but occasionally you have to swap out the pistons. Keep looking, there's probably a matching cylinder barrel near there. Nice to know the spare parts chain stretches that far. Still more Martian machined fittings. The thing about people seeing things that aren't there, connecting dots and coming up with images of religious icons, faces on Mars, etc. is a phenomenon known as pareidolia. Humans are apparently hard-wired to do just that; it's a survival thing. Just last April, while in Chicago, going to visit a friend from Northwestern University astronomy dept. days, who is now teaching at De Paul University, I exited the Kennedy Expressway at Fullerton and saw news trucks, reporters, police, barricades, crowds. Later on the evening news I heard that this was caused by an “image of the Virgin Mary” in the form of a salt stain on the concrete wall. Carl Sagan addressed the phenomenon several times, without using that word, in his books and the PBS series Cosmos. (For example, his excellent The Demon-Haunted World, Chapter 3, “The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars.”) I parodied this phenomenon in my April 1 entry. Yes! Now it can be told! That was an April Fool's joke! (Sheesh).
April 8, 2006 Space capsules, time capsules
Look closely. There's actually two historic events there. We've forgotten that these things were happening simultaneously. Needless to say, I wasn't much interested in the second story.
I'm so glad The Chappaquiddick Kid is safe. As a result, we've been blessed for the last 3 ½ decades, as we've watched ol' Ted's nose turn into something resembling... yes, the Lunar surface.
April 7, 2006 The Hurtling Moons of Tellurium* * From Latin tellus, “earth;” we're all Tellurians on this bus. Yesterday I was going through a pile of things I had squirreled away in boxes at my folks’ house. I found a long roll of photographic images on 9 1/4” (235 mm) wide resin-coated paper, of Earth satellite imagery, taken in late 1972. (I got these out of a wastebasket at a company where I had a night job as a janitor, earning money for college while in junior and senior year of high school). The images were shot by Landsat 1, originally known as ERTS (Earth Resources Technology Satellite) 1. The images look something like this, and cover a range of things: Washington State, Vancouver, Chesapeake Bay, and Zambia, Africa. Here's part of Washington State.
Now, with Google Earth, it's a simple matter to get modern imagery, in much greater detail.
It's been 33+ years since Landsat 1 did its pioneering multispectral imagery. Today, we take this stuff for granted, indeed we can get much of it for free on our home computers – packaged, navigable, with nifty overlays showing roads and the nearest fast food franchise. We derive tremendous benefit from space exploitation (weather and earth resources satellites, communications satellites, TV satellites). Perhaps less so from misguided “exploration” that doesn't really explore anything (for example, keeping two janitors in space, maintaining a station that’s never going to produce any useful science), but even the cost of that is puny compared to the tangible benefits from all the commercial (and decidedly non-NASA) space activities we enjoy every day. And we wouldn't have those commercial operations if somebody hadn't gone there first under the guise of “exploration.” Maybe if we considered the NASA budget as part of the cost of doing business, the Luddites would find it a bit easier to swallow. After all, the NASA budget of $15 billion-ish per year is peanuts; just yesterday, GM sold 51 percent of its most profitable operation, its finance operations, for about that much, which will barely offset one year of its corporate red ink. So I wondered whatever happened to Landsat 1. Well, it turns out it's still up there. It was finally shut down in 1978, but it's high enough that its orbit hasn't decayed. For that matter, early stuff like Vanguard 1 is still up there too, and visible if you know where to look. I use an excellent, free sky charting program called Cartes du Ciel, written by a fellow in Switzerland, Patrick Chevalley. Its “calendar” function is able to open files of “Two Line Elements” (TLEs; satellite orbital elements, provided by NORAD), filter them for things like object type, brightness, and current visibility, and plot them on sky charts for any selected time or location. One used to be able to get these files freely online, from any of several independent, usually hobbyist sources. In the post-9/11 world of Security Theater, one now has to register with Space Track. You have to sign up for it and explain just why you want to look at satellites. In keeping with the Security Theater aspect, “approval” (such as it is) takes a matter of minutes, but at least Something Is Seen To Be Done. One thing that Space Track doesn't provide is TLEs for military and reconnaissance satellites. Well, duh... But that doesn't keep other people from providing them. For example, Amsat.org provides a link at Spy Satellite Info. Mike McCants' linked TLE file of “classified” birds is hosted in Texas, but apparently the ringleader of those evil satellite watchers is Canadian. It figures. Of course, anybody who really wants to keep things hidden from spysats has their own resources and doesn't need hobbyist information. Back to Landsat 1. Can I see it or not? Well, yesterday morning by happy coincidence, even before stumbling across the roll of images, after many months of not doing anything with satellite elements or Cartes du Ciel, I downloaded several files of TLEs. I had some trouble getting them to work, until I checked some old troubleshooting posts to the CdC forum and noted that I had had this problem before, and it's caused by long file names or unusual characters. Once I shortened them to eight-character alphanumeric, they worked. The "all satellites" file covers nearly 9000 objects, and takes up 400+ pages in Microsoft Word. I just did a search for Landsat 1 in Word, copied the two lines of data plus title to its own text file named Landsat1.tle, opened that in Cartes du Ciel and saw that it was going to make two passes in the early evening, one of them almost overhead. The Cartes du Ciel calendar results look something like this (location and times deliberately blurred by me, in keeping with the Space Track rules – no disseminatin' of data!
Click on the pass in question, and Cartes du Ciel generates a star map, like this one. The satellite is shown moving from lower right to upper left, nicely parallel to one side of the triangle forming the “hindquarters” of Leo the Lion.
At magnitude 5.3, it should have been an easy object in binoculars, even with the moon nearby. And so it was. At the appointed time, I went out, and, right on schedule, to the second, Landsat 1 slowly glided across the sky. I watched it until it disappeared near the northern horizon. How strange. More than 33 years on, and the spacecraft that produced one of the things that caught my attention in high school – some satellite pictures of Earth – is still up there. A lot has happened in that time, I've come a long way and Landsat 1 has gone even farther (I figured as a rough guess, it's reeled off about 5 billion miles), but there it is, still on its track, still visible.
April 4, 2006 Bunkers I Have Known Jeff Duntemann has been hounding me to come up with a catchy name for this blog (I can't read “blog” without thinking of John Belushi and “The Blog Diet” on Saturday Night Live). So I came up with Infobunker. Indeed, a year and a half ago, Jeff and I were discussing various bunkers and the topic made it to his diary (see his Aug. 21, 2004 entry). Back in the early 1980s, while I was working in Germany, my friend Donn M. came over to visit. As we were driving around Stuttgart, he'd notice odd structures and ask “what's that”? “Oh, that's an air raid bunker, left over from the war.” I think the first was this one, around the corner from the Bosch plant where I worked at the time.
(Here's a good German-language site on the various cookie-cutter bunker designs and their locations). See, it works like this. The thing is so massive that Allied bombs are supposed to bounce off and explode harmlessly (more or less) alongside. A few minutes later, “What's that?” “Oh, that's another air raid bunker from the war.” These things are such tough lumps of steel-reinforced concrete that they're not worth demolishing. Instead, they hang stuff on them, like that bus shelter scabbed onto the one outside the Stuttgart-Feuerbach train station (above), or like this one,
up the hill near the former Robinson Barracks at the Pragsattel (known to generations of American servicemen as “Macht Nix Corners,” or, worse, “Mox Nix Corners” – because you can go off in all directions from there). That lump is five stories tall and about all they can do with it is hang neon signs and streetcar catenaries on it. So we drove over to Strasbourg, France. As soon as we crossed the Rhine and entered the city, we were confronted by a bunker built into the abutment of a railroad bridge, obviously aimed directly at anybody dumb enough to try coming straight across the only bridge over the Rhine for miles around. (The whole concept of the Maginot Line, World War II edition, was based on the assumption that the enemy was basically dumb and wouldn't do an end-run around your forts – again). By this time, Donn would crack up anytime I said “Oh, that's just another bunker.” He suggested I write a book, Bunkers I Have Known. Maybe I will. A few years later, about 1990, after I had moved back to the States, and it was Donn't turn in the barrel to work in Europe, we met again in France, on a near-deserted, wonderfully straight and flat two-lane road north of Strasbourg, to do some instrumented testing of the latest Porsche Turbo for an American car magazine. We spent part of the time exploring some abandoned, unmarked bunkers, outlyers from the Maginot Line. I had passed by these things dozens of times by car, and never noticed them until one day I decided to bicycle down to Strasbourg, and only then noticed that some grass-covered mounds off in a meadow had low cupolas on them. Some with holes from armor-piercing rounds punched through them. I think the steel turrets had either the logo "SC" or "Schneider-Creusot" cast into them. This isn't the one I found, but they follow a pattern: two outlying smaller cupolas for spotting or machine guns, flanking a larger central, elevating and rotating turret with a bigger gun. This is a “petit ouvrage” – a "small fortification." These are not like the huge forts of the Maginot Line proper, connected by underground rail systems, barracks, kitchens, etc. These are basically isolated, improved blockhouses. Here's a photo, found on the web site of... get this... a British-based bunker tour operator.
Here's another, at a different location. These, of course, are seen from the backside (the side your enemy is not supposed to do an end run to see). From the intended side, all you see is a gentle hill with big upended iron pots on top.
(These are from http://www.bunkertours.co.uk)
This is what they look like when they've been shot at. Probably for target practice long after combat had ended.
(From http://www.lignemaginot.com)
Another. Hey, a little Bondo, a little paint, who's gonna know?
(From http://community.webshots.com/photo/44300285/1024179950031766371FpZPMzzkQN)
Well, no, Timmy, that one's gonna need some new sheetmetal. I can see it all now: a new “reality TV” show, Pimp My Bunker. Eh? What's that? The Germans are doing what???
Ever see a vertical railyard?
I have to do some digging, somewhere in my slide collection I have pictures I took of a bunker near Nice, on the French Riviera, built into a cliff facing the sea, near a five-star hotel. I suppose that was to ensure the establishment's exclusivity.
Ah. Here we go. I shot these in 1994, while hiking near the Grand Hotel Saint Jean Cap Ferrat, on a peninsula of that name between Nice and Monte Carlo. I don't know if this is a French or German emplacement, but we were told the Grand Hotel was Nazi HQ for the area during the occupation. It looks similar to German “Atlantic Wall” emplacements found along the English Channel coast, but then, there's only so many ways to make a concrete box with a hole in it.
View up the slope with the Cap Ferrat lighthouse.
Somebody' s mega-boat just coming into range...
View back into the hillside. Rails might have been for transporting ammunition. Or, maybe this didn't house a gun at all but rather an optical rangefinder, reporting back to guns hidden somewhere else. Maybe the devices, whatever they were, could be rolled back for protection.
This is easy to spot on satellite imagery. Here's a general view of the peninsula. Grand Hotel at upper right, note shadow of lighthouse on headland at lower left.
And here's a detail of the above, with the footpath and round darker gray roof of the gun emplacement clearly visible below the bright white lighthouse.
April 3, 2006 A prediction You know those sob stories we get with our Liberian 419 scam spam – if it isn't some distant relatives who got roasted in a "fiery crash" on the "Sagama Express Road," it's the wife or son or daughter of some recently (pick one)
African leader, who needs help smuggling millions in ill-gotten wealth out of the country. Now that this is playing out, I predict that it is only a matter of days, if not hours, before our inboxes start getting 419 scams with a heart-rending "Charles Taylor story." Attention, crimestoppers: be on the lookout! Your inbox may snag the first specimen! (Postscript. I went through my spam from the past few days. I don't have a winner, but this isn't bad. Dated April 1).
Uh... Bongo Briggs? Maybe he was drummed out of office. Or murdered. Then they could make a movie: Bedtime for Bongo.
April 2, 2006 More wrenching tales I have a collection of unusual wrenches. All right, so I have two unusual wrenches. Besides the Star-Mangled Spanner, I also have this thing.
I can just see the conversation in the emergency room now.
It might not even be Chinese. It might be Austrian. With a typographical error.
More better Mars Do you have a pair of those red/cyan "3D glasses" lying around? I save way more junque than I should. But sometimes it comes in handy. Here's a set of those things, logically found filed in the "dead eyeglasses drawer" (a prime source of tiny replacement eyeglass screws, frames that might still work, and single lenses). This is from an Imax show at San Diego's Reuben H. Fleet Science Center. They're rather stylish, as is plainly obvious.
Don't have any? Don't know where to get any? Send these guys a SSAE envelope and for 39 (not 37; that's old info) cents, you get your very own pair. So what to do with 3D glasses? Why, you look at images like these! Of course, you're not limited to still images.
These are called "anaglyphic images" and for fun, just put on those mondo cool shades and do a Google search for anaglyphic. There's cookbook instructions online for making your own anaglyphs. Here's one example using Adobe Photoshop. Some more cool links on that guy's site: And another site with links to 3D images. (Added April 9, 2006): More sites with free anaglyph making software:
April 1, 2006 Another NASA coverup With plentiful, high-resolution images flooding in from the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, independent thinkers have once again stolen a march on the established "scientific" community and revealed the presence of fossils on the Red Planet. Just as Richard Hoagland discovered the Face on Mars, once again it is people who not only think out of the box, but manage to chew their way out of it every now and then, who are showing us the true path to scientific knowledge. There's a guy in Florida who sees fossils in just about every photo returned by the Rovers. Here's some examples.
That's a trilobite fossil inside Erebus Crater on Mars.
And that there is a fossil "sea urchin shell."
Scallops, anyone?
Or howbout pasta? That's rotini.
Or a nice conch shell?
Enough with the fossil pond scum already. These piddlin' invertebrates and molluscs and croatians* or whatever are just so far down the evolutionary ladder, I don't understand what all the excitement is about. After all, NASA has stunning photographic evidence of vertebrate life on Comet Wild!!! Oh, but they wouldn't tell us that, oh no. They left it for a free thinker such as my humble self, oh yes oh yes, to discover the truth (oops, I mean -- The Truth).
* "That's "crustaceans," Miss Litella." "Oh. Never mind."
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