PDX

Packed and drove to Radisson Hotel by the Airport. A little difficult to find. Almost clobbered a motorcycle when I had to change lanes at the last minute to make my turnoff. Guy was in a hurry, passing on the right.

Anne bought a case and a half of micro-brew beer, in bottles, for her brother. No problem, just wrap it up and ship it as luggage. We each get two bags and we are only taking one a piece. Lay an old sleeping bag over a duffel bag that my brother Andy left us. Set the two boxes of beer on the bag, wrap them up in the sleeping bag, and zip the giant duffel bag closed. Great, it all fits. It is a little heavy. Are we going to meet the weight restrictions? Well, no, we are not. The bag weighs 56 pounds, and bags over 50 pounds net a 50 dollar surcharge. Okay, so we have to open it back up, pull out the smaller box and pack it in another bag. Okay, now we are under the weight limit.

We stay at the hotel because they offer free parking while we are gone, and because we do not have to get up at some ungodly hour and drive to the airport. We still have to get up at an ungodly hour, but it is a little easier to get ready, because we have already cut our ties to the house. No trying to figure out if we forgot anything. All we have to pack is the stuff we brought with us. Does what we save on parking pay for the hotel room? Maybe, I don't know.

The hotel has fancy numbered beds. Supposedly you can adjust the firmness of your mattress by pressing these buttons on the remote control. I could not detect any difference. The remote was a bit of a pain to use. Press the up button to increase firmness and this motor starts running and making noise and the numbers on the display increase. Okay. Press the down button and nothing apparently happens. Hold it down for a while and then let up and you get a new, smaller number in the display. I tried running it up to 95 and then down to 35 and I could not detect any difference, until I tried to get out of bed. Then I noticed there was a padded rail at the edge of mattress. The center of the mattress had sunk below the edges. I think I probably should have boosted the pressure a bit. Later on I could hear the neighbor running their mattress pump. Loud and obnoxious.

All the outlets were in use, so I had to unplug something so I could plug in my CPAP machine. Why are outlets in hotel rooms always in the most inconvenient places? They always seem to be behind the mattress or the dresser. Seems like the room designers could do a better job of this. Anyway, I got the machine plugged in and then it quits. What's wrong now? Well, the outlet is loose. If you the jiggle the plug, the machine turns back on. Seems having a plug in the socket and then jamming the mattress against has damaged the outlet. Big surprise. Get it working and leave it. It continues to work, thankfully.

The shower had a large diameter head. The flow was adequate, but the force was not very high. It was weird, when I let the water run on my face it tickled my lower lip or something. I couldn't quite figure out what it felt like exactly. It did not hurt, but I could not stand it either. Could not let it run on my face for more than a second or two at a time.

There was a tissue dispenser under the sink, but it only had two or three tissues and was soon empty. There used to be a card lock on the outside door, but it was gone. There was a track of something gross on the parking lot outside the back door where a garbage bag had dripped on the way to the dumpster.

Turns out we were lucky to have a room. All the hotels in the area were full because of the Grand Opening of IKEA tomorrow. Anne had booked our room weeks, if not months, in advance.

Anti-Dive Brakes

Many any years ago when I used to ride a motorcycle, I always found it disconcerting how much the front end of the bike would sink down when I applied the brakes hard. After some thought on the matter I realized a link connecting the front brake caliper to the steering head could help alleviate this sinking feeling.

The caliper would need to be mounted to the axle and free to rotate around it. It would be mounted behind the front fork, that is, to the rear of it. When the suspension is compressed, the link would cause the caliper to rotate around the axle towards the bottom of the disk. Conversely, when the suspension was extended, the link would cause the caliper to rotate towards the top of the caliper. Applying the brakes would cause the caliper to try and rotate in the direction of the forward rotating disk. This would exert an upward pressure on the link which would counteract the downward pressure of the front of the bike, keeping it from diving so far down. Some experimentation to determine the length of the link and radius of the link connection point will be in order.

I supposed an illustration is in order, but I have not learned to use a computer drawing program that would allow me to produce a drawing as quickly as a pencil. And pencil sketches, well, they would have to be scanned, and then they would require some fiddling. Someday I may get around to that.

But back to the topic at hand. Some time later I observed that when a car comes to a stop we have something of the same phenomena. It is not nearly as disconcerting, probably due to the seating position, but there is one thing that bothers me, and that is the way a car sets back on it's springs after it has come to a stop. It should not do that. When it comes to a stop, it should stop completely, it should stop moving. It should not be moving around on it's springs. With all the fancy schmancy technology they are trying to pack into cars these days, let us see if the automotive engineers can solve this puzzle. I can smell the hype now: "Anti-dive brakes, the ultimate in braking refinement".

Movie: "Mirror Wars"

A made-in-Russia espionage thriller! I can't remember the last time I saw a movie made in Russia, oh wait, maybe "Archangel", another thriller. But "Mirror Wars" was made by Russians. It was not too bad, not too good, but not too bad. It had several well-known English language actors, but for the most part it was dubbed. I really do not like dubbing. You lose so much from the tone of voice. I much prefer to hear it in the original language and read the subtitles. I think they worked really hard on the dubbing, because I did not notice any discrepancy between their lips and the words you were hearing. However, it often made for very odd pacing of their lines. I wonder about the English language actors. Did they speak their lines in Russian originally, and then dub over them? Or did they speak in English to Russian actors who responded in Russian?

The plot was complex enough to be interesting and there were a couple of unexpected twists. The two cops sent to investigate made an interesting pair, the girl was pretty, there were a couple of spectacular explosions. The gun fight staging was feeble. Watching the jet aircraft was enjoyable. I am not sure why that should be, but it was. It was shot in a number of locations. I think they could have made more of that. Sometimes it was difficult to tell if you were in London or Moscow, Siberia or Pakistan.

Games

I have taken to doing the Jumble word puzzle on the comics page each morning. Some mornings it goes fairly quickly, some days I am stumped. I will eventually solve it, but I will have to leave and let it pergelate for a while before I come back and make another attempt. Unscrambling the five letter words are fairly easy for me. The six letter words are another matter. Some of those can be real stinkers.

Crosswords are impossible for me. The only crosswords I have ever had any luck with are the ones on the back of the kid's menu at Elmer's restaurant. The ones in the paper are impossible. I have tried crosswords before, diligently worked through both lists (Across and Down) and gotten three words, if I am lucky. Often I don't get any. So I have given up on crosswords. My friend Jack and my mother-in-law Audrey will sit down with the New York Times crossword and do it in ink.

Lately I have playing "Series of Tubes" and "Planarity". I like them because they have a definite solution and I can work them out in five or ten minutes. Of course how long it takes depends on what level you choose. The level in "Series of Tubes" can be set between 8 and 300. I like level 258. It has a large enough field to be interesting, but the because the field ends at the edges, it is much easier to solve. On some levels the playing field wraps around the edges. That is, you have a rectangular playing field and symbols at the right hand edge of the field may connect to symbols on the left hand edge, as though the playing field were a cylinder and it has been unrolled so you can see the whole thing. So on some levels the field wraps around from one side to the other, on other levels it wraps from top to bottom, and on some levels it wraps around both ways. These are much more challenging. I like level 258 because it is easy, it does not wrap.

Planarity looks very different from "Series of Tubes", but it is similar in that involves unscrambling a scrambled mess. I am not sure how high the levels go, but if you go much above 12 your solution is liable to end up crowding the edge of the board, and will have to move everything you have done away from that edge to give yourself room to finish. All this moving has to be done piece by piece, which is a bit slow and tedious, since you are not really making any progress in the solution.

I was playing Cubox (the link seems to be dead, and no one else seems to carry it) for a while, but it got to be frustrating. Sometimes I could see the solution and solve it instantly, other times I would fight with it forever and still not get a solution. You can just point and click and eventually you will end up with a solution, but they tell you the number of moves required to solve the puzzle, and it is very low, like 4 or 5, and I think, I should be able to do this. And sometimes I could, but sometimes I could not. What was worse is that I would come back later and try to solve a puzzle I had solved easily and find I could not. Bizarre.

I really need a new game.

Impossible Skateboard

I saw a boy trying to ride a skateboard this evening while I was walking up at Jackson Elementary School. He was only three or four feet tall. The skateboard he was trying to ride was a bit unusual in that it only a single wheel in front and a single wheel in back. I had seen them before, but had not a chance to study them. The front and rear portions of the board can tilt independently from side to side. The single wheel is a caster, so tilting the board causes the caster to swivel and board to therefor change direction. Normal skateboards are propelled by pushing off against the ground. This board is propelled by (I assume) some trick of wiggling the feet and/or shifting your weight. The boy was struggling with this board, but he was making some progress. I saw him get the board to go about ten feet before he had to step off.

Suspension for off road vehicles

One of the big innovations in automotive suspensions in the last fifty years was the introduction of the anti-sway bar, or sway bar in common parlance. This device is designed to keep a vehicle more nearly level when it goes around a corner. Most automobiles have one in the front suspension, some sportier cars also have one in the rear.

When driving a four wheeled vehicle, such as a Jeep, off the highway, i.e. on surfaces that are not paved, you want to keep all four wheels in contact with ground as much as possible. An uneven dirt surface does not offer as much traction as a smooth paved surface. The anti-sway bar, and the stiff chassis of most modern vehicles combine to make it difficult to keep all four wheels in contact with the ground when the terrain is uneven.

So we have a conflict here. For highway use, we want a stiff chassis that does not roll much. For off-road use, we want a suspension that will keep all four wheels in contact with the ground.

My idea is to connect the front and rear axles with an anti-sway linkage. Current anti-sway bars work by causing both wheels on one axle to move together. When one wheel goes up, the sway bar exerts pressure on the other wheel to move up. My idea is to couple wheels diagonally. That is, when the left front wheel is forced up, my cross linked sway bar would exert an upward force on the right REAR wheel. Likewise, when the right front wheel drops down, a downward pressure would be exerted on the left rear wheel.

If you visualize a vehicle with solid axles (like a Jeep, or a heavy duty truck), when the front axle tilts one way to accommodate the terrain, the rear axle would tilt the other way. In off road situations, this would help keep all four wheel in contact with the ground. On the highway, it would act like a pair of conventional sway bars. A further benefit would be that tend to keep a more upright position when traversing uneven terrain. The cross linking of the axles means that attitude of the vehicle would not be following one axle more than the other, its' position would be determined by the average of the position of the two axles.

Constructing such a suspension for an existing vehicle would take some talented engineering. Using an all mechanical solution of bars, links and torsion springs would have the advantage of being reliable, but would no doubt be difficult to construct around the existing frame and suspension. A hydraulic system might be easier to install, but would need careful engineering to be reliable. Either system would need extensive testing before it could be sold. It would need to be tested off-road to see whether it did if fact help vehicles negotiate uneven terrain and whether it will hold up to off-road abuse. It would also need on-highway testing to ensure that it did not adversely affect the behavior of the vehicle, especially in emergency situations.

Garbage Tax

We have too much stuff. And it is not just me, it is the whole country. We have gotten so good at making things that we will buy a new one just to avoid having to clean an old one, or even worse, just because we are tired of the old one and want something new. Nothing wrong with that, it helps keep the economy going, but it leads to accumulations of stuff, and eventually someone is going to have to dispose of that stuff. Useful stuff you can sell, or give to Goodwill. Eventually though everything wears out and will have to be disposed of. I mean there are things that even Goodwill will not take.

I suggest we put a garbage tax on everything sold new. Everything: food, houses, cars, clothes, furniture, do-dads, knick-knacks, whatever. The tax rate would be very low, maybe one percent, maybe less. The money collected would be used to pay for garbage collection, sewers and recycling. Businesses could bid on providing these services. Companies that do a better job of disposing of stuff could make more money.

Dumps, instead of charging people, would pay people to dump their stuff there. Fringe benefit would be no more illegal dump sites, or least fewer. Why dump your trash by the side of the road when you can collect money for it at the dump?

I heard that some places in California (naturally, all the wacko ideas start in California) do not have separate recycling bins anymore. People dump everything in the trash containers and then garbage collection people sort the recyclables from the garbage. On one hand it sounds bizarre. Seems like it would be easier to deal with if it was sorted to begin with, but then there are people who cannot be bothered to separate the recyclable stuff from the garbage, or do it incorrectly. And then there are cases, like we had here in Oregon, where a whole bunch of stuff, some kind of plastic I think, was accumulated from our recycling program, but it ended up going to the landfill because there was no market for it. How many man hours went into recycling that plastic? First, the consumer has to separate it. Then the garbage collection company has to keep the plastic separate and then it has to be stored. A great deal of handling for something that turned out to be worthless.

Recycling only works when you can produce vast quantities of a material that there is a market for, and it only pays when you produce that material for less than people are willing to pay for it. Recycling can work, even if it does not pay directly, as there can be mitigating factors that our current business rules do not cover. Things like not sending material to the landfill so that it does not fill up as fast. Or using recycled material instead of new generates fewer emissions into the atmosphere or water.

I think we need a garbage tax levied on all new materials when they are sold.