MODCONS - Microwave Oven Timer

Emerson Microwave Oven

MODCONS - Modern Conveniences. Real Estate jargon. I've got a microwave oven I use for basically all my 'cooking'. The only thing I really cook in it is scrambled eggs - 2 eggs, a splash on milk, whip with a fork for a minute and then 2 minutes in the microwave. If I put in a bit too much milk the bottom of the eggs is still wet, which is better than when I put in too little and the egg gets cooked all the way through but sticks to the bowl, and cooked egg is the devil to get off. Scotch Brite scrubber and elbow grease does the trick. I keep thinking I should get some anti-stick spray or something but it hasn't happened yet.

Anyway, the timer that runs the microwave oven. If you want to heat something for 2 minutes, simply shut the door and press 2. If you want less than a minute, or anytime that is not exact number of minutes, you need to press TIME, and then the digits of the number of seconds (and minutes) you want, like 3, 0 and then you press START. If you really want the oven to be a modern convenience it should have something like a 5X or 10x button. Press the 10x button and 3 and you get 30 seconds. To do minutes and seconds maybe a + (Plus) button. Press +, the number of minutes, then press 10x and a number and off you go. Of course it adds two more buttons to the control panel, but there are already a bunch of buttons on there I don't use so they could go away. Until I need them.

A Big Raise for Congressmen? Part 2

Corruption by Leslie Garvey / POGO

I've been thinking we need a better way to pay our Congress Critters. One idea I had was to raise their salary to something that would reflect their responsibility, like the way the heads of large corporations are paid. Since then I've had a couple more ideas.

One is that Congress Critter's pay should reflect how much tax people are paying and how much money the Federal government is borrowing. Lower taxes mean Congress Critters get paid more. Reducing the Federal debt would also result in a bonus. I have no idea how you might calculate that.

The other idea is that Congress Critters should be paid by the states they represent. Each congressional district would be responsible for paying their representative, and the state government would be responsible for paying Senators.

Not to worry though, nothing is going to change our current arrangement, especially not some post from a deranged conspiracy theorist. Our country is on a slippery slope. Everyone on the inside is scrambling as fast as they can to keep from sliding any farther down the slope and if their scrambling is sending other people into the abyss, well, that's just too bad.

P. S. I thought I put up the linked post last month. Turns out it was six months ago. 

4 X 4 Suspension

Jeep JL ICON Suspension

I've been watching Matt's Off Road Recovery on YouTube for a while now and I am reminded of the amount of flex these vehicles need in order to get around when out crawling around on big rocks. The way you get flex is to remove the (anti)roll bars from the suspension. Problem then is that the vehicle leans heavily toward the outside when going around corners at speed. Second problem is the large twisting force applied to the vehicle when it goes over ground and the front axle has tilted one way to maintain contact with the ground, and the rear axle has tilted the other way for the same reasons.

Solution: mount one of those fancy shocks at each cornet and connect them via hydraulic or gas lines to each other. When one shock gets compressed, it sends gas to the other three shocks. The shock on the other end of the same axle uses it to extend the shock. The shock on the other axle, but on the same side of the vehicle also uses it to extend the shock. However, the third shock, the one diagonally opposite from our #1 example shock, uses the pressure to contract the shock, mirroring the action of the #1 shock.

Well, I think it's a great idea, but now I'm thinking I'm going to need to build one and try it out. I figure I'd buy an old jeep for maybe ten grand, and then hire a local 4 by 4 shop to install the pneumatic suspension. That'd probably cost another ten grand. And then you probably ought to double it because these things never go as planned.

What would help if I knew somebody who worked with suspensions for 4 by 4's on a daily basis, What would really help is my leg would stop complaining.

Previous post on the subject.

A Big Raise for Congressmen?

My theory is that the entire Federal Congress and the administration are totally corrupt. They are passing these enormous spending bills solely for the purpose of getting kickbacks from the benefactors of this spending. And who can blame them? They are in charge of one of the biggest economies in the world and they are getting salaries comparable to what any mid-level manager in the private sector is getting. Congressmen should be getting salaries like $10 million a year, something comparable to what CEO's of large corporations make. If we combined that with a serious anti-corruption campaign, things might improve.After all, these days Congressmen have to spend government money to get a kickback, but if they get the kickback up front (whether they spend government money or not) it might lead to some better decisions for the country.

Update July 30, revised the last couple of sentences to make them clear.

Magic Mirror

I've got an idea. It is very difficult to get a good view of the back of your head. You can use two mirrors, but you are not going to get a straight in view, it's going to be at a bit of an angle. And trying to adjust the mirror so you can see what you want, gahh! What a pain.

We have all these wonderful flat panel displays and digital cameras. Maybe hook a camera to a directly to a display, then you can move the camera around and look at whatever you want, and you don't have to move, you can just sit still and look at the display. This can be easily done with a computer and a smartphone. You might want someone else to hold the camera. Trying to point the camera at the back of your head is going to be a little difficult.

The big question is the view on the display going to be as good as what you get from a mirror? I think it will. I also think there will people who will disagree. That's the way of the world.

I think you could make this into a product. Maybe start with a couple of beta units in a fancy salon, work out the kinks. I'm thinking that mounting the camera on arm so a person didn't have to hold it would be a good idea. Problem is you've got this arm swinging around a client's head, or even your own head. I think you might want some good sensors and spacial awareness software to figure out where all the players were in this environment along with some quick acting motors to move the arm out of the way in case someone decides it's time to party, or go to war. Don't want anyone to collide with the camera before they get out the door.

On the other hand, maybe you make the camera stationary and rotate the client in front of it. The display would be attached to the client's chair so that whichever way he was pointing, the display would be right in front of him/her/it.

Shoot, this might already exist. I haven't checked.

Windshield Wipers

10 Hours of Driving in Rain for Sleeping
RelaxingASMR
It's been raining sporadically. It pours for a minute and then it stops. A few minutes, or miles, later and it starts drizzling and then it stops, or pours, or dribbles so I'm constantly turning the wipers on or off or speeding them up or slowing them down and I'm thinking there's got to be a better way. Maybe if I siliconized my windshield and got some of them RainX wipers with the silicon edge I could just leave them on all the time and because if they've got all the silicon, they wouldn't squeak even when it was dry. That would be an improvement, if it worked, but it wouldn't be a big improvement, and it would require siliconizing the windshield which would require a bunch of elbow grease to get it properly rubbed in.

Vaisala WXT531 Acoustic Rain Gauge

No, what we need is a robot that can tell when the wipers need to be activated and does it automatically. I was thinking you'd need a camera and some kind of image processing software to tell when the view is obscured, but then I remembered a solid state rain gauge. It was basically a small, light weight metal dome connected to a microphone. Whenever a raindrop hit the dome, the microphone would hear it, and the computer that was listening to its signal would add one to the number of raindrops. We might be able to use a similar technique to control the wipers. Stick a microphone (technically a sound transducer) to the windshield and listen for raindrops and squeaky windshield wipers. Shouldn't be that hard, right?

Subscriptions

The New Yorker

I used to read The New Yorker. I don't know why I quit. Probably because a new issue would show up every week and I never got around to reading them and then I ended up with a giant stack of like-new magazines that I had to consign to the dustbin in order to maintain my sanity. They publish some good stuff. They also publish a lot of nonsense, but that's just the way the media runs these days. Anyway, I got a promotional email this morning. I was going to delete it, but then I wondered if there might be an email address buried in there, so I looked, and lo and behold, there was. So I wrote them this little message:

I am not going to subscribe to The New Yorker or The Washington Post or The New York Times. I don't want to be locked into one news feed and I don't want to be paying subscription fees to half a dozen different outfits. That shit can add up to real money.

What I want is a subscription service that lets me read from any number of sites. To make things fair, that service would keep track of what stories each subscriber accessed, how long they spent reading it (and if they actually read it, but that might be tricky) and then divy up the fees amongst all the news providers on a proportional basis.

I don't understand why someone hasn't done this, other than the old paper empires are still locked in old ways of thinking.

If I keep promoting this idea maybe someone will latch onto it and run with it.

Dumb as a Rock

Plato's Atlantis

Heuristics That Almost Always Work a new post on Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander is an entertaining story about how confidently predicting "nothing bad will happen" is a wonderful rule for situations where nothing bad almost never happens. But being the way we are, that's the rule we like, so on those rare occasions when something bad does actually happen we tend to get clobbered.

Funny thing about the picture. It showed up with the post on Feedly, but not on the Astral Codex page. I suspect the moral of the story is someday a catastrophe will befall us, but because nothing bad has happened in a very long time, we don't believe it can happen now, to us, which is liable to make that catastrophe even more catastrophic because we won't have prepared.

Some people maintain a large store of food, enough to feed themselves for a year. I think what we need are communal warehouses that keep enough food to feed the community for a year. However, they don't just stock the warehouse and hold it, they managed it like a FIFO queue (First In, First Out). Food is constantly being added at one end, and food that has been there a year is taken out and distributed, so nothing is going to waste. It means all of your food is a year old, and it doesn't work for fresh vegetables and such. But it would eliminate a lot of headaches for everyone involved. Don't know how well it would work in practice. It take someone with more social skills than I have to organize it.

Big Ideas

I have a number of Big Ideas [tm] that have been rattling around in my head for a while now. Mostly they are just idle thoughts, but now I'm thinking I might actually like to pursue one, well, as soon as the new house remodeling project is done and I can divest myself of one of these houses. It's going to take a while to finish. Some people think we might be able to finish up by spring. I'm afraid it may be another year. Whatever. Real estate prices keep climbing and with the way inflation is going I doubt they are going to collapse. They might not continue to increase at the same rapid rate we have seen recently. To coin a really bad phrase - inflation lifts all boats. Unfortunately most people don't have a boat. That's enough economics for today.

Ideas:

Steam Engine

Convert an automobile engine to run on steam. Start with an engine that has one of those variable valve timing set ups. You only need the intake to be open for a short time, maybe 10 or 20 degrees of the crank rotation. Change the cam timing to run at the same speed as the crankshaft. Probably going to need a custom camshaft. Might be a bit of a trick for a custom camshaft house (like Iskendarian) to grind a weird cam, but I am confident they could do it.

I've seen some conversions that other people have done and they typically are using the spark plug holes for the steam inlet. That requires a whole new valve system.

Big problem with letting steam in through the inlet valves is that high pressure steam is going to be trying to push the valves open. However, valves are small, steam pressure is not that high (2 or 300 PSI), and valve springs are strong. You might have to go to stronger racing springs. Automotive speed shops could help you there.

And no boiler. Use a steam generator - hot flame heating a short length of pipe. You have to balance the amount of water being pumped in to the amount you can turn to steam in that short length of pipe. Mount it where the carburetor used to go.

Use the steam engine to turn a generator to provide power for the house. Build a garden shed / shack at the bottom of the hill to house it. Then I'd have a place to hide out when modern life gets to be too much.

Magnetohydrodynamic Generator

It's possible to generate electricity without any moving parts using a magnet, some wire and a flame. To make it practical would take bit of futzing, or maybe a whole lot of futzing, but it's been done before so it should be possible to do it again. I'm thinking if you could make one the size of a Coleman lantern you could use it to supply power when you go camping. It should be quieter than an engine powered generator, should be nearly silent making no more noise than gas lantern or stove, but who knows? Maybe these kind of devices make some unearthly howling which is why no one uses them. Could also be used for sensors in remote locations that need to make intermittent readings and report them via radio. 

Industrial Strength Litter Box

I've been sifting cat turds out of the kitty litter in the litter box since forever. I know the new thing is to train your cat to use the toilet, but I'm not going to try that with our cat. Like me, he is old and set in his ways. I don't know if he could be trained. We bought one of those robotic things when they first came out ten years ago. It did not work out. I would be willing to pay good money for one that worked reliably and didn't need to be cleaned itself, ever. Well, ten years would be good enough, then you can throw it away and buy a new one.

Dirigible Spaceship

If we are going to send people to visit other planets, I think our spaceship needs be built like one of those rotating ring space stations we used to see pictures of in science fiction magazines. If you are going to be gone for years the one thing you do not want to run out of is air, so we make a big balloon, big enough to contain our rotating space station, and fill it with air. Yes, you could compress the air and store it in tanks that would take up much less room, but tanks are heavy and if one gets punctured it will lose all of it's air in hurry. You puncture a balloon and it will leak, but it will leak very slowly. People often shoot a blimps, the bullets make holes and the blimps leak, but the volume is so large and the leak is so slow they never notice. Mind you, they check for holes and patch them when they find them, but it's not a big deal.

Also, we are in space, so making storage compartments smaller doesn't really buy you anything. It's not like there is any wind resistance.

I was thinking about making the balloon out of metal, something strong to resist space debris, but that's pointless. Any debris you encounter is going to be traveling at several miles per second and at that velocity it will punch through anything that gets in its way, and if it's a metal plate, there going to fragments of metal blasting away from the site of the impact causing who knows what kind of mayhem. Better to put up something that will give way without causing massive secondary damage.

Of course, we are likely to encounter numerous bits of debris during our voyage and if we have one big balloon we will end up leaking like a sieve, so we fill our big balloon with a whole bunch of little balloons, balloons the size of a blimp maybe. (I'm imagining our big balloon would be maybe 600 feet in diameter. Our big balloon would be filled with 600 blimps.) Now a routine maintenance task is crawling around in this giant balloon pit, finding holes and patching them. You could use ropes like mountain climbers to force your way through. Need to be careful. Lose contact with your rope are you could easily become lost and / or stuck, then we'd need to send out a rescue party to find you.

And then there are the computer programming projects, but those are going to have to wait.

On-the-fly Tire Pressure Adjustment

About time we listened to you...

Watching Matt's Off Road Recovery videos I am reminded that going off road often means letting air out of the tires until the internal pressure is more like 10 PSI instead of 30 PSI. Higher pressures work well on the highway. You have less rolling resistance, better control and the tires don't get over heated. Lower pressures off road give you better grip on iffy surfaces like mud and sand. Getting back on the highway after an off road adventure, you want to pump up your tires back up to 30 PSI. This usually means carrying a portable air compressor with you, and if you have very large tires, spending a quarter hour or more waiting for your tires to reach highway pressure.

Of course, you need to stop the vehicle and get out to perform these operations. The military gets around this by having an air system built into the wheels and axles, an expensive proposition that few civilians can afford.

It occurred to me that it might be possible to build a system into the wheel with no mechanical connection to the rest of the vehicle. A small air compressor would be mounted to the wheel inside the tire and would be controlled by a radio signal, much like Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems do now. The only real problem we would have is providing power to the electric motor that will drive the air compressor. This could be done by turning the wheel into a generator. A ring of magnets would be mounted to the vehicle some where around the brakes, and a set of coils of wire would be mounted to the wheel so that they are in close proximity to to the magnets. When the wheel turns, the coils of wire would pass through the magnetic field, electricity is generated, the motor drives the air compressor and the tire is inflated.

Given that we would want to keep the weight as low as possible and the low speed of the wheel, this wheel mounted generator would probably not be able to generate much power. It might be enough to do the job. You might have to drive a mile at a lower speed before the tires were inflated enough to handle highway speeds. You would however, be moving as opposed to being stopped waiting for your portable air compressor to do the job. An experimental model would have to be built and tested. 

If that arrangement is not adequate, we might want to add battery packs, which are heavy, or a bladder to hold a supply of high pressure air. It would be in the shape of a small inner tube that would hug the wheel and so not interfere with the deformation of the tire often encountered when crawling over rocks.

Camp Town

Idyllic Camp Town

I'm thinking that maybe what we need are more tents. Not everybody wants or needs or can afford a house. A tent doesn't offer as much protection as a house, but they can be comfortable. Mostly I'm thinking about the homeless who are camping out on downtown city streets. I would think a campground who make for happier campers, especially if there was a soup kitchen in the center of it.

But I'm also thinking about our mindset, that in order to be a good, solid citizen, you need to have a house. Houses have many advantages, but I suspect that one of the reasons so many people are convinced that houses are the way to go is because people who own real estate promote the idea as being the only solution. To them, tents and camping are not a real solution to the housing problem. I think they are wrong.

Tents and tent materials are becoming ever more sophisticated. A  'permanent tent' is no longer an oxymoron.

Politics

I try to ignore politics, but it is so pervasive some of it gets through to me anyway. I know, for instance that Donald Trump is the President of the USA, and Boris Johnson just won a landslide victory in the UK. If you mention my representative or my senators, I will probably recognize their names.

My vote my be important, and I would vote if someone would tell me who to vote for. If I agreed with the Democrats or the Republicans it would be easy, I could just vote the straight party ticket. But both parties have big defects, so I'm not going to do that.

Then I got a big idea: a web site that helps you figure out who to vote for.  Have a list of issues. All you have to do is decide how much you care about the issue (and which direction you lean), and the website would sort through the various candidates and pick the ones that best suit your viewpoint.

It might be a little difficult to sort out some of these people, what with the weasel words, flip-flopping and the way some issues get combined with others so if you support one, you're shooting yourself in the foot on the other.

Then you might want to grade each candidate on character, things like crimes, scams and scandals would need to be evaluated. You can bet politics will try to color this score.

Of course, this would only be useful for people who like getting their data in black and white. Not everybody is a reader. I suspect a goodly majority of people prefer getting their information the old fashioned way: by word of mouth, straight from the television.

And how would you ensure the whole thing was accurate? Sounds like a lot of work, but think of the advertising revenue. It could be the next Facebook.

What a Good Idea

Requiescat in Peonies

I tend to come up with big ideas that require such a large commitment of resources that I have no hope of ever implementing them, which saves me a lot of work. I come up with the idea, and if I am feeling energetic, I will write it down and dump it on the world and then I am done with it. If somebody out there happens across it, and they like it, and then also happen to have the requisite resources to implement it, well, cowabunga, go for it dude, or dudette. As Clint Eastwood said, a man has to know his limitations, and I think I have pretty good understanding of mine.

P.S. Requiescat is "a wish or prayer for the repose of a dead person". I mention this because a) I didn't know, and b) last night I used the word retinue which is "a group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person". Posse in modern parlance. This caused some consternation because it evidently is not as well known as I thought.

Binocular Vision

Binocular vision allows us to judge distance to objects that are nearby to us, I would say things that are up to ten feet away. After that, the difference in the angle of our eyes gets pretty small which would make it very hard to tell the difference.

The F-35 has a fancy system that allows the pilot to see in any direction, even right through the floor or through the back of the seat. Well, I read a story one time that said that was the plan. I don't know whether they ever got it working or not.

Now it occurs to me that with the advances in electronic cameras and flat panel displays, we could conceivably do away with windows completely. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, not as long as computers keep getting hacked, crashing and breaking down.

However, I wonder if you mounted a couple of cameras on the wingtips of an aircraft and aimed them forward and down, at like a 45 degree angle maybe, and then connected them to one of those VR displays, if they might allow the pilot to more easily judge the distance to the ground, which could make landing easier.

Just don't blame me if you kill yourself trying this out.

I want a new Internet

Tip-a-tap-a-tappy

I spend a couple of hours a day at my computer (ok, more like 50 or 60), and most of that time I spend on the net. And there are a couple of things I've noticed that could be improved.

• Passwords and Logon ID's. Everybody wants to know who I am, and most of them I don't care whether they know who I am or not*, but I don't like having to have a separate logon id and password for all of these sites. The ISP (Frontier, I'm looking at you) should validate who you are and then dole out this information as necessary. Someone would need to insure that telling some flake in a Florida boiler room who you are doesn't give them access to your back account, but there are plenty of smart people in the world and I'm sure someone could come up with a scheme.
• Subscriptions. Everybody wants you to subscribe. I wouldn't mind subscribing, but once you subscribe to one it's much easier to justify subscribing to another, and then another and pretty soon you're shelling out 50 or 100 bucks a month, and I ain't gonna do that, so I don't subscribe to anything. I wouldn't mind paying $10 a month in order to get access to everything. I mean, if I have a subscription to one place, like the WSJ, I would spend all my time there. If I had two subscriptions my time would be split between the two, so I would be accessing each one only half as much. Likewise if I had ten subscriptions. The ISP should collect $10 a month from you and then dole it out to the websites on the basis of how many times you visit that site.
• Metric versus English measurements. Every article that attempts to contain any information inevitably contains numbers, and any time there are numbers some people seem to think they need to provide values using both English and Metric units. I don't need both. Give me one or give me the other. HTML should be able to handle this. Actually, it probably already can, we just need a publishing program that can handle the conversion automatically.
• Better History. Your browser keeps track of every page you visit, which is pretty worthless. I don't need you to record all my visits to Gmail, or YouTube, or most Google sites. I would like a list of all the other sites I have visited, especially Wikipedia. There may be a browser extension out there that will take care of this, but I haven't found one. I've tried a couple and they haven't really done the trick. I will probably have to write my own. Soon. Right after I finish this donut.
•  Better Search Options. When I am looking for images, I don't want any with watermarks, and I don't want anything from Pinterest*. This might be achievable using my current search engine (Google), but I haven't looked in it, mostly because I haven't had much luck with fancy search options.
• Blacklist. This goes along with the previous item. Everyday I run into a website that I never want to go to again, mostly because they are so bloated with adware that they take forever to load. Some of them never stop. I want to be able to blackflag them (sort of reverse gold star) so if I ever try to access that site again I will get a warning. Actually, I want my browser to warn me any time I try to load such a page, even if I've never been there before.
• Limited Page Length. Every once in a while I will run into a web page that has no end. Facebook is like that. The end is usually where you can find contact information, so you can complain about things like there being no end to this web page, except you can't get the contact info, because you can't get to the end because there is no end. Blackflag this bitch.

*Except Pinterest. Seems like half of the pictures that turn up on a Google image search are from Pinterest, but Pinterest sucks. They only show you a teaser and if you try to get any more information they put up a sign-up wall. Nothing more until you sign up. I am pretty sure I don't want to have anything to do with Pinterest because there is no information about the pictures. People post stuff because they like it, but they don't tell you who shot the photo, where it was taken or anything. Stupid dumbheads.

Big Idea - Number a Day

The idea is a website with just a single page that would have the current price of gold, and the current exchange rates for the Argentine peso. Naturally you'd want a graph so you could see what has been happening lately. It would need to update itself automatically from some source somewhere. It would have a couple of ads. Hopefully the ads would bring in enough revenue to pay for the annual domain name registration and maybe buy you a lunch out once a year.

The reason I wanted something like this is because the sites that have this kind of information are too noisy. They are covered with all kinds of crap that I neither want nor need. What's worse is that they make it hard to find the information I do want. This is the main reason I prefer Google over the other search engines - their home page is very clean and simple, uncluttered. Pristine. Glorious in it's minimalism. You get the idea.

So then I thought about this idea a little more and I realized that it could be a franchise, kind of like 'XYZ for Dummies' series of books. Things like 'Stock Price of the Day', or currency exchange rate of the day, or population of Zimbabwe, or high temperature in Chicago. Anything that could be represented by a number that changes every day.

We would need a two prong approach. One would be a list of web sites / web pages were you could get the particular number you wanted. Second would be an email/twitter/text service that would deliver the number you wanted. Every web page would have an ad or three, and every sent message would include an ad. If you really wanted to be fancy, and this became popular, you could even offer a subscription service that would dispense with the ads.

To make it a success, the web pages would need to be clean and simple. We aren't trying to be a service for experts, there are plenty of tools for analyzing stuff in depth. What we want is the lowest common denominator kind of information.

Treadmill Truck

Lopifit, an electric bike with a treadmill

Driving across the country I saw a great number of large trucks, trucks driven by people sitting in cushy seats for eight to ten hours a day. It's exhausting. This is my fourth day home and I am just now starting to feel human. If you are going to spend that much time sitting in a chair, getting a little exercise might be a good idea. So how about we put a treadmill in the cab of the truck? As evidenced by the bicycle above, it is possible to chew gum and walk at the same time. You would probably want to have a seat as welll, walking all day long could be even more exhausting than sitting. There are innumerable little issues that would have to be dealt with to make it safe, legal and accepted, but somebody should try it and let the rest of know how it works out.

Chuck Key

Tightening the chuck on a drill press

An electric drill has a chuck to hold the drill bit. Most drills use a key to tighten the chuck so it grips the drill bit solidly. Problem is that if this chuck key is not chained down it tends to wander off which can be very annoying when the drill bit needs to be changed. Chaining it down solves that problem, but makes the key awkward to operate, and if you are working with a portable drill, the chain can be a nuisance.

How about we make a socket in the drill body to hold the key, and make the switch dependent on the chuck key being in that socket before the drill will operate? Solves both problems. Requires some space in the drill and a fancier switch but it would solve the problem of the missing chuck key that has plagued machinists and carpenters since before there was electricity.

Yes, I know, many hand-held drills use keyless chucks these days, but those are only good for light duty jobs. If you need to drill a real hole, you need a real chuck, one that uses a key.

Blind Spot

2013 Ford Fusion

Saw a Ford Fusion the other day. I think they are pretty good looking cars, partly because they look big, kind of swollen, like a football. Make the most volume out of the available sheet metal. Little cars are fun, but if you are going to be spending a lot of time in your car, more space is more better. Might also be because Ford appropriated the Aston Martin grill style, which is the slimy kind of thing you might expect from a giant corporation. For a while when Ford first started using this grill I was fooled into thinking that they actually were Aston Martins. Hey, look! It's James Bo..., er, no, it's just another Ford. So maybe some of that impressed-with-money feeling rubbed off on the lowly Fusion. Whatever.

One of the things I like about cars, as opposed to motorcycles, bicycles or shoes, is that they do provide you with a protective shell. An important part of that shell is the A-pillar, the steel roof supports on either side of the windshield. In order for that shell to protect you it needs to be strong, and in order to be strong, those struts need to have some size to them. Normally, like when you are driving down the highway that is not a problem. You are looking straight ahead and the struts are not in your way.

Driving around town, turning corners, looking out for pedestrians, and those struts become blind spots keeping you from seeing those fools who are hiding from you. You can get around this by moving your head back and forth and while it is not much of a problem, you still have temporary blind spots wherever your head is.

So how about we put narrow video displays on those A pillars along with an outside camera to show you what you are missing? It would take some sophisticated software to munge what the camera sees into what you would see if the A-pillar wasn't there, but as Google Street View has demonstrated, we are past masters at munjing video.

There is the problem that current display technology cannot show you everything you could see with your native eyeballs, but that is only a problem with distant stuff, like looking a half mile down the highway. Stuff that is within your area of concern when you are turning a corner, which is when you would want to use these A-pillar displays, would not be a problem.

P.S. An A-pillar story.

1962 Ford Sunliner

Once upon a time I had a cousin who had an early 60's Ford convertible. Out driving one day he managed to flip it over. Landed upside down on the grass median, squashed the windshield frame flat. Neither he nor the two people riding with him were hurt. Big, stupid luck, I guess. Anyway, my uncle, being the cheapskate he was, wasn't going to pay anyone to fix the car when he could do it himself, so he blocked the front wheels and hooked a come-along to the windshield frame and started pulling. The back end of the car came off of the ground before that windshield frame budged.

P.P.S. The Science Fiction novel Blindsight might have had something to do with this.

Bloody Commute

Cars flowing along highways

Driving around town yesterday I was musing how cars flowing along highways were a lot like blood cells flowing through blood vessels, except cars all have specific destinations and blood cells are just uncaring particles being born along in the stream. But what if they are not? 

Blood cells flowing through blood vessels

Maybe each blood cell has a specific destination in the body where it is to deliver its oxygen molecule and a specific source in the lungs where it picks up that oxygen? I mean blood cells are complicated enough that they could easily contain a couple of encoded addresses. Making use of that information, being able to control its path, and recognizing its destination are all a bit more complex, but who really knows what blood cells are thinking?

The Incredibles

Blood cells are complex creatures, there are zillions of chemical reactions going on all the time. It's not too hard to imagine the daddy blood cell leaving home in the morning for his commute to the lungs to pick up his daily supply of oxygen and then ferrying it back home to his wife and chilluns.

Update March 2019 replaced missing image and then replaced another one when Blogger's automatic 'fix' caused it to disappear.