Moses Lake

Antonov-225

Back in May of 2012 the six-engine Antonov An-225 Mriya flew into the airport at Moses Lake, Washington, to deliver two mammoth winches destined for the Alaskan oil fields. While the Antonov could have landed at Sea-Tac International Airport, it was too large to park. At Sea-Tac, there was no area to put the plane once it landed. From a story in the Puget Sound Business Journal

Another case of an Antonov landing at an old SAC airbase.

Norden Bombsight

Norden Bombsight in the nose of a B-25 bomber

Posthip Scott sent me an Ebay listing for a Norden Bombsight. I'd heard of them and I knew they were sort of a big deal, but I had never come across any good information about them, like how the machinery inside actually worked. I realize now that they are horribly complex mechanical computers that performed some operation that any $2 digital calculator could do now. The 20th century military-industrial complex was full of this stuff. In short, they were complicated, expensive pieces of precision machinery and if you were so inclined you could spend years sorting out all the ins and outs of their design, construction and operation. It might be fun, but at this point it's more like archaeology.
     Looking around I uncovered a couple of interesting bits. I found this one on Wikipedia.

At the beginning of WW2, after Britain was engaged but before the USA got into it, the Brits were keen on obtaining the Norden bombsight, so they sent some guys to the USA to talk about it. During one visit there was a demonstration.

The RAF's desires were only further goaded on 13 April 1939, when Pirie was invited to watch an air demonstration at Fort Benning where the painted outline of a battleship was the target. "At 1:27 while everyone was still searching [the sky for the B-17s] six 300-pound  bombs suddenly burst at split second intervals on the deck of the battleship, and it was at least 30 seconds later before someone spotted the B-17 at 12,000 feet". The three following B-17s also hit the target, and then a flight of a dozen Douglas B-18 Bolos placed most of their bombs in a separate 600 yd × 600 yd square outlined on the ground. - Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War by David Zimmerman

Malcolm Gladwell gave a TED Talk about the Norden bombsight back in 2011, wherein I found this bit:

And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars -- billion dollars in 1940 dollars -- developing the Norden bombsight. And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. 

That's in 1940 dollars which were worth about 20 times what they are now.

The Fremont Bridge

Fremont Bridge
Warning: link autoplays

Driving up the ramp towards the Fremont bridge this evening I was struck by the feeling that this bridge was like something out of a science fiction story. The thing is huge, it is bigger than all of the other bridges in Portland put together.

Fremont Bridge in 1988

It even dwarfs downtown. It's like a monster tree trunk has fallen across the river and all the squirrels who populate this section of the forest have taken to scurrying over it to cross the river, but none of them have any idea how it came to be here. It's just like the river that flows underneath it, it's just part of the terrain.

Previous post about this bridge.

Update December 2018 replaced first picture.

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.

Truck of the Day

An Automobile Shippers, Inc. 1940 Dodge COE filled with 1940 Plymouths

Automobile Shippers, Inc. was founded by Eugene Casaroll. He was also the man behind the Dual-Ghia lux-mobile. COE stands for Cab-Over-Engine, which doesn't quite apply to this truck, but maybe that was just the way the 1940's version was.

The War on Cash

Spent $1500 but says if it's good he will come back to buy more.

Is the government / big business trying to get rid of cash? I've come across a couple of articles in the last few days that mentioned the idea, and then this morning I came across this:

An outbreak of small pox, transmitted with a virus planted on bank notes, has swept across the United States – devastating its people, the country's infrastructure, and within just five days, causing the collapse of the US government. - Ben Skipper writing about a new video game on IBT

Sounds like the powers that be have enlisted the video game industry in their nefarious scheme to eliminate cash.

My kids don't carry cash, they use debit cards for everything. I use cash for most small stuff, stuff that is going to get consumed. Does the government / big business really need to know about the box of donuts I bought this morning? Also, I don't want to have to keep track of all my purchases, you know, save the receipts, mark them off against the monthly statement, which is what you are supposed to do, or at least that used to be what you were supposed to do.

    But does it do any good? After years of struggling to keep track of my expenses I find it is more likely that I would lose a receipt than the bank would post a bogus charge against my account. And how would you know if they did? You aren't going to have a receipt for a charge you didn't make, and if it's something ordinary, like gasoline or a cheeseburger, how sure are you going to be that you didn't make that charge?

    So maybe cards are the way to go. Cash is kind of a nuisance, especially change. I stopped in a 7-11 the other day and the penny tray by the cash register was overflowing. Admittedly it was a small tray so there was only about 25 cents in there, but still. Pennies are absolutely more trouble than they are worth. We could probably dispense with coins entirely. Okay, maybe we'd want to hang onto quarters. Four of those can still get you a cup of coffee. Some places. I think.

    Problem is that the black market runs on cash, and the way things are going, the black market is a sizable fraction of the economy. I read something the other day that said Americans spend more money on illicit drugs than they do on gasoline. I'm not sure if I believe that or not.

    If you are driving a car you are probably spending about $100 a month on gasoline. (1000 miles per month times $2 a gallon divided by 20 miles per gallon. YMMV) Somebody with a drug habit could be easily spending that much in a week, and if they are using hard drugs it could be that much a day. Add in the facts* that 

• doing drugs can impair your judgement about all kinds of things, like whether you should buy another baggie, 
• there are is a sizable contingent of people with money to spend and nothing better to do, and
• Vincent Vega was buying dope for personal consumption at $1500 a whack back in 1994,
• drug money saved banks in global crisis, 

and, yeah, maybe we are spending as much money on dope as we are on gas.

On the flip side, big business / government sound like they are trying to relieve us of this dilemma by simply getting rid of cash:

• The Hubris of Trying to Eliminate Cash by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF (2014)
• Getting rid of big banknotes is not as easy as it sounds, The Economist (2016)

One of the problems for the powers-that-be is that the black market is not taxed. If they could eliminate cash then all financial transactions would perforce be done through the financial networks where they could be tracked and, more importantly, taxed. Now if drugs were to become legal, then there should be no problem with buying drugs with credit cards. But I suspect what will happen is that the shitheads-in-charge will

1. eliminate cash,
2. start taxing all drug transactions, but
3. still prosecute anyone who has bought or sold illegal drugs. Anyone that is, that they feel like prosecuting.

We are headed straight for hell, and our fearless leaders are leading the charge.

*for some value of 'facts'.

Car of the Day

1962 Dual Ghia L6.4

No one can deny that Eugene Casaroll fought the good fight. The Detroit businessman had taken a Chrysler concept car and developed it into a limited-production convertible, employing reliable MoPar mechanicals and svelte hand-built Ghia coachwork. Not only had the car been successfully produced, but it had, in only three short years since its 1956 introduction, become the favored automobile of Hollywood royalty. Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, and Peter Lawford all had Dual-Ghias in their driveways. - Sotheby's 

More photos here.  The Cadillac Allante was another Italian-American project.