I-5 Tunnel?

Tunnel Roadway Profile and Upstream Alignment chart

The I-5 bridge between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington is an antique. They've been talking about replacing since forever, but all the talk has gotten nowhere. Maybe we should consider a tunnel. At the least.

Willamette Week has a few words to say on the subject:

Shouldn’t We Be Talking About Constructing a Tunnel Under the Columbia River?

Clark County Today posted a story three years ago:

Is a tunnel actually viable for crossing the Columbia River?

Previous post about the bridge.

Early photos of the river and bridge.

My hare-brained idea for a bridge.

Building Immersed Tube Tunnels

The Most Implausible Tunneling Method
Practical Engineering

These guys are insane. Look at the organization skills required, you have to get bunches of experts to cooperate on design and techniques. You need bunches of skilled people. Not every one has to be an engineer, but ever job is critical. The guy who connects the hydraulic hoses, or shoot, even the guy who checks whether the bobby pins are correctly installed in the hitch pins. 'Bobby pins' is my term, but it got us there.

Clevis with large pin installed and bobby pin inserted in the large pin

'Hitch pin' seems to be the preferred term.

Anyway, there are, I think he said, over a hundred of these things around the world. I don't think I ever heard about this technique before. Well, I probably heard it mentioned on a newscast that the project utilized immersed tubes, and that doesn't really tell you much. I like his analogy comparing installing one section of tunnel with docking a spaceship. 

These projects are always huge gambles. The results when they are successful are great, but all big projects can be derailed by unforeseen events. These events can be minor or they could result in the project being canceled and all money spent to this point is just gone. Well, it's not a complete waste, at least the workforce will be willing to go to work on another project, should you come up with one. If they didn't get paid for their work so far, they wouldn't be so likely to go to work on a new one.

Flatlanders

Tunnel Construction Explained
The B1M

Driving to the airport the other day I was noticing the freeway. It's concrete and it's dirty. I mean the road would probably like to be clean, but with a zillion cars passing over it every day shedding tire and brake dust and dripping oil, it's just not going to be clean. Bridges and complex interchanges can be impressive with the sweeping loops and glorious arches, but they are still going to be filthy. It's kind of sad because cars are like our main religion. Where we all used to tithe to the church, now we tithe to automotive industry and the oil companies.

For a long time I have thought that making cities multi-level with cars on a lower level and people on an upper level would be the way to go. Cars occupy about half of the land area in most urban and even suburban areas. Just look at the streets, parking lots, garages, driveways, repair shops, gas stations and automobile dealers. It's kind of mind boggling. It shouldn't be a big deal to make an upper level just for people, I mean a car weighs twenty times as much as person.

Then I realized, yes, that is true, but those numbers only make sense if people will keep their distance, and it you know anything about people, you know they won't. For some inexplicable reason they like to clump together. A fully loaded semi-truck can weigh 30 tons. That semi-truck will cover 400 square feet. You can easily pack 100 people in that small an area. Maybe not comfortably, but imagine the press of a crowd trying to get through the gate for a concert, or trying to get out the exit when a fire erupts. In a panic you might have twice that number. But let's just stick with 400. 400 people times 200 pounds each ('cause this is America) give you 80,000 pounds or 40 tons. That's more than a heavy truck. So that upper level that only needs to be able to hold light weight people is going to need to be stronger that interstate highway bridges.

We can build structures to support that much weight, but they are expensive. So maybe Elon's crazy idea of digging tunnels for new highways is not so crazy after all.

Bootlegger Train Tunnel Utah

Potash Evaporation Ponds, Moab, Utah

A view of these ponds showed up in my screensaver, and so I thought I'd see if I could locate it on the map. I found it, but then I notice a portal to a train tunnel, so I go digging some more and I found this on Train Sim World 3:

By American railroad standards, the Cane Creek Branch is a newcomer. In the late 1950s, plans took form to tap massive potash deposits found along the Colorado River in eastern Utah. By 1960, development of what would evolve into today’s sprawling potash mine and processing facility south of Moab and near Cane Creek were rapidly taking form, and the Denver & Rio Grande Western agreed to build a new branch from its main line at Brendel. Grading and construction of the new branch line was contracted to Morrison-Knudsen and work began in August 1961. Morrison-Knudsen completed its work in September 1962 and D&RGW crews moved in to lay the tracks.

The potash mine and facility at the south end of the line began production in late 1964 and the branch was operated by D&RGW as its Cane Creek Branch until the road’s merger into Union Pacific (D&RGW was combined with the Southern Pacific in 1988 and merged into Union Pacific in 1996). While there have been fluctuations in the amounts of potash being moved over the Cane Creek Branch, it has been in nearly continuous use since the 1960s.

Remarkably, the Cane Creek line gained a second purpose – and source of extensive tonnage – in 2008. Moab had long been the site of a Uranium mill which closed in 1984, leaving approximately 12 million tons of dirt tailings behind. While these tailings are only modestly radioactive, the risk of their erosion into the nearby Colorado River required eventually reclamation. Under the auspices of the United States Department of Energy, a burial site for the tailings was developed at Brendel and train loads of the contaminated soil began moving over the length of the Cane Creek Subdivision to Brendel. These unusual rail movements, nicknamed “the dirty dirt trains,” are expected to continue until approximately 2028. Given that both the potash and contaminated soil tonnage involves carrying loads northbound, the climb from Potash and Moab to Brendel requires plenty of horsepower.

Bootlegger Train Tunnel Utah

Train Entering North Portal of Potash Tunnel

Cut near South Portal of Potash Tunnel

Crescent Junction Disposal Cell

Cane Creek Branch from Brendel to Moab

Simplon Tunnel

1908 poster for the train between Paris and Milan

I'm rereading Blood of Victory by Alan Furst, a novel of espionage during WW2. Serebin, our hero, is a writer living in Paris but he's visiting Istanbul and on his return trip (page 56) he takes the Istanbul-Paris train which goes through the Simplon Tunnel. In ordinary times it would be called the Orient Express, but that service has been shut down because of the war. Not sure what's going on, it might just be literary license.

Various Orient Express Routes
X marks the Simplon Tunnel

Simplon Tunnel Profile

The tunnel is an engineering marvel and considering when it was built it ranked as one of the great wonders of the modern world. Opened in 1906, it's 12 miles long. There is 2,000 meters of rock overhead, which means the temperature inside can get up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

SAS: Rise of the Black Swan

*new trailer* SAS: Rise of the Black Swan | Netflix - August 27
Next to Netflix
This is a fair to middling movie. Lots of action, villainous villains, heroic heroes, cute girls both good and bad, corrupt good guys, all fairly typical of an action movie. The whole plot of hijacking the Eurostream (new name for the TGV) train running through the chunnel is fairly ridiculous. The escape through the natural gas pipeline was preposterous, but hey, James Bond did a tunnel thing once. I can imagine the movie makers discussing this: 'Well, yes, you can do a pipeline thing, but you need to make it more spectacular. Hey, I know, instead of it being empty, we'll fill it with natural gas. And a bomb. That'll make it spectacular.'

The only redeeming feature was they showed that the government and big business are the ones behind the terrorist attacks that set this whole thing in motion. Not that it makes any difference. Government and big business are basically unaccountable for whatever they do. Some people complain, but the worst that happens is that some low level flunky gets blamed and sent off to prison, but the stupid incompetent mothball fakers who cause all these problems go along their merry way, richer and fatter than before. I don't know why we bother.

2 hours on Netflix

Deadwind Season 2

DEADWIND S2 Trailer
We watched the entire second season of this series over two days. That was entirely too much. We need to start restricting our TV watching.

The plot is a little complicated. I'm not sure I've got it all straight, but the good guys figure out who the bad guys are and the bad guys get their just desserts, so it's all good. There is a serial killer at work killing half a dozen people over a short period of time. The lead detective, a youngish woman with a child and wild, wild hair, figures out the connection between these murders and puts them on the track of the culprit. But there is something about one murder that doesn't add up, and she digs around until she finally figures out who done it, and it's someone that no one suspected. Turns out he's been at it for years and killed a bunch of people, many more than our recent revenge based murderer killed.

There are also a couple of killings that happen on the spur of the moment, both in response to being threatened. You just don't know what's going on in some people's heads.

There were a couple of interesting bits. One is the proposed Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel. It is a big issue with mayor's new political party. It also seems that some people in real life are serious about it.

Ferries play a role as does cold water.

1991 BMW 850i

Another was the car driven by one of the detectives: an aging BMW 850i. The distinctive blue & white BMW hood emblem was blacked out in the show. Kaarppi, the woman lead detective, tells her partner, Sakari, that he has a car now and hands him the keys. (Season 2, Episode 1, Mark 17:30).

On Netflix, in Finnish with subtitles in English.

Spoilers follow. The lead detective, Sofia Karppi, has an adult step daughter, Henna Honkasuo. Henna finds a stash of Subutex that was hidden in the snowy woods (where have we seen that before?). Never mind that the guy who buried it there has been murdered by our revenge motivated serial killer, somebody figures out that she has the drugs and wants them back. Probably because she told her new boyfriend, who was trying to sell them wholesale and got killed for his trouble. The bad guys want these drugs, but when she finds that her stash, which was hidden under a railroad bridge, has gotten ripped off, they offer to let her work off her 'debt' by smuggling several kilos of drugs across the border from Tallinn. She and her handler take the ferry to Tallinn, get a taxi to the middle of nowhere, dig up a million dollars worth of contraband from underneath some rubbish in a derelict house.  Now another couple of guys drop off a car for them and they head back to Helsinki on the ferry. Henna overhears a phone conversation with her handler that convinces her that they are going to drop her in the shit. This leads to a heated discussion and her handler pulls a gun on her. She relents, he puts his gun away, she pulls out her dad's big switchblade and stabs him in the gut half a dozen times. He collapses and dies on the deck. The big, open, windswept, totally unoccupied upper deck. She drags his lifeless body to the rail and dumps him overboard along with his gun and her knife.

The mayor kills her number two man when he threatens her so she pushes him off the end of dock. Bad place to be standing if you are going threaten somebody, dummkopf. He flunders in the ice cold water for a few seconds, but makes no attempt to save himself. Doesn't he know how to swim? If that's the case what the heck is he even doing on the dock? Double dummkopf. He was a political hack, so he got what's coming to him. Is that the message here? It was just kind of weird and unexpected. But we already know the mayor is cold blooded from a previous encounter with some skateboarders who were harrassing her blind daughter who is trying to ride to a board.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago at least, but I didn't post it. Possibly because I had more to say, but now I don't remember what that was, so here we go, even if it isn't finished.

Life on the Moon

SpaceX’s vision for a human outpost on the Moon.

I read Artemis a couple of weeks ago and it got me started thinking about long term living on the moon. If we are going to have a base there, we are going to need a regular rocket-to-the-moon service, at least monthly, preferably weekly. I mean ol' Elon's getting pretty good at puttin' rockets up, and since he reuses them the only cost is fuel, which is just natural gas, which is dirt cheap, and oxygen, which he takes out of the air, so it's free. Once they get this regular service going, the cost of going to the moon is going to be too cheap to meter (as they once promised us about nuclear power). Okay, it ain't gonna be cheap, but we should be able to afford it.

Anyone, if we can get that far, we are going to have people living on the moon for days going on weeks, and given what happens to a body hanging out in the International Space Station for a long time (it's bad), we can probably expect similar effects on the moon. One way to compensate would be to build a centrifuge. I proposed building a train that would travel in a circular tunnel at high speed.  The long radius would reduce the difference in force between the head and feet and so should be similar enough to the Earth's gravitational field that there would be no ill effects.

Graviton Carnival Ride

But that would be a major engineering project. Even if you could deliver a tunnel digging machine to the moon, it would likely take ten years finish digging the tunnel. We aren't going to want to wait ten years before we start sending people to the moon, so we need something a little smaller. You can generate enough force to simulate gravity with a small cylinder, you just have to spin it faster. However, if you are standing, there is going to be a large difference in force between your head and feet. However, if you are lying down, the difference in force between the tip of you nose and the back of your head, or the tip of your big toe and your heel, is going to be minimal. It might not be very good for working, but it would be just fine for sleeping. And spending eight hours a night in a full G environment might be enough to keep you healthy enough to return to Earth without suffering the ill effects of 'gravity sickness'.

The city of Philadelphia could easily fit inside a theoretical lunar lava tube. (Image credit: David Blair/Purdue University)

So we take an empty fuel tank, locate an empty lava tube, drag the tank down underground into the lava tube, mount the tank on a couple of big bearings, fill it with air and beds and you've got your one Gee bunkhouse. Shoot, big as those lava tubes are, you could take the whole front end of SpaceX's Starship down there. It would already have everything you need: air, power, water, waste management (yes, we will need lavatories even on the moon), an airlock and beds.

(The whole point of going underground is to reduce the effect of radiation which is pervasive outside of the Earth's magnetic field. Domes on the surface can be covered with dirt, but a spinning cylinder is going to need some kind of structure to protect it. If a natural cave could be located, that would be perfect.)

Problem with caves on the moon is that they are devoid of air. And even if you could find one that could be sealed (perhaps by coating the interior with some kind of polyurethane), depending on moon rocks for the air you breath (don't you dare move, you rocks you) might not be prudent. Better to have a self contained air-supply, and that means air locks.

Moon Man exits the Quest airlock at the start of U.S. EVA-51. Photo Credit: Oleg Artemyev / Roscosmos

This centrifuge isn't the only thing going to need airlocks. Space ships are going to need them, regular moon domes are going to need them. Airlocks are basically a box with two doors. Domes connected with pressurized corridors won't necessarily need airlocks, but they will need pressure doors in case somebody springs a leak. I look forward to seeing what kind of doors they are going to use for moon houses.

Arizona Olds & News

Lucid Air electric car

Iaman reports:

I'm making motions to move to AZ for a bit to get my biters fixed (teeth) fixed in Mexico,  today I  talked to a guy, Randy,  my age who built a big house in the mountains, got divorced and now has a wing of the house for rent, sound's good.
I've been looking at the news of the area.  Lucid motors is building plants on both sides of the border for production of their 1000hp electric 235mph car,  I'd never heard of such a company or car.
Apparently there is glut of late season grapes pouring over the border,  trying to beat tariffs. Cool spring means rush of Mexican grapes before threatened tariffs. Almost all grapes imported from Mexico passed through Nogales ports last year, data show.
And 100's of  tunnels under the border walls in Nogales.

He might be exaggerating about the number of tunnels under the border. The story just tells us they found 3 tunnels back in January. 3 tunnels a month times 12 months is 36 tunnels. At that rate, three years would put you over a 100, and this has been going for how long? There's probably thousand's of tunnels. I wouldn't be surprised that to hear that whole sections of the town collapsed due to the number of tunnels.

I got nuthin' on grapes. They make wine and raisins out of grapes. I add raisins to my oatmeal, makes it much more palatable.

The Lucid car factory is going to built in Casa Grande, former home of the Penthouse printing press. Also, from way back in the cold war, it was home to the Corona spy satellite calibration program. And just to tie this up, I used to drive a Toyota Corona.

Elon Musk (the Tesla electric car billionaire) was going to build his big battery factory in Casa Grande. He's also got a big tunnel boring machine project going on. Drugs smugglers are digging tunnels under the border. There might be big money in big, car-size tunnels, but smaller tunnels, like tubes big enough to transport a small package of, I dunno, maybe cocaine or heroin, could be a real money maker. Since the drugs the smugglers are smuggling are probably hard drugs, which take up much less space than evil marijuana, I am surprised they haven't started using pneumatic tubes to get their drugs across the border. A ditch witch should be able to send a four inch pipe a couple hundred yards under the border in  matter of hours. Or maybe they are already doing that, but they just dig a man-sized tunnel every so often so the DEA can claim a victory.

Can't say as I am impressed with the Lucid. I am sure it will be very wonderful, but I ain't got that kind of dough. I mean look at the picture at top. Their target demographic is people who have their own jetliners. And even if I did have the money, I am not sure I would want one. Driving is getting to be more of a pain every day. I like my back yard, my computer, and my big screen TV.

Lucid back seat - gratuitous space car porn
(link goes to YouTube video)

Younger son borrowed my car to drive to Bend over the weekend. He didn't leave me stranded, he left me his 30-year-old Ford pickup truck. Good lord, what a beast. Anyway, I take Cornelius Pass Road over the hill on the way to his house in North Portland and they are working on the wires, so there is a 10 minute delay because traffic is down to one lane and we have to take turns. I don't make it through with the first pack, so I have to wait another ten minutes or so. After that it was smooth sailing. On the way back I took I-5 and as soon as I got pn the interstate the traffic got all creepy-crawly. 20 MPH all the way to highway 26. Can't win for losing.

It came to me that while cruising down the highway, where you aren't crowded and traffic is flowing freely, is pleasant, enjoyable, even relaxing, driving in downtown or creeping along in a traffic jam is a whole lot like work, and it isn't enjoyable work either. I think I'm moving to Montana soon.

John Henry

Tennessee Ernie Ford sings "John Henry"
Bayou Renaissance Man got me started with a couple of clips of guys drilling holes in rock the old fashioned way, i.e. by using a hammer and a steel bit, which reminded me of John Henry and the Steam Drill, related by Tennessee, above. I noticed that the men were holding the drill bit with their hands. I can understand doing that in a competition, but when you are working I think you would be using some kind of tongs to hold the bit. Too much danger of getting your hand smashed by the hammer should it miss its mark.

I also remember reading a story about a man drilling rock by hand, but he used two sledge hammers with well oiled handles. The oil made the handles flexible, which meant that when they were swung correctly, they hit with considerably more force than a hammer with a rigid handle. And this guy knew how to swing those hammers, and he would swing them alternately, left, right, left, boom, boom, boom. He must have been a hell of a man. I might be able to get a couple of licks operating like that, but that would be all and then I would have to take a break. For some reason I think it was a story by Neal Stephenson, but I can't imagine what it would have been. Kind of a pity that I don't remember who wrote it because the image sure stuck in my brain.

Since we are talking about hammers, I want to relate this little bit. I remember working at the Ohio State Fair 50 years ago putting up a prefab steel building, and there was a crew next door erecting tents. Three or four guys with big mallets would stand in a circle and take turns pounding on these giant tent stakes. Each one would take a swing with their hammer. They would go around the circle maybe twice and the peg would be in the ground. They were good. Smooth, practiced and efficient. Never seen the like before or since.

1871 Ingersoll Rock Drill

The Ingersoll Rock Drill could be powered by steam or compressed air. Steam was used in quarries or other open air excavations. Compressed air was preferred for mines as a constant flow of steam could make the mine uninhabitable.

The contest between John Henry and the Steam Drill may have taken place during the construction of the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia.

Google Map
Open Railway Map

We made good use of a sledge hammer while we were tearing out the old floor in the kitchen of younger son's newly purchased house. The house is 50 years old and they must have put a new layer of flooring down every 5 or 10 years. Underneath each new layer of linoleum or Pergo, was a new new layer of  sheathing, and each of the layers was nailed or screwed down tight. It took us a week to peal it all off and pull all the nails and screws. Well, maybe not a week, but it sure felt like it. We used the sledge to drive a pitch fork or a crow bar under the flooring so we could pry it up and peel it off.

Norway's Coastal Highway Project

Norway’s $47BN Coastal Highway | The B1M
This project sounds almost as difficult as the plan to put a tunnel under the Bering Strait. People used to talk about it anyway. The difference is that this highway in Norway would get used and, two, thanks to their North Sea oil business Norway has the money to pay for it. I'm always impressed when I hear about a big new engineering project. I'm not sure why. They keep getting bigger and bigger. You might think I would get used to that, but I don't. One of these days one of these mega-projects is going to fail and it will be bad when it does. But I guess that has already happened and we charged on regardless.

I know I've mentioned Norway before, but I just checked and was surprised at the number of posts I have about Norway.

Cold Welcome

I finished the book this evening. I just picked it up Thursday afternoon at Powell's and I'm already done. I think that's something of a recent record. Not too many books are easy enough to read and keep me interested. Easy as in smooth, well written, the words slow smoothly by.

Grace Darling Lifeboat Rescue

Space travel doesn't figure much in the tale. It's mostly a tale of surviving in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic during a winter storm and then washing up on the shore of Greenland. Well, the first half of the book is, and it's not the North Atlantic and Greenland, it's some other ocean on some other human-habitable planet.  Slotter Key, that's the name of it.

Tunnel

The second half of the book involves exploring a giant underground military base, empty at the moment, but well stocked and equipped, so maybe they only use this place during the summer.  There is something odd about this place though. Most everything is normal, but they run into something they don't understand, like the lights or the remote controls, things that are just odd enough they must be alien or very old. Nothing like what anyone uses now. But I don't remember aliens in any of Ms. Moon's early sci-fi adventures, so this a new twist. Then again, they might not be aliens, they just might be really old.

Space Mercenaries

The main thrust of the story is how do you protect two dozen people when a couple hundred heavily armed, blood-thirsty men are coming to kill you in four days? Ky's strategy is to abandon their safe underground redoubt and run away. You have mystery vehicles you can ride in, but they only go 15 MPH and we don't know what kind of range they have. You could travel on the surface. Traveling for 24 hours a day, you ought to be able to cover 300 miles, baring impassible abysses which are common enough in places where there are no maps. (What do you think happened to all the map makers who ventured into these uncharted areas?)

Or you could follow the mystery tunnel. It's mostly a tunnel, there are doors off to the side occasionally, but we ignore them, press on! is the order of the day. This is Ky's choice. They drive for 12 hours a day and then they stop to rest and recuperate. They travel for 3 days and cover hundreds of miles. This is one really long tunnel. This has got to be aliens.

But wait, this is a space faring civilization, the have some kind of Warp drive that lets them travel to nearby stars in a matter of days. I'm pretty sure if you can do FTL, digging a tunnel completely around the planet is not out of your reach. Why anyone would do that is, well, crazy people who want to build gravity trains, they would.

Gravity Defying Spaceship

Some of the details about the technology this civilization builds and uses were a little thought provoking. They have interstellar flight, but they don't land their spaceships, they stay in orbit. They have shuttles to carry people and cargo to and from orbit. Of course the military do have star-ships that can land, but they cost extra.

Spaceship

An FTL spaceship is happiest in space. Once you have gotten out of the gravity well, you really don't want to go back in there if you can help it. FTL ships would be happiest navigating between stars, that is about as far out of the gravity well you can get, at least within our galaxy. Coming in toward a star (to visit your parents or pick up some fresh fruit) you are going to have to loose a lot of speed. Not just the speed you accelerated to get here in time for grandma's birthday party, but also the speed you acquired falling down the gravity well to this sun. It would really be nice if we could get a handle on gravity. I'm not really counting on it. We just now managed to detect a gravity wave using very large and expensive machines, and it was a wave from a granddaddy of an explosion, at least in our quadrant of the universe. I'm more in favor of whatever comes after the fusion rocket, say, 500 years down the road.

Space Elevator

Anyway, shuttles are a really terrible way to get up to orbit and back. Surely if they can build FTL spaceships they could build a space elevator, but then I realized that you would need a serious amount of interstellar traffic in order to justify the construction of one. That's how we build bridges, you need to have the demand first in order make building a bridge, or a space elevator, a viable proposition.  Building a space elevator would be an enormous undertaking, not to mention that we don't know how to do it yet. This is a world that was only colonized a few hundred years ago, so while interstellar trade exists, it isn't swamping their ability to handle it.

Everyone has a smart phone implanted in their head, well, everyone except those weirdos in that one weird sect. Mizzy-something. They don't. Ky also has an ansible, science-fiction's solution for instantaneous interstellar communication, implanted in her head as well. Now I can't remember any reference to the power for the skullphones, but Ky has to connect her head to a power outlet with a wire in order to run the ansible. This to me just sounds like a really bad idea. Anything using that much power is sure to be giving a noticeable amount of heat unless it's turning that energy into instantaneous quantum fluctuations. And why carry it around in your head if you need to plug it in anyway?

Terry Farrell as Jadzia Dax on Star Trek Deep Space 9

There could be reasons, like it's some kind living organic mesh that lies on top of your brain and communicates directly with your synapses. So it's not just a bad idea, now it's creepy too. But then there was that really good looking babe on Star Trek that was hosting a living symbiot. That was a little creepy. Good looking woman, but the creep factor was a little disturbing. What if that thing in her decided to colonize your brain and it was able to do that because the girl favored you (biblically, so to speak)?

Or it could be a function of the times, like somebody figured out how to a do a brain to computer interface, and the first computers they used were so small and such low power that a power cable wasn't needed. Maybe they used a radioactive battery like a pacemaker does, or maybe they had a flexible device that generated power when it got bent. Or maybe they had some kind of organic-chemical battery that sucked oxygen from your blood, or electrons from your neurons. Whatever, it wasn't an issue, but the brain-computer interface was such a hit, people started using it for all kind of things, and when the ansible came along, implanting it seemed like the logical solution, because it uses this same brain-computer interface as the skullphones all use. So it uses a little extra power, we'll just give her a cable and she can plug it into the wall. It is a prototype after all, not our fault if she fries herself.

Bear Claw

There is one scene at the end where our heroes are being closely pursued by the bad guys. They can hear the bad guys climbing the stairs a dozen flights behind them. But now the passageway ends in a mountain cave home to a hibernating bear. Our heroes manage to sneak by, but you just know the bad guys aren't going to be the least sneaky and they are going to wake up bear and there is going to be hell to pay for all concerned. On one hand I want our intrepid band to block the stairway. It's basically a small passage in a mountain, a cave if you will. Of course a blast big enough to block the stairs is liable to upset the bear as well.  Kind of a tough choice, especially since you didn't bring any dynamite with you. Or rock-drills, which you kind of need if you are blasting in rock.

Then there is the business of anti-gravity aboard the spaceships and the existence of tractor beams. If you have these, then what do you need with aircraft and space shuttles? Okay, they are technology heavy and you can't justify using them if ordinary methods will get the job done. Space ships get anti-gravity because it's just a side benefit of being able to warp space. Kind of like an automobile heater is a side benefit of having an internal combustion engine*. Great Aunt Grace has tractor beams holding up the driveway to her corporate headquarters. Don't want anybody driving up to your front door? Just turn off the tractor beams and suddenly big holes appear in your driveway. At least that's how I interpreted what I read.

So it's a rough and tumble sort of story with plenty of action and people dealing with daily problems. But there is also another thread about the stability of society. There was a civil war within living memory here and apparently not everyone is satisfied with the way it turned out. On the surface all is calm, but treachery lurks in the shadows, and there are lots of shadows here. The corruption is well entrenched and runs deep. I look at what's going on in the world and it's not that much different than what's in the story.

Look at our world. For instance, Russia has always gotten bad press. First when they were Communist and now with Putin in charge and they are resurgent once again. I suspect that at the higher levels things aren't much different than they are here. Oh, maybe Putin will have you killed if he finds something about you that he doesn't like, but over here they just ruin your life to the point where maybe you wish you were dead.

I'm all in favor of rooting out corruption, but there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Maybe it's just the nature of our society. Maybe that would change if we just changed a couple of the rules. But what rules could those be? I was thinking it would have to be small change, but with the right propaganda we could implement almost anything. So basically anything is on the table, but I really don't know what the rule would be.

* Internal combustion engines that throw off a whole bunch of waste heat. Two thirds of the energy from the fuel they burn is wasted. The amount of heat produced by the heater is a small fraction of the energy available.

Barrel Roll Redux

New Jaguar E-PACE | GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ Barrel Roll
I am a little underwhelmed by this stunt. It first made the world stage when it was done with an AMC Hornet for the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, and they made a complete barrel roll, not this most-of-the-way-and-land-kind-of-sideways like they did here.

Mercedes and Top Gear also did barrel rolls, but they did it in tunnels, not free flying through the air.

As for the Jag, I can't say as I am impressed. It's looks like they are following the industry wide trend of making cars more like appliances: boxy, utilitarian and ugly. I suppose that comes from the pressure of life in our modern world.

Via Road & Track.

Skateboarding Adventure

Devium - Dying Days from Devium on Vimeo.
A group of guys go to a good deal of trouble to skate inside a big concrete pipe at Shasta Dam. Reminds me of when me and my buds swam to the base of Mansfield Dam at Lake Travis. Just being there at the base of a large dam is an unsettling experience, and then these guys go way back in the tunnel. Some people like caving. Me, I've never cared for it.

North Portland Railroad Tunnel

North Portland Railroad Map

Driving down North Lombard Street on my way to the airport yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that I was missing a piece of the puzzle. North Portland is about a 150 feet higher in elevation than the river. This is especially noticeable in the bluffs between the University of Portland and Swan Island. Railroads don't like hills, so how does the railroad get from Swan Island up to the level of North Lombard Street?

For one thing, the land slopes gently down toward the north and east, so by the time Lombard meets up with the railroad (a couple miles east of the above map), their elevation is about 50 feet, only about 25 feet higher than Swan Island. The railroad has about 5 miles to to make that climb, which is only about one foot of rise in a thousand feet of run, which should be easy enough for any train.

So that part of the puzzle is filled in. But while I am looking into this I discover a train tunnel running under North Portland. I had no idea. The tunnel was built a hundred years ago and is still in daily use. It is the pale orange line running vertically in the map above, about a half an inch from the right hand border. The railroads first project to cut across North Portland involved making a cut (basically a big ditch). That's the thick orange line running diagonally across the map. People were so upset about their town being cut in half by this ditch that when the railroad proposed making another cut, they were forced to back off and dig a tunnel instead.

Brief history of the tunnel here.
Discussion on Reddit here.
Railroad maps here.
Topographic maps here.

Sicario

FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), her partner Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya)
in a tunnel under the US-Mexico border.

Slightly different perspective on the War On Drugs. Not a lot of legalese, more tactics and action. This is what's going on down in the trenches, and it ain't pretty no matter how you slice it. Or shoot it. There is a good scene where there is gunfight in the line of cars waiting to cross the border. Wasn't much of a fight actually. All the bad guys die, none of the good guys got hit.
    There was also some cool night vision shots during an operation infiltrating a drug smuggling tunnel. We've got a mix of night vision (starlight scopes) and infrared. Hollywood Reporter claims the infrared (thermal) viewers are used for research. Some of them might be, but the big users are the police and military. They use them to track down and kill people. Don't give me that hogwash about 'research'.

    If this is really how we are fighting this war, then we are in even bigger trouble than I thought. You think the War On Drugs is supposed to halt the illegal drug trade? You're a fool. The whole point of the war is to keep the flow of cash going to the CEO's of the American drug distribution cartels, and if several thousand people are tortured and murdered every year, well, it's no skin off their nose.
    The War On Drugs is just one more example of the corruption that is running rampant all around the world. Until we clean our house, we shouldn't really be asking anyone else to clean theirs.

Casey Jones Goes to War

Veresk Bridge

Mazandaran Savadkooh: View from the Veresk Bridge.

I don't remember what exactly got me started on this, possibly one of Comrade Misfit's posts about steam locomotives. Anyway, I got started rummaging around and discovered this little bit on Schenectady History dot org. Alco is the compact version of "American Locomotive Company".

Alco was also on time in the kind of war story most satisfying to railroad men. The story was told in "Casey Jones Goes to War," by Amy Porter, in Collier's magazine, May 20, 1944:

The Trans-Iranian railroad gave America's soldier railroaders one of the hottest, coldest, toughest jobs they ever had to do. In the critical days of late 1942, Russia called for more supplies. Nazi submarines were crippling the Murmansk convoy route. The Mediterranean was closed to Allied shipping, and although generous supplies were being brought around the tip of Africa and landed at Persian Gulf ports, only a feeble trickle got through to Russia. The inadequately powered Trans-Iranian Railway was the bottleneck.This 650-mile road bisects a 150-mile stretch of desert before it struggles to heights of more than 7,000 feet in the Elburz Mountains. Temperatures range from 170 degrees Fahrenheit in the desert to 40 below in the mountains... There are 225 tunnels, thousands of bridges.
British steam locomotives and even America's 2-8-0's were not powerful enough to negotiate this tortuous road and haul much freight. It took most of their power to carry the coal and water on which they ran. Something had to be done.
At this point American Locomotive Company representatives were called to Washington... Could P. T. Egbert of Alco, Washington wanted to know, get some diesel-electrics over to Iran quick? Mr. Egbert could. And could Alco, by the way, convert the diesel axle arrangement somehow so the Iran road could bear their 120-ton weight? They could.
In the first week of December, twenty-nine diesels with six axles instead of the standard four were delivered at the Persian Gulf-along with a newly recruited American Locomotive shop battalion, eight hundred strong, to play nursemaid to the thousand-horsepower giants. The M.R.S. (Military Railway Service) took over operation of the road, and shipments increased until in May, 1943, Russian requirements in munitions and supplies were exceeded by 18 per cent...
Now a great fleet of diesels and a grand division of M.R.S. troops have the Iran situation well in hand.

Wikipedia has a story article about the Trans-Iranian Railway.
Odd old film, in French, no subtitles: Reza Shah of Iran inaugurates the Trans Iranian Railroad

Costain built 11 miles of the Trans-Iranian Railway, seven tunnels and two viaducts in isolated mountainous terrain - for £1 million.

The Veresk Bridge is right in the center of this map. You will notice how the rail line doubles back, loops around and even crosses itself here. This explains how we can see the viaduct in the second picture from the bridge in the first picture.
    The map is about 9 miles top to bottom. Iran has a green fringe along the shore of the Caspian Sea. This area is right at the southern edge of this green fringe which makes it about 50 miles from the coast.
    I made this map by tracing the railway line in the map version and then changing the base map to the satellite view. The little white blobs are tunnel entrances. There are more tunnels but Google Maps ran out of ink, or memory, or something.

Hot Date in Yuma, Arizona

Yuma Medjool Date Festival 2014

Iaman, who isn't in Iowa anymore, told me about the Yuma Date Festival. I like dates well enough, but no, I'm not going to Yuma.
    I've driven through Yuma at least twice. All I remember seeing there was acres and acres of motorhomes driven there by snowbirds from up North. Other than that, well, there was the movie 3:10 to Yuma and the Yuma Proving Grounds. But dates? It all looked like desert to me.
    Yuma is right at the border with California and Mexico and at the intersection of the Colorado River and Interstate Highway 8.
     A hundred years ago some enterprising souls figured out that all they needed was to divert some of the water from the Colorado River and they could grow big crops. Most irrigation projects involved dams and canals but this one, this one is a real oddball. They dug a tunnel under the river. This video does a pretty good job of explaining the project.

Yuma Siphon Irrigation Project

Yuma Siphon

The population in Arizona has been growing which is putting more strain on their water supply. Now they are experimenting with paying farmers not to grow crops in order to free up water for other uses, like drinking.

P.S. I was thinking dates were tied up with wasps in some bizarre sexual escapades, but it's not dates, it's that other middle eastern fruit: figs.

Westbound

I got back from Denver almost six weeks ago, and I am just now getting around to finishing my report. I wonder why that is.

We had a vague idea of visiting Dinosaur National Monument on the way back, so we headed West out of Denver on Interstate 70. It's been a long time since I've been on this road. My wife and I drove to Winter Park using this road 20 odd years ago, and Matt I drove to Los Angeles this way 40 odd years ago. Matt and I had a real good time. (Can you believe it? Blogger's spell checker doesn't like Los Angeles.) Going up that first set of hills, trying to maintain speed while carrying a load of furniture, the truck had to work a bit. At one point I had the engine at redline, the throttle wide open and the transmission upshifted. Bang! That was a little unnerving. I eased off a bit after that.

There are three tunnels on I-70 between Denver and Grand Junction. The first and longest is the Eisenhower Tunnel built in 1979, so it wasn't there when Matt & I made our trip to LA. Reading the Wikipedia article I discovered that there is a height restriction on this tunnel, which may explain why we saw so few trucks on this route. For a while I wondered if we were going to see any, but as time went by we saw a few.

I used an old, paper, Gousha road atlas to navigate. It's been sitting in my bookcase for umpteen years. It is dated 1985, and we discovered no discrepancies between the map and the roads we traveled. That didn't used to be the case, back when the Interstate Highway System was still under construction.

The next morning we got off the Interstate at Loma and started up State Highway 139 toward Dinosaur. Loma is a fine town, full of streets with names like L 7/10 Road. We stopped for gas and donuts. Three other full-size pickup trucks, all hauling stuff, stopped for gas while we were there. The other drivers were all wearing Oakley sunglasses and blue-tooth earpieces. I was the odd man out with my compact truck, $2 sunglasses and a hand-held phone.

Hostess mini-donuts, Squirt and hot dogs were staples of my diet on this trip. The Hostess man must have just been there, because the Hostess rack was overflowing with packages of mini-donuts. Guess I'm not alone in my preference for road food.

State Highway 139 is a two lane blacktop with hardly any traffic. There were some switchbacks going up to Douglas Pass where we stopped to check out the view.

When we got to Dinosaur, we drove into the Monument using a road marked "No Fossils". It seemed to take forever to drive all the way to the end, but only a few minutes to drive back out. It was about 15 miles one way, a mere nit in the overall scheme of things. We stopped at the Echo Park overlook. I used to be really impressed with these views, but now I look and I think how grim and forbidding it looks. Lots of rocks, no water or shade. Well, okay, there is a river at the bottom of the canyon, well, you hope there is anyway. You can't see it from up here, and it's a couple of thousand feet down. Be a hell of a hike to find out the river is dry. Just thinking about it is making me thirsty.

Our next stop was a campground in the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. We grilled some hot dogs for lunch. The campground was way up above the lake.

After that it was back on the Interstate. The next day the tarp decided to break loose and start flapping in the wind. We stopped 2 or 3 times to try and fix it before we finally pulled into a store in Wendell, Idaho, and bought 100 feet of cord and ran a zig-zag over the top. 


By coincidence I stopped for gas near Boise at the same place I stopped on the way out. Maybe that's not so surprising being as there is only one gas station every six bajillion miles out here. When we crossed the border into Oregon gas prices jumped up 50 cents a gallon, and for some reason, the bugs really started flying. We had to stop every hour or so to clean the windshield, it was so bad. We considered stopping for another night, but by then we were in Pendleton, and shoot, we're practially home, so we pushed on and got home around midnight.

The next day we're unpacking and I inspect the damage to the tarp. It was really big, so we had folded it over a bit to contain the excess. All that flapping in the breeze had worn a hole in it, and where was the hole? In one corner, where it wouldn't be a big problem? No, because of the way it was folded it was right in the center.