It's a Goodyear

I saw two immature squirrels the other day, both dead while apparently playing chase. Their bodies were only a few feet apart. I'm sure there are about a thousand witty or funny or deep or insightful things you could say about their plight and the nature of life. Mine was "one was too fast, one was too slow". Any other good ones?

Multilateral Arms Race

I may have overstepped my strength this time. Being accustomed to being one of the strongest of the geeks in my engineering group for some years, I challenged some of my younger colleagues to a quest of sorts. We are in a competition to see who can be the first one to bench press 135 pounds (easy) 40 repetitions at one go (much tougher). It's great motivation for all of us to work hard to stay/get in shape. I started with a decent lead, based mostly on gristle and Old Man Strength. However, the race has really tightened up, with my two competitors hitting the gym daily at the obscene time of 5:30 A.M. It's tough for me to match that schedule. Now my lead is slim, 35 reps to 32 and 29 for my opposition. I love doing these sorts of meaningless, yet committed guy things. I do not love losing.

Lun-acy

The picture above is not the scheme of some half-educated warfreak engineer (ahem). Well, it's not just that. It's a real machine! The Lun is a Russian.. umm, I guess the phrase is "ground effect vehicle", which uses wings to create a cushion of air that lifts it above the water, drastically reducing drag. The end result, in the case of the Lun, is a 300 ton vehicle that can travel at almost 350 miles an hour! Beter than just dreaming up such a monstrosity, the Soviet Union (not Russian, stricly speaking) built one of these vehicles. Proof is found below:

Notice the 6 Sunburn anti-ship missiles (Moskit variant)carried atop the fuselage. I totally dig the blast deflectors and the cabin directly beneath the muzzle of the two forward canisters. I'll bet the most junior crew members ride in there! To quote Skipper the Penguin from Madagascar: "We'll need special tactical equipment. We're gonna face extreme peril. Private probably won't survive. "

I cannot believe the entire vehicle was airborne, as evidenced in this picture of a launch. I can only wonder how it would handle heavy surf. Both the above pictures reveal search radars, and possible communication equipment, in the tail. Judging by the sensors, gross speed and heavy armament (almost 10,000 pounds of weight per missile!), this thing must have been intended to independently seek and destroy heavily defended targets. Against most anti-ship cruise missiles, the Lun's high speed would have made interception very difficult, and higher velocity anti-aircraft missiles may have struggle at making such low-altitude attacks. Plus, the small warheads on most anti-aircraft missiles might have been insufficient to down such a hog before it completed its attack run. I can only imagine what difficulties the designers faced trying maintain vehicle balance and trim with a mere several meter margin of error when discharging 5 tons of payload almost instantaneously.

The Soviets only built a single prototype. Perhaps there were too many technical limitations. Perhaps coordinating with other elements of a strike force (submarines, aircraft, conventional surface ships) proved too unwieldy. Perhaps the turn radius was 10 miles! I can only wonder. Nonetheless, the Lun, dubbed the "Caspian Sea Monster" by Western observers, is... something else.

May Your Paths Be Straight

I recall that in December of 2008, one of our engineers left our group to take another position. He felt engineering wasn't for him, and it's certainly not for most people. Some days, I don't know WHO it could possibly be for, in fact. He ended up taking a position where his primary responsibility is training our workers on all manner of procedures, and there he remains.

In July of 2009 I ended up being asked to prepare a "combat systems for not-quite dummies" to educate a few customers on how we work. It was a good time. A few weeks later, I was asked to remove the "not-quite" and make it a lecture for anybody in the company who had an hour to waste. By November I was lecturing a packed auditorium, with geeked-ness only slightly exceeding nervousness, with cameras rolling. Now that lecture is on our company intranet which means I will get teased for years to come over this. Things went well enough that I've been tasked with turning the "not-quite" into "brand new" and making it a regular training presentation for new hires. In this roundabout way I have now gained a surprising amount of responsibility for... training, without so much as changing my desk.

Sometimes, it's not about finding the right road to get where you want to go, but remaining on the road you are on until it takes you where you need to go.

Dorkter Knows Best

Woot woot.

That is all.

The Fire Outside

We recently burned all the brush I cleared from the blueberry patch and the "garden". Most of the brush was vines and sticks, but there were perhaps a dozen small trees in the mix. Everything had a long time to dry out, and there were some leaf piles underneath the sticks. I had some friends over to carry shovels and rakes for tending the fire, set a few newspaper pages in strategic places, and got things started. I wasn't even sure if we would be able to get a good flame going, but the flames popped up nicely within a minute or two. Another minute after that, and we had a complete firestorm on our hands. I'm talking about flames reaching 12-15 feet into the air, with wood crackling electrically over the roaring maelstrom that created an actual wind that mocked the light breeze that was already blowing. The heat and sound were incredible, and it was a good thing that I had already raked most of the surrounding fuel into the pile, so the fire had nowhere to spread. After 10 minutes or so, the blaze had subsided into something more like what you would expect from a medium size brush fire.
It was clear, though, how powerless we are when confronted by the forces of the natural world around us. The fire was unable to spread, but there was nothing I could do to put those flames down, the combustion was simply out of control. We have become increasingly insulated not just from the elements, but even the humanity of our neighbors as we retreat to the Internet. That insulation allows us to build a false image of our own importance. Standing next to a howling fire, which was itself nothing compared to a 100 acre fire advancing at 15 m.p.h., clearly illustrated my own impotence.

Days of The Late 90's

Of late, I've been completely hung up on a little alternative ditty known as Enemy (click on the link, then press 'play' on the upper right corner) by Days of The New. Check it out, if you like a blend of music that, according to Wikipedia, spans "post-grunge, acoustic rock, and electronic" genres. I've not listened to the remainder of that particular album, I must confess.

I've long enjoyed the band Days of The New's first album (self-titled), and only major hit. That release is more stark and stripped down than Enemy, but if you enjoy acoustic guitar, there is at least something in it for you, and I recommend you look into this album as well, online or elsewhere.