Life a Lottery

Mentioned elsewhere that you're rarely going to remember more than a salient fact from any one book that you read and from Jon Ronson's book The Castle it is likely to be this.

In 2015 happy high-school girl Brandi Bragg's grandfather won the Powerball lottery and by 2017 she would be dead.

Ronson, who produced the podcast Things Fell Apart, suggests the reason is found among the researches of Emile Durkheim ~ founder of sociology ~ back in 1897.

He discovered that social change of any kind ~ even for the apparent better ~ does actually increase the rates of suicide. He attributed it to the fact a world swept from under people's feet that leaves them without ground-rules and a sense of purpose, suffering from a zombified condition he termed 'anomie'.

His supporters point at the collapse of communism in the East, following which the average age of life expectancy fell after 1989 by five years from 62 years to 57.

The thing about life is that whilst complaining about it, having to go to either factory to parade-ground leaves you with less time to dwell upon it.

At the same time people are no longer constrained by society rules: sound familiar?

All a question of being careful what you wish for, and the reason I'm happy to mix driving trucks with experiments in ground-effect.

You'd probably be suggesting that I never bring anything to a conclusion?

But then neither does life, with the exception of death.

Durkheim on a good day

HUGE #4

Here at Wickes DIY on the outskirts of Liverpool we can see the underlying basis of our craft-in-the-making. Do we remember what XPS stood for? Yes... Extruded Poly Styrene!

I've gone for this because it's the thickest they do and while greater thicknesses are out there, they are often laminated on just one side.

Also however it's a match for a common width of timber at 20mm that is practically three-quarters of an inch. The booms supporting the tailplane or stabiliser will be a square spar of this dimension, though what Daddy will bring home in the way of the lateral spars and hydro-skis will depend on what the store has to offer.

I did tell them what I thought, which was that they've STILL left out how good it is for building maritime drones besides tiling bathrooms.

HUGE #3

We saw this a few days ago and what I would say is that ~ as the great Bob Symes suggested ~ inventors tend to succeed at designs they keep re-visiting. This, a plan view of something that looks more practical altogether, is a starting point as we get to thinking about dimensions and off-the-shelf materials.

In fact though those hydro-skis extend almost eight feet forward as per this draft, I would like to cut that in half for then we can use raw material no longer than that at each stage of the game. Eight feet or 2440mm is a broadly available spec worldwide and stems from the fact that four-by-eight feet sheets are about as much as you'd be able to muster without being blown away on the way home.

Searching the 'net, ground-effect like EVs and flying taxis has come of age with the advances enjoyed in electrical motors and storage.

And we want to be a part of it, don't we?

The foreplane seen here we can omit too, because firstly there's no need for it and secondly we've no sheet material left from the template to spare.

HUGE #2

We must first dust off the archive amongst my patent filings...

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search?q=Colin%20Hilton

...and beside marvelling at how much of my life was wasted in fruitless pursuits, appearing as a third entry is broadly speaking what we are aiming at.

Appearances however are deceptive, which is good because this looks fairly crap.

Nonetheless it will form the basis of what we shall use for building at a smaller scale altogether than of late.

It stems from the fact that the mono-ski version (featured at the top of the search list) literally wouldn't stand up without the support of out-riggers that I didn't want.

There have been ~ besides sail-planes ~ aircraft with out-riggers or stabilisers for support, but they have been few and far between. Which tells you something.

In fact I can think of only the U2 spy-plane that is most famous for being shot down and the Hawker Harrier that went on to more success altogether... though what we have to replace it invariably uses a conventional undercarriage.

And so now you know.

HUGE #1

I mean, as Rick Astley famously sang, you know the rules and so do I.

And thus it all starts with a back-of-the-envelope sketch, and this literally was the back of an envelope.

It was a letter from British Gas saying my meter needs replacing because it is worn out, but actually it is because they will be penalised by the government if they don't force people to use 'smart' metres. As these are about as 'smart' as the government however I won't be letting that happen.

What we're aiming to do here though is to produce a maritime drone which can be scaled for human carriage, and which is so simple to construct that people will kick themselves on their death-beds for not having done so.

If that's at all possible on your death-bed.

Accordingly it is designed around that universal desideratum in the shape of a single unitary sheet of whatever, which in our case will be laminated foam board.

All will become evident as things proceed!

Backer-board to the Future

Look, am just back from Istanbul where we thought we could scale things up on the Sea of Marmara, didn't we, but there's no good news on that front and I needed be the first to tell you.

For we've been building our boats in these laminated foams produced in Germany to suit our peculiar needs besides those of builders everywhere, except it would appear in Türkiye.

This is simply a reflection of the fact they build houses the way we used to, as there is an ample supply of skilled labour over there so they can afford to build bathrooms with brick walls and plaster, prior lavish decoration with ceramic or marble tiles.*

Here and in the US in contrast it's all about timber-frame walls and plasterboard as a basis, or tile backer-board going forward. Ironically it was pioneered in Germany too, a place where to the best of my knowledge they also prefer traditional method.

So I'm disappointed, your disappointed, we're all disappointed.

Then again life is short at the best of times and shorter when you get to my age and so we've to consider how best to use time we have left on planet Earth in pursuit of ground-effect.

Thus we shall draw together all that we've learned over the years from among these pages that already rival Homer's Odyssey in breadth and depth... and work together to create a craft that is half-watercraft, half-aircraft and one for the ages.

We'll call it HUGE or Hilton's Universal Ground-Effect project.

(And because it'll be huge.)

Ed. Marmara is Turkish for marble, and that from here was go-to building material for practically anything you can think of in classical Greece and Rome... but did they have backer-board?

There Will Be an Answer, Lucy Letby.

If you too feel obliged to do more about the disproportionate conviction of nurses under our criminal justice (sic) system, feel free to use the artwork here brought to you by the NHS, BBC, ChatGPT and me... in that order.

Badges, tees, stickers, tats, projections on the Houses of Parliament?

Ed. Who let the docs out, who, who, who, who, who?