In the Navee, you can put your mind at ease...

If you don't think individuals make a difference ~ and it's trendy not to in the UK ~ the results of a YouTuber's months-long effort to build a DIY ground-effect machine has seen the design being marketed as a commercial product... the world's first and naturally from China.

As that nice man from New Zealand points out on his channel it is what anyone who has watched ground-effect videos at 0200 a.m. (and who hasn't?) wants; although at this point in time you'd need to find circa $100,000.

That cost, as with EVs, will doubtless fall in time and this really is one more regime that electrification is making possible following decades of effort in which individuals as stupid as me have lost fortunes trying.

All the action in ground-effect is taking place in the US, China, South Korea and in fact Singapore... with rearguard efforts still underway in Germany and Russia where much of the foundational work took place.

In the UK if you found the wherewithal to do any of this without being shot down by taxes, regulation, scepticism or anywhere to test it without complaint... then no-one would be at all surprised.

In fact apart from the outline I built at scale and uploaded to Boat Design's website in the US, I see no evidence of anyone doing anything whatsoever in the field.

All in all though it adds another layer to China's much-vaunted strategy to dominate the electrification of transport both on land and in the air (inset).

We're trying to do something similar with drones in and around Swindon, but as you can imagine, with products developed elsewhere.*

* By NEROS, STARK et al.

Rescue Bot

This is what, in the first inst, rescued two downed crew from an Apache helicopter in the Straits made famous recently by US efforts to bring peace in our time. It is thus the first rescue at sea by robot, and a red-letter day for drone-lovers a world over.

Look at the RNLI's website in contrast and ~ despite constant pleas on morning TV to leave them a legacy ~ there is nairy a drone of any sort in sight. I suspect it is because, unlike the lady who founded the institution with only a rowing-boat and a sore arse, it is a lot more fun riding around the seaside in an expensive RIB than to sit in that lookout wearing a pair of Mark Zuckerlump's 3-D spectacles.

Ed. Do consider the author's bravery too, in view of the fact criticising the RNLI in the UK is up there with drowning kittens.

Route 66

With leftovers from what I used for a bath-panel I knock up a couple of 66% scale sections of the cats I figure we'll be able to float in the eBay bath-tub I've to set up in the garage, and I put one on the floor and ask it were it able to speak then what would it be saying to me?

For we're at a crossroads and I realise that as your captain, you're relying on me to bring you to safe harbour. What do we want from this, what do we REALLY want?

In fact what do we really really really want, zig-a-zig ah?

In WW2 if you'd ideas like bouncing bombs then the MoD would set up a task force and you'd all dress in a khaki coat and drive down to the south coast to build and to test it, to film it in 8mm, to shout 'hurrah!' and go for a pint of ale.

Nowadays you have to form a company for a government that only wants to screw the tax out of it like lemon juice, all presented on a plate... but that's not us, is it? We don't want to run a company, do we, at our age? We've no need of money, for we know life is essentially a vale of misery and the blog an illusory veil that merely postpones the inevitable date of our death.*

(I planned on a round-table here to discuss all of this, but couldn't find a round one and so had to make do with an oblong discussion instead.)

For at the end of the day, do we go down the thoroughbred drone route and confine ourselves to sailing from armchairs using headsets that only make Mark Zuckerlump even richer than the rest of us?

'No, no, no, no, no!' as Margaret Thatcher was most famous for saying beside 'Fuck the miners.'

For we want something we can sit in too, or at least something we can sit in and sail digitally together into a sunset. And so tho' I've drone designs up my metaphorical sleeve, we'll persist with the flat-cat but continue to refine it to the point where it is as feasible to chimpanzees as to you and I with our extra 1% of DNA.

So do join me now if you would in telling the cat we're not quite finished with it yet?

After all you can only get sectioned for it.

* Ed. He puts that on application forms.

iMigration

People in the UK have become quite exercised this week with issues of immigration, legal or illegal, which is worth looking at in the cold light of a laptop's screen over a flat white and a flat biscuit.

I can't recall whether it was travel writer Wilfred Thesiger or King Charles' favourite explorer Laurens Van der Post who wrote it, but I'm quite sure it was the legendary Colin Hilton who read it ~ the suggestion that the car and aeroplane were what had destroyed diversity in the world from one country to another.

Put that into context: Thesiger arrived once at a village in some or other desert-ified place and seeing his Land Rover the locals brought hay (or the equivalent) to feed it with, not having seen one before. Before you question whether that were possible in the twentieth century, consider that not that long prior when horses were first seen in the Americas the locals figured horse and man were together a species of human being... which would have delighted the ancient Greeks, who did the same to goats and bulls, albeit more often in stone.

Migration is therefore simply a networking issue to which we've to add smartphones as the cherry on the icing when it comes to lubricating the process. The lifestyle we most enjoy ~ and wish to continue enjoying ~ is thus the one that most persuades and enables people in moving vast distances from A to B.

The car, for instance, is King and governments like our own do all in their power to ensure that life is practically impossible without one; an effort replicated throughout the West.

The aeroplane is effectively subsidised and operates as a tax-free Nirvana in which a population is moved seamlessly in pursuit of work, leisure, friends and relatives. It's the Queen, of buckets and Spades.

The phone, which our lives revolve around, ensures that the comparative paradise the UK is can be communicated elsewhere in order that ever-expanding networks on the ground and in the air can be exploited to the greatest extent: the Jack, of all trades.

Given this, in view of the fact we're voluntarily fuelling the process, what politicians of any colour are able to do is likely to be as effective as King Canute in claiming to be able to defeat the tide: running around the room shouting 'Smash the gangs!' all they're really missing are the party-hats.

Here on the blog we're interested in the physical world moreso than the human, and the whole thing is fascinating only so far as its parallels with processes of osmosis or diffusion.

Isn't it, Gromit?

My friend who arrived via inflatable joined a weekend in the Peak District and seeing video of me at a parkrun or a drunken BBQ in the summer sun, who wouldn't want the chance to share a sausage with an influencer?

Nosing Over?

Courtesy of US VCs, Alton Towers and Boeing proudly present the didn't-ride-of-the-century... strap in, prepare to go nowhere and experience that nose-gear collapse in 6D!!!

Ed. Print off, pin up and piss off your line manager this Monday morning... I know you want to!

Financial Sweeteners

Two more UK companies in peril at the start of this week... Tate and Lyle set for a takeover by a US ingredients giant which in turn provides the sucrose for chocolate (Cadbury's) that also originated on these shores. The former began life in Liverpool in 1859, which is where much of the raw material was imported ~ fortunes further boosted by a licence to market the Swiss-German sugar-cube to the British to put in their tea.

Meantimes Airlander struggles with finances... barely surprising in circs in which so much more interest in terms of available capital lies in AI, space or preparations for war. Disappointing from the website for lighter-than-air lovers like me is the lack of technicalities: the only airship I've seen without the accompanying gaseous capacity unless I'm missing something?

We hope it succeeds, despite a recent nose-dive that amply demonstrated the fact that one thing about being lighter than air is a susceptibility to its whims in the form of gusts vertical and horizontal... from which I suffered often whilst heavier than air.

Ed. The lump was invented by a Moravian man in order to make life easier for his wife although he went bankrupt ~ which probably didn't ~ and was revived by mass production in Germany. A 'Sugar-cube Square-pants' key-ring is available on our merch page.

Re: Industrialise

And in an unlikely resurgence on the part of Detroit, here's a sell-out con with no burning man required. No mistake the aforementioned Y Combinator is increasingly selecting material bits over bytes, now we're waking up to the fact that nations producing little or nothing are on the road to perdition in an unstable world... which judging from the UK government's DMs, doesn't seem to be bothering anyone here.