Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

As long as we’re on the subject of wild@ss drag bikes, here’s Clive Waye’s VW powered slingshot(s), the Drag Waye:

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I wonder what the front fork looks like?!

More pix from around the web:

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Via Ride the Machine.

I posted last June about the move of a large transformer down through Crawford Notch to the Saco Valley substation. Public Service of NH just put up three YouTube videos documenting all phases of the move. Here’s a YouTube playlist that will (I hope) string all three together:

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The Transformer on Rails main page is here.

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SLOVENSKA STRELA – Tatra 68 (1936)

I would give my eye teeth for one of these. Unfortunately, my teeth are not worth anything close to the $120,000 this is likely to sell for.

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Via the comments on Daniel Strohl’s post, a camo-ed example from the WWII Victory Museum:

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It occurs to me that if I had two, I could declaim, as I swung wide the doors to my palatial garage, “Check out those bodacious Tatras!”

Simultaneously hilarious and mind-expanding (one of my favorite combinations).

Freedom is just another word for nothing! There is no dead weight in my urban spatiality. No clotted semiotics, cajoling me to behave in the stereotyped haute-bourgeois manner that Deirdre once used to stifle me.

Dematerialisation is defined by its interfaces. That which was product will become a service. That which was a service will accelerate at warp speed toward de-monetisation on the Path-to-Free. So this is not so much a post-divorce flat as a vibrant zone of interactive transaction.

Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.

YouTube – Parrot AR.Drone : Flight Demo (HD version).

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I’ve been thinking about AR’s potential to extend our sensorium – it’s happening more quickly than I could have imagined though.

Via @dannychoo.

NLS Digital Archive – First World War ‘Official Photographs’ > Photographers > David McLellan > 124 L.774, Putney motor-bus in France doing service as a mobile pigeon loft.

On a recent tour of an incredible basement and barn collection, I was shown this – a patent model constructed around 1918, in support of a patent for a flying sub.

Further objects of the invention are to provide a hydro-aeroplane which admits of the wings or supporting planes being readily moved into and locked in operative position when the craft is to be used as an airship, or to be swung rearwardly into an out of the way position against the hull of the craft when the device is to be operated as a marine vessel, which provides effective means for propelling the craft through the water as well as through the air, which may be equipped with torpedo tubes and used for the discharge of torpedoes while submerged, and which is at all times under the perfect control of the operators. *

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Irwin Allen, you’ve got nothing on Mr. Hans Christian Petersen of Ludington, Michigan – though your creation is much swoopier.

For more on the history of patent models there’s this story from the NYT and the history page at the Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum (the Museum will soon be added to Atlas Obscura by yr humble correspondent). And yes, that’s an Isetta in the background.

Took a trip up to the Mt. Washington Valley today to see the Schnabel car before it leaves. I’d been told that they were probably going to unload it last – Murphy loves me. It was unloaded and reconfigured for running empty (cradle on it’s attendant flatcar, A and B ends joined) and the riggers were getting ready to ‘jack and slide’ the second, smaller transformer component off the heavy duty depressed center flatcar. Normally the flatcar would have been a ‘lookit that!’ item – with the Schnabel two cars away, it lacked punch.

Apparently ferroequinophiliacs are a problem:

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And the slideshow (complete set here):

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Last Saturday the Conway Scenic Railroad brought a BIG load down through Crawford Notch (part of the old Maine Central Mountain Division – one of the biggest grades east of the Mississippi). The load consisted of  a two-piece transformer – one component on a heavy duty depressed center flatcar, the other on a cradle carried by a Schnabel car. The load came in from China (sigh) to Searsport, ME and made it’s way to Hazens, arriving there on Friday. Friday night CSRR hooked up 2 FP9s and a GP7 as motive power and attached a couple passenger cars to the tail end for potentates, panjandrums and poobahs.

I wasn’t able to get up to watch – I am going to try to get up for at least some of the transfer to a truck for the last leg – but the internet comes to the rescue. Some footage of the train going through the Gateway and at Bartlett.

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Daihatsu Midget – I would definitely commute in one.