Engine

I turn Fridge Compressor into 4 stroke Engine
Lets Learn Something

This is a gear head fantasy - let's make an engine out of a bunch of junk! Compare and contrast this project with The Silicon Greybeard's engine building project. We have two techniques as different as can be, but still working toward the same goal. 

This guy doesn't use any machine tools, a drill press and an angle grinder are his tools of choice. The TIG welder is biggest gun in his arsenal. When he gets to setting up the ignition system, and he starts pulling out what look like new parts, it's almost like he's cheating. But all those electrical parts cost like next to nothing compared to anything made out of metal. They only become expensive when you happen to need the exact one necessary for your 2019 Super Whizbang, and that's only to pay for the warehouse full of parts and the clerk that are sitting there waiting for you to need what they have.

This video has been out less than a week and it already has over two million views. Looking through my YouTube history, the only ones that have those kind of numbers are music videos.

Me, Rambling

Blackboard full of mystical squiggles

The longer I am around, the more I tend to think that mathematical ability is inherited. Not to say that someone whose parents are both of a non-mathematical bent, could not have the ability. Genes combine in new ways and who is to say whether any particular combination could result in a brain with an attachment to math.

So I hear people complaining about math: 'I don't use it', 'it's too hard', 'boring', and I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't force everyone to take math classes. Save us all a lot of grief. But then I got to thinking that by forcing everyone to attend these classes, they are at least being exposed to the terminology, so when someone uses a mathematical term like 'addition', they'll at least know that it's a math term and should be suitably cowed. Assuming they were suitably devastated when they failed that level of mathematical education.

A more lenient version would be that they would simply recognize the math term and allow better communication.

Queen Mary Bridge - Thomas Woolworth

Our world runs on math, but the controllers run on emotion. We have built, at great expense, a giant ocean liner. It's as big as a continent and holds the entire country, and we are cruising at tremendous speed, straight ahead through time. Through the magic of engineering and government contracting, we have a nice gold plated dial to control the direction of the ship. Turn the knob to the left and the ship veers left. Turn the knob to the right and the ship turns right. Easy-peasy.

But which way should we turn the knob? Or should we turn it at all? Or has it been turned so far that we are going backwards? (That's entirely speculation, I don't think it has, but there are any number of conspiracy theories that would support that notion.)

Naturally, everyone has an opinion about which way to turn the knob,  and those who care the most about it are pushing their way to the front so they can put their hand on the knob. 

Whoever actually gets to turn the knob has to be careful that he doesn't turn it too far. Remember, he is in the center of a crowd of people, all hollering at him to turn the knob! If he turns the knob too far in either direction, he is going to piss off a group of people somewhere in the crowd, and they are going to start pushing a lot harder, forcing their way closer to the center, and the guy in the center is going to feel it.

Here it is, two days after the election and we still don't know who won. I think RobertaX says they have nine days to count the ballots. This all seems very weird to me. Seems like when I was a kid, the results of the election were known that night. Of course, it might have been that in all those elections the winner was clear.

So maybe these hotly contested elections are a result of more people pushing in toward the center of control. There must be some reward for getting closer to the center. It could be financial, or it could be moral: you are doing the right thing, those other clowns are immoral goat fuckers. Nothing drives people like anger. Demonizing your opponents enables you to hate them, which will invigorate you and give you the energy you need to push for what you want.

I've been kind of hoping that Trump would win, not that I especially like Trump, it's just there are some Democrat actions that strike me as irresponsible. I suppose what bothers me most is the way some blue states have run up huge debts and are on the hook for huge pensions. Now that I've said that, I'm sure someone is going to point out some red states that have similar, or equally egregious, examples of irresponsible financial shenanigans.

Trump. Boy howdy. I don't know if there is anything to like about him, I've never listened to him. I've seen a few of his tweets, mostly ones that were quoted by someone else. They might be cute little phrases, but they aren't going to really tell you anything of substance. What I do like about him is that a large number of people detest him. Anybody who can make that many people hate him must be doing something right.

You know, Trump might have done some things right. There is the recent peace agreement in the mideast. Whether it will last is debatable. There have been numerous peace agreements there before but they never seem to hold. There may be some other stuff, I haven't noticed.

What I have noticed is COVID-19 lockdown and multi-trillion dollar emergency relief package that the congress passed in reaction to the lockdown. The nationwide lockdown is complete bullshit. Near as I can tell it comes from Dr. Fauci (did I spell that right?) and he reports to Trump. The relief package was aimed at people who should have had enough money in the bank to weather the storm, but did absolutely nothing for the lower class who got slammed into the ground by the lockdown.

Liquid Manure

The powers that be don't give a shit about the lower class. They make lots of mewling little noises about how this program or that is supposed to help poor people, but they are more likely to just throw them under the bus. But maybe that's the nature of politics, you are in a war against your mortal enemies and in a war, you can't always protect everybody from everything. Sometime sacrifices have to be made. I understand that, but do they have to lie all the damn time? It's the unending stream of liquid manure coming down the wire that disgusts me.

Regard

USS Constitution Gun Deck

I'm reading the Ionian mission by Patrick O'Brien and on page 177 Killick (the captain's steward) and the ship's carpenter come into Jack's cabin because they're clearing for action (i.e. packing up all of Jack's stuff and carrying it down three or four flights of stairs and storing it in the hold, and then knocking down Jack's apartment walls to make room for the gun crews to serve the pair of six thousand pound cannons that share his apartment with him).

'Just let me down this cup, Mr. Watson,' said Jack, drinking the last of his ill tasting coffee, 'and the place is yours. You will take particular care of the Doctor's - the Doctor's object will you not?' he added, pointing at Stephen's dressing-case, now doing duty as a music stand.

'Never you fret, sir,' said the carpenter, pointing at the joiner in much the same manner. 'Pond here has made a special case for it, lined with junk.'

'It is not an article that should ever have gone to sea,' said the aged joiner in a discontented voice. 'Still less into action.'

Stephen, being who he is, is probably totally unaware of the amount of trouble the captain and crew go through on his behalf. That they do all this without complaint and without even mentioning it tells you how highly regarded he is. 

P.S. 'Clearing for action' is like an everyday affair aboard Jack's ship. Repeating the same procedure over and over again is no doubt tedious, but practice makes perfect, and if you ever need to do it in a crunch, which is generally the only time it really needs to be done, it's best to have the procedure down pat. Crunch time is not the time to be figuring out where to store the commander's favorite bowl.

SpaceX Raptor Engines

SpaceX Raptor Rocket Engines
Engine for atmospheric operation on the left
Engine for vacuum operation on the right

This picture shows how much bigger the nozzle on the vacuum engine is. The mechanical bits at the top are very similar, if not identical.


How SpaceX's New Raptor Vacuum Engine Is Different From Previous Raptors (and Other Stuff)
Scott Manley

In this video Scott Manley gives a pretty good explanation of the issues involved in designing rocket engine nozzles for different conditions.

Plywood

 

De Havilland DH 83 Fox Moth

The DH.83 Fox Moth was a successful small biplane passenger aircraft from the 1930s . . . Many components including the engine, tailplane, fin, rudder and wings were identical to those being used for the de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth then being built in large quantities as a military trainer. These were fitted to the purpose-built wooden, plywood-covered fuselage . . . - Wikipedia

An airplane made of plywood, haven't run across one of those lately. When was plywood invented? Wikipedia knows, or at least has an opinion:

The ancient Egyptians and Greeks cut wood thinly and glued it together in layers with the grain in perpendicular directions, making a versatile building material. In 1797 Samuel Bentham applied for patents covering several machines to produce veneers. In his patent applications, he described the concept of laminating several layers of veneer with glue to form a thicker piece – the first description of what we now call plywood. Bentham was a British naval engineer with many shipbuilding inventions to his credit. Veneers at the time of Bentham were flat sawn, rift sawn or quarter sawn; i.e. cut along or across the log manually in different angles to the grain and thus limited in width and length.

About fifty years later Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel, realized that several thinner layers of wood bonded together would be stronger than a single thick layer of wood. Understanding the industrial potential of laminated wood, he invented the rotary lathe.

There is little record of the early implementation of the rotary lathe and the subsequent commercialization of plywood as we know it today, but in its 1870 edition, the French dictionary Robert describes the process of rotary lathe veneer manufacturing in its entry Déroulage. One can thus presume that rotary lathe plywood manufacturer was an established process in France in the 1860s. Plywood was introduced into the United States in 1865 and industrial production started shortly after. In 1928, the first standard-sized 4 ft by 8 ft plywood sheets were introduced in the United States for use as a general building material.

Artists use plywood as a support for easel paintings to replace traditional canvas or cardboard. Ready-made artist boards for oil painting in three-layered plywood (3-ply) were produced and sold in New York as early as 1880.

 The idea has been around for a very long time, but it took the invention of the rotary lathe to make it commonplace.

Garden Party

Garden Party | Oscar Nominated CG Animation | Short of the Week
Short of the Week
Shades of Tony Montana. The animation is very realistic, almost perfect, but there are a couple of  instances where the frogs exhibit some human behavior. It's not much, it's just a subtle motion of the head or body, but it rings false, which is all I needed to convince me that it was an animation, not some the work of a crazed naturalist camped out in a former drug lord's oasis of death.

Okay, that's one take on it, but you say 'Garden Party' and I remember Ricky Nelson's song:

Garden Party by Ricky Nelson 1972 Official | Stone Canyon Band | Original Lyrics in Description
Our Nostalgic Memories

It wasn't a big hit, and it didn't really connect with me, you know, not like a Beatles or a Led Zeppelin hit did, but the lyrics were kind of interesting and eventually, like a thousand years later, I looked it up and found out about what happened. When this song came out (1972) the culture war between the straights and the hippies was going strong. The Vietnam war and the associated protests were in full song. And I was kind of on the side of the hippies.

You go to school and you study all this stuff and you learn all these things, and what's your reward? You get to go to more school and learn more things. Or you can go to war and get yourself kilt dead, or worse. What the fuck kind of deal is that? Where's the new Chevy convertible? Where's the job that pays $5 an hour? (If you were making $5 an hour back then you could certainly afford a car, maybe not a new one, but a decent car could be had for a few hundred dollars. Yeah, Madison Avenue was painting a rosy picture, but you're eighteen and you step out of the house and you find it's a long way to the ground. No wonder people were pissed off and protesting.

There was something wrong with the straight world. I didn't know just what was wrong, but I knew it was stupid. They had all these rules and bullshit, and a lot of stupid, useless classes (anything that involved reading and writing). Math, the only subject that counted, was super easy. Entertaining even. (I think it might be genetic. None of my kids seems to have it, at least not to the extent that I do.)

But given that most people seem to have difficulty with math, I don't think we can say that freakish genetic mathematical ability was pervasive enough to lead to zillions of people protesting. I think there were other things wrong with the straight world, and other people, ordinary people, saw there was something wrong as well.

Fifty years later, I am thoroughly embedded in the straight world. And there are still things wrong. I think my biggest problem was I thought everyone else in the world was stupid. That's probably a common affliction amongst 19 year olds. I would have benefited from some real life lessons that I suspect I was protected from simply by my place in society. No soldiers in the streets, no bombs going off down the block, no bums on the sidewalk.

There's still something I am not connecting here. Or maybe it's because it's all so far away that it's all a little jumbled.

Update July 2022 replaced missing Ricky Nelson video.

Evolution of Elon's Starship

Starship 101: All You NEED To Know About SpaceX's Vessel
smallstars

This video gives us a brief history of the evolution of SpaceX's Starship. I had kind of forgotten how long they have been working on this, and how far they have come. I suppose that comes from being nearly overwhelmed by what's going on right now.

When will SpaceX's Starship SN8 fly?
What about it!?

This one has some aerial shots of the SpaceX operation Boca Chica. It's a much bigger layout than I thought. The spy videos of activity there don't really show how extensive it is. It's kind of weird that we aren't getting much in the way of reports from inside the fence. I suppose there is enough enthusiasm for this project on the outside that SpaceX doesn't really need a video production team running around on the inside. Besides, producing videos could interfere with actually getting things done, and we can't have that. I mean that's one of the reasons everything NASA does costs so much - they have to show everything they do as a Walt Disney show for the kiddies.

These videos aren't quite perfect, but they are pretty darn good, and the information content certainly outweighs the minor stumbles.