My post Clovis-flyabout time in Arizona was uneventful: some time boondocking near a ghost town and a week and a half at Kartchner Caverns SP. I’ve driven by signs pointing the way to KCSP for years and never bothered to look into it – turned off by eastern tourist trap caves I guess. This time round, I was looking for a campground near the southern AZ grasslands and gave KCSP a whirl. The campground in nice, but OMG the caves! Discovered in 1974, kept secret for 14 years, and developed prioritizing the cave environment; just incredible. If you visit when the bats are elsewhere (they close part of the cave during bat season), the Big Room tour is my recco.
From S AZ, it was off to San Diego. I had 2 spots on my high priority list. The San Diego Model Railroad museum was the first. They have multiple layouts: O, HO and N – I was there for the La Mesa Model RR Club’s HO scale Tehachapi layout. So, early on a Tuesday morning, I hopped on my bike and pedaled to Balboa Park. My plan was to be there when they opened and get some more-or-less quiet time before it got crowded. Ha! By the time they opened, I was one of a couple dozen people at the front door. It got crowded quickly and I’m still crowd-averse so I only spent and hour and a half or so inside, but it was time well spent.
The Tehachapi Loop is a famous track spiral in south central California. By spiraling, the railroad gains horizontal distance so that it can keep the vertical grade manageable, but the v cool visual benefit is that any reasonably long train ends up passing over/under itself. The La Mesa folks have modeled it, and modeled it well. I read somewhere that this layout is the largest model RR representation of a prototype in the world.
A westbound freight headed by 2 SP SD40T-2 tunnel snoots bracketing a UP U30C with an SP SD39 bringing up the rear.
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The same train running downhill through the loop.
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And just for grins, a shot of one of the CTC panel displays.
Between the museum, Balboa Park and a very interesting waterfront bike ride, an A+ day.
I visited the Roswell Museum yesterday; it’s an interesting mix of art, historical objects (with, for many items, the usual issues of who they originally belonged to and how they were acquired) and a re-creation of Robert Goddard’s Roswell workshop. I’m going to embed a widget that lets one scroll through the photos I took – I’ve done my best to credit and describe in the captions.
The second Amarillo RR Museum attractant was the HO scale layout in their building. It models a section of the Santa Fe railroad between Canadian TX and Texico NM. An absolutely amazing track plan getting built with care. I’ve been interested in model railroading since I was a kid; to see current state of the art writ large was fantastic. You can see the track plan here and the designer’s commentary here. Some photos with commentary (n.b. the layout is very much a work in progress):
The bridges over the Canadian River – the ‘easternmost’ point on the miniature Plains Division.
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They’re modelling specific structures on the route. In many cases (the Canadian R bridges, for example) they’ve done some selective compression, but the goal is to create scenes that someone familiar with the area would recognize instantly.
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Two common support elements in modern large layout design are helices and staging yards. A helix lets one gain or lose a lot of vertical separation in a relatively small footprint; ideal for two level track plans like this one. And staging yards allow for trains to wait in the wings before they take their turn on stage. Bottom yard is for trains from the east, the top is west.
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Controls, both miniature and full sized. At the top are the Digital Command Control interfaces and power supplies. DCC is a flavor of power line networking – the power line in this case are the tracks which supply both go-juice and throttle, sound card, lighting, etc. info to the motive power. For a glimpse of what DCC and modern loco electronics can do, take a look at this. I’ve cued the video up to the engine’s (a Rapido E8 in Amtrak Day One livery) startup sequence. Below is the RR Museum’s dispatcher’s panel. Apparently. one of the members’ mom worked for the Santa Fe when they closed the Amarillo dispatch center and the museum got possession of the actual Amarillo panel! They plan on operating the layout prototypically with the dispatcher controlling main line switches, signals and, via radios, train movements (telling the engineers what to do). Too cool!
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There are more layout photos n the Flickr album, here. I’m considering starting my Cali coast portion of the trip (Feb and Mar) in San Diego so I can check out the San Diego Model RR Museum. The La Mesa Model RR Club operates a model of the Tehachapi Pass and there are two other layouts in the museum. A goal, once I become a little less nomadic, is a small layout – or at least a module/diorama – of my own…
Via Justin Pickard on the tweets comes this fantastic project: Alias, a gadget that helps you take control of Amazon and Google’s small surveillance devices.
We looked at how cordyceps fungus and viruses can appropriate and control insects to fulfill their own agendas and were inspired to create our own parasite for smart home systems. Therefore we started Project Alias to demonstrate how maker-culture can be used to redefine our relationship with smart home technologies, by delegating more power from the designers to the end users of the products.*
I’ve never been tempted by Amazon Echo or Google Home. First off, I like not needing to reboot light switches. And the privacy implications of these gadgets are stunning. There’s the obvious: if you don’t think they’re listening and harvesting data whenever they’re plugged in, you clearly haven’t been paying attention. The Alias project mitigates this exposure with a man-in-the-middle attack – it sits between you and the listening device and only talks to the listening device when you’ve told it to.
I’m still thinking it through, but Alias isn’t a panacea. All the things Google Home (for example) is asked to do: play music, turn off lights, adjust temperature, will leak back to Google and they can build an interesting model of your life using this data. That being said, a Cordycepian brain parasite for our cloud overlords’ bugs* is conceptual candy to me. (earlier Cordyceps post here)
I’ve been interested in kite aerial photography almost as long as I’ve been on the internet. I’m not sure how I got there, but I remember falling over Prof. Benton’s KAP page back in the days of usenet and listservs. I’ve flown a couple different kinds of drones, but the notion of a kite as the camera’s skyhook never stopped being attractive. As I thought about camera equipment for the trip, a KAP rig immediately suggested itself. Drones are heavy and power hungry; kites are neither of those things. I got the stuff together and yesterday – a day of 20 mph+ blustery winds – was the first sky trial.
KAP requires 3 things: a kite (and line obv), a camera with some sort of automatic or remote triggering capability, and a way of hanging the camera off the kite string. I already had a GoPro; they come with wireless capabilities and a phone app to control them. The kite was easy, too. Though I already had an old parafoil kite, I ordered a larger one (for better light wind lifting) with a monster tail (for stability). The last bit, the camera/kite interface, is interesting. I’m using a picavet (or picavet cross if you prefer). It’s named after its inventor, Pierre Picavet, who came up with the notion in 1912. Side note: the history and longevity of KAP is another thing that attracts me.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Yesterday was the first day that all the elements were in place: good wind, no rain and all the components rigged and ready. So off I went to a nearby (sodden) playing field complex. When I got there, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person with kites on their mind. This person was doing some dry land kite-boarding practice.
We spoke briefly – I wanted to make sure I didn’t get in his way – and I walked off to a different corner of the field. He left soon after; the wind was strong and out of the corner of my eye I saw him execute a nice landing after getting pulled a combined Olympic long/high jump distance by his kite.
I had a good time and came away having learned a few things: a mark of a successful outing in my book.
Wear gloves!
I need to spend more time with the GoPro phone interface. The interface is simple, but when you’re using it one handed with an angry kite in the other hand, well… And distance may or may not be an issue – again, tough to troubleshoot when one’s attention is divided.
I am going to experiment with more and heavier line. The kite came with a 300′ spool of 80lb line. I have a 500′ spool of 160lb line – it weighs more (boo!) but the extra 200′ will come in handy.
Don’t expect stable video when you are flying in a wind right at the top of your kite’s rating.
Here’s some barely-edited footage of the first flight; not great but there’s nowhere to go from here but… wait for it… up.
Logistics note: I’m planning on posting video to both Flickr (esp after they open up the time limit to 10 minutes) and Youtube. I realize there’s angst on the internet over how SmugMug/Flickr is handling the free account downgrade. I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for a long time for exactly that reason: lack of trust in the permanence of free internet services. And so the thing I pay for (Flickr) will be the primary drop and the “free” thing (Youtube) will be there as a secondary source.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I love two wheeled vehicles. My own riding has been restricted to bicycles for a long time, but I love looking at a nice motorcycle too. The presence of an engine gives builders freedom to be less minimalist and practical – expressed esp in the world of choppers. Last Saturday there were two bike shows: the Welcome East motorcycle show in Portsmouth NH and The Builder’s Ball handmade bicycle show in Boston. I spent time at both as I made my way back to Scituate.
There was an an amazing range of bikes at the Welcome East show; a diversity that led to my favorite juxtaposition of the day: two bike conversions next to two superbikes.
My favorite was this perfect BMW. I am a sucker for Earles forks.
The Builder’s Ball was smaller but in some ways even more amazing. The attention to detail was incredible. Brian Chapman used spare spokes as chain slap protectors:
Bilenky Cycle Works fabricated a gorgeous rear dropout to accommodate a Gates belt drive:
There needs to be a break point in the drive side rear triangle of Gates-equipped bikes so that the belt can be threaded into place. I’ve never seen the problem handled so elegantly.
There was also space for less Apollonian stuff. A bike chopper with what I assume is a combination running light and butt warmer:
And this amazing machine:
I thought at first that it was some sort of e-bike conversion. And then realization dawned: hydraulics! The owner was given the bike by its creator, a Worcester machinist, as he was heading off to a retirement home. The current owner has had the bike for two decades and it is still immaculate. I’d hang it on a wall if I owned it – art.
Locally, preparations for my bike trip continue. Today’s task is choosing books that will live at the Scriptorium in Breuklyn – Lotte and I are heading south tomorrow to celebrate my b-day with friends and fam!
Oh, come on. I’ve seen Canadian geese attack nuns. Canadian geese will attack any damn thing in their general vicinity, they are vicious and stupid and definitely got the memo that they were a legally protected species and tht THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT if they repeatedly try to murder you. Geese attacking things definitely do not count for attack video compilations; it is not unusual behavior because they ALWAYS approach the world like a coked-up, steroid-addled teenaged athlete who hates his parents and has something to prove. It’s their default state. – Eyebrows McGee
That’s some serious dislike there Mr McGee.
Did a Canadian goose beat you up in High School? – ambivalentic
And the weirdest – bees attack drone. My current hypothesis is that the sound of the drone motors angers the bees – I can’t come up w/ any other reason for them to behave this way.
Gerry Anderson died last Wednesday. I’ve mentioned previously how important he was to me growing up. I’m not alone. Here is Neil Gaiman singing the Fireball XL5 theme last night (New Years Eve):
One more Fireball reference I’d like to note – Alan Moore made a great joke in The Black Dossier: “Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray steal a rocket named Pancake XL4. Each ship of the series is traditionally named after the manner of her predecessor’s destruction. The Mushroom Cloud XL2 and the Shrapnel XL3 are named as other examples of the Fireball XL5′s antecedents. The Pancake XL4 is destroyed by a collision with a mountain, exploding in a huge fireball and earning the XL5 its name.” *
Beausage. A nice word printed, less felicitous spoken, but the phenomenon it speaks of is the best – the marks of wear that come to good materials through use. Worn bluing where a shotgun is handled. Work boots well treated with bar oil and oak sawdust. And this:
Silent history. Wear your scars and dings proudly, people.
About dang time I posted on this! A couple weeks ago I did, as part of a Seacoast Makers outreach effort, a naturalistic vivarium how-to talk (otherwise known as a frog-and-pony show) at a favorite local plant place, Wentworth Greenhouses.
Yr humble correspondent, gesticulating.
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It went quite well – decent turnout and no one fell asleep. I went through a viv build from start to finish: enclosures, substrate, backgrounds, lids and lighting, plants and, finally, animals. As you can see above, I brought a 16″ cube and (on top of the cube) a small carrier with a Phyllobates vittatus inside. The Ranitomeya ventrimaculata Iquitos Red that inhabit the cube are shy at the best of times; no way were they going to show themselves after a car ride.
Good Tuftian that I am, the slide show was just that – a bunch of photographs loosely related to whatever I was talking about. Luckily -strike that- By design I have accumulated quite a few build documentation pics and they were put to good use. I thought about posting the presentation here for download, but I think for the moment I’ll make it available on request: if you’d like a copy of the presentation in .odp/Open Doc Presentation format, send along an email addy or share a Dropbox folder with me and I’ll get you a copy. A few of the slide images after the jump.
With all the hubbub over James Cameron’s planned dive to Challenger Deep, a little attention should be paid to the first and, at this point, only people to make it to the deepest point in the ocean: Auguste Piccard and then-Lieutenant Don Walsh. They did it in 1960 on the bathyscaphe Trieste.
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The Trieste was, essentially, a dirigible. It was mainly buoyancy cambers filled with gasoline (here water:gasoline::air:helium) supporting an untethered bathysphere; there’s a huge difference in compressibility between liquids and gases, so I’ll leave the blimp vs. zeppelin distinction alone. *saunters away, whistling*
The point of this post is an interview NPR did with Capt. Don Walsh. I was blown away. Check out his Wikipedia bio – adventure scientist extraordinaire – and yet in the interview (unsurprisingly), humble and thoughtful. I’d encourage folks to give him a listen either at the NPR link or here (right click and save the mp3 locally).
Tandems (bicycles-built-for-two-or-more for the uninitiated) are amazing bits of work. More than anything else, a good tandem is FAST. A tandem is not as heavy as 2 individual bikes, does not have twice the rolling resistance and, most importantly, has essentially the same frontal area as a single bike with two, three or even four times the power driving it. The increase in power without an increase in wind resistance explains the use of trips and quads for pacing (rolling windbreak) on the track before dernys came into the picture.
There are at least four different approaches to getting the power from 2 pairs of legs to the rear wheels.
The crossover front (seems to have been popular with French constructeurs):
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The crossover rear (most common):
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And then the 2 reasons for this post…
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The single side rear (a single side front would be crazy – which means it’s been done somewhere). I found the Paketa V2r by googling racing tandem bicycle; after seeing the bike that ends this post, I was curious about what the current road racing state of the art might look like. I’m not surprised that the timing chain (the link between the captain and the stoker) isn’t a chain at all – belts are popping up in applications where the chainline doesn’t vary – singlespeeds and hub-geared bikes, especially. The biggest advantage that single side rigs have over crossovers has to do with cranksets. On a normal crankset, the left pedal/crankarm is reverse threaded. If it were threaded normally, rotational forces would tend to loosen things up. Since 3 of the crankarms on a crossover drive are on the ‘wrong’ side (both in front and the left on the rear on a crossover rear, for example), you need to purchase special tandem cranksets to get the threading right. On a single-side, the cranks are set up just as they’d be on a solo bike; thus, one can use a super light state-of-the-racing-art set of cranks. You give up the ability to use a triple chainwheel setup, but if racing is the goal, one presumably doesn’t need a super low gear. The folks who make the bike shown below make some other claims about their single side setup regarding torque and bearing stress that I have some trouble getting my head around. It seems to me that the stresses would just switch sides, not somehow balance out. That aside – still a pretty dang cool bicycle.
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Finally, the bike that started me thinking about drivetrains in the first place. This tweet led to this photograph:
Which led to me learning about daVinci Design’s drivetrain. I’ll quote their website (I like the sound of jackshaft rather than intermediate shaft – feel free to substitute as you read):
The main component of da Vinci Designs’ ICS is an intermediate drive shaft six inches in front of the rear bottom bracket. The intermediate shaft has two single-speed freewheels on the left side that are independently driven by the cranks at twice the rotating speed and half the torque. On the right side of the shaft, four Hyperglide™ cogs drive the bike. The chain rings are half the size as those on a conventional tandem because of the double rotation of the intermediate shaft. The combination of 12-, 18-, 24-, 30-tooth driving gears equals 24-, 36-, 48-, 60-tooth chain rings. *
Wicked smart! Were I to spring for a tandem (good tandems are NOT cheap), this would be #1 on the list with a bullet. I wonder whether you could get away with eliminating the freewheel body on the rear wheel? After all, the captain and stoker are already decoupled by virtue of the freewheels on the jackshaft and keeping the ‘final drive’ rotating all the time would mean that the captain could shift even when no one’s pedalling. Da Vinci – call me. I’ll sign the idea over in return for just one of your gorgeous machines.
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To finish up, some supplementary material in the form of YouTube videos. First, you didn’t think I’d talk about tandems without embedding this, did you?
Some Paralympic Tandem Pursuit action (the stoker is blind or visually impaired). In pursuit races, opponents start of opposite sides of the velodrome and whichever team closes on the other, wins. In this race, there’s a full-fledged catch (5:35).
No tandems in this one, but it does serve to emphasize the importance of aerodynamics and, dang, team pursuit is just about the most graceful thing in sports.
