The Moat Pit - Culross Scotland

I was reading a story on Unherd about the resurrection of Culross, Scotland, an old coal mining town and it mentioned this mine. Coal must have been a valuable commodity back then, much like oil is now.

The Moat Pit

Scottish Mining Museum:

Most of Scotland's coal in the sixteenth century was mined close to the Firth of Forth and transported by sea. Shipping the coal from the Moat pit at Culross, Fife, was easy because one of its shafts emerged on an artificial island on the foreshore. Boats could come alongside to load directly from it.

This remarkable innovation was developed by Sir George Bruce of Carnock in 1590. Sea water, which leaked constantly into the pit, was drained by a horse-driven chain of buckets and emptied back into the sea. The pit was flooded in a violent storm in 1625 and abandoned.

Remains of the Moat Pit

Map showing location of Moat Pit

The pit isn't really visible on Google Maps. It looks like there are a bunch of rocks just under the water. hard to say just where it is.

Ford F-150 Lightning

TEARING APART my new Ford Lightning electric truck made my mechanic WANT TO RETIRE?!?!
Hoovies Garage
Electric cars are conceptually very simple - a battery, a dial to controller the voltage and a motor to drive the wheels. In actuality they are very complicated. Now most of the complicated bits don't have any moving parts so there won't be any mechanical wear, but even the best electronic components sometimes fail for no apparent reason. Ford or some tool vendor probably has a tool to diagnose any problem, should one arise. The solution will undoubtedly be to replace the defective component, and it will very likely be a very expensive component.

Then there is the cooling system that seems to to be connected to everything. As long as it doesn't spring any leaks, and it shouldn't, you should be fine.

All this reminds me of the story about the guy who bought a used electric car for around $10K, drove it for a year or two and then the battery died. Replacing the battery was going to run $14K, if you could find one, but as far as the dealer was concerned, they were obsolete and no longer available.

If you are just driving around town, and you can plug your car in every night to charge, I can see that an electric car could make your life a little easier. But I am afraid they are going to be like all the other modern electronic gadgets - disposable. Use it until it breaks, but when it breaks it's not going to worth fixing it. Just throw it away and buy a new one.

The biggest problem with electric cars is the same problem we have with bicyclists and vegans - people who believe in them won't quit telling you how great they are.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Robot boss supervising a lazy and incompetent human worker - Kriztian Bocsi (Bloomberg)

Flares into Darkness  has a post up about  The glorious future of labor relations

My title from here.

V-Band

Atmospheric Absorption of Millimeter Waves

Silicon Greybeard is talking about a satellite built for Boeing to test some V-Band communications gear. V-Band is very high frequency. At 60 Ghz it is much higher than the other frequency bands used for satellite communications.

The chart above illustrates how much a radio signal is reduced when it passes through the atmosphere. Note the peak right around 60 GHz, which is where the V-Band is. This makes it look communicating with a satellite using V-Band signals is going to a little difficult. So why would they choose to use such a frequency? As the Silicon Greybeard says, maybe they are not trying to communicate with ground based stations. Well, that's dumb. What else is there? Umm, other satellites, other spacecraft and best of all, UFO's.

Microwave Frequency Bands

RF's original chart used millimeters (mm) for some wavelengths and centimeters (cm) for some others. I changed it to use all millimeters.

Microwave Frequency Bands

The bump in the red line is because the F band overlaps the upper part of the W band.

Gweduck Flying Boat

Gweduck Flying Boat

Very cool. 

The Ellison-Mahon Gweduck is a modern, twin engine amphibious aircraft, built from composites and closely resembling the Grumman Widgeon. It was designed and is built in the United States and was first flown in 2009. - Wikipedia

It's a kitplane. The kits are produced by Composite Creations of Prineville.

The name comes from a large grotesque clam that inhabits the Pacific Coast of North America.

Via Business Tribune.

Employment

The local car wash is offering $20 per hour for help. The local pizza joint is offering $25 per hour for a full time position. Fifty years ago when I got out of high school entry level jobs were paying $2 an hour, gasoline was 25 cents per gallon, and a studio apartment could be had for $80 a month. So wages have gone up by a factor of ten, but fuel and rent have gone up by a factor of 20. If wages were to keep up with rent, then entry level jobs would need to be paying $50 an hour, which would amount to $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) a year. $2 an hour 50 years ago wasn't enough to enable you to pay for a car. Basically, if you want to live like a white man, you need to pulling down upwards of $100 an hour. Professionals like doctors and lawyers cost upwards of $200 an hour. 

What are things going to be like next year? Are prices going to double? That's what I'm thinking.

Magic Mirror

I've got an idea. It is very difficult to get a good view of the back of your head. You can use two mirrors, but you are not going to get a straight in view, it's going to be at a bit of an angle. And trying to adjust the mirror so you can see what you want, gahh! What a pain.

We have all these wonderful flat panel displays and digital cameras. Maybe hook a camera to a directly to a display, then you can move the camera around and look at whatever you want, and you don't have to move, you can just sit still and look at the display. This can be easily done with a computer and a smartphone. You might want someone else to hold the camera. Trying to point the camera at the back of your head is going to be a little difficult.

The big question is the view on the display going to be as good as what you get from a mirror? I think it will. I also think there will people who will disagree. That's the way of the world.

I think you could make this into a product. Maybe start with a couple of beta units in a fancy salon, work out the kinks. I'm thinking that mounting the camera on arm so a person didn't have to hold it would be a good idea. Problem is you've got this arm swinging around a client's head, or even your own head. I think you might want some good sensors and spacial awareness software to figure out where all the players were in this environment along with some quick acting motors to move the arm out of the way in case someone decides it's time to party, or go to war. Don't want anyone to collide with the camera before they get out the door.

On the other hand, maybe you make the camera stationary and rotate the client in front of it. The display would be attached to the client's chair so that whichever way he was pointing, the display would be right in front of him/her/it.

Shoot, this might already exist. I haven't checked.