Dash Cam

It appeared a man on a unicycle was set to win the women's 800m final at those European Athletics championships in Birmingham this week; but it's a cameraman tasked with close-ups that are beyond drones or else our old friend the spider-cam.

Watching it, I wonder if you like me found your mind straying toward the Gulf War?

Dean Kamen pioneered the self-balancing electric unicycle which he went on to call the Segway. As I recall it was developed as 'Project Ginger' and demo'ed to tech bros like Bezos and Gates in secret. They all agreed it would change means of transport on a revolutionary scale, which just shows that brilliant people can be as stupid as the rest of us.

But move on, and Segway would be sold to an ex-coal-miner from Leeds, who made his money developing those cages ~ or baskets ~ filled with rocks and used to build defences in places like Iraq. Sadly he died reversing his Segway off a cliff whilst making way for a dog-walker. History doesn't recall the dog-walker in question, but he has to be up there with the 'man from Porlock' in the English annals.

The Segway would be evolved into a more compact version altogether by someone based in the UK who co-founded Y Combinator in the US ~ and this (unless it is the Australian equivalent) is what allows us to enjoy the efforts of local athlete Keely Hodgkinson at Birmingham.

I can't leave off the reflection however without recalling my own efforts in the 1980s to build a unicycle; lost to posterity because digital photography was yet to escape Kodak's clutches. It was not electronically stabilised, however, and proved a dismal failure.

I like to think there was a life lesson there, but if there is one at all it is not to be so stupid.

Float, Float... Off

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what extremely thin mono-hulls want to do if left to their own devices. Vowed I'd never be back here stood in the anaerobic sludge that comprises the nearest pond, but here we are. The exercise prompts a number of questions, of which the most pressing has to be, Why am I wasting my life like this?

I have to add a couple of sizeable battery-packs that each weigh around 2.50 kilos, just to set the mono-ski at an angle of around forty-five degrees... hopeless. Issue as much as anything is the timber content of the ski, which produces some 0.75kg of buoyancy and at a considerable remove, which gives it greater leverage.

What we would need to do is sub it with PVC strip of around 2mm by 100m section, which can be sourced in Burnley for around £11 per 2400mm, although the point is that in prototyping you have to choose your battles. The density of spruce is of the order of 0.50 that of water, that of PVC nearer 1.50g per cubic centimetre.

For the fact is, the dis-benefits of mono-skis are positive benefits when it comes to catamarans, which relish the idea of lighter and more buoyant skis for example and for whom floating upright comes with the territory. There is a literal tipping point if close-coupled pontoons are involved as we intend, but this will be addressed by the wings that are extended to either side.

Well done me though, and well done the waders!

Patently Clever

But none of this has been getting boats built, so let's recall the benefits of putting a maquette or model together for the purpose of producing drawings that would grace the pages of a patent specification. And here below, a delightful render from my old friend and erstwhile technical drawing expert Richard Bache at Carimet.

During the process of mocking up the cat, I got to wondering whether it might ever be feasible to build a drone that may be racked, an almost two-dimensional product.

The one advantage that batteries have as a means of powering airships for instance is that they remain constant in weight. And as for boats, it means they can be used as ballast. We've all seen glass bottles bobbing upright at the seaside, the question being whether sufficient ballast might allow for a mono-ski to float upright prior to take-off with its motors and avionics in particular clear of the waterline.

Bit of a rabbit-hole to go down and means donning the waders again, but someone's got to do it, haven't they?

Ed. Not sure why my thumbnail looks like that, but I've a manicure Friday anyway.

Skyweaver

Always thought this would be a good idea, but thinking and doing are two different things altogether as a casual place at my own life will testify. But the DARPA heavy-lift challenge has thrown up any number of beautiful innovations and this amongst them.

What has been encouraging too is that invariably innovators have drawn upon the possibilities of electrical motors or jet-turbines, eschewing IC engines altogether so far as I can see; even the relatively compact rotary engines that are produced here and do power aerial drones worldwide requiring range or endurance.

And that is probably the key, not much of either being required for this challenge, instead a requirement to move heavy stuff a short distance across what would in reality be a battlefield of sorts.

This one though flies a couple of aircraft in circles so as to put the line connecting them under tension, whereupon they both climb in order to raise the payload that is fixed to the vertical line to the ground. Thereafter they are co-ordinated so they can move in one direction or another.

It is all software driven and way beyond my pay grade, so well done!

Eh Aye...

There's considerable debate out there as to whether these are human, robotic or AI; all I know is that I'd like one for Christmas.

Livestream*

We go now live, now that funding has been withdrawn from the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, to Astronomer Royal Colin Hilton's back garden for an epic view of the 65% eclipse that won't be coming this way again until 1990. Direct views of the sun are NASA's ball-park really, and so here we have bounced an image of the sun off a pair of concave make-up mirrors and onto a black-glass set of bathroom scales. Finally we view all of this through a pair of sunglasses from my Chinese neighbour, who now (as she has long suspected) thinks I'm a trannie.

The Astronomer Royal comments: 'Basically this was shit, but an excuse for tinnies in the back garden. I was in London for the 1999 full Monty: birds shut up, multiple shadows of leaves, cappuccino, nutty Danish pastry. Basically if it's not advertised as 95% or more, it's like a cunt in a BMW on high beam with a headlight out.'

* Ed. Of golden bats-piss, sadly.

Istanbullish

Back when I 'served' you all at London's Heathrow airport it was the busiest in the world, but after I left it went into severe decline and so has since been overtaken as Europe's busiest by Istanbul (above). It might change with a third runway, although as this was first considered eighty years ago your breath should not be held. We do have the consolation IST was designed by London architects... ours being a service economy.

Actually LHR once had a third runway, the crosswind 23 that I used on windier days altogether. Without an ILS, it required a sidestep that would put the fear of God into most airline pilots ~ as it did me.

Heathrow as it looked when I was still there