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Assassin Potters.
My Wife is taking a pottery class. She came home with the set of tools she needs to make pots and things. One of the items is a Garrotte.
It is is thin wire strung between two small dowel handles. It is identical to what I saw in a Commando display at a museum. Was there a desperate fight in a pottery studio and the commando grabbed what came to hand or was there a trained assassin taking a day off for meditative clay manipulation? Hey this can be used with pots they think.
Sentries searching a potter's sack could find this lethal tool; "Whats this for?"
"It's just for cutting my pots off of the wheel." So innocent and not threatening. Then the sentry turns his back and.....
Which cam first the potters or the assassins?
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More on the Key Bridge Collapse.
I saw a few streams and the comments are interesting. Engineering professors saying there was nothing wrong with the bridge. Other experts saying there is no bridge that could survive such an impact. It is not a fault in the bridge.
But actually it is.
If abutments are vulnerable they can be and often are surrounded by protective barriers. Sometimes heavy piles sometimes full artificial islands.
Here is a photo.
Look to the left side with that very tall slender pole. That is a high tension power line support. And look around the base. That is protection from ships. They worried more about the power lines than the bridge.
A ship collision is an obvious possible failure. It should have been considered. If it was considered and bean counters decided to not spend the money on protection then it gets political. The Engineers should have known better.
Oh and to be clear I am an engineer and have worked on bridges.
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Another Bridge goes down.
Getty images off the BBC.
This is in Baltimore Maryland, USA. March 26 2023. It would have been much worse if it happened in daytime, it was in the wee hours after midnight. Worse with respect to human casualties, but still very bad economically. The collapse cuts off a major container port from the sea.
This bridge opened in 1977. It is a large complex truss bridge. I graduated engineering in 1977. Up till then certainly truss bridges were popular. They are efficient and economical to build and use material wisely. Minimal first cost which is perfect for government work.
BUT!
As is the case in all such failures, trusses will totally fail if ONE place is overstressed. It is called single point failure. It has a name as engineers have realized it is a problem. New bridges are designed to be redundant. If any single part fails the load has another place to go. You do not see big truss bridges being built anymore.
There is video and it is disturbing. Not that you see bodies falling or anything. You see a big ship just touching the bridge support and the whole thing falls in a few seconds. Aside from the truss thing it is apparent the support pier was weak and badly designed. It should have either been protected or made much tougher. Ships hit things.
It is suspected that there was a power failure on the ship and control was lost. The details about the ship are actually immaterial. It was a flaw in the bridge waiting to show itself.
civil.jhd.edu
It was a handsome bridge intact. I believe it was the triangular support on the right that got hit. Since ships are big, clearance needs to be high so this kind of bridge is fairly common over harbors. Ships pass under them thousands of times every year.
It will take a few weeks to fully clear the wreckage and if they replace the bridge it will take 10 ish years as they cannot just put up another one like it. Likely a really tough cable stayed bridge. One with heavily armored support piers to protect them from the next ship.
Oh and lawyers will make a lot of money.
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Brian Mulroney.
He died and everyone is praising his time as Prime Minister of Canada. With all the nice things people are saying I just have to balance that a bit.
Full disclosure I voted for him to get in and later to get rid of him. He had both the greatest majority and later caused the almost total destruction of his party.
He also almost destroyed the country by exacerbating Quebec and Western Canadian separatism. He is responsible for a lot of damage.
I knew a person who was a player in the federal Conservative Party who met and got to know Mr. Mulroney. He described his formula for power to my acquaintance was to give Quebec whatever it wanted no matter how unreasonable. (Direct Quote) His constitutional "accords" were attempts to put that into the basic law of the land. It was that which doomed both to failure when English Canada understood the imbalance. That lead to Western Separatism and eventually the "Reform Party". Failure to deliver was what prompted the Bloc Québecois to rise and pull the other way.
But the thing that really pissed me off is he took money for contracts. The bugger was already wealthy he did not need the money. He swore he never met Mr K. Schreiber who provided cash in brown paper bags directy to Mr Mulroney in exchange for Air Canada buying Airbus Planes, and for the military to buy MBB helicopters companies he represented. Even if the money went to fund the Conservative Party it stunk and that is what did him in.
When it started to come out he sued the RCMP and Government prosecutors for libel who timidly settled, but the facts got out.
He was a dirty bribe taking liar. Oh but a good husband and father and respected by everyone except those with a memory.
With all the warm breezes blowing over his reputation I had to put this down in black and white.
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Conspiracy and needs.
TV and movies go on and one about spies and assassins. Conspiracy fans think there are roving teams of killers doing the will of mysterious cabals etc.
The real world disagrees.
In Russia Putin has sent people to kill opponents. They tried to kill Navally several times and missed. they tried to kill that ex-spy in the UK and missed. Both times with poison. More success with blowing up airplanes and throwing people out high windows by accident.
That seems to be it. But the botched jobs do not speak to highly capable operatives. More like clumsy thugs.
Yet if there were such elite star chamber operations there are a few people that would benefit the world with a bullet to the head. Top of the list is Putin himself. He is ruining one country trying to ruin another. He lives in fear so stays well away from threats. those meeting tables are epicly large. It is most likely he will be ended violently. The sooner the better.
Next on the list would be D Trump. He has single handedly made fascism fashionable again. Adolf Hitlers speeches on his bedside table for many years. He also lives in fear and apparently lives off of fast food bought from random outlets to avoid poison. Heart disease is ok though. Ironically he has his lawyers argue in court that a president has a right to order the death of their political opponents. Obviously he has plans. So he thinks the present POTUS can order his death legally? Such a moron. Doesn't he know who commands his protection detail?
As no shots have been fired is that not evidence of absence?
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More trouble in Electricarification land.
A recent news item was for a new electric car that had a small dent. The dent was in the underside probably from running over something on the road. A stick, or maybe a rock, but nothing crazy.
The repair was $60,000 or way more than the car cost new. Why?
The dent was on a cover over the battery pack. If a battery pack is damaged it can fail spectacularly. Flames and explosions type of spectacular. So this not unusual event totaled the car. It is now junk.
The problem is you cannot fix or replace electric car batteries. They wear out, and should be replaceable, but no you cant. Most are buried deep inside the bottom of the car and to get to them you need to disassemble the car down to the frame. Some "converted" cars can get at them from below like the short lived Fiat 500e. Cars designed for electric power like to hide the batteries deep inside.
There is a safety aspect in that batteries need protection from impact as a serious crash can make them explode. They are much worse than a leaking tank of gasoline. Wrapping a protecting frame and armor plates around them makes it hard to access them if you need to.
These batteries have a short life. My evil (small) gas powered car is 8 years old. If it were electric the battery would likely need to be replaced now as it would have less than half the original capacity. Since you can't replace one the car would be trash. It is a good business model you have to buy a new car every 5 to 8 years or even more often. Lucky for me I can drive it for years to come as long as there is fuel which there will be for the foreseeable future.
No manufacturer has any recycling or refurbishing programs for electric car main batteries.
There is an obvious solution. Standardize battery packs into simple modules that bolt in from below. When they age out replace them with fresh and send the old ones for refurbishment.
So governments should not just say build electric cars. They should require manufacturers to:
Establish standard modular battery packs for all cars. There can be many types, but all must fit one of several agreed upon standard module specifications.
The battery packs shall be removable from below with common shop tools in a reasonable time.
The manufacturer shall only use batteries that can be refurbished and recycled.
Refurbished battery packs shall perform as good as new ones so an older electric car can stay on the road long enough to pay off the environmental impact from making it.
Add that to the list of things they didn't think about like the fact there is not enough electric generating capacity to fuel a full fleet of electric cars. Care to buy a Nuclear power plant or ten?
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Another Pretendian.
Buffie Sainte-Marie is not a first nations or even just mixed race person anymore. She has no ties to Canada having for years claimed to be from somewhere in Saskatchewan. They found her birth certificate in Massachusetts. She has sisters and brothers who for years got threatening letters form lawyers to keep quiet. Nice person eh?
She is of Italian ancestry on both sides.
She got her start as a folk singer in New York City during the early hippie days. It suited her brand to claim to be first a Mikmaq Indian from eastern Canada, then an Algonquin from central Canada, finally a Cree from Western Canada. Back in the post war era there were many first nations children "freed from poverty" by forcibly adopting them into white families. True dat, but since there was so much smoke and confusion almost impossible to trace.
And living in New England, Canada is a distant place of mystery. It is where the snow storms come from.
Eventually somebody mentioned on a tour or something that she may have come from Piapot Saskatchewan as a girl was taken from there years ago. She visited and was truly adopted by a Piapot Cree family. That part is true and her only legitimate claim. My Mother was from Piapot Saskatchewan, but of Scottish and Irish ancestry by way of Nova Scotia. My mom had a better claim than ol' Buffy there as at least she was from the right area.
I actually wonder how being born in the USA she managed to get so many honors in Canada as if she were a citizen.
Part of me can sympathize it may have been an almost innocent claim at first, like saying you are descended from royalty or something as a stage name or persona. But as she grew more prominent the story got more important. It eventually defined her. She is not that great a singer or a songwriter. But telling the story of "her people" got her an audience.
I wondered with all the mixing and the centuries if I had a bit of first nations blood in me from the Maritime Provinces. Apparently it only takes a distant great-great-grandparent to get legitimized. But 23 and me shows no I don't. I am as white and European as anyone could be going back a few thousand years. Back then there were no races or countries for that matter. So maybe people who want to make such claims should spit in a tube and see what they get.
It would bring some clarity to the issue.
Another one bites the dust.
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Nazis and other stuff.
In Canada there is a major kerfuffle about the speaker of the parliament doing an honor to a 98 year old Ukrainian man who fought Russians in WW2 and was a hero. The speaker resigned and apologized.
His mistake was pretty serious. I mean who was fighting Russians in WW2? It was the Nazi Germans. As an educated man the speaker should have tweaked to that. This guy was fighting on the side of Nazis.
There are several back stories here and I think they are important. The president of Ukraine was in town and made a speech in Parliament. That is why and when the honor was given to the old Ukrainian soldier guy. Ukraine is at war with Russia because Vladimir Putin accuses their government of being Nazis because they dare to oppose him. Everyone has heard that.
Back when the war started I did a rant explaining why Ukrainians HATE Russians. Between WW1 and WW2 there was genocide in Ukraine propagated by the Soviet Russian government. So even if Russia conquered Ukraine they would be an occupying power in a hostile country.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
When the German Army rolled across the Soviet Union in 1941 an early goal was to conquer the area that was Ukraine and access the land and resources. Many Ukrainians considered them liberators and joined German military formations organized by the Waffen SS. Yes those guys. The SS often recruited from local populations. Some of these people were conscripted or joined voluntarily, but there is no doubt they fought for the SS. Another country aligned with and fighting against Russia with the Nazis was Finland. They also hated Russians.
Nobody is accusing Finland of being Nazi, but they had their own army and were not under the orders of the SS. So there is that.
Eventually as the fortunes of war turned this Ukrainian Division restyled themselves as a new national army and dropped the SS thing. Thousands retreated across Europe to escape capture by Russian Troops and certain death. The old man in the Parliament gallery was one of those. He was a teenager when they surrendered to the Western allies. He probably was not a Nazi, but hey I don't know for sure.
Now it gets personal.
I had an uncle long dead who was an MP from Alberta. He was ethnic Ukrainian as am I obviously. He worked with the Canadian government to immigrate and settle a lot of these former soldiers. Many were admitted and settled in Canada and even the USA.
They were investigated in 1950 for possible involvement in atrocities and crimes. This was repeated in 1986 and there was no evidence of such crimes by them uncovered then. So it is very likely that this old man was not a Nazi sympathizer, or involved in any crimes as a soldier under SS command.
I have a bit of a problem with if what my uncle did was really a good thing. I know many of my relatives from that era were antisemitic. My grandfather was, but I do not know how much. He wrote stories where Jews were villains. I cannot say if that played a part or not. I grew up differently. However it is not certain that any of these former SS troops were actually Nazis.
Hell the American Military grabbed lots of rocket scientists from Germany back in that era. The man who designed the rocket that put men on the moon was in the Nazi party. His rockets were being built by slave labor during the war, but he was OK. Ferdinand Porsche was a Nazi but people still bought his cars. My Uncle saved lives. If they had been sent back to Soviet Territory death and torture was assured.
So I think it is important to recall the reason many young men joined an invading army, even though that army represented one of the most horrific episodes of human history.
Stories are never one dimensional.
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I got sourdough!
Yes I was one of those people. I made starter and tried to follow the directions and YouTube videos and nothing worked.
There is a common stream on the internoise where knowledgeable people put stuff up and always, and I mean always, seem to leave out exactly what you are struggling to understand. Which steps are really important and which are not? Why does a loaf utterly fail to rise or collapses after it rose? I know now, but not from any "influencer" or book author.
Yes this is another rabbit hole and I tried, failed, and gave up. Then a guy from the office (GFTO) who is a very talented cook started to try it. So I said I could try again. He offered my some starter.
In the meanwhile I had found a recipe for "normal" bread using store bought yeast and it worked fine. I made it interesting by adding in herbs and seeds and stuff like that. Warm bread fresh from the oven with butter, yes please!
So the GFTO gave me some of his starter. He had watched hours of videos and taken notes and failed and tried again and was damn persistent. The starter started, but he ran into the same problems I had. He found out why loaves collapse and stuff. He was getting closer, but still not a real SD loaf.
I had a book. It was a thick, padded, hard cover coffee table type book about artisanal bread. One 30 page chapter was on basic country sourdough. 30 damn pages for a recipe, so not simple eh? So I read it again, and again. I followed his steps pretty well using the starter from the GFTO. It was looking good.
Things he said did not matter much I did not stress over. Things that were key I was careful about.
Part of the thing was I had done this before and knew basics. My success with normal bread helped too. Tricks like baking it in an iron dutch oven pot helped a lot.
Fun fact is the same weekend the GFTO did his first successful loaf too. We were both grinning Monday morning.
For all that it is much simpler to buy it from the store, but hey it is kinda fun too.
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The internet is run by morons.
Though that may be an insult to the mentally low end. I have a couple other blogs on things I like. In one I put a photo of an audio amplifier. It is a big rectangular block with a on off switch.
The next day I looked at it without being logged in to tumblr and there were photos leading to ads for an air conditioner, a food dehydrator and I think a humidifier. All big rectangular things with switches. Obviously there is an AI twit looking at pictures and completely being wrong about what is there. Less than a moron. Even a trained dog would be able to distinguish these things.
That is not helpful and is not the first time such stupidity has happened to my stuff.
And this is how people are fed news and products and all the noise in exchange for money the online economy depends on.
Artificial intelligence is not. It is a pale poor imitation. It is like artificial vanilla flavor that got the brown liquid color right, but tastes like a petroleum product. And it decides what you get to see.
Oh and while I am in rant mode. Internet front doors like Yahoo and Google and Microsoft have news and "happening" streams and click bait stuff. They steal much of it and get paid for the rest as that maximizes profits. But there will be a story about a male star being accused of sexual misconduct or politician groping an aid. The story presented with righteous indignation and all that. Yet there will be numerous shots of a Kardashian semi nude, or a nip-slip, or some bimbo in a see through dress as content. So treating women as objects or chattel is bad when a celebrity does it, but fine when the content publisher does it? Hmmm.
Oh and tapping the side of your skull will not cure tinnitus.
This is not the best we can do.
If I were emperor I would ban such trivia. I would mandate real verified news, and no scam ads.
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Quantum Computing.
Is it bullshit?
I saw a video of a presentation by the head of the IBM research team working on quantum computing. It advertised that the process would be demonstrated by a deck of cards. OK I can digest that so I watched it.
Rather than explain how it works he described a problem and how a quantum computer could solve it. The problem was there are four cards face down. One is black and the others are red. A small quantum computer can find the black one in one step rather than four steps a conventional computer takes. Errr excuse me, that is nonsense in the most literal meaning or the word.
The problem is predicting a random selection from four choices. The black card is in a random location. A conventional computer would say simulate flipping the cards over one by one until a black one is found. To be absolutely certain of an outcome it takes three tries. There is a one in four chance on the first flip and each subsequent flip gets better and better odds until all the red cards are flipped or the black card is found. If the computer is "unlucky" it takes four tries to see the odd card. The result is the location of the correct card. Note the idea of luck.
To be useful you need to find the card without looking at the other ones. That is how you win bets.
To claim that of four choices (was it two qubit computer?), will find the card in one flip means all possible cases were checked and evaluated in one step. I call bullshit.
Think of it this way. I have a random deck of 52 cards. Say I have a quantum computer that can process the deck in a game of blackjack. Can it tell me what the next hand dealt will be? No it can't because it is random. It is bounded by the possible combinations of a 52 card deck under the rules of blackjack, but is the selection of a given hand certain and predictable? No it is not! That is what random means.
In one section of the presentation he said they think a 50 qubit computer will be able to solve serious problems. I will admit my expertise in the field is like a young child's understanding of the English language who should not be expected to write a Sonnet. But I am not afraid to use common sense.
This computer I am using has a 64 bit processor, that is the size of the registers and memory address range. 64 is more than 50. And there are gigabytes of memory and disk space. That is a lot of capacity.
A quantum computer needs a conventional computer to run it and read the result. One physicist mentioned if a large quantum computer was simulating chemical reactions it would produce ten terabytes of data per second. That is a problem you know.
The task people are always quoting is breaking encryption which involves factoring large numbers. A method called Shor's algorithm does that if they can eliminate noise and random errors. So far with billions spent they can factor 21 into 3 and 7. 35 failed due to noise and errors. Noise at the quantum level goodness who expected that.
People who do understand this stuff to a deep level also have doubts.
So to answer the first question yes it is bullshit.
Though one could argue that every brain in every head is a quantum computer. Though the results we get are subject to error and noise.
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Oppenheimer the movie.
I may not bother to see it. I know the story. The birth of the A-Bomb is a great and terrifying story. I grew up in the duck and cover age. If you do not know about that google it. Feeling fear makes one want to know why. The movie explosions may be fun, but my wife hates things like that and so its go alone or not at all.
The Manhattan project was huge, dangerous, and expensive. It established towns built for the job that were not there before. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico new towns eventually small cities were made. One because there was abundant electrical power the other because it was so isolated and remote in case something happened.
Money was no object it was war.
First thing to note is that it was not the most expensive WW2 project. Developing the Boeing B29 bomber cost more. That is just one plane type.
The B29 is the plane that dropped the two A-bombs in Japan. It is also the plane that firebombed cities in Japan which actually killed more people and destroyed more homes that the A-Bombs. I do not say that to minimalize the impact of the A-Bomb. It was horrible, but many other horrible things were done as well by the winning side.
I want to talk about the Bhagavad Gita. Hard turn there? No not really. Much is made of the Oppenheimer Quote "Now I have become Death destroyer of Worlds". As in many things there are layers to see that superficial people will miss. That is a line from the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna who is a powerful god avatar shows his "true" form of Vishnu to Arjuna the prince. In doing so he recites those words.
At issue is Arjuna, a Prince in command of an army who does not want to fight the battle as the other side is powerful and has his friends and relatives and revered teachers in it. He knows many will die and is racked by guilt and reluctance. The back story is long and complex and beyond knowing this immediate situation is not necessary to get into.
I am far from a scholar, but Oppenheimer was. He read and translated the story from Sanskrit. He also spoke German Fluently as he was of German Jewish heritage which is why his family moved to the US. He studied Physics in Germany and wrote several papers in German and that is where he got his PhD in 1927. He knew most if not all the people working in Germany in advanced Physics. He had friends there.
When a few scientists during WW2 wrote the US president a letter noting that a huge new bomb was possible and that the leading experts were in Nazi Germany the math was done. It was a race. It was war, and I am still talking about the Bhagavad Gita.
The core issue is Dharma / Karma and well as I said I am not a scholar, but I take those as a mixture of Fate and Duty. The battle Arjuna must fight must go on, it will go on. That is Fate. He must do his best as a soldier and general that is duty. There is no choice. Krishna is explaining in detail why he must proceed.
So here is a man deeply conflicted with the skills and knowledge to do a hard thing who must actually do it even though others, many who he knows and loves may die.
Oppenheimer knew that the bomb was possible. He knew the people on the other side who were working on it and could do it. He knew it would be done. As it could be done it must be done. All that is discussed in the Bhagavad Gita and was deeply known to Oppenheimer.
So the simple line about destroyer of worlds is not as simple as simple people would have it.
Oppenheimer became a proponent of nuclear disarmament. He was also caught up in the red scare of Joseph McCarthy. He knew communists. They were for a long time just a political movement. Then they became the Enemy in the USA. Just as Jews were the Enemy in Nazi Germany. A convenient hate target for small people who craved power.
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Aliens!
The BBC News stream had an "entertaining" item on Aliens. It was titled the "Fermi Paradox."
Put very simply Enrico Fermi (very big name in nuclear physics) was asked his opinion on life on other planets. He thought about it and said "Where are they?" The idea is that the universe and our little corner of it is very old as in billions of years. There has been enough time for life to occur and evolve millions if not billions of times elsewhere.
There has been enough time for at least one civilization to reach the stars and travel the entire circumference of our galaxy several times at far below light speed. Doing so would be very difficult and would not such voyagers stop to rest and resupply at a world such as ours, yet apparently they have not. We have been broadcasting radio waves for over 120 years. We are not hard to spot.
Everything about the how and why is speculation. One thing that is not speculation is that the speed of light is an absolute limit and would take infinite energy to drive a spaceship to that speed, Star Trek not withstanding.
The Voyager 1 space probe is the fastest moving thing humans have made. At it's current velocity it will travel 1 light year in 18000 years. It is currently covering 523 million km per year. Our nearest stellar neighbor is 4.2 light years away. And Voyager aint even going that way. Space is BIG.
In addition it is pretty clear that interstellar space is not empty. It is full of dust and gas particles that will damage a vehicle traveling at very high speeds unlucky enough to hit something. Oh yes they are very diffuse, but still a grain of sand hitting our space station would be like being hit by a large caliber bullet and that is only at 28,000 kph.
As far the fuzzy haired alien visitation conspiracy people I could rant on for hours. Grainy photos and fake videos only prove people are likely to lie and fake things usually for profit in a book deal or TV show. In fact photos are even less believable now with computer graphics. The key factor in the UFO thing is in the first letter. Unidentified. That means we do not know what it is.
Oh and finally I am sure there is life on other worlds, but we will never see it. Or if we do it may be the last thing we see.
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Flying cars ... AGAIN!
Next candidate!
I love it. This is such a total scam and it gets full news coverage. I pulled this image off of the Yahoo front page today. The "manufacturer" has permission to test it from the FAA. By that keep it away from any stuff it may fall on and have fun. Oh and the test is not actually the thing you see in the nice pictures, but a "prototype."
The company has a website. Alef Aeronautics, google it. Oh and they are hiring interns, you know the people who don't get paid.
Why is it a scam? Hey its better than call center fraud for sure. First clue is all the images are computer renderings. I like this one here:
That's what I call sight seeing! Very nice. Almost as good as the Ehang flying over the alps in that video years ago. There is a prototype somewhere, but curiously no photos. Hmmm.
So lets cut this one up. The Yahoo item had a Skype interview with the designer/engineer/poser who was wearing sunglasses indoors and had long flowing locks of hair. He bragged about how efficient that the car could travel on the ground for 200 miles or in the air for 100 miles. All for only $300,000! It will be certified as a car and as a plane. No office or engineering suite in the view, just a bedroom door by the looks of it. No shop to build even a model.
A real company would tour the shop floor at the very least.
The concept is easy to say, but impossible to do. The image gives you all you need. First is the top surface of the car is some kind of mesh. That is a good idea to protect everyone from the whirling blades of death. But in horizontal flight it is a huge source of drag as the intent is to fly mesh side forward so that the sides of the car acts as wings and provide the lift for more efficient flight. The mesh will prevent that from working, sorry. I guess hiring an aerodynamics engineer is too expensive and they are so negative!
Next issue is car regulations require crash protection and all sorts of safety impact stuff. Aircraft need only to be light. From the image there is none of that safety stuff. Would it survive even the most basic collision test for a car? No hope of that I bet. And don't go claim some carbon fiber breakthrough will make that happen. I work in composite engineering.
Oh there is more. Where are the batteries? In every electric car there are tons of batteries. Big heavy and bulky they are. Oh just leave that out of the picture for now. Just one more breakthrough.
I love that the tires are just hanging there and who needs a suspension that is so limiting.
That tiny passenger pod thing in the middle is really small. It looks to be much smaller than a Smart Car:
This is a real car that does pass safety requirements and weighs more than a Cessna 172 airplane. I holds two people if they are good friends and maybe a couple of grocery bags. For comparison the Cessna has a 140 hp motor and 36 foot wings. The Smart car I recall had a 50 hp motor.
There is a very small licensed Helicopter called a Robinson 22. It does take off and land vertically with 130 hp and weighs slightly less than a smart car.
Flying cars have been touted for decades. I mean lots of decades. Very clever people have tried (even geniuses) and millions of dollars invested, spent and lost.
The long hair dude will probably walk away with some good cash.
The people who built the one below actually had a thing that flew and could go on a road if you ignored those safety regs.
Terrafugia from 2012 ish. Sold the company to a Chinese vulture firm and make drones now.
The future is an endless chain of scams.
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Disaster Dan follow up.
There is a small controversy in the media about all the effort and cost to search for those poor rich people in the toy submersible. It was a toy so don't drop on that. A very expensive and dangerous toy.
Yes millions were spent searching for them, and people are starving and dying all around the world.
All I want to say is the US and Canadian Coast guards exist only to do things like this. They have equipment bought and paid for and the people are on salary. The net cost is ZERO for that. Everything else is fuel. The exercise is a valuable for experience and training. The planes and people do not sit around all the time, they patrol and train.
The Navies also get experience and all that is only good. Emergency response is an important capability. That they all got together so fast is because they train and prepare and practice. That all costs money and is just in case they are needed.
Sometimes they save a life. Often they risk theirs. Want a glimpse read the book "The Perfect Storm."
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Disaster Dan.
Tourist submarine failure.
I should create another blog just on my take on disasters from poor engineering.
So that Ocean Gate "Titan" implosion. Another regulations are for losers megalomaniac type guy. Pay attention Elon Musk. A carbon fiber hull section failed instantly killing 5 people.
I am currently working as a design engineer in composite vessels as in tanks and that sort of thing. The biggest external pressure I have to deal with is 1 atmosphere or about 15 psi. (14.7 typically) The wreck of the Titanic is deep enough for about 6000 psi or 400 times as much. 15 is hard enough to make work, but lets set that aside.
A CF drum shape is made with a method called filament winding. A mold is prepared called a mandrel upon which fine filaments of fiber are wound after being saturated in resin usually an epoxy-vinyl-ester. This method creates a dense well formed compact section of very good strength. There are two basic variations on this scheme.
The first variation is called helical winding where the feed of fiber is moved back and forth as the mandrel rotates to create a mesh like net of fiber. This is less compact but is provides some strength in two directions those being axial and circumferential. Circumferential direction is also called the "hoop" axis. Think of a wooden barrel and the steel hoops around it.
The second variation is called ortho winding where there are two types of fiber. One is the hoop axis fiber the other is a uni-directional fabric where the main fibers run at 90 degrees to the winding fibers. The hoop fibers act to compress and compact the "uni" fibers to make a dense matrix of material. The two types are alternated as the product is wound.
OK that is all good. One thing to take from this is that both methods make a product that is anisotropic.
Anisotropic ADJECTIVE:
An object or substance having a physical property that has a different value when measured in different directions. A simple example is wood, which is stronger along the grain than across it.
The material has one set of properties axially and another circumferentially. CF composite has a grain like wood.
OK class, a filament wound cylinder has different strength and stiffness in the two major directions of it's geometry whichever method is used to wind it.
The TITAN submersible had titanium hemispheres on each end to cap the passenger space. Titanium is a metal which is generally and effectively Isotropic. That means it's properties are the same in all directions. Titanium is strong and relatively light compared to say steel.
The first problem in combining two different materials is that you have two different materials.
The second is that those materials have different properties and one has different properties on two different axes.
Titanium has a "young's modulus" (YM) of 120 GPa. (gigaPascals).
CF composite has a modulus of from 70 to 220 GPa. You have to figure that out by testing of samples for a given laminate specification.
That modulus is the key factor to buckling failure from compression for any given geometry. Spheres are stronger than cylinders for a given material thickness due to the two way curvature of the surface.
The thickness of both materials and the YM determine how much the shell will compress or shrink under load. The thickness of the cylinder must carefully be proportioned to shrink at EXACTLY the same rate under load as the titanium ends or a secondary flexural stress will occur where they join. That stress can be huge.
I do Finite Element analysis of things like that and it is these joins and details that are the hard part to make work. My designs are driven by the secondary stresses for the most part.
I have no idea who designed this vessel. I heard they uses Finite Element Analysis. It has to be used properly to be correct. It is possible to fiddle constraints and such to make things appear to work. Whatever and whoever did the design it was wrong.
In my work I am required to use a factor of safety of 5 to 1 for loads like that. It is apparent the FOS here was close to 1 and as more dives were made it got smaller. A higher FOS is expensive and they were running a business there.
At the very least the person who must take the blame/responsibility went down with the ship.
May his customers rest in peace.
#titanic tourist submersible#titanium#carbon fiber#composite engineering#failure is always the option#Titan#Ocean Gate
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Required Learning.
I have a professional certification and must therefore participate in continuing education. Part of that is mandated subjects and stuff.
Yesterday I had to do an online course for 3 hours about First Nations Reconciliation. I am still processing it. Canada has been very shitty to those people historically.
Language is a living evolving thing and becomes what people use most. I find using some terms strange. For example "learnings" as in "these are the learnings from this section." Hell my spellcheck just flagged those words as wrong. See it is not just me. Similarly I was a "learner" in this process. It is almost like the usage from the Star Wars movies has become mainstream. I think it is clumsy. There are other words too, but those stuck.
As I said I am still processing it. Some things I find ironic. For example people in this course are categorized as one of four things. You are First Nations, or Metis, or Inuit or a Settler. They consider me a settler. The issue being addressed is racism, but breaking people into groups and assigning characteristics by their heritage is inherently racist is it not?
I object to the term settler. On my mothers side I have at least ten generations born on this continent. On my father's side he was born in Northern Alberta on a Homestead. His parents were certainly settlers. Does what happened generations ago somehow stain me and continue to stain my descendants? There was certainly negativity in the presentation.
From physical appearance and common names many First Nations people have some European heritage too. Blue eyes and facial features betray something there.
Metis are the descendants of French fur trappers and first nations women. In terms of DNA are they not also Settlers? They certainly have First Nations DNA, but also European. Arguably mostly European. As I said I am still processing this. I have questions, but the answers depend on the perspective.
I understand the term Indian is basically offensive to First Nations and do not argue the point. It is confusing in British Columbia as there are many many people actually from India here. You do not call them Indians though they are as they do not want to be lumped in with those others. I know this as my son-in-law is the son of Indians from India. We twist words to call them South Asians, though south Asia is a very big area that is far more than the Indian subcontinent. Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and PPNG are all in the South of Asia.
History is full of humans being shitty and cruel ranging from Genocides to slavery and relatively simple oppression. Actually on a Global scale the places that are nice are very few. Even the nice places have a stain. The USA had slavery up until 1869. Canada had it until 1793. Europe colonized most of the rest of the world and that has left scars. It was not because Europeans were better, but because they were good at war having perfected it on each other. Guns, Germs, and Steel. (good book that)
When I was a child the TV had many many stories about blacks in the US fighting for the right to vote, and to have full access to education and facilities. Weirdly that fight continues until now.
So many things to apologize for.
I suppose that the best we can say is that we are trying to work it out.
There was a lot in that course I have a lot of thinking to do.
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