Four Funerals and a Wedding

Mark passed last week on his 51st birthday. He'd run with us on a Thursday evening and over a pint ~ to restore his weight moreso than his spirits ~ divulged the fact it had only been possible in view of morphine prescribed for a back pain turning out to be more than practically anything you'd have preferred instead.

People dying on a birthday turns out to be statistically significant, but attributable to excesses on the day of one sort or another. But there is a suggestion that there is a form of 'holding out' to, well, mark a day of greater significance.

Either way, people furnish our lives and it's like walking in one day to find the couch is no longer there. John Lennon was quoted as saying that life was what happened when you were planning other things; although a more meaningful quote would be to say that death is what happens whilst you're planning other things.

It does though leave one wondering why we bother getting up each day at all, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. But I guess in continuing to run ~ or walk ~ until he'd no longer the strength to do so, was an object lesson in that regard?

Seen here as part of a group of runners plying their passion across the South West Lancashire plain on a summer's evening not long since.

Heavy Metal

Spotted this on the outbound and parked the rig on the return ~ an object lesson on why not to loiter down the nearside of a truck, though surprising how many drivers are content to do so for miles at a time.

Crash investigation is big on TV currently, and here it would seem the car has been braking, with the doors being opened like a can of sardines.

And with all done, a pic of a container that's not going any place anytime soon, with a loose load making light of two-millimetre corrugated steel with brakes hit hard.

As a teen I collected an engine for a pick up and strapped it to the tail-gate, only for it to break loose in the same circs... albeit without conspicuous damage like this.

Containers are the 'black box' of haulage. Often sealed, there's no knowing what's inside or how it's been restrained, if at all. Their weight is known, for shipping lines need it. No-one was harmed, incidentally, in the making of this blog-post.

Dickensian Britain

A fellow in my running group divulges the fact we've re-introduced telegraph poles with which to furnish the communications network, presumably because it proves to be cheaper, easier and in many ways more long-lasting than burying cables under the ground where they've to compete with every other utility.

I'm all for it, being altogether the more eco-friendly solution on the one hand beside restoring a nostalgic feel to town and country. The lowest portion of pole features a coat of bitumen to guard against the deleterious effects of canine urine, and there's a label too and a set of steps within the reach of a ladder.

My childhood was peopled with telegraph poles, and on one occasion walking home from primary school and desperate as a canine to relieve myself, I was letting rip on the pole at the same moment one among my teachers drove past and clocked me. I think it merited a mention next day, but in truth it is something I'd largely forgotten until such time decades later that BT restored their fortunes.

Ed. Miserable bastards will be suggesting that the pole did not stretch to Dickens' period, though in fact the telegraph was invented in 1855 and was rapidly slung along railway lines (internet 2.1, internet 2.0 having been canals) on such poles as these. The author's last work appeared fifteen years subsequent, and this author nearly visited his childhood home in Portsmouth recently, except that it was closed. 

HM Costguard

We can't leave the south coast (although in reality we have) without reflecting upon the SAR or Search and Rescue aspect of the UK, can we? (Ed. actually we could).

I learned to fly at RAF Finningley, which had been a nuclear V-bomber base but by then hosted navigation training in the form of the HS125 or Dominie; along with an SAR service comprising Sea Kings beside Westland Whirlwinds and Wessexes. I was offered a ride in the middle one, held out for a flying lesson cancelled due weather and thus missed out on both... the story of my life, if not those of One Direction.

Since then SAR in the UK has effectively been privatised and offered to Bristow, whose founder appeared at a mess dinner at the same airbase; speaking afterward about the ongoing wave of labour disputes back then in ways that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush. Bristow was though a UK success story and like all of the others, was sold to the US. So as with all else, we are paying foreign shareholders for what we used to do ourselves.

What caught my ear recently was news that the people running the service have asked crews ~ the dangling ones and not the pilots ~ to provide services for free, presumably inspired by the RNLI or lifeboat service. Difference being though that the elderly want to leave their savings to the latter, but few would consider doing so for the former.

The way forward would appear to be more extensive use of aerial drones like the 'cam-copter' from Austria seen above. They've four of them now, and prices aren't quoted as ever with taxpayer-funded enterprises, but suffice to say the Thai Navy spent over $18 million investing in a couple (tho' they come with a broader package of add-ons).

The argument for maritime drones meanwhile, without wanting to appear the sort of single-issue nut-job that people's cyberspace, is that extended range aerial drones are likely to remain prohibitively expensive in future ~ albeit a fraction of the cost of using the sort of helicopter seen alongside ~ whereas a network of drones loitering at sea provides broader coverage at a fraction of the cost.

And they could, anticipating the counter-argument that they don't provide a birds-eye view, deploy an aerial drone of their own... self-deploying types already already on the rise.

Figuratively and literally.

Strip Show #9

Am tee-ing up the first keel here, although prior to doing so I've had to shave some 20mm off the forward end of each deck to suit. In the US when you're buying 4' by 8' sheets of anything they are likely to be the stock measure. The use of metric tho' in different parts of the world means that there are endless variations on the perfect match of 1220 x 2440mm.

I've used the backer-board (aptly) to back the keels, whereas the decks are topped with ply. The latter conforms to that conversion metric, the former does not. In fact it measured 600 x 1200mm at the get-go, hence the required adjustments this morning. Elsewhere I have seen sheets 2500mm long by 1250mm wide, so what I do is to treat it like a box of chocolates, as Forrest Gump would.

Go With the Flowcopter

This thing is gaining traction and rightly so, although off the bat it looks unwieldy for a drone with distributed electrical propulsion (DEP)... and that's because it isn't.

The motor looks to be from Hirth, a venerable German company that dates back I think to circa WW1 but more recently turned to powering ultralight aircraft with 2-stroke motors.

Details are sketchy, but so far as I can see it drives a hydraulic pump that in turn is distributing pressure to each of the motors; except that those motors are not your regular pressure-driven actuators but digitally-controlled pumps themselves derived from the aerospace industry.

I can tell you that whichever airliner you fly, 'hydraulics' is a sizeable chapter in the manuals as it conventionally provides for practically anything that moves around its outline: landing gear, flight control surfaces, every other surface, generators etc.

These actuators are relatively cheap, decidedly light and super-responsive as you'd expect from a century or more of development. Turning back to drones, which to be able to fly require rapid adjustments to the RPMs of the propellers in each corner, it would appear that this is what they do viz. adjust the underlying hydraulic pressure supplied at source.

It's not the most efficient and pales when compared to a simple drive-shaft; but it is actually an arrangement that is everywhere in the modern world. Look at the fields, and those tractors with skinny legs and wheels to negotiate the crops use systems like this, as do any number of cranes manoeuvring containers around the docks.

What it does here is to provide a reliable means that far exceeds the state of the art when it comes to battery-come-motor solutions. Effectively the only way DEP allows for the range and endurance as such a vehicle as this is to turn it from a helicopter into an aeroplane for the cruise and back again for the landing.

Which is altogether more complicated to do than what you see here.

So well done. I'd offer to do their PR but am too busy doing nothing.

Face Off... and On Again

In a moment of epic import on a par with that of Odysseus, I too have returned after ten years sojourn: but to Facebook if not Ithaca. Needless to say the profile needed updating to reflect the advancing years ~ but not overly so ~ and I have settled for this delightful AI render.

I asked it to drop the 'northern trucker' vibe for a look that says 'Here I am in my vineyard in the Napa Valley on a summer's evening entertaining billionaire friends and enjoying the fruits of my labour designing and building not so much rockets for Mars as bits of polystyrene I can sit on out at sea.'

As a young man about London Town I'd be told I had the look of Rick Astley about me, although nowadays ~ as I just saw in his book ~ he still retains a quiff whereas I do not. Nonetheless you can be whomever you want to be on social media!

The alternative being that seen below, which frankly still has its hat in the ring.