Science – Page 12 – Fooyah

April 15 2013April 17 2013

Bridge Construction

When I was in America I did some running. On my last day in the USA I ran past some bridges. While running up to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge I noticed a curious linkage design in the side of the bridge.

In the UK the majority of bridges are built on rollers so that when they expand in the summer, warmer months they don’t crack and break apart. These rollers can be observed from under the bridge and the expansion joints can be seen on top of the bridge.

This particular bridge in Washington DC is hanging from the cantilever end parts of the bridge to allow expansion in the structure. A close up below:

A close up with my annotations:

This is quite a clever solution to bridge expansion. I also think it is quite clear that I would make an excellent dinner guest, not boring at all! One of the things I love about civil engineering is that it is Meccano but just bigger. Big bolts, big nuts and big cables!

March 16 2013March 16 2013

They Just Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

It doesn’t have to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Those Victorians really knew how to build lovely buildings. Just look at the ceiling in this cafe area of the Natural History Museum!

March 5 2013March 6 2013

Jack Frost

This Fooyah Communication concerns the weather and cars. It does not concern the fact that my car doesn’t like starting if the temperature is below 2 Celsius and nor does it concern the run of cold weather recently. I also have not done any controlled, scientific tests to confirm my observations but I would be interested in doing so.

Observation:

When there is a frost and the cars in my street have ice on the windows the side of the car that is closest to the buildings has less or zero ice.

Hypothesis:

One side of the car is warmer than the other resulting in less ice.

Mechanism:

The nearby buildings radiate heat and keep that side of the car warmer or slow its loss of heat.

Pretty picture:

Cars parked in the road in position A have less ice on the SW facing side which is nearest the buildings in the street. Cars parked in position B have less ice on the NW side which is closest to the buildings there. It is not a phenomenon to do with the sun as both of these positions are shaded from the sun’s rays in the early morning and there isn’t any sun when I go out to the car in the deep dark midwinter.

Most of the houses in these streets were built around 1880 and so have brick-thick walls and no cavities to insulate. Therefore they radiate the heat energy of the house quite efficiently. I need to park my car outside a modern house with cavity insulation to see what effect that has on the frost of the car.

Some not-very-sciency-maths-stuff:

I have made a huge number of simplifcations in the following calculations but the order of the result will be about correct and if it isn’t then I am sure that one of the F5 +1 will let me know. Essentially I have estimated the amount of energy lost by the air in my whole house and have assumed that about one third goes through the front of the building (the roof is quite well insulated). I have also assumed that the bricks of the house will lose some heat over the night and that this is radiated out although some will be radiated in. Then the car absorbs the energy without any loss. Basically, the final answer is a big ISH.

So the car absorbs about a couple of Watts per metre squared. That seems about right, but what do I know? Thermodynamics freaked me out at college!

March 5 2013March 6 2013

It’s Just Right

Once a fortnight is just about the correct frequency.

Private Eye is a fortnightly news magazine to which I subscribe. It’s possibly the only newspaper willing to spread the truth and print what is going on. It’s quite frightening really just how corrupt and dodgy most organisations and societies are. Maybe corrupt is the norm and I’m just hoping for an idealised society that can never exist? The other magazine I subscribe to is Scientific American.

In the same week that I receive Private Eye the Merseyside Skeptics Society release their podcast called Skeptics With A K. It’s a show about an hour long which features three normal (ish) guys chatting about skeptical items that interest them. There’s a bit of swearing and a reasonable amount of poking fun at people but it is very interesting and I learn a lot.

Both these subscriptions arrive in the same week and have for a few years, even allowing for the Christmas break they have. Each new year I wonder if the synchronicity will be altered but I haven’t found so this far. Perhaps it’s deliberate?

February 20 2013

Latest iPhone Background

Here’s a picture that I have as my latest iphone background. I got it from the Hubble app. It’s just gorgeous.

February 10 2013February 10 2013

Breather

I’m slightly paranoid about electronic gear overheating. This might be down to a fear of setting my house (and street) on fire and relying on Jase to put it out but is also to do with breaking electronic kit.
Everything has an optimum operating temperature. Whether that’s me at about 36 or so Celsius or the sun running at a few million Celsius. Electronics are no different. Why do you think that stuff has fans and air circulation grates?
My amplifier has loads of grating over the top of the housing. This indicates that the contents are likely to get quite warm. The Blu-Ray player I bought has tiny feet and a solid base. Now, the only sensible arrangement for the kit is amp at the bottom, then the disc player and finally the Sky box.
All of these items have a fan or large vents. Why then do they stack so to leave very little room for air circulation? Granted, you don’t need a great deal of space to move air but you would think these things would be designed to fit with other electronic kit? No. They are designed to look good and functionality comes a close second! (See the original PS3 for cooling issues)l
So, rather than pay loads for spacers for my kit I used Duplo and Lego. It looks rubbish but adds a little colour and a certain something!

February 5 2013March 5 2013

A New Fallacy

I would like to introduce a new logical fallacy into the world.

The argument from “PROFESSIONALISM”.

This argument is provided by those who wish to change organisations and structures. The conversation might go something like:

“We want to make you work 20 hours more in a week. As a professional you must agree that this would increase the time you have to work.”

Essentially it seems rather a hard argument to try and battle. If you are a professional then you want to do your job to the best that you can. You also think that you are open to change and improving outcomes. So, this “you should agree with me” approach seems rather hard to argue against.

My problem with this argument backing up changes in an organisation is that pretty much anything can be justified using the “you’re a professional and so would want the best for your sector”. This is why the argument shouldn’t be used. If your argument can be extended (a bit like the slippery slope) to back up anything then it invalidates the points you are trying to put across.

“You can’t disagree with these new standards as they surely improve what it is that is expected of you as a professional.”

Again this seems hard to argue against. But there is a counter argument to be made. As a professional I should be expected to do all that I reasonalby can to ensure that I work my best. There is a limit to what can physically be done and the expectation on professionals should stop before that limit is reached.

Time for the world to use arguments that really back up what they want to do. Some evidence wouldn’t go amiss either [not just anecdote].

February 1 2013February 1 2013

Simulview and Dual Play

Simulview is Sony’s buzzword for displaying two player images on a 3D television so that each player sees only their screen. Essentially the shutters on the active glasses activate at the same time rather than alternately and so P1 sees only his/her image and P2 sees their image only. This is quite cool and displays (I assume) a 1080p picture to each player.
Downside: This only works on the Playstation Monitor.

DualPlay is the technology that LG have introduced to try and allow two players to see their own picture full screen. It has taken me four days to figure out how to get this to work (which is slightly embarrassing). DualPlay uses passive glasses with P1 having a left/left combination and P2 having a right/right combination. The standard two player screen (up/down or left/right split) is then stretched over the whole screen. This will work with most games with that picture split.
Downside: Aspect ratio issues.

I haven’t yet tried this on my TV but will soon. I am quite excited about it but also worried about the aspect ratio change. Nice of LG to think of gamers though.

December 11 2012December 12 2012

Bring The Noise

The latest fashion for drinking water from a bottle with a “sports top” has caused an epidemic of slurp sounds as people release the bottle from thier lips and air rushes into the bottle.

As an aside, I would have to say that the bottled water industry is an utter con. In the UK practically all tap water is potable. It is such a waste of resources and CO2 that water is put into plastic or glass bottles and then moved around the country by truck to be sold in shops as an alternative to the (often purer) water that is supplied into every home by the kitchen tap. Bottled water should be taxed greatly to compensate for the waste. The marketers of bottled water have done a marvellous job and the environment is going to suffer. I can’t think of a single argument for selling bottled water in the UK.

So, the prefered delivery recepticle for bottles of water at the moment is the sports top. A bottle top that doesn’t have to be turned to open the bottle, just pulled with the hands and teeth. This, in itself, is not a problem. The problem is the small aperture for the movement of water into the mouth. When squeezing the bottle to force liquid refreshment into the mouth the bottle compresses and sometimes crackles as it does so, this is reasonably noisy. But the most annoying part is when the lips are removed from the bottle and the air rushing back into the bottle causes an awful slurping sound. The gust of wind pushing past the lips and teeth and through the aperture can make a sound that just grates.

When bottle tops were screw tops there was plenty of space for air to enter the bottle IF you chose to have a small gap for air at the top of your lips, just under your nose. Now, apparently, this is an incovenient method of bottle top. Everyone should be using the sports top but not everyone is doing sport. I think it should be renamed the common top for lazy people. Let’s have a new design top for proper sports people.

To stop the slurp you just need to blow air into the bottle and allow the water to flow out into your mouth without creating the negative pressure in the bottle. Simple.

December 10 2012

Meme

One of the standard explanations and examples I use when teaching the mechanics module of A Level is to consider driving a car around town. Most pupils have experienced, or are aware, of people thier age who drive circuits around the local town trying to get noticed. I used to just talk about this practice but a few months back a friend was talking about his teenage experience of this form of behaviour and he used the term:

Barry Laps

This term didn’t really need any explaination as I already knew what it meant. I’ve never really partaken in the the Barry Lap experience. I think the closest I got was riding around Bishop’s Stortford on my Honda NTV 650 with Daryl on his Silverwing just after we had set up radio communication between us. We went around town a few times chatting to each other on the way. Being able to easily communicate between different bikes was far more of a novalty than trying to get attention from onlookers. This was in 1999 and quite before either of us owned mobile phones.

Anyway, I hope that with my continued use that the term Barry Lap might one day make it into the OED!

November 20 2012April 17 2020

Vindication

The BBC News website carried a story yesterday about a high speed yacht that broke the world record. I was instantly interested as my final year project at university was the conceptual design of a high speed yacht.

The major design innovations of my yacht were:

outrigger
hydrofoils
aerofoil shaped sail

Here’s a picture of my concept:

High Speed Yacht Concept - Drawn By Richard Oussedik — High Speed Yacht Concept – Drawn By Richard Oussedik

Here’s a technical drawing of the main body of the yacht:

And so, to compare, here’s some pictures taken from the Vestas Sailrocket website.

So, the sail is in a different place and at an angle but I think my original choices for my final year project have been vindicated. I feel quite pleased that I managed to conceptualise a design that, in general, has worked.

Well done to the Vestas Sail Rocket Team.

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