Category: learning curve

That secret space plane and why my holiday in Borneo is now in doubt

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Thanks to a comment by Craig Gibbs (Thanks, Craig), we can now see what the secret (I think they may have missed something here) space plane which everyone in the Western Cape thought was coming to probe us on Tuesday evening.

X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle

Of course, this is it in daylight, not jettisoning fuel. It looks completely different at night, above Cape Town, squirting kerosene and hydrogen peroxide into the upper atmosphere. I can personally vouch for this.

This from the initial launch of the X-37B, back in 2010:

The craft was recently completed and has a 4.5 meter wingspan with a length of 8.9 meters.  It comes equipped with kerosene and hydrogen peroxide fuel tanks, an experimental bay, a large navigation “brain”, and likely other more secret components.What’s it doing in space?  Your guess is as good as anyone else’s.  And guesses tend to range from “deploying spy satellites” to “maintaining spy satellites”.

I’m no expert on top secret military hardware, but if they want to keep it a bit more secret than it is, it’s probably best not to release photos of it on a runway, nor attract the attention of several thousand confused South Africans on a Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, in unconnected news, Professor Anna Nekaris at Oxford Brookes University have found a nocturnal primate in Borneo which can kill you with toxin from its elbow. Wait? What? But yes:

“The slow loris might look like a harmless, big-eyed Ewok from a scene in Star Wars, but the animal is actually one of the only poisonous mammals in the world. Its toxin can cause death in humans through anaphylactic shock. Unknowing humans should stay clear of the toxin, which is released from nears its elbows. When threatened, the loris takes the toxin into its mouth and mixes it with saliva.”

I would imagine that knowing humans would also do well to keep their distance. Especially if it starts licking its elbow, not matter how  entertaining it would be to watch it try. Fortunately, I’m now a knowing human, and I have thus cancelled my plans to holiday in the rain forests of Borneo, at night.

You’d probably be wise to do the same.

Classy Lancastrian After Dinner Party Treat

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This was just emailed to me. I’m not sure if it was off some Lancastrian pinterest board or other, but it’s proof that there’s nothing that you can do to properly domesticate people from that side of the Pennines.

Frankly, I’m amazed that a Lancastrian even knows what a “dinner party” is. But I’m guessing that Gemma is just using a posh term for some people eating tripe together.

To be honest, if I felt that I was so broke that I had to resort to frozen Aquafresh as an alternative to after dinner mints, I’d probably just not invite anyone around. Jesus, can you even imagine how bad the rest of the meal must have been?

“Yes love, we went to Gemma’s ‘ovel. We ‘ad some twigs for starters, tripe fer main course, some lovely muddy water fer afters and then she topped t’evening off with some wonderful frozen toothpaste.”

 However if, for some utterly bizarre reason, you think that this is a good idea:

a) Stop reading this blog and get away from me. And everyone else. And,
b) Please remember the dangers of fluoride toxicity and don’t eat too many of these “cool” “tasty treats”.

Slice Rotary Keyboard

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This looks interesting.

Time to retrain our brains people. Just as touch-typing has become something of a sport, with lightning fast texting and constant keyboard contact, a new app is looking to change the paradigm. The Slice Keyboard app is a new on-screen rotary board that redefines typing by creating new finger movements.
The idea is the typer will always have certain fingers on the touchscreen of their device. Depending on which circle the users’ fingers are on, a rotary wheel appears with certain characters that allow the user to quickly access via simple taps.

The question is, can we handle a change in such a fundamental and important means of interaction with our devices?

image

I already use Swype, which makes my typing lightning fast. Even that, using a standard Qwerty keyboard, took some getting used to. But I’ll give this a go and report back. Better still, of course, would have been to actually use Slice to write this post. But ain’t nobody got time for that.

The LEGO post

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Three parts to this one, which I will click together to make a simple, yet pretty and colourful post.

Firstly, my lucky son, who got an early Christmas gift from his Uncle and family yesterday. They’re away for the festive period, so the cousins took our kids out yesterday and they got to choose their own presents. Scoop chose a cuddly puppy with its own portable kennel, while Alex plumped for a Lego set. He then spent yesterday evening building his 4×4 and trailer and was up and dressed by 6:30 this morning to finish it off.
I always loved Lego as a kid and I still think it’s great, firstly for teaching kids about following instructions and then, as the set gets “integrated” in with the rest of his bricks, for stimulating the imagination as they build ever wilder vehicles and other such fanciful “stuff”. And I haven’t even mention the fine-motor skills bit yet, although now I have.

Secondly, I also came across this story of another kid who has just got a new Lego set as well.

James Groccia has loved LEGO since he was about 4 years old.
But when the little boy told his parents a couple of years ago that he wanted the $100 Emerald Night Train set, which had more than 1,000 pieces, they hesitated before making the big purchase.

The couple, who live in Boylston, Mass., also saw one of those golden parenting opportunities to teach their oldest child about responsibility.
“My wife just basically said, ‘If it’s something you really want, save up for it,” Groccia said.

James, who has a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, did just that. It took him about two years to save up the $100.
And then, disaster struck. LEGO had stopped making the train set.

Of course, there were still sets available, but they were on collectors’ websites and – as with all toys that are no longer produced – the prices were through the roof, way beyond the $100 that James had saved up.

James wrote to Lego and explained the situation. Lego sent a letter back saying that they were sorry, but that set was not being produced any more. And that was that.

Until just before James’ birthday, when a package arrived at the Groccia’s home. Here’s what followed:

Well played, Lego. Play well.

But then, in a really tenuous link (and here comes the third bit), what if James had wanted to build a really tall tower out of the Lego set he was sent? I know that you’re asking exactly the same question that I am – Exactly how tall could he build that Lego tower?

It’s a trivial question you might think, but one the Open University’s engineering department has – at the request of the BBC’s More or Less programme – fired up its labs to try to answer.

“It’s an exciting thing to do because it’s an entirely new question and new questions are always interesting,” says Dr Ian Johnston, an applied mathematician and lecturer in engineering.

Looking on the internet, he expected to find the answer, but was surprised to find only a lot of speculation.

Perhaps that’s because not everyone who has pondered the question has ready access to a hydraulic testing machine.

Perhaps that’s the reason, yes. In fact, in a quick poll of my Facebook friends, precisely zero of them had ready access, or indeed, any sort of access to a hydraulic testing machine. Although they had all pondered the question. But yes, 0% that amounts to a fairly robust vote for “not everyone”.

Here’s a 32.5m tall Lego tower in Prague, which is impressive, but could they have made it, say, 33m or even taller?

The problem with doing this experiment “in the flesh” is that there are likely to be a number of difficulties. Finding somewhere big enough to do it, finding enough Lego bricks to build it, finding a way to keep adding the bricks. So the best way is to use a readily accessible  hydraulic testing machine.

Safety glasses on, the engineers begin to nervously edge towards the door.

“We’re setting it up automatically, so that we can all back out of the room, so none of us is in range when the thing goes bang,” Johnston explains – positioned, I notice, slightly behind me.

This basically squeezes the Lego bricks and measures the force they are under to see how many bricks it would take before the bottom bricks fail under the weight of the tower:

…the load on top of the brick gets larger and larger. We reach 3,500 newtons (N) of force – the equivalent of having 350kg (770lbs) sitting on top of the brick – more than a third of a tonne.

The force climbs on, above 4,000N. And then…

Nothing.

Well, not much. There is no big bang. The brick just kind of melts. It looks like a small square of warm Camembert.
This, Ian Johnston explains – noting that the computer also shows the load is no longer increasing – is a “material failure”.

The total force causing that “material failure” was 4,240N. They’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and that equates to 432kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000.

So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.

That’s more than 3 Table Mountains piled one on top of the other. So you can see that there would be other issues involved as well, not least the banging SouthEaster which would take it down as soon as it got anywhere above 10cm. Also, we’d have problems with the local Nimbys and their tall-buildings phobia. Incidentally, if you have ready access to a hydraulic press, 4,240N is also quite enough to silence their whining.

The smell of paint

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We’ve done up the guest loo. Replaced the basin and the pan, stuck some tiles down on the floor.

Oh, and we painted the walls as well. That was done yesterday and thus, the house smells of paint. You know about the smell of paint. It’s not a pleasant smell. Chemically. Painty.

Fortunately, Mrs 6000 has a “secret” “proven” way of getting rid of the smell of paint, which is backed up by many links on the internet.
You’ll therefore note that it’s not actually “secret” at all. Nor is it “proven” in any way, shape or form.

It involves chopping up several raw onions and leaving them in the room which has just been painted. The scientific theory behind this method goes (and here I quote):

I don’t know how it works, but it just does.

Well, fortunately I’m here and I’ve brought along Science to help with the nitty-gritty of the chemical processes involved.

Firstly, we need to look at the differences between a neutralising agent and a masking agent. It’s pretty straightforward, because these sensibly named agents either neutralise an odour or hide (mask) it behind another odour. Simples, ne?

Ideally, we need a neutralising agent here – some chemical that binds to the VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) which cause the paint odour and thus render them less volatile and less odorous.

Onion fumes are not that. Onion fumes actually contain different VOCs – specifically including one called propanethiol S-oxide. Propanethiol S-oxide is the chemical in onions that make our eyes water. Propanethiol S-oxide will not bind to the VOCs from the paint fumes. Oh no. Propanethiol S-oxide will merely mask the paint odour by competing with it for the attention of our scent receptors in our noses.

Congratulations. Your house now smells of paint and onion. You’ve effectively doubled the number of unpleasant chemicals in your breathing environment.

Winning.

If you’re going to use a masking agent, rather use something which at least smells nice. It’s not like you’re going to come home, notice that your house smells of paint and think:

I know, I’ll defaecate in the corner of the living room; there’s an idea which is sure to make the paint smell less obvious.

is it?

I can’t decide if the tears in my eyes this morning were from the sheer lack of science involved in the whole chopped raw onion thing or the propanethiol S-oxide widely circulating around my home.

This whole issue has been compounded by the fact that the said bathroom window faces south, so opening the window to ventilate the room merely allowed yesterday’s howling southeaster to come through said bathroom, pick up the combined paint and onion smell and distribute it liberally around the rest of the house.

My wife and I have been married for nearly 8 years now and we’ve done a lot of painting, so we’ve also “discussed” this onion idea on several occasions previously and I’ve had very little success (absolutely none, in fact) in getting her to stop it. Thus, yesterday evening, as she headed for the vegetable drawer, I sensibly kept my mouth closed and left her to it.

And then for the rest of the evening, I wished that I could do the same with my nose.