ASSORTED THOUGHTS

Hi internet, I've been a little quiet here lately compared to the 
regular flow of phlog posts over the last few months. Actually I've 
generally been feeling fairly contented, all this month and even 
earlier. Not for any good reason, I haven't even stopped finding 
things to try and fix on the Jag (I've been at that all this long 
weekend in fact), and I'm still quite sexually frustrated, although 
the unique event of meeting some real life girls at the school 
reunion didn't send me quite as obsessed as I feared. Increasingly 
I'm thinking that my next project might be attempting to implement 
my big website idea. I don't know exactly what I want from it, just 
a stab at making lots of money really, so I can keep on living like 
I do, or so I can retire young to my own private island, or 
somewhere in between. Or maybe I'm just bored, in my own way.

Wow I must be in a weird mood, I seem to have condensed everything 
I had to say into one paragraph. By my normal standards I should 
have a 800x600 screen-full of text by now. Well I'm sure I can pad 
it out some more, can't let you get away that lightly reading one 
of my posts...

I've almost finished Ghost Towns of Australia. Researching what's 
happened to them since is quite interesting, although sometimes 
they're described so elgantly in the book that it's nicer just to 
think of them as they were then in the 50/60s. I feel I'm quite the 
sort to end up one of the last residents in some of them, staking 
their claim at the furthest fringe of society. Perhaps I'd be 
happier at that than as a tech millionare, but really I want to be 
both, maybe just to add another contradiction to my personality, as 
if I haven't collected enough of them already. Yep, I want to be 
the Howard Hughs of the outback.

Speaking of aircraft innovation, HackADay had an article about 
airships that made me think I really should finish writing up my 
airship idea for the ideas section that I left unfinished right at 
the start. But I also started making it way too long and detailed. 
Well here's the short version: Lift problem - hydrogen goes 
Hindenburg, Helium is too scarce - solution: Build a big 3D printer 
capable of printing an extremely strong, light, air-tight material 
in an intricate honey-comb sort of structure, and put it in a huge 
vacuum chamber. If the material is strong enough and light enough, 
the printed structures would actually float when exposed to the air 
- someone proved it was at least theoretically possible. Then just 
print the structural parts of the airship with that. Control 
problem - Wind blows them all over the place - solution: for 
inter-continental travel have them lower submersible out-riggers 
into the ocean, below the waves where the water is calmer. These 
are slim structures but contain motors and fins like a submarine (I 
know they've got a proper term for the latter things on subs, but I 
can't think of it). They connect to the airship by cables and 
spread out in a triangular configuration using hydrofoils to impart 
latteral and downward force. The result is a stabiliser anchored in 
the sea which follows under the airship to help it resist the force 
of wind and tow it along from the water. Even though this adds 
resistance to the airship's propulsion due to resistance of the 
outriggers against the water, it's vastly less resistance than that 
of a ship floating on the sea, thus allowing for comparatively 
faster travel. Plus where the weather is appropriate these 
stabilisers can be hoisted up and it can travel independently 
higher in the air and over ground.

Of course that's all a bit fantastical, but not beyond possibility 
if the world powers actually got serious enough about pollution as 
to restrict travel by conventional aircraft. That's not very likely 
though.

Oh another book I've begun reading is "Mechanics for Mugs". Like 
most things, I got the Jag and immediately jumped into the 
step-by-step instructions of the Haynes service manual and similar 
things, without bothering to aquire a complete theoretical 
understanding of the subject. Also as usual it also pretty much 
worked out OK, but now that I'm approaching some level of 
proficiency I'm actually getting interested in all the information 
that I skipped originally. This little book which I bought for $2, 
a full $1.50 under it's original price in the mid 1980s, is an 
appropriate bottom-up description. Actually since it's a revised 
edition of a book from the 70s, it doesn't really go up even as far 
as the technology of my late 80s Jaguar, but it is somewhat easier 
to appreciate modern systems like electronic fuel injection and 
ignition on top of a proper description of the mechanical systems 
that preceeded them. Also I just find the complexity of it all 
quite facinating, not that the electrical complexity of the later 
replacement mechanisms isn't actually even more advanced and 
mysterious (and also requires it's own maintenance attention on the 
Jag).

OK, that's long enough of a ramble to meet my standards, I'm even 
boring myself to sleep, so I'll leave you inter-dwellers and go 
collapse into bed drained by a hard day's bolt bashing and wheel 
wrangling.

 - The Free Thinker