Flat-Cat #1

Let's stay in our comfort zone shall we, interspersing reflections on life with periodic builds of the boat?

If you're a young person, you'll know it's not at all easy to get a conventional means of employment these days and while Daddy's in favour of Universal Basic Income, it is unlikely to happen any time soon.

That clever man John Maynard Keynes said in the 1930s that by now we'd all work just three days a week and then only if we wanted to, whereas in what I'm doing driving trucks I have to sign away the 'right' to work no more than a 48-hour week, as indeed I had as an airline pilot.

So what we'll do here is set about putting something together that might elevate our current circs at least, whilst providing us with a little more satisfaction and not a little entertainment. The man who started Linux in this way said that all things stem from military requirements prior moving into commercial spheres and ending up as entertainment. You can sort of see that with drones as you enjoy grainy vids of them blowing up ships and radar installations, can't you!

Well first up we need a name, and whilst I like the idea of TELEDRONE because after all it's me droning away on telly, I prefer the idea of something more generic like flat-cat; because after all it's flat, and its a cat -amaran. You might want to consider a trademark, but this really is 'old-world' stuff that only corporations can afford and trade between themselves. It rarely helps individuals, except perhaps by lightening their wallets.

The oldest trademark is reputedly a simple red triangle that was registered by the Bass brewery in the UK, and they still use it. If we were to trademark our venture we would have the choice of doing so for simply the word viz. flat-cat, else a logo. Patent offices do not tend to approve marks that literally describe what something is and might therefore object to the word itself being applied for, in which event we'd have to revert to a logo.

A benefit of a logo is it's universal and independent of language, which the social network once called 'The Facebook' has achieved with a simple 'F' albeit in a typeface of their own devising.

On that note we need a logo that doubles as a button on a smartphone and below there is one both I and my son like, though we do both prefer cats alive than dead.

I'm not going to register it because I'm done with IP, though it would be difficult for you to do so too now that you've seen it here because technically any piece of art* like that I've drafted here is subject copyright. Technically it means you can't use it for seventy years following my decease, so you'll be maybe a centenarian and past building things unless you're Elon Musk?

So here's hoping this is one pussy he'll never gets his hands on!

* Ed. Or piece of shit, like what's generally promulgated here...

The Liverpool Vicarious

Multi-sheaf document here on the legendary breakfast-bar that will be informing the recycling bin moreso than me and something my insurer expects me to contemplate in lieu of a life.

The story instructive and one that Mrs T herself would have relished, dear reader.

Liverpool's Victoria friendly society was established in 1843 as a means by which a pauper could fund a decent funeral ~ of which it provided over 200 within the first year and a half.

Wind forward a century or more and Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society becomes Liverpool Victoria Financial Services; insurance separate from life sold to German giant Allianz.

Liverpool, not least due its connection to shipping, was once a hub of insurance in the UK, although LV's HQ would be transferred to London in the 1920s and later to Bournemouth on the south coast, doubtless due the costs of being in the capitol. 

(As a result of Liverpool's role in finance and Manchester's in manufacture, it used to be said there were Manchester 'men' and Liverpool 'gentlemen').

As we saw with Alton Towers, it's as ever foreign capital in the driving seat and tho' it's not derived from Wall Street this time, it is likely only because Europe resists ~ as with its airlines ~ broader foreign ownership.

Does it make any difference to the man at the breakfast-bar?

Not really, no.

Naval Gazing

I'd be the first to admit I'm all talk and no neoprene trousers, but take a walk in my flip-flops if you would?

I visited his exhibitions in London and Brussels and the workshop in Antwerp, and I like to think that I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant in the shape of installation artist Panamarenko. In the end he'd produced nothing practical whatsoever, though inspired any number of us with a glimpse of the possible when it came to motivating us in both literal and figurative ways.

As I survey my designs and patent applications filed over decades, or my empire of dirt as Johnny Cash suggested I call it, I have to remind myself it's brought a lot of joy to at least one of us. That said, as I said to one of the founders of the UK's now fairly-shit NESTA initiative, the reason no-one else is ever going to exert themselves developing any of your ideas is that it is like asking them to bring up your kids for you.

We are, therefore, stuck with it: my efforts to execute unorthodox designs and you laughing at them. If we're going down that route however, we have at least as the first half of 2026 expires to ask ourselves what we hope to get out of it in the long-term?

Well keen followers of the 'blog will have noted a recent craving for a simpler build altogether, and whilst simply building it in my head is as appealing as ever, we're a hands-on community of makers and shakers, aren't we?

Accordingly let's enumerate our very own hierarchy of needs:

(1)    I don't want to build a company, and nor do you, but I do want to build a boat

(2)    It has to be scalable to transport (or rescue) a person, but still inspire drones

(3)    It has to be transferable to places like the Med where circs are more amenable

(4)    It has to be available to aero- and screw-propellers alike, ideally electrified

(5)    It has to be able to hover, plane on water and operate in ground-effect

(6)    It must be flat-packed for assembly and storage

(7)    It has to look so good that others want one too

(8)    It has to be cheaper and faster than any other 

(9)    It has to have less impact on the planet

(10)  It has to make people give me money

I think you will agree that these are noble aims altogether, albeit not those Mother Teresa would be willing to sign off on? Accordingly now's the time to print them off, stick them on the fridge and re-dedicate yourselves to them daily, as I hope to do.

Clauses (8) and (9) are each as good an aim as any, they requiring less material to build fast-moving watercraft and less energy to propel them. Of the 12 million boats registered in the US, for example, any number are (literally) forever boats that are being abandoned in waterways for someone else to clear up when the party's over.

Thus my promise to you for the remaining half of 2026 is that whatever is baptised here in the shitty waters hereabouts will feature that sketch, the whole sketch and nothing but the sketch.

We shall revisit each of those points in turn, though I realise you've had all you can take for one day. Yet with the month of June slipping away, we're holding steady at 60,000 views per month on this hailing frequency alone.

Tail Wags Dog

Am loving this because ~ talking of circles ~ we've come full circle in boating terms.

A company in France, where they still make things, has re-introduced the long-tail outboard in electrical form. You like I will only have been aware of these from either visits to transport museums like those in Berlin or Istanbul, else while being terrified in Thailand at being driven at high-speed along the waterways of Bangkok.

Ironically, tho' it would appear more obvious to put a propeller on a stick as here, the original outboard patent filed by a Frenchman in 1880 featured an upright type; albeit chain-driven instead of requiring a gear-box to turn a perpendicular driveshaft through ninety degrees. This may have been done first by Evinrude in the US, but I can't be bothered with the due diligence.

It had to wait until 1904 before another Frenchman would devise a long-tail like that here. It would flourish however in the Far East, where it was the ideal way to repurpose scrap auto-engines, and where they would not be shut down for mincing small children.

They're asking £1200 for the extendable entry-level prop-on-a-stick and £1800 for a carbon-fibre version: each of which deliver the equivalent of 1.50 horsepower.

Product design tho' it's ever France, Italy, Japan and James Dyson in the play-offs.

Ed. Dog not included. 

Circles of Hell

The ancient Romans often figured that the longer you put decisions off, the better; and the delay in outlining the defence requirements of the UK might be one of the outgoing PM's better decisions, albeit for the wrong reasons. For defence is a pork-barrel, and existing suppliers to the military-industrial complex will ever be looking to push an agenda that effectively supports the status quo... in their favour.

But one of the few benefits of war for those on either end of it is that it does upend the pork-barrel when it comes to altering ways of thinking. There's enough news out there about the Royal Navy abandoning big ships for small; and the Army and RAF will have to follow suit given successive government efforts to abandon an industrial base for a ~ literal ~ welfare state.

The drones however are even coming to roost for residents of Moscow, where fuel shortages are beginning to bite now that they've range and wherewithal to target oil storage facilities. Previously it would have required bombs dropped from a great height, most of which would miss: especially ineffective in view of the number of bombers that would be lost in the circs.

That's all gone now, for a reduction in the cost of computing and communication has meant there's a half-dozen different means to guide drones to distant targets at affordable cost and some ~ try it on a three-year old ~ can be taught chimpanzees.

Liquid product has generally to be stored in bottles or tins, because as the Romans discovered, circular structures best withstand internal and external forces. So it is that LPG is transported in pressurised spheres. They're not the easiest to make and so liquids at pressures deriving only from gravity are better made of a cylinder with a lid on top. And as there has still to be an element of pressure for expansion and so forth, that lid best approximates a dome... like that atop St Pauls cathedral.

The problem with this is that for modern aerial drones, it's a game of bubble-wrap. Take a look at Europe's largest storage and refinery facility at Rotterdam and see if your child can spot the dots? And it gets easier as destruction progresses, as drones progressively turn those white dots black.

In terms of computing, it's something Alan Turing could do ~ and likely did ~ before bedtime.

Every LIDL Helps

I get an altogether constructive response from LIDL following my experience in the small hours of Wednesday evening last. In fairness there are good days and bad in haulage as elsewhere, and tho' the latter can be decidedly bad let's not complain as it gets us out of bed each day.

Three reflections though worth are worth contemplating.

Firstly the UK's economy has amongst the worst productivity in the developed world and whilst it's not all my fault, on a daily basis I can see why. We may never know if my two-dozen pallets of produce were binned, but what you should know is we do so to substantial volumes in the UK and not least when all the chillers and freezers in the supermarkets pack up as they do when temperatures exceed 35C. Actually it is turned into ethanol and included in your petrol, but if you think that's sustainable, wait until the Russians arrive.

Secondly I spent much of my life in an airline industry that introduced the concept of SMS or Safety Management Systems, taken up since at places like the National Health Service. It's about replacing a time-worn 'blame the pilot' view of accidents and incidents, with one that features contributory factors. It is still as often a not a case of 'blame the driver' when it comes to logistics, which rarely changes because most need to keep their jobs, whereas I'd be cracking open a bottle.

Thirdly it does not surprise me that a German company ~ albeit in the UK ~ should endeavour to do things in the right way. I'd fly with a one of the smartest people I knew (at the Bank of America) to Germany, where he was totally smitten by their professionalism when it came to fixing issues which needed it. I flew nuclear waste from Wick to Frankfurt and we'd be sent on our way by a guy in tweeds with a pipe, and met at the other end by motor-cycle outriders and an armoured car mounting a machine-gun.

The Heat is On

I write at a time when the June temperature record has been broken three days in succession in the UK, and the reasons are instructive and again something that you study in detail in the class-room ~ or less engagingly online nowadays as ever ~ in preparation for flying airliners.

In fact jetstreams like that in the pic were only discovered circa the 1940s, as either bomber-crews headed for Japan realised they went one way faster than the other or when commercial airliners crashed in the Andes when they figured it must be time to descend when they'd been fighting a headwind all along instead.

Either hemisphere best-viewed as an LP record, you can see that the outside moves faster than the inside and thus a descending column of air incorporates a spin from the surface of the Earth as it does so... clockwise in the northern hemisphere. At the same time descending air produces high pressure, and in doing so it warms and so is less likely to condense to produce either cloud or rain.

Broadly speaking the jets emerge because hot air from the Tropics expands to slide toward the poles, but is transformed into fast-moving rivers of air by a planet that rotates at around 1,000 m.p.h. at the equator. In turn these sinuous rivers produce eddies of rising or descending air, producing the high- and low-pressure systems we enjoy from one week to the next.

Turns out that climate-change, so called because it sounds less like something we caused than global-warming and in the hope it will go away, is affecting the Arctic most of all. Here it is warming at three times the going rate, with Europe at twice the going rate.

This alteration to the status quo at the northern pole apparently allows a jetstream to split as illustrated, which in turn allows for a high-pressure dome to inhabit the continent as shown. Hence temperatures of around 38C in England and 41C in a city once considered delightful to be in during Springtime, or Paris.

I studied (when I could be bothered) what might be called Earth Science nowadays but Geography and Geology back then, and one of the few things that told on me was how the plant loves a positive feedback loop. They often occur over stretches of time, but can be flipped into one or other long-lasting state by, for instance, human interaction or more obvious actors like volcanoes or asteroids.

An easy one to remember for those of us living in urban heat-islands (as the bulk of humanity does), is use of air-conditioning units. These (a) consume fossil fuels at a distance to increase warming on a broader scale and (b) dump hot air externally so as to increase it on a local scale. Which persuades more of us to use them... and so on and so forth until the roundabout spins too fast as it did at Blackpool's Funhouse and we all fall off.

Good pub quiz question though for you:

    Q.    Which nation has the highest per-capita energy-use?

    A.    Qatar.

And ladies, gentlemen and the undecided that is because you cannot really function there without moving between air-conditioned homes, shops and workplaces in air-conditioned cars. All of which uses more fossil fuel beside that used to provide water that would otherwise be largely absent.

It's a party, like humanity, that can only go on for so long. Someone I know asked an American ex-pat of the sort who provided the means of extraction from the 1930 on that has allowed for all of this... how it might end?

'Back to the sand from which it came' apparently.

But then we're nothing but dust anyway, are we?

Ed. And you have a good weekend too...