Tonight I was watching the Finns skate against the Czechs. It was a decent contest, but Finns had my boys pretty much outclassed. My Bili Tigri goaltender gave up three, but that doesn’t reflect the chances the Finns had. None of that matters.
I have noticed in a few international matches that Garnier Fructis, the shampoo, is a major sponsor. At first this struck me as odd. In general, hockey fans are not the crowd I’d be selling fancy shampoo to.
Unless…
Fructis Mullet formula.
Pay dirt, baby.
Tonight I was recalling speed bowling. When you rent a lane by the hour and the hour is running out, the nature of bowling changes. The ideal is to have the ball on the way down the lane before the sweeper lifts. Speed bowling requires timing and finesse. You must know your alley. Every once in a while, not often, mind, the sweeper would not lift as quickly as it should have. Then you have to throw extra balls down the alley to knock the rejected ball down into the return mechanism, hoping all the while that the management is not watching.
But all that’s old hat. Tonight I was pondering how to make bowling a team game, and I harkened back to the speed-bowling days, and the accompanying hijinks, and I remembered other sweeper-damaging games. One of them is the foundation for team bowling.
As we all know, there are already bowling teams, but they don’t work as a team. It’s just a bunch of individual bowlers combining their stores. Not in my game. In my game team members must work together, and all that putting-a-spin-on-the-ball-so-it-hits-the-pocket-at-the-best-angle crap is out the window. The concept is simple. The team bowls. At the same time.
You could get pretty fancy with this. You could have one person lead with a lighter ball on one side of the pocket, so the ball deflects and reliably takes out one side of the rack, while another, hotter ball comes in on the other side, to bring kinetic energy and the resulting mayhem. Sweeper balls down the right and left to pick up the rabbit ears and you’re golden.
Of course, once one ball goes through, the sweeper drops. Here we bring in the artistry, the ballet that is team bowling. All the balls have to arrive down there within two seconds or so. Any ball hitting the sweeper is a scratch. So you have four bowlers, all trying to bowl on the same lane at the same time. This is where the teamwork comes in. Left-handed bowlers will be tremendously valuable – every team will want one, and would prefer to have two.
I picture the four gathered at the top of the alley. the first releases a slow but dead-on granny shot which slowly trundles down the lane. The rest of the team sets up, and when the ball reaches a certain point the crasher releases his ball, to be followed moments later by the cleanup team, who are just sending in some extra kinetic energy to make sure that anything that might fall down, will fall down.
The way I see it, a strike is one point. Knocking down all but the head pin is two points. Knocking down all but the five pin, buried in the center of the mayhem, is five points.
May the best team win.
Prague, in the summer, is a beer-drinkers paradise. Beer gardens dot the city, the people watching is unparalleled, and the long, warm days make it wonderful to sit inthe shade of an old tree and sip a fine Czech pivo while writing.
Unfortunately, that same pleasant sun makes it nearly impossible to see the screen of a typical laptop. Even in the shade it’s just too bright out there. I had been designing in my head a special “writing outdoors” laptop with an ultra-bright screen. They have them, but they are power hogs, so the rest of the computer would be taken up completely by batteries. There would be no optical drive and maybe even no hard drive, just enough flash RAM to hold the OS and Jer’s Novel Writer, and a USB port to use for file transfer.
But then I noticed something. I can hardly see my phone screen at all when I’m wearing my shades, but if I turn it 90 degrees, there it is. The light is polarized. And there lies the key to outdoor laptop use. Construct the screen so that the light is polarized in a particular direction. Create glasses that are extremely dark except for light polarized in that one tiny notch. As Voltaire would say, “Voila!” The relative brightness of the screen would be increased without burning through batteries.
I don’t know what it would take to make lenses that were that specific to a particular polarization angle and very dark in all others, but I bet it could be done.
Best of all, Geeks would finally be able to get some fresh air and sunshine.
This stretch of the planet is having a cold snap right now, sustaining temperatures well below freezing for days on end. Today Prague enjoyed a high temp of something like -4 C, or 269 K. (that’s about 25 F). Now before all you midwesterners (both of you) get all in a huff saying, “That’s not cold! Why I had to walk to school…” let me just say, Yes, it is cold. When you were tramping through the drifts with only wonder bread bags for shoes you were saying “Crap! This is cold! I can’t waif until I can buy an RV and take it down to Boca Raton in the winter!” Don’t deny it.
So where was I? Right, I hadn’t told you that yet. I’m at home. I’ve been on a trip and as a cheap bastard I had the heat turned way down while I was away. I came home to an apartment at a balmy 12.5 C, turned on the heat, and went out to dinner. When I got home more than two hours later the place was up to 14.5. It takes a long time for things to heat up here. So with my home at less than 60 F it was time to get creative. That’s when I invented the toasty tent. I am now sitting in one of my moderately uncomfortable comfy chairs right next to the radiator. I have a blanket draped over the radiator and over me, bringing a significant fraction of my home’s heating power to bear on only a few cubic feet, some of which contain my head and other favorite organs.
I am toasty.
I’m sure I’m not the first to put a blanket over the radiator to keep warm. It’s obvious, really. What sets my invention apart is the name. Toasty Tent. Come on, that’s golden!
Some engineering remains to perfect the toasty tent. The blanket is smaller than I would have at first thought ideal, but that keeps it from getting too stifling in here. If I move my hand toward the floor, there is a sudden drop in temperature at the bottom of the blanket. At first I was most concerned with the light level, but the smaller blanket lets in enough light I merely had to dim my laptop screen a bit. The main problem is the difficulty in keeping a beer within easy reach just outside the toasty tent. If I move around too much the blanket pulls off the radiator and I have to construct my haven all over again. With only a little engineering this problem can be overcome. All I have to do is make it so my head is not a significant part of the structure.
Apparently my radiator also has a “safety feature” called a “thermostat” that shut it down just as things were reaching their toastiest. The final version of Toasty Tent will have to be sure not to insluate the radiator, but merely to make sure its heat stays in the correct general area. A delicate balancing act for the world’s top scientists at Muddled Industries, Inc.
The Toasty Tent is just what this energy-starved world needs to keep going. By only heating the parts of a home where people are, a typical family can save a fortune, and help the environment at the same time. The Toasty Tent. It just might save humanity.
In this day and age of contrived sporting events (basketball games with style points?) it’s time we turned our attention back to day when sports were sporting and athletes were athletic. For that reason the time has come to launch HPMBRL, the Human-Powered Mini-Blimp Racing League. It would be like the Tour de France in 3-D, with elements of the America’s Cup thrown in.
Best of all, it would be very photogenic, and there would be lots of surface area for sponsor’s logos.
To get off the ground the league would need star power. Who better than retired world-class cyclists? Would people pay to see Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault (probably spelled that wrong) go head to head once more? You bet they would.
So who would the likely sponsors be? It would be fun to see Boeing sponsor a team, and maybe Rutan’s company—the crew that build SpaceShipOne. Bicycle companies would be naturals, as many of their components would be used in the blimps’ drive trains. Fuji already has a blimp presence, and a photogenic sport would be a natural for a photography company. I could imagine GM or Ford sponsoring a team.
I haven’t figured out the actual rules for the race, but I can imagine a series of great big hoops suspended at various heights above the ground that the fliers must pass through, or perhaps simpler would be a simple requirement that they pass over a certain sopt on the ground. In the hoop scenario, there would be a great deal of emphasis on positioning and tactics as the flyers approached the hoop.
Wind, of course, would be a major factor. Courses would be designed with the prevailing wind of the area in mind. There would be legs of the race that featured long, hard climbs into the wind, and others that would allow the blimps to sweep down to where they are practically skimming the Earth as they are swept along with a tailwind, knocking the hats off the awe-struck spectators.
So there you have it. HPMBRL (probably need a better acronym) extends the careers of great athletes, pushes technology, looks cool, and would be a sponsor magnet. What could possibly go wrong?
While sitting in a bar with Lotto the other day I noticed that when no one won a particular prize the dough (or at least some portion of it) rolled over into the next pot. For instance, if no one gets 4 out of 4, then that pot rolls over. I’m assuming that the more people who bet four numbers, the more cashola goes into the next pot. That makes it possible, if the prize rolls over enough and enough people are playing (paying) for that prize, that the expected value of the reward could conceivably exceed the cost to play. In other words, the prize would be larger than the cost of covering all possible outcomes. (The one time I did the math it looked like the return on a dollar bet was in the $.50-$.60 range depending on how many numbers you chose, far worse than almost any bet you’ll find in Vegas.)
Normally when a jackpot gets really large the expected value of an entry decreases because so many people participate that the chances of sharing the prize rise faster than the value of the prize itself does. But with ordinary ho-hum lotto you would have to be extra diligent to notice when the prize had grown to an enticing level. Since there is a new drawing every few minutes, when the prize does get large enough there is no time for a gambler to respond.
So what you need is something that monitors the lotto channel and watches for particular prizes to roll over an extraordinary number of times. (Ideally you would also be able to see how much money rolled over each time.) When enough moolah is on the line, Lotto-matic would enter you in that drawing for all possible permutations. I doubt that would be possible—entries have to go through special machines. Failing that, the system would notify you and you would spend the next ten minutes furiously filling in lotto slips.
Of course, if the system can’t enter you automatically, you have to already be at a location with a lotto machine (say, perhaps, a bar) when the opportunity strikes. The cost of sitting in a bar waiting for the right moment is likely (at least in my case) to dwarf any potential winnings. It might, however, be tax-deductible…
After watching SpaceShipOne on TV this morning, I was thinking again about my electromagnetic double-barreled space gun which captures the energy of a returning craft to launch the next one. Obviously, since a hotel on the moon is my ultimate goal, the gun needs to be able to fire its projectile at what is for all intents and purposes escape velocity, plus extra for the loss due to drag the first few miles of flight. Since the acceleration would have to be moderate in deference to my squishy guests, I knew that to get up to that kind of speed would take a launcher several kilometers long.
But how long? Well, this morning I did the math. Escape velocity is about 11100 m/s. We’ll shoot for 12000 m/s to give us a little cushion. Plus, it makes the math easier. OK, the first warning bells started to go off when I realized that in the last second of the launch the capsule would need almost 12 Km of launcher. Uh, oh.
Get out your shovels, boys and girls, because to get the capsule up to target velocity at the only moderately-stressful acceleration of 40m/s/s would take 300 seconds, or five minutes. In that time the capsule would travel 1800 Km, almost 1/4 of the diameter of the Earth.
The electrogun could still be used for an initial boost for a ship which also carried its own rockets to allow it to claw up out of the gravity well, and indeed several people have already thought of that. (I have not seen any design that recaptures the energy on return, however.) A gun with much greater acceleration and a shorter barrel could also be used to launch non-squishy payloads.
It’s also worth noting that it would take only a tiny fraction of the energy to needed achieve escape velocity to match the feat of SpaceShipOne, so I’ll still happily accept any large donations to make my dream a reality. In the meantime, I’m back to rooting for the Space Elevator boys to deliver my hotel guests.
Please note: There’s a lot of engineering and physics in here, but give it a try even if you hate that stuff. I’ve tried to give the Carl Sagan version here. I thought about splitting this entry up, but it’s kind of a big-picture thing. I’ll add some drawings tomorrow (er… later this morning). If you start to glaze over, you can always see what’s happening at the Suicide Squirrel Death Cult.
I’ve got it all worked out, see. I had most of the plan worked out some time ago, but I had put it on the back burner. The other day my brother sent me an article mentioning the space launch contest and that got me to thinking again. Now it’s the wee hours of the morning, and the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.
Here’s how space flight works now: you make a huge bomb with a nozzle at one end. You set off the bomb and hope it burns in a controlled manner long enough for it to carry something worthwhile into space. Now you have something way up there and when you bring it back down you have to do something to slow it down, or, like a truck rolling out of control down a mountain, something bad is going to happen at the bottom. To get rid of all that potential energy, you use the air to slow you down. That generates an enormous amount of heat, so you hope the payload makes it to the ground without burning up. We have seen tragedy both on launch and landing as our frail machines proved unable to handle those enormous amounts of energy. There are several other drawbacks as well. Off the top of my head:
It’s time to rethink the whole proposition and take a step backward. Remember Jules Verne? He shot his space travelers out of a cannon. If I remember correctly, that’s how the martians came to Earth in War of the Worlds. There are some problems with the approach, but with a little thinking a very elegant and practical space launch system could be developed.
Here’s the skinny: rather than use a huge explosive charge as a typical cannon does, use a long electromagnetic coil to propel the capsule. I’m not going to do the calculus here (I’ll save that for a later post. I bet you can’t wait.), but for a manned capsule you are limited on the acceleration of the payload by human endurance. Since I’m eventually going to be launching wealthy patrons up to my hotel on the moon, the barrel of the gun will be very long indeed. I’m thinking you find a tall mountain and start drilling down. (This needs to be in a remote area anyway, as it will be really freakin loud – more on that later.)
Now, it’s going to take a lot of energy to get your cargo up into space, though not nearly as much energy as a traditional rocket needs, because we’re not burning fuel to accelerate fuel. The total energy required will be a fraction of that needed to launch a payload today. Nonetheless, chemical rockets have one big advantage – they can release a whole bunch of energy at once. It is very difficult to store that much electrical energy and release it all in a very short time. That’s what had me partially stumped until tonight.
So here’s the story so far: we have a miles-long electric cannon that in a burst of energy flings a breathtakingly beautiful streamlined capsule into the heavens. The capsule is designed to be as aerodynamic as possible, so that the pesky atmosphere hinders it as little as possible. (No amount of streamlining will diminish the enormous shock it creates as it tears the atmosphere a new one, but we’ll try to minimize that.) There are certainly some hurdles into getting the thing up there, but things really get interesting on the way back down.
As I mentioned before, spacecraft returning to earth have a lot of energy to get rid of. They need a way to apply the brakes all the way down that big gravity hill. Spacecraft today use the atmosphere to slow themselves down, turning all that potential energy into heat. Not my aerodynamic little beauty. When it points its slender nose toward the earth, it’s going to slice through the air as cleanly as possible. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there will still be lots of heat, but this baby will only have to deal with a tiny fraction of the heat that other spacecraft do. Out of the sky our capsule plunges, greedily hoarding its energy rather than using it to heat the air. Down it comes – straight down the barrel of the gun that launched it.
Now those giant coils that first hurled our spacecraft upwards become the brakes, transforming the kinetic energy of the capsule into electricity. We actually get back some of the energy we used to launch the craft in the first place!
Here’s the beauty part: it’s very difficult to store electricity, and boy, we’re going to be getting a lot of it all at once. If it doesn’t find a place to go, there will be trouble. We need to use that energy right away, as it’s generated… by launching another space craft. Sweet Saints of Symmetry, Batman! As one goes in, another comes out of another barrel of the gun, like two people on a trampoline bouncing each other. Bounce! one comes down, sending the other soaring into the air. Bounce! the other comes down and sends the first even higher. Of course, there has to be energy added on each bounce. The trampolinists use their legs to supply the energy to send each bounce higher. Our bouncing space capsules will use a large electric power plant. But since the power plant doesn’t have to supply all the energy for each launch, the problem becomes manageable.
All that’s left is getting the bouncing started. That’s the part I came up with tonight. Like the two bouncers on the trampoline, you don’t start at full height, you bounce back and forth, building up your energy over time. If you have two capsules, first you give one of them the biggest kick you can. Maybe it goes 5,000 meters up then comes back down. You get some of the energy back from that one and kick again. The next capsule goes 9,000 meters up, and so on. The biggest problem with the electrical launch, how to store enough energy, is solved. Away you go, Chumley, laughing at the very idea that it would take two whole weeks to launch a capsule twice.
That Ten Million is practically mine. Anyone have a billion to loan me? Actually, better make it five billion.
Post Script: Please read the followup article which discusses a slight hitch in this plan.
If, that is, by “innovative” you mean stupid. John has some misguided added criterion that the resulting instrument should sound good. Now, that’s how to get poor quick.
John, being largely unemployed, has been spending lots of time on his music, and his love for unusual instruments is as strong as ever. He is even considering (in a vague, undirected kind of way) going to brass instrument repair school. I’m hoping he does, so he can get the skills he needs to execute some of our designs (although I doubt the school will cover explosive welding).
The cream of our instrument designs this time was the coaxial trumpet. (John had drawn a picture for me to photograph and insert here, but I used it to catch dog puke. I’ll get him to draw another.) The theory is that the standing waves in the outer and inner bores would reinforce and improve the efficiency of the horn. The catch is that if the tubing doubled back over itself the player would be staring straight into the bell. To overcome this the design gets pretty odd. Another possibility is the triaxial trumpet, so that the tubing doubles back twice, creating a short, fat-looking horn.
“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” they say, which in this case meant “quit waiting for John and draw your own damn pictures.” Here is the result of my attempt:
I won’t bore you with all the details, but there are plenty of fiddly bits like the plate that caps off the tube where it doubles back. Brass players love to tinker with their horns, so giving all kinds of shapes, materials, and thicknesses of the various parts would create great aftermarket potential.
If, that is, by “Great Aftermarket Potential” you mean a pile of expensive-to-produce parts that no one wants.
We also discussed techniques for creating trumpet bells composed of various layers of different materials. Explosive welding could be the key there, fusing laminae of alloys that can’t be electroplated. Plus, we could sell with each horn the video of the bell being made. Blammo!
Let’s start by thinking about the reasons anyone would want to visit the moon:
1) It’s the moon!
2) Low-gravity sex – and, uh, other activities
Number 1 means that when someone looks out the window, they expect to see pristine lunar landscape, not the tracks left behind by the construction equipment. Brian’s offer to head up the lunarscaping crew notwithstanding, any marring of the terrain (lunain?) will be permanent.
So how does one create a structure without touching the surrounding land? My thought is to learn from the mushroom – pop up from underground overnight.
Man, I wish I had a napkin scanner now.
Anyway, the idea is to start by going underground. For health and safety you want most of the complex beneath a layer of rock anyway. Way deep you bury your reactor; it’s going to take a lot of energy to build the place. Then above that you put the living areas. Then you open a big umbrella and set if down over the top of your complex, completely covering all the tracks you made landing and drilling under the surface in the first place. Set the umbrella down gently and outside there will be pristine lunar landscape. Good viewing!
There would, of course, be a location where guests arrive and depart; that will likely not be as pretty. It would be out of sight of the main city, connected by tunnel or – Ooo! – by a graceful elevated rail to give spectacular views as guests arrive. Building that without ruining the surrounding countryside would be tricky, but probably worth it. In the low gravity you could build something that really defied imagination, something that our common sense would say must fall down. Definitely worth the effort.
As far as point 2 above, Brian V. already has dibs on the astro-jump concession.
John pointed out that one of the entries in this year’s race brazenly stole my idea for a self-stabilizing motorcycle. There’s even video of it wobbling around the campus. While it’s not a bad start, I think my design is better.
So here’s what I’ve got:
By making the gyroscope very large, it won’t have to spin as fast to get the same stability. The things steers by tilting over, controlled by the gyroscope. Raising the main gyro way up improves ground clearance. I have now dubbed my machine The Camel.
Putting the motors directly on the wheels like that implies electric, but I doubt that’s practical unless it was solar powered. Batteries would just weigh too much and be too bulky. Probably end up with little gasoline motors, but they’re harder to control. Fuel cells? Steam power? Mr. Fusion?
No napkin scanner, but this way I get color, too!
The race course is revealed to the teams the day before the competition. Well, there was no winner this year. In fact, the best any vehicle did was seven miles. Most of them were out after less than a mile. the prize is $1M, and it will probably cost quite a bit more than that to build a winning entry.
Which makes this excellent fodder for a get-poor-quick scheme indeed, although perhaps not on the same grand scale as a hotel on the moon.
Most, if not all, of the entries looked like dune buggies with junk attached all over them. I have a proposal for a radically different vehicle. I would build motorcycle with a big gyroscope that would stableize the vehicle and allow it to turn. it would even be able to pick itself up if if fell over. Both wheels wold be driven with independent motors, and a second gyroscope with a vertical axis would allow the motorcycle to lift its front or back wheel. With that configuration, the vehicle would be able to climb just about anything.
What few pictures of the race make the course look a lot tamer than what I had imagined, but many of the cars turned over or suffered mechanical failures, so perhaps the course was rough, just not where the cameras were. It does appear that the course was on a road the entire way. That would certainly reduce the need for climbing capabilities and perhaps give an edge to the 4-wheel vehicles which could carry more fuel and electronics.
Still, a self-stabilizing autonomous motorcycle would be pretty cool. Are there any mechanical engineers, AI guys, and remote sensing experts who want to win a million bucks with me?
This just in – John pointed out that there was an entry like that. I looked at their design and it required less custom mechanical engineering than mine would (gyroscope was a pre-packaged unit, but much smaller than the motorcycle needs if you’re going to stay upright.) I would use the gyroscope for steering as well, rather than try to steer with the front wheel. their bike suffered from a severe case of the wobblies.
Gyroscopically balanced GPS-guided motorcycles to win some contest sponsored by the pentagon. Ways to cool the London underground. Most of all, construction details for the hotel on the moon. Napkin Scanner. Naaaapkin Scanner. Yeah, that’s it.
before someone aces me out. I saw another plan for a moon hotel, designed (like all of them) to look cool FROM THE OUTSIDE. Aye, yi, yi. So far no one seems to be considering making the place the best experience possible for the guests.
I’ll try to put together a description of my plan and put a link to it here. Multi-billionaires looking for and investment may contact me directly.
By the way, the astro-jump concession has already been spoken for.
While traveling around the Czech Republic, it occurred to me that all the postcards of the attractions were aerial views. That got me to thinking, and when I start thinking you know there will be blimps in the picture somewhere. So…
What if there was a tour company that took people all over Europe by blimp? It would be a big ‘ol blimp with enough room that the passengers could sleep in comfort and dine in style, and it would mosey about the countryside from one attraction to another. It would be a cruise ship of shorts.
Getting people on and off the blimp is an issue, of course, but with a big enough blimp you could have a hangar and a small plane to ferry people up and down.
Not much fun on a windy day, though, and who knows how people would feel about a giant blimp blotting out the sun?
For your protection, Science has established the above threat level. Adjust your duct tape supplies accordingly.
Get-Poor-Quick Schemes
