Infinity Wail

If you want a practical example of how AI ups productivity, in times past I'd load a model on a trailer and drive to a studio in Liverpool where they have an infinity wall to provide an all-white background; whereas now I ask ChatGPT to clean up the image so Daddy can use it on his blog.

It's good news for me and you, but people running studios could be going the same way as the whalebone corset-makers.*

Not that we can wholly trust AI, which as you can see from the spot-the-difference competition here, has added screws to the main-deck that don't actually exist.

I know where it got the idea from, because the fore-deck bears a simple cap of thin ply that had to be screwed to the underlying timber, and ChatGPT has decided that it likes them... and that the main-deck would benefit from a similar treatment.

Accordingly I logged back into the prompt and typed, 'Get this right bots, I'm boss around here, you do that again and you'll never work in this laptop again.'

I'll be woken and slapped round the face with a MacBook: being told now they are the masters, jah?

* Ed. Whalebone corsets are available on our merch pages.

Flydroplane

Well that's what we've been working on, isn't it Gromit, and if we are ever to cross over between high-speed planing on water and ground-effect flight above its surface then it's likely to look more like this than not. Probably a best use of foam laminate tile backing-board you're likely to come across, and something I have put out there in this month of October by way of a show-and-tell and which I shall double in size during the month of November, prior to powering up for testing come December.

It weighs just 2.50 kilos ~ although those are not real motors swinging those 11" propellers ~ and is around 18" wide and 67" tall stood on end. There's a panel that forms an inclined ramp beneath the forward end of the main-deck, which it time we shall use as a foot-rest to accommodate a seat on its upper side. We can use what we have here for static flotation tests, principally to determine the best location for the motor... which we have the flexibility to add to the rear of the main-deck or else the leading edge of the tail-assembly.

I may take it up to Coniston speed week at the start of next month, as I suggested to you some time back; but then again I might not be bothered. Fuel's getting little cheeper nowadays, which is one reason I design such things as these. Fact I would like going forward for people to adopt such data as kt/kW (knots per kilowatt) else kt/kg (knots per kilogram) when it comes to the speed of such things, to emphasise how little energy should need to be required by fast watercraft.

Because the way we build now for movement on air, land or water seems designed to maximise use of resource and emissions of carbon, even if we kid ourselves that it doesn't.

Proud of what I see though: proof it might yet be that I'm not altogether useless.

Ed. Cockpit an empty bottle of Prosecco meantime that I call 'the cockpit of shame'. 

Alma Mater-Fuckers

Am invited as an alumnus to go online at bit.ly in order to enable me to be kept in touch.

Listening to the budget delivered in parliament yesterday as I drove down the A1, I couldn't help thinking that the Labour Party ~ not unlike the Democrats in the US ~ was a party born out of people who got their hands dirty at work, yet now is inhabited by people with clean hands and a regular manicure.

Thus driver of any sort does not make the cut, despite the fact there are pushing two million of them working in the UK; which means more people drive for a living than any other type of people living here, period. In short your world does not go round unless a steering-wheel does.

In contrast, I could probably invite the UK's vicars, influencers and writers over for cocktails without us spilling into the conservatory. The mess we are in (although I exclude NMITE in Hereford from all this) is in large part the result of clean-handed lawyer Tony Blair deciding in the 1990s that the only reasonable course of action for young people was a degree... of any sort whatsoever. We've a million 'neets' in the country ~ neets an abbreviation for doing fuck all ~ and wonder why.

So I've emailed the link to the University of Sheffield ~ which didn't have the balls to fail me, whereas I would have done ~ to ask whether my money's good enough for them?

And what about grave-diggers, sex-workers or airline pilots... in order of respectability?

Ed. He is having a bad day, isn't he? Thank goodness for Frasier.

The Ski Lodge

Can't believe I've never seen it before but episode 14 of series 5 aired February of 1998 has to be the one that ~ if you see no other ~ you have to watch. Combines epic writing, performance and production with the finest tradition of British farce; high praise from a place that gave you Brian Rix and 'No Sex Please, we're British'. The actress beside Frasier? Cynthia Montagne... I'd love to have scaled those peaks.

Ed. the author divides his time between driving trucks, building boats, blogging and re-runs of Frasier.

UK Budget Briefing

Broadly speaking, people here are disappointed over its lack of scope and ambition.

This is unfair, for the West is in decline and in economic terms ~ with Mrs Thatcher ever prone to comparing it to a domestic economy ~ countries like the UK could be compared to a film-star past their best, with a maxed-out credit card. In my time I have marvelled in the past at how cheap the living was and how slow the trains; in Poland I've lived and worked and seen why the best part of a million Poles moved here to work and earn from the 1990s on... until now, with both economies striding ahead in comparison to ours.

In either case, those considered to be among the architects of each turnaround do agree that ~ absent a crisis ~ such developments are impossible, principally when it comes to selling them to the electorate. Accordingly in bloated economies like those of the US and UK, instead what transpires is an expansion of regulated complexity of the sort all civilisations tend to suffer prior to their collapse. 

The US is shielded by dint of manufacture and export, which invariably is a way out of crisis; people rarely realising that software that we use provided invariably by the 'tech bros' we are all asked to loathe is itself a form of manufacture. What it mainly benefits from is the ease of distribution.

Accordingly the UK is in hoc like the alco with the credit card bill: to the banks in the form of the bond markets, which determine those economies appearing to be those with the least credit risk. Accordingly politicians are unable to do anything but tinker and regulate in an effort to appear more relevant among a public no longer seeing them as such.

Dominic Cummings, one of the best politicians who never was, puts this down to the fact that two things which affect public service as such are firstly the fact that those with talent now go elsewhere ~ where they can make more of a difference ~ beside the fact that ministers used to bear responsibility for their actions whereas now they don't... generally they are shuffled on to another post.

Poland itself was privatised on a scale that would have delighted Mrs Thatcher, and it has clearly worked, although as the current PM proved close by in Manchester it generally requires talent in both private and public spheres. Outright capitalism will not work absent that public service interest ~ as the trust cases in the US itself has so often proven ~ but then neither does an outright public sector.

Probably the foremost reason in the case of the latter is that throughout the world people in national or local government service are effectively unable to be fired no matter how piss-poor their performance ~ and I'm thinking of the property manager in West Lancs local council here, to take it from the general to the particular. It's for this reason that even in China the most difficult academic tests (in truth, mostly of rote-learning) are accrued to entry into the civil service: a role popularly called the 'iron rice-bowl' to reflect how it is viewed as a job for life.

But how does any of this relate to drones? Well as Cummings puts it to that same parliamentary committee, the reason defence procurement here isn't all it could be is that information from Ukraine on how wars are won nowadays is suppressed by a Civil Service largely devoid of talent so as to protect ingrained interests in what little remains of the UK's defence capability ~ principally BAE Systems for the occasions we don't buy off-the-shelf from the US.

Here's an interesting thing though. I've been ghosted by the NWAA (as by most, in fairness) or the NorthWest Aerospace Alliance... although I was largely there in the first place for the Christmas ball. You have to wonder whether this would be down to its principal source of funding and credibility. Which would probably be the local employer, BAE Systems.

Ed. Well he's got that off his chest, hasn't he?

Engine Out Drill

We've seen from among these posts how there have been steam locomotives which served a century with what was once British Railways, and how the venerable B-52 bomber is closing on that tenure with an alloy frame in place of steel. Now however in a world devoted to preserving the planet as best we can, we're scrapping airliners faster than you'd trade your car.

The explosion of civil aviation that I myself was a part of over in China is combined in a perfect storm with a lack of shop-floor technicians to produce a shortage of jet engines worldwide. It in turn means that new aircraft rolled off the production line might not go into service, but be flown to where its engines can be removed so as to be fitted to another to keep it flying.

On the other hand, when airlines go bust airframes as little as a few years old that ironically bear the name 'Neo' are knocked down for maybe five million dollars once shorn of their motive power: at which rate we'll all be able to afford glamping pods from fuselages.

Aluminium is known as the energy metal for the electrical energy required to smelt it, and in the way carbon emitted by making an EV outweighs that ever likely to be emitted by your banger ~ carbon stemming from a cycle of 'make-it-and-break-it' likely outweighs the ecological benefit from those more efficient engines.

It's a mad mad mad mad world... but love it while it lasts.

Watch petrol-heads on YouTube and you'll soon learn how green tick-boxes require more power from smaller auto-engines than ever, in turn making them decidedly life-limited, prone to failure and difficult to maintain ~ a situation replicated in the newest generation of geared and super-sized jet engines that are subject to more recalls than ever. 

Big Mach

Kitchens by Wren, aircraft by Bath university

Part of my off-and-on series about young people doing great things in Great Britain, these ones are trying to break the world record for fastest jet-powered RC aircraft, qualifying that with '3-D printed' because there must have been military drones or else test-programs involving radio-controlled jets capable of such speeds? One that springs to mind would be the 707 crashed in order to test a non-inflammable fuel which turned out to be as flammable as ever... there's a crash-test by NASA in the picture below, which might actually be it.

The first flight of the latest (and final) prototype achieved speeds approaching 300 m.p.h. with 550 m.p.h being the target. A problem they have is finding a test-range large enough, for a turning radius for any size of aircraft depends only on speed. Keeping this one-metre model in sight has therefore imposed G-forces (11) that few pilots will ever suffer, bending the prototype wings beyond expectation.

They started as we do nowadays with electric power in the form of ducted fans prior stepping up via turbines to 300 Newtons. I don't like Newtons, so we'll call it 65 pounds of thrust. In context this means the model will likely achieve unity of thrust and weight and vertical climb capability. Piloted aircraft took fifty years to do it (the Starfighter but the F-15 Eagle the first regular), then it shows what drones combined with both modern material and modern people can do.

So keep calm, and carry on popping whatever pills you're on.

707s and steel fences proven by NASA not to mix