Turbine Wheel

So I was writing about driving an old Buick through the flooded streets of Houston. It was practically submerged, but it kept going. Which reminded me of my idea of making a boat out of a car. There are two problems with that idea:

1. Cars are heavy, which means they displace a lot of water, so if you are going any speed at all, you are constantly pushing this big, heavy weight up hill.
2. You have a lot of wetted surface, which is a big drag. Literally.

Which reminded me that Art Arfons built a jet boat to break some kind of speed record and he put wheels on it, because when you are traveling 150 MPH water is as hard as concrete. The rolling resistance of the wheel would be less than the resistance of a pontoon sliding along the water.

So this got me thinking about why they use jet engines for all the high speed land records instead of driving the wheels, and I realized that the drive train must be the weak link. All those shafts and bearings and gears whirling around with these tremendous loads and speeds, it is just too expensive. And then I had an idea!

How about we drive the wheel directly? And just how would we do that, you ask? We make the wheel a turbine, and we direct a high velocity stream of air at the fins to make the wheel spin. Mechanically the only connection between the wheel and the car would be the bearings, the same as in a jet propelled car. You mount a series of cups inside the rim of the wheel. These cups would also function as spokes. You would mount a nozzle so that is pointing forward at the top of the wheel and into the cup. The force of the gas entering the cup will try and turn the wheel forward. The cup will redirect the gas to the rear of the car, effectively doubling the useful work of the gas.

Now where do we get the high pressure gas? Now this is the genius part: we the use the exhaust from a conventional automobile engine. Normal engines exert all their power turning the flywheel. This engine will exert all it's power pushing the exhaust gas out the nozzle at a very high velocity. Turbocharged engines use a somewhat similar principle to spin the turbocharger, but that is small potatoes compared what we are trying to do. This will mean high pressure in the exhaust manifold, and may even cook the exhaust valves, but this is for the world speed record, and sacrifices will have to be made.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Cruise

I don't know what brought this to mind today. Maybe I overheard someone talking about cruises, or bad weather or something. Anyway it reminded me of this little adventure we had.

Several years ago my in-laws took my family on a cruise of the Caribbean during Christmas vacation. We flew to Orlando the week before to visit Disney World for a few days. The first night we got there they had a record low which killed all the poinsettias by the front gate. The next day the gardeners were out in force replacing them. It was supposed to be warm and we were not prepared for cold weather. I ended up buying a Mickey Mouse black knit hat. The one good thing about the cold weather is that there were no crowds.

The cruise took us to the Bahamas, St. Thomas and the Virgin Islands. The weather was a bit rough. The Captain told us it was the roughest cruise they had ever been on. Most of the passengers and a good part of the crew were seasick. Even I who hardly ever gets seasick was suffering from it. I took some Dramamine and it helped, but it made me very sleepy. My wife was absolutely miserable and spent most of her time on the upper deck by herself, wrapped in blankets. This was the pool deck where you see all those pictures of happy people playing in the pool. Not this time.

I spent quite a bit of time exploring the ship with my daughter. The inside of the ship was seven stories tall and my daughter has an aversion to elevators, so we would take the stairs. After climbing up and down several flights, I developed a technique for going up the stairs that made it much easier. The ship was pitching quite a bit, the bow would go up and then the bow would go down. Each cycle took several seconds. If you were on the forward stairs and you wanted to go up, you would stand and wait while the bow was going up, and then when the bow started going down, you would sprint up a half a dozen steps or so. It made it very easy to climb the stairs. The pitching ship did all the work.

On the way back to Florida we stopped at a "private island". There was a smallish boat standing by to ferry anyone wanted to visit the island. I watched it tossing on the waves and decided I did not need to visit the island at this time.

Sometime later I read that the same ship we had sailed on was now doing cruises to Alaska. While on a such a trip they had a rudder malfunction somewhere North of Vancouver B.C. Caused the ship to make a sharp turn and go in a circle. Lot of damage to the crystal in the gift shop, but that was about the extent of it.

Note regarding the picture: between the time I found this picture on the internet and when I finished posting this entry, the picture disappeared and was replaced by some business logo. I really like the angle of view and the sky in the background, so I was a little irritated that it got pulled. I also was surprised that blogger hadn't made a copy. A friend of mine had told me that somebody was archiving the internet, so I looked up the web site and after a couple of clicks I was able to locate the picture and save it off on my hard drive. So now the link from the picture points to the archived page instead of the current page.

Update April 2015: Replaced the picture again.

Pain In The Neck, Part 2

So I went back to the Naturopath and he worked on my neck again. This time he tells me he doesn't like the way my back looks and would really like an X-ray of it. Insurance won't pay for it if he prescribes it, so I make an appointment to see my regular doctor, who I haven't seen for several years. He is a DO (Doctor of Osteopathy) and runs a spine care clinic, so this might be a better bet. I don't actually get to see him, but I get to see one of his nurse practitioners. All they have to hear is that I am having trouble with my neck and they run me through a whole gamut of tests including half a dozen X-rays.

The X-ray machine is really noisy, it sounds like there are some ball bearings that are getting ready to fail. These things make me nervous. How do you know if they are emitting X-rays or not? You have to trust the technician and the machine. I would like it better if there was a little red light that came on when the high voltage was on, or something to tell you what's going on. Sitting there in front of this machine with bearings grinding away is just a little disconcerting. Maybe if the bearings were quieter it wouldn't bother me as much. I suppose it's the theatrics I've been conditioned to. In the movies, bad things are generally preceded by bad noises. Here I am all alone in a room with a possibly dangerous machine making bad noises. This sounds like the scene from a Science-Fiction/Horror movie. I can see the fake newspaper headlines now: "Man accidentally exposed to massive X-rays turns into drooling monster".

Examiner puts protractor/level on my head and has me tilt my head this way and that to measure my "range of motion". Not very good. Okay, that much I agree with. Nurse-Practitioner Karen comes in and crunches my back a couple of times, or least tries to. It's pretty tight. She shows me the X-rays. Spine looks good, neck vertebrae not so good. Prescribes six weeks of physical therapy.

So I was trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this problem, and I finally remembered the console we bought last Christmas to use as a TV stand for the brand new monster TV. It appears to be made out of wood, and looking at it you wouldn't think that it weighs more than 50 or 75 pounds. It doesn't, it weighs a whole heck of lot more. It was made in China and the Chinese must have been using furniture to get rid of their surplus depleted uranium because this little old console weighs over 200 pounds.

So I think back to last Christmas and remember loading and unloading this beast and thinking I must have pulled a muscle or something that is just now showing up. Talking to the physical therapist this morning, maybe not. More like 20 years of bad posture sitting in front of a computer has finally caught up with me. This bites big time. Just when I was really getting into using my computer for something I wanted to do, instead of just for work. Hopefully you can still teach an old dog new tricks and I will somehow learn to sit up straight. We shall see.

Physical therapist told me a couple other things I did not like hearing. Evidently I cannot spread my fingers very far, not good hands for a piano player. Well, I don't play the piano, but this may explain my unusual typing technique. My legs are little short for my torso. I always thought I was of average proportions. Well, my legs are average length (I wear trousers with a 32 inch inseam), but I am slightly above normal height at a fraction of an inch short of six feet. I don't care what he says, I am not a drooling/misshapen monster, everyone else is. I walk with my right foot splayed out about 30, maybe 45 degrees. He predicted that my shoes would wear unevenly, but this is not the case. Maybe my walk has been influenced by my stiff neck (everything is connected to everything else), so maybe my walk is normally fine.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Dental School

Talking to my physical therapist this morning. He has triplets that have just graduated from college. One of them is going on to dental school in San Francisco. Tuition is $100,000 a year. He doesn't have the money, so he has signed up with the Army. Once he graduates he will owe the Army three years of service. If he instead borrowed the money his repayment schedule would be $4,000 a month for ten years, or roughly $500,000, which means the bank would get roughly $100,000 in interest. That must be a special low interest loan. About 25% of students at this dental school have signed up with the military in order to get their dental training. One of the reasons dental school is so expensive is all the equipment they need. You might think that the manufacturers would be providing the equipment free, or at least discounted, but evidently that is not the case.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

DVD

My daughter put together a video for a class project. She and her co-conspirators wrote a script, put together the props, filmed the action, edited the results into a coherent story, and wrote it all to a single video file. Okay, now all we have to do is burn this file on a DVD and she should be ready to deliver this to school. Simple, eh?

No, it is not. You might think with the proliferation DVD burners, Windows would have built in support for this kind of thing, but you would be wrong. I got roped into this project about 10PM Sunday night and I spent the next three hours chasing my tail and burning disks, none of which met the criteria for delivery: we had to be able to put the disk in the DVD player connected to the TV and have the movie play.

I was able to create a DVD disk that would act like that on my wife's laptop, but it would not play in the SONY combination DVD / VHS player connected to the TV. I was also able to burn a CD that would play in the DVD player, but it would not play until you selected item #1 (the only item) and pressed the GO button.

Once you cross over into the realm of making DVD's it is like entering another world. Nothing is normal, everything is arcane jargon, no one is interested in what you want. I imagine it is something like being in the middle East. I did learn a couple of things. Burning DVD's is a slow process, and converting video files from one format to another is an even slower process. There do not seem to be any free software packages that support this operation either. I did download one program for a two week free trial. It seems to support all the necessary operations, but it has so many options I was just shooting in the dark when I burned a disk.

I think I got pretty close, after all I was able to play one in the laptop as though it was a movie disk, but it would not play in the SONY. Of course, this may have been due to the media (a ten disk package of DVD-R disks from Office Depot for $8) or to the burner I used in the laptop.

Eventually I got together with my son and we burned a CD using Imgburn that met the requirements. Much easier than burning a DVD. I probably could have done it myself if it hadn't been one o'clock in the morning.

I could have researched all this stuff on the internet and probably discovered just exactly what I needed to know to successfully perform this operation, but you know, I did not really want to know all this arcane flim-flammery. This is the kind of stuff I get paid to know, and right now my brain is full. Anything new I push into my brain pushes some old, hard won knowledge out. Of course, learning new stuff is good mental exercise. It keeps you flexible and prevents ossification. But gol durn it, you have to draw the limit somewhere, and I really don't want to know any more crap about computers. There are too many other things in life that are more interesting.

When I worked for Intel in Phoenix lo these many years ago, we kept a room full of microcomputers for testing. We probably had two or three dozen of them, and they were all different. There were Multi-Bus I & II, 8086, 80186, 80286, 386 and even some 486 CPU's, and there were probably two or three models of CPU board for each CPU chip. There were IDE and SCSI hard disks and controllers, tape drives, multi-channel serial controllers. One and two board ethernet controllers, etc. etc.

Some of these systems got used extensively, some rarely. What I found was that I could keep about three systems current (with all the latest updates) and operational. Any more than that and I wasn't getting any work done. It was a matter of how much useful information your brain can store and how many hours are in a day. Three systems may not seem like much, but that was my practical limit.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Glencoe Honors Night

The Ecolitan Operation

From "The Ecolitan Operation" by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., page 56:

Celia: "Every Imperial Special Operative falls within certain clearly defined parameters - male, with an optimum muscle, fat, and bone ratio that never varies by more than five percent; never less than one hundred eighty-one centimeters nor more than one hundred ninety-five centimeters; primarily Caucasian genetic background; strong technical education and mechanical skills; generally between twenty-eight and forty-five standard years; and always with surface carriage index of between seven and eight."
Jimjoy: "I understood everything until you got to the last item."

Me too. I take the term "surface carriage" to be the way a person carries themselves. The way people walk is quite distinctive. I have been at cross country meets where I could identify a runner by the way they moved even though they were too far away to be able to see distinctly. "Surface carriage index" I take to be pure science fiction. I have never heard of anyone trying to classify the way people walk, much less trying to correlate that with any personality traits. Last night I got to observe a great deal of "surface carriage", but since I only knew a few of the participants I wasn't able to draw any great conclusions. Besides, I did not hear the term "surface carriage index" until today.

Last night Glencoe High School had their awards ceremony for their graduating seniors. Quite the show/ordeal. Three hours of speakers and presentations. At least the scholarships awards were more substantial.

I went to this same show two years ago when my eldest son graduated. Same sort of deal, but I remember there being lots of feeble old duffers getting up and giving ten minute bumbling speeches in order to award a measly $100 scholarship. This year the speeches were shorter and the awards were more substantial. $200 was the smallest. There were several for $500 and $1000 and at least one for $2500.

Marine Corps Emblem

The military was present in the form of a marine who gave, I believe, two scholarships for $500 each. This is in contrast to the last Science Fair award ceremony I attended, where all four arms of the military each gave several big awards.

Anyway this show was a mix of two parts: scholarship awards and academic achievement awards. I think half the student body was there, at least 200 students. Each one had their name and their honors read as they walked across the entire width of the stage. Of course the person who got picked to read all these names and awards sounded like he was coming down with something. After this event I would not be surprised if he was hoarse for a week.

Watching the way the students carried themselves ("surface carriage"?) as they walked across the stage was interesting. There were marchers, and shufflers, and those who scooted along on tip-toe (girls, mostly). There were those whose nervousness showed, and those who managed to conceal it well. Several of the teachers handing out rewards received hugs from their students. The principal received the most. Some teachers shook hands with the students, some gave them a pat on the arm, some just handed them their award.

Farmers Insurance Logo

OSAA Logo

Farmers Insurance got a lot of publicity. There were two awards from OSAA (Oregon State Athletic Association) that were evidently sponsored by the insurance company, so every time one of these awards was handed out, the announcer dutifully read the name of the insurance company. I think about half of the students got at least one of these awards.

They gave out the awards in order of the number of honors earned. There were probably ten or so different awards. They started with those students who had earned one award, which was the largest group by far, and then went on to those who won two, and then three and so on. MY DAUGHTER WON FIVE. The last group were those students who had qualified for eight awards. There were only four people in this group and they were all girls. Easy to tell, girls gowns were dark red, boys were black.

The student body president got a special mention from Principal Carol Loughner. He is basically a good kid, though he does wear his hair long, down to his shoulders. I think he probably has the longest hair of any of the boys at Glencoe. But he has the respect of his peers. The Principal gave an example. They had an assembly of the entire school the other day in the gymnasium, over one thousand students. Austin asked them to be quiet, quiet enough that they could hear a pin drop, and they did it. I can hardly imagine such a thing, but according to the principal it really happened.

Update November 2016 replaced missing pictures.

The Blue Hammer

by Ross MacDonald. I finished this book yesterday. There were a couple of memorable lines which I neglected to mark, but which went something like this: The members of some families should all live in different states and write letters to each other once a year. The members of some families should all live in different states and write letters to each other once a year and then tear them up.

I thought, yes, that is very true. I wonder if it applies to my family. I live with my wife and kids. The only other relatives who live in the area are my cousin and his family. My brothers, Aunts, Uncles and other cousins are scattered all over the 50 states, well, not Hawaii. I wonder why that is. Are we more disagreeable, or just more independent? Some families all stay in the same place. Why is that? Comfort? Family ties? Having a reliable sparring partner?








Update May 2012: Rereading this book and I come across the same passage, which I once again failed to mark. Looked it up on Google Books, which found it on page 187. Reading it there gave me enough context to find it in my paperback copy on page 194.

Update November 2015. Replaced missing picture.