« January 2019 | Main | March 2019 »
What you see being made below is something I learned how to do in kindergarten. Decades later, I made one of these in the office of my then employer and suddenly there were dozens of them all over the place being made by my coworkers. It is a project within the capabilities of a small child, but it can hook adults too.
How to make a paper lantern:
Be careful if you attempt this. It can be habit forming.
I got into a little discussion quite some while back about tires on a moving vehicle. The question was given some particular forward velocity, how much G-force must the tire material endure? A simple minded look at that issue is shown here.
First consider the vehicle itself:
The tire tread that is in contact with the road is at zero velocity because the road does not move. As the wheel rotates, that formerly zero velocity point on the tire accelerates and gets up to double the vehicular speed when at the top. While that acceleration is in a constantly changing direction, going from vertical at the start to horizontal, I decided to simply use the V = a T equation to estimate acceleration because all I really wanted was an order of magnitude result and I don't have the mathematical ability to model the changing direction issue.
I found the following results for several vehicle speeds.
The acceleration rates for these speeds are phenomenal and so are the G-force numbers.
Tires are made out of tough stuff!
From Tapetum, we find "Tapetum lucidum" described as follows.
Now say hello to my son's cat, Mickey.
He's certainly got what it takes!
I spent most of the year 1971 in Wakefield, MA representing my employer at the time regarding acceptance test procedures at the facility of a subcontractor. I was often in the company of quality assurance people. One time, at the end of a tiring day, the QA man and I went to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
Both of us were pretty tired and conversation was a bit slow until the fellow spoke to me: "Say something interesting!" and I did.
I told him that the earth was going around the sun at an orbital velocity of approximately eighteen miles per second. Since the earth's diameter is approximately eight thousand miles, that means that where the two of us were just ten minutes ago was now an airless void.
He freaked out! He took a sip or two from the screwdriver drink he'd ordered and then he regained his breath.
Looking a bit more closely at the numbers, they actually come out a little bit different.
I chose the phrase "traversal time" to mean how long it takes the earth to move an orbital distance equal to the earth's own diameter.
Of course, I hadn't factored in the solar system's orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy nor the galaxy's linear velocity toward "the great attractor" on the other side of Sagittarius but, y'know, I don't think it really mattered,
The pyramids of ancient Egypt are accurately aligned with true north. How, one might ask, how could denizens of a primitive society possibly have determined which way true north was? Obviously, some bloviating folks tell us, there must have been space aliens on this planet to provide the necessary guidance, right???
Nope.
In that part of the world, the landscape is quite flat, the weather is often clear and there are unobstructed views to the horizon in pretty much every direction. I have heard of two theories of how true north might have been located.
One theory was for ancient astronomers to have tracked the exact point of the rise of a particular star above the horizon and later the exact point of the disappearance of that same star below the horizon. From one's point of observation, two lines could be plotted toward those points of appearance and disappearance creating an angle which when bisected, would lead to true north.
Another theory is that ancient astronomers placed a very long and exactly vertical rod into the ground and studied its shadow on solstice exactly at dawn and exactly at sunset.
By carefully noting the rod shadow positions exactly at sunrise and exactly at sunset and bisecting the resultant angle as shown, true north could be readily determined.
No godly chariots or UFOs, no little green men, no Erich von Däniken, nothing but some insightful thinking was all that it would have taken.
I visited a hospital the other day where to get in, I had to present identification that turned out to be my driver's license. The license was put into a scanner from which my photograph was reproduced on a visitor's badge. Elsewhere, I've had my picture taken with a desk mounted camera, but this was different.
Here's the image:
This picture, if I may laughingly call it that, has a signal to noise ratio pretty close to zero dB. I stared at it for several minutes before I first began to vaguely see my face. The longer I still stare at it, the more easily I see myself, but the visual noise is quite overwhelming.
What if I was an extraterrestrial being trying to make first contact with humanity and this picture is what arrived at Project SETI? Would it be discoverable or would the noise level block discovery?
Klatu, Spock, Flebdap and I will have to discuss that I guess.
Image used with permission of Guy Gilchrist, https://www.aguygilchristproduction.com/contact/
There is a large school on a very busy road near here which has No Parking on that street in front of the school building. Many drivers have habitually ignored that prohibition.
Vehicles get parked there throughout the morning as students arrive and traffic flow is very much impeded, especially when those illegally parked vehicles are large SUVs or pickup trucks that come to their stop a large distance from the curb. Other vehicles must veer around the illegal parkers which leads to many close-call collision events.
Recently, I have noticed traffic cones being set out in an apparent attempt to dissuade the illegal parking.
I don't know if those cones are the doing of school officials or the police, but even with those cones in place, some drivers still park along this stretch, often with doors flung wide open as stuff is retrieved from here and there within the passenger compartment.
How long before someone is killed because of all this is unknown, but I fear that with circumstances as they are, such a tragedy is ultimately inevitable.
Learn about our
free engineering
consulting referral
service at:
We have over forty
electrical, electronic,
mechanical and
software engineers
with expertise in more
than sixty-five categories
of technology and business.
All are members of the
IEEE and adhere to the
IEEE professional codes
of ethics.
No fee is charged for the
referral service.
Each member is an
independent consultant
and negotiates his/her
own consulting agreement.
Editor: Jerry Brown
Contributors:
Carl Schwab
Unless otherwise noted,
reprinting or republication
of anarticle on this blog is
authorized by crediting the
author and prominently
displaying the following
sentence at the beginning
or end of the article,
including the hyperlink to
"This report is republished
with permission of IEEE
Consultant's Network of
Long Island"
