Using more of the fruit

The BBC reports that Swiss chocolate researchers have found a way to use the cocoa fruit and not just the cocoa seeds. The article drags in irrelevant self-flagellation about slavery, and somehow manages to miss the fly in the ointment--the cocoa fruit rots quickly. Harvesting that would demand refrigeration on site and in its delivery, and the concentration process would have to also be in-country. The latter industry would be a good thing for the producing country, but providing reliable electricity to the farms might be challenging.

Anyhow, kudos to the researchers!

Chickens of the world, keep warm!

The chicken bomb was supposedly not an April Fools joke. Blue Peacock was a serious proposal to put nuclear mines in Germany in case of Soviet invasion, and somebody (I have to believe the proposal was tongue in cheek), proposed that to keep the delicate nuclear mine working in the winter, it be kept warm with live chickens.

Raconteur Press

Raconteur Press is a new business whose current focus is science fiction and fantasy anthologies, rather like the pulp magazines of old. The term "pulp," derived from the inexpensive paper the old magazines used, now refers to a style of writing--fast paced and entertaining. The press has published two books a month for the past year, with anthology themes like space marines, goblin market, moggies in space, wyrd west, and The Super Generation. I need to read the other stories in that last book.

I find writing to spec difficult, but a useful discipline. I've tried several stories for them before--one story wound up so far out of spec that I threw more words at it and tried to make a novella out of it (it's currently being beta-read).

Keep it clear

With a hat tip to Sippican Cottage, a story about how bad display design crashed a destroyer. Control of the engines and rudders can reside in several different machines on the bridge. Critical little bits of information are found in teeny tiny boxes -- the user interface is hair-raisingly bad. As for example, whether the propellers run at the same speed (you can turn if they don't; helpful if the rudder isn't turning you fast enough). As for example, whether your station has command and if so, of what (turns out that transfer of control goes one propeller at a time!). I'd want a big bright star, or sharply different color, to show what I've got control of, and something a bit more dramatic--like a big band connecting the thrust indicators--to tell whether the thrusters are in sync or not.

The ProPresenter our church uses for slides and videos puts a yellow rim around the image of whatever the current slide being projected is. I don't care for this; it should be as subtle as a brass band. (Maybe it's configurable--I need to complain.)

In the heat of the moment, you want your context switching to be as clear as possible. I know, I know--practice practice practice. The Navy has young sailors with a limited amount of practice time, the church has every-other-week volunteers, and whoever painted the traffic lines on the street forgot that you can't see over the hill and out-of-towners won't guess that there's a left turn on the other side.

Drone defense

Some of the video from Ukraine suggests that drones are getting to be quite effective weapons. If they were quieter, I suspect the criminal cartels would be using them for assassinations already--loiter and attack the witness/judge/competitor.

Some of the videos show them capable of entering shelters through windows or passages. And, of course, they're good at watching for things, whether they have offensive capacity or not.

OK, how do you stop them? You're with your buddies in a truck and hear/spot something headed your way. Shooting won't do much unless you're super-super-accurate. Net guns... they look nice, but I wonder how practical those are in the field. Hide behind trees...

Pros and amateurs try their hands at downing drones in this video (which has a very annoying long commercial in the middle). Some of the methods are more amusing than useful.

One of the methods tried is the vortex ring cannon, which can pack more of a punch than you might expect. For sufficiently large vortex cannons, of course. Of course, you could also try using guns adapted (with blanks) for the purpose. The article cited talks about "knock-down effect" on humans (mediocre), but it might be suitable for trying to knock down lighter flying objects.

Copter-type drones are somewhat at risk for vortex ring state, where instead of pushing the air down the propellers push air down and around and up and back through the blades again, in a "circle" that doesn't provide lift. The article explains how designers have been mitigating this. However, if a strong vortex ring hits a quadcopter, it should provide some impact, some twisting, and maybe cause one or more of the propellers to get into VortexRingState.

If the equipment is just an adapter on the end of your rifle (and maybe blank rounds, maybe not), it might be easy to carry, cheap(*), and relatively quick to field. The vortex ring is a lot bigger than a rifle bullet, so your chances of hitting are better.

There are obvious possible issues--would it destabilize the drone enough with an average hit? would the ring move fast enough to reliably hit a moving target (80 m/sec??? with my sloppy estimates for vorticity)? and can soldiers/civilians aim well enough, especially at night? Oh, and is the effective range good enough?

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(*) "Cheap" would probably be the kiss of death, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I found an Army report. The Wikipedia image of the vortex ring was out of a 40mm barrel, and they developed 100kpsi in their chamber, using a "rupture disk" to get the cleanest possible flow. They did not design the test system for rapid fire. So this probably wouldn't be a snap-on, but a separate (hopefully light) blunderbuss. They found that C4 wasn't great--the ring momentum was low--so they converged on "exotic" explosives like Red Dot and Bulls Eye (up to 30g). They were getting about 160'/sec.

Their aim, so to speak, was attacking humans, who are typically less fragile than drones in flight. The idea might work. I assume that with lower pressures the final velocity would be proportionately lower, but fluid dynamics is messy.

Windows experience

One of our machines is a Windows 10 machine, with a SSD system disk and a hard drive for everything else. After each reboot, it would quickly start slowing down. The task manager said the D: hard drive was getting 100% use, and click/click/click was heard in the land. I tried a bunch of recommended cures (balked at registry edits). The one that worked was chkdsk.exe D: /f /r , though it took a couple of hours.

So some kinds of disk problems can cause infinite loops? Interesting. (I'm using Ubuntu at the moment.)

Making air travel an adventure

Air Maroc damages runway at Roberts International Airport: "the plane landed on both rear wheels, but shortly after, the left wheel veered into a muddy grass patch adjacent to the runway. This caused damage to several runway lights, which are already sparse at RIA." ... "the pilot did not report the incident to the control tower or airport authorities" ... "passengers on board the aircraft were unaware of the incident" ... "before its scheduled departure, significant debris was found on the runway" ... "aircraft remain grounded until further notice."

The photo shows no obvious damage to the landing gear, but lots of grass and dirt in its mechanism. Something invisible is probably bent.

Yes, the pilot's failure to report is bad, but the passengers not noticing is also rather startling--the plane ran off the runway and destroyed some lights; is that just something you expect with Air Maroc?

Stars

The boys' room used to have a heavy bunk bed, and desk and cabinet (part of a set we were given) and a bookcase (everyplace has to have a bookcase). After we'd set it up, I bought some glow in the dark star stickers, made a list of the main stars in the southern sky, and got on a stepstool, tape measure in hand, to try to put the southern sky in place. Our eldest was fond of the southern constellations--my wife had made him a shirt with them painted on.

I got one quadrant of the ceiling done, and realized that my tape measure hadn't always been perfectly square. I wasn't about to try to take them all down to start over, and what with one thing and another they never did get more than one quadrant's worth of stars on the ceiling. (Once furniture was in the room, standing on a stool to measure got hazardous.)

They moved out years ago, and the room became my wife's office, with a big desk, lots of bookcases, and a small spare bed for just in case. Then came the covid and I snarfed the office to work from home in. (It has a nice view of the garden--well, not an exciting view in the winter or early spring.) Sometimes I move the sewing stuff to rest on the bed, and look at the ceiling. The glow in the dark aspect grew too feeble to see decades ago, and the stars were pretty much the same color as the ceiling when not glowing. The only way to excite them these days is with a UV flashlight. But I know they're there, and know that I never finished them.

There are a lot of unfinished things in my life. Some, like the stars, are moot now. Still.

No regrets

We drove past a pyramid-shaped restaurant (we guessed that was what it was) quite a few times, but it was too far from home to serve as a supper destination and inconvenient to our travel the rest of the times, so we never saw the inside of the place: " "Pyramid of the Nile - Egyptian Fine Dining Experience!" (the menu was American cuisine, such as Pharaoh's prime rib)."

It may still be for sale, though there's a huge pile of gravel on the site now.

I probably didn't miss much, though if it had been close by we might have given it a try just for fun. The lighting was probably terrible, though--those windows aren't big.

automatic dingus

In a Bill Nye story about a one room schoolhouse, the narrator refers to "a new self-cocking weepon that had an automatic dingus for throwing out the empty shells."(*)

I wondered at that a bit, but never looked up the details until now. The automatic pistol was invented in 1892, and Remarks was printed in 1887, which means the story itself was written well before the automatic was invented. However, something that wasn't quite "self-cocking" a double-action revolver(**) did have "an automatic dingus for throwing out the empty shells": the von Steiger auto-ejecting revolver. No, I'd never heard of it before. This was 1870's, so the dates work.

It used a little lever that, on cocking the hammer, slipped under the rim of the empty case just right of the live round, and as the hammer flew forward the lever snapped the empty case back out (originally right at the shooter :-( ). It worked, but was pretty complicated to make.

(*) A writer's group has been going over a story that includes a one-room schoolhouse scene, and that brought Nye's work back to mind.

(**) Brain freeze. Single actions had to be hand-cocked, of course.

Where did they sleep?

On the Yamato sailors slept in hammocks. The netting variety of hammock from the Caribbean became quite popular around the world, though canvas beds were apparently known in Europe for millenia, and possibly used in English ships before Columbus. How the Japanese sailors slept before Western contact didn't turn up on a quick search.

Bunks seem like the obvious way to store sleeping crewmen if the vessel is tall enough and you haven't developed hammocks, and even if you use them you'll need vertical space between them--not everybody can sleep at once.

Viking longboats had space on deck for the men if they took the sail down and tied it over them for a tent. Triremes, though--there wasn't a lot of room on those things. If they hauled in all the oars there might be room to lie down between benches, but probably this guy had the right idea: "Usually under blankets around their campfires on the beach." Non-warships would have more space--you could sleep lying on top of cargo, perhaps, and being taller in the water might make part of the deck available. Jonah was asleep in the hold. Coasters with short trips still have people crowding the decks to sleep however they can/dare.

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Another rabbit-hole: what became of Viking longships? The Mediterranean ships were taller and stronger, making it hard/impossible to assault them from a longship, and aspects of that design were quickly adapted, making the classic longship obsolete.

What If: Shakespeare

If you haven't read Simak's Goblin Reservation, do. It's a fun sci-fi book set in Madison in an era with interplanetary teleportation and also time travel--which sets the scene. The Time Department has brought William Shakespeare forward to give a lecture. (There's a saber-tooth and a ghost and a Neanderthal as well, but read the book for yourself.)

Take that notion as the what-if. You have Shakespeare available for a couple of weeks. He's an astute businessman, and will be happy to write whatever play you commission, and might be happy to write fewer than five acts. (Producers and directors would trample each other for the chance to produce/direct/film it. I suspect Shakespeare would love the "Take-2" capability of film--and also the ability to work with women instead of boys for the female parts.)

Would you risk a comedy? He might need a crash course in "what's funny this year"; as AVI noted, humor doesn't always age well. You might feel overawed and leave it up to him, but just for laughs, try to think of something--maybe a fairy story?

He did some historical plays. Their Finest Hour might be too huge a canvas even for him, but WWII seems like an inevitable choice. Unless you wanted him to try Apollo? Or if you wanted to keep it to things he knew about already, King Harold? Odyssus might not be a good fit, but Achilles might.

Or a tragedy. I brought the topic up at the table, and Youngest Daughter suggested Yamamoto: facing Fate in the form of the death cult militarists and the Emperor, and Nemesis in the form of the US Army Air Force. I don't think Nixon's story would be dramatic enough for Shakespeare. Maybe something classical?

Just for fun, what would you suggest?

Particle Fever

The documentary Particle Fever has a trailer out. The trailer telescopes events from several years into two minutes, for drama's sake. That's irritating by itself, but the repeated claims people make about how much this is going to change things is very offputting. Maybe it's a fine documentary, but hype makes me very itchy.

It quotes a man who spent most of his career on this single project.

After my degree, I spent mine on several different, mostly related, projects; experiments with hundreds and sometimes thousands of colleagues. There were a few whose contributions exceeded a percent. I was not one of those few.

I had other things that grew to higher priority--that's a good reason, but not the whole. But I can imagine--better than imagine, I saw it now and then--the "I've dedicated my life to this, so it better not fail" attitude. Surrounded by like-minded people, it can be hard to remember that the money to pay for all this is a "grant", not something earned. And when you're reminded of this (by editorials, budget cuts, and whatnot), it's tempting to exagerate the benefits. It's the center of your life, so it's obviously a big deal, right? And given two equally good projects, the best salesman wins.

Most of the scientists I knew had lives outside the lab; families (rarely large), hobbies (skiing is inexplicably popular), some were religious too. One also managed a farmette and owned some rental properties, another wrote an NYT bestselling novel. (I have a ways to go yet on that.)

Peter

In the garden Peter falls asleep. He's probably pretty ashamed of that--is that what Jesus was talking about?

Then the soldiers come, and Peter summons up his courage to show that he's willing to die with Jesus. He gets rebuked for his pains, and all his good work undone.

So after the arrest, he summons up his courage again, and becomes a spy, going with his friend John who has an in at the high priest's place. That doesn't work out very well either; it turns out that being a spy implies the exact denial that he swore he'd never do. And his merely human courage is probably running out about now too as he watches what happens to Jesus.

Peter got a one-on-one visit with Jesus after the Resurrection--mentioned but not described. I wonder if Jesus said anything to him then, or needed to.

Olympic tempest

Drag queens (those I've seen pictures of) create a caricature of femininity and mock it. The point of mockery is to offend. They were used in the Olympic tableau to mock and offend. So I conclude the the Olympic organizers' non-apology's claims that they regret that people were offended and that it was meant to be "inclusive" are both false. This would remain true whether or not the designers were as innocent of Western art as they imply they were.

Artemis project

Smarter Every Day's Dustin talked to the American Astronautical Society. I found it very interesting. He brings up some aspects of the Artemis project that I'd not heard about before. Yikes! I hadn't paid a lot of attention to their plans. The points he brings up sound crazy.

He recommends What Made Apollo a Success?; NASA document SP 287. I haven't read much of it yet.

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The rabbit hole that led me to that was this video he made about progress in learning how the flagellum motor works. It's pretty spectacular--a motor made out of proteins.

Maybe it makes sense

In an oldNFO video Ian suggests that a good gift for a fidgety person is a lock pick kit. A lock as a fidget toy...