The Search For Earth-Like Planets

This video is a mix of real information and speculative claptrap. It's pretty good overall. There are some good explanations of exo-planet hunting techniques, and some of the ideas being kicked around as to what kinds of planets one might find. Excellent video.

Via Universe Space And Time.

The Gas Line

I'm working on the gas fireplace in the basement under the watchful eye of my daughter this evening. I reach for the BIG RED HANDLE to turn on the gas and suddenly she wants to know what I am doing. Huh.

When we were in San Francisco a few months ago there was a big, huge, ginormous gas explosion about ten miles from where we were staying. Took out several houses, killed a couple of people. It was big enough to warrant the Governor's attention, or maybe the Lieutenant Governor, I've forgotten. I guess it made an impression on her.

Well, this triggered a dump from the memory banks.

Forty-five years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, my Dad threw in the towel on his engineering career and bought a farm 40 miles NE of Columbus, Ohio. The farmhouse had an old coal burning furnace. My mom, the sophisticated urban woman that she was, wasn't having any of it. As there was a high pressure gas line running across our property, why can't we just tap into that and get gas heat? So we did.

A trench was dug the 200 yards from the house to the pipeline, then the gas company sent out a couple of guys in a truck to make the connection. I got to watch. They dug down to the pipe, it wasn't very far, which was kind of weird, because they were on a slight rise just to the side of the road. The pipeline route was perpendicular to the road, maybe there was a special go-under-the-road kink in the line there, I don't know.

Anyway, they uncover the big pipe, clean the surface down to bare metal and weld a short stub of pipe onto the main line. Hooked up a pressure gauge, pressurized the stub and checked for leaks. Screw a valve onto the stub. Screw a hand operated drill into the valve. Turn the handle on the drill, drill through the wall of the big pipe. The drill had no gears, just four spoke handles. The bit looked an ordinary quarter inch drill bit. I imagine the wall of that pipe had to be half an inch thick. It took a while.

Now it gets interesting. The way it was supposed to work is you retract the drill and then you close the valve. Something went wrong and the valve wouldn't close, so when they pulled the drill off we got a jet stream of high pressure Natural Gas going 20 feet into the air. This caused everyone to step back, but it didn't catch fire, so after a bit one of the guys returned to the scene and closed the valve. Whew.

After that it was just hook up the pressure regulator, the gas meter and the normal shut off valve. Pretty cool, all in all. Especially since we didn't all die.

The History Of Profiling

The day it all started was March 6, 1836. On that fateful day, Davy Crockett woke up and rose from his bunk on the main floor of the Alamo. He then walked up to the observation post along the West wall of the fort. William B. Travis and Jim Bowie were already there, looking out over the top of the wall. These three great men gazed at the hordes of Mexicans moving toward them. With a puzzled look on his face, Crockett turned to Bowie and said: Jim, are we having some landscaping done today?

From Steve. Which reminded me of this:



I think I have posted this video before, but I could not find it.

SEMITORR

I saw a white van on the road the other day with the name SEMITORR painted on the side, and I thought, that's an odd name. Torr relates to how vacuous a vacuum is, so I'll bet these guys have something to do with high vacuum systems, and Semitorr means a part of a Torr, so that must mean a really high vacuum. Silly boy. Semi refers to the semiconductor industry, who are the only customers in this neck of the woods that would care about how high (strong?) their vacuum was.

From Wikipedia we have this:

The torr (symbol: Torr) is a non-SI unit of pressure with the ratio of 760 to 1 standard atmosphere, chosen to be roughly equal to the fluid pressure exerted by a millimeter of mercury, i.e. a pressure of 1 Torr is approximately equal to 1 mmHg. . . . . It was named after Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist and mathematician who discovered the principle of the barometer in 1644.^[1]

Quote of the Day

When people believe that hard work will not pay off, when they believe that the game is rigged against them, that's when they are ripe for the message that they are being kept down by some nefarious cabal.

We know how that tends to work out. - E. B. Misfit

Traffic Jams

I got caught in a couple of little traffic jams last week and I timed how long it took to get shut of them. One took four minutes, the other took six. These were on the freeway where I had been sailing along at 60 MPH and in a few seconds I was reduced to crawling along at 5 MPH.

Four minutes and six minutes are not very long, but at the time it seemed like for flipping ever.

Of all the problems we have in America, this is the absolute worst.

Tunnels & Line Of Sight

We have a few tunnels in the Portland area. A couple that I drive through on a regular basis are curved and, inevitably, if there is any traffic at all, it slows down for these tunnels.

There are the two big (three lane) tunnels that go under the West Hills and connect Highway 26 to downtown Portland. A few hundred yards down the road in the East bound lanes, the left and right lanes peel off and duck into short tunnels on their way to I-405.

On the other side of town, the exit from I-84 Eastbound goes through a short tunnel on it's way to joining up with I-205 Northbound.

I've been out to the airport a couple of times this month in the evening, after traffic has died down, and I was able to sail through at least some of these tunnels without slowing down. It was pleasant.

So it struck me that one of the reasons that people slow down for these things is the reduced visibility: you cannot see around corners. Never mind that you can see far enough ahead to avoid a collision, the problem is you cannot see as far ahead as you could just a few seconds ago, before you entered this tunnel. The sudden reduction in visibility is what causes people to slow down.

One way to deal with this is to drive in the outside lane (if there is more than one), or the outer most portion of your lane (if there is not). This will let you see a little farther ahead. I would suggest that the road painters move their lane markers (on those roads where there is room), but that would make the lane off-center in tunnel, and that would probably cause more consternation than the curve.

I wanted to include a drawing here, but that would take more time I want to spend right now.