How high is the sky?

On a nice day, people like to go outside and look at the green plants, the brightly colored birds and the blue sky. One of things you hear prisoners complain about is not being able to see the sky. Space travel is a lot like living in prison. Close quarters, no going outside and no blue sky. You might have windows, but windows are a radiation hazard. You would be better off with video. You could sustain yourself for a while with the idea that you were on a big adventure, but I imagine even that would get old after a couple of years. So I got to wondering, what if you made a really big space ship? Once you are in orbit there is no structural requirement to support your mass because gravity has gone bye-bye, so you could easily build enormous structures. My question is, could you build a structure, a sphere for instance, that was so big you couldn't tell if there was a roof? Could you build a smaller room that gave the illusion of having no limit? Remember The Truman Show?

Cuba

Cuba from Paul Clements on Vimeo.
Soundtrack : 'First Dream Called Ocean' by Helios.
Update April 2017 replaced missing video.

Driving

Just the coolest looking car in the world.

Drive home the other day, coincidentally during rush hour. The on ramp to 217 Northbound from Lake Oswego was backed up to beat the band, so I thought fine, I'll just take the side streets. It won't be any quicker, it will take just as long or longer than creeping along at 5 MPH for infinity, but at least it will be different. And there were a couple of occasions where I was actually able to go fast enough to catch a bit of a breeze. It was warm, and I was one with the heat. I got to stop and sit at many traffic lights, and I started turning off the engine when that happened. I am not sure why. I doubt it saves more than a nickel's worth of gasoline, and it puts extra wear and tear on the starter, so I can't justify it from an economy standpoint. But when the engine shut off I immediately felt calmer. Weird.
     Taking the Sunset Highway to Hillsboro it's generally pretty smooth sailing, at least if it's not rush hour. After you pass 185th Avenue the road narrows from three lanes to two, and things start to get a little more clogged up. I don't think it's just the narrower road, I think it's a cultural thing. People who live in town, in Beaverton anyway, are go-getters, they don't have as far to drive and are not so concerned about mileage. People who live farther out are more economy minded and so restrict their speed to 55 in hopes of getting that magical number of miles per gallon they so fervently crave. Or at least a larger percentage of them do. Anyway it's really weird. The farther out you go, the slower the traffic goes. I am afraid that if I tried to drive to the beach, by the time I got to the pass over the coast range traffic will have come to a stop.
    The reason kids have more wrecks is because they are playing the odds as they see them. Kids have been down the road a hundred times, and nothing happened, so they think nothing is ever going to happen, so they press their luck. People who have been down the road a thousand times are more likely to have seen something happen that could have caused them trouble. It didn't kill them, so they are more cautious. The more you drive, the more potentially troublesome events you have witnessed. If they don't kill you, they should make you more cautious.

Update August 2015. I think the catalytic convertor was on the way out. It was causing some unpleasant rumbling in the exhaust system, which is why shutting the engine off made me feel calmer.

BATF Laboratory Hosts The Media

25 Photos from inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives labs.
Most of the photos have captions. Go to the online album to read them and to see larger versions of these images.

Best of Military Photos dot net 2013 June

53 Photos of Ships, Amphibious Assault Craft, Armor, Protests, Work, Ceremonies & Aircraft
Most of the photos have captions. Go to the online album to read them and to see larger versions of these images.

Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon

This is the cover to an audio edition, but I like it better than the one that actually got used on my copy. This is the last of Ms. Moon's tough-space-chick novels. After this she got into fantasy. I don't like fantasy, I like science. I want particle beam weapons and spaceships that can travel faster than light. It's all fantasy of course, you just get to believe in different imaginary stuff. I will probably start reading her fantasy at some point because I really like her writing.
    Her stories all seem to be about personal interactions, how people react to situations. The villains and heroes are painted in bright primary colors, there is no mistaking who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
    One thing she glosses over is the gravity well problem. There are shuttles that carry people from a planet's surface to orbit, but they may as well be magic as there is no explanation of how they work. Of course, there is no explanation of how the faster-than-light travel works either, or the artificial gravity, so you just have to believe they have it under control.
    The gravity well problem is the first major problem in space travel. The second one is how to survive in space for a long period of time. Once you have mastered the survival part, and gotten into orbit, you really don't need to go back down to a planet's surface. You also wouldn't want to go back down because getting back into orbit is such an energy expensive undertaking.

What Watt? Watson-Watt!

Atmospheric Dynamics Group (ADG) Medium Frequency (MF) Radar, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Up on Andøya Island in Northern Norway, near the Andøya Rocket Range, is a MF (Medium Frequency) Radar installation, the largest in Europe. MF Radar seems to be mostly used for atmospheric research and/or weather prediction. I'm always interested in big government projects, so I spent some time looking for pictures of such a device, but I didn't find much. Basically you have a series of tall, thin, antennae towers. You can see shadows on satellite images, but that's about it. So now I'm reading up on radar and I find that Sir Robert Watson-Watt developed the first pulsed radar system in Great Britain in 1935. Watson-Watt? Would that be Watt, son of Watt? Yes it would:

Born in Brechin, Angus, Scotland,on the 13 April 1892 Watson-Watt (the hyphenated name is used herein for consistency, although this was not adopted until he was knighted in 1942) was a descendant of James Watt, the famous engineer and inventor of the practical steam engine.

Knighted for his work on radar.