Product Improvement, 1830's style

Down in Baltimore they have a railroad museum full of steam locomotives. It goes right back to the first steamer the B&O ever built, Tom Thumb. Walking around the museum you can see the machines evolving from the first experimental model to the humonguous machines built in the 1940's.
The first model, Tom Thumb, of the famous horse race, is an obvious design. Take a four wheel chassis and plunk a steam boiler down in the middle of it. Firebox on the bottom, fire tube boiler above the fire, and a stack, for draft, atop the boiler. Vertical cylinder driving the wheels thru gears. The number 2 and number 3 engines, dubbed "grasshoppers", are bigger and heavier versions of Tom Thumb. Design is moving forward, number 2 grasshopper still has the expensive-to-make gear drive. Number 3 grasshopper drops the gear and replaces it with cheaper and simpler drive rods.
Grasshopper design reached a dead end. The grasshoppers were not very big or very powerful and they could not be made larger. A larger vertical boiler would be taller and would not fit under the bridges. A look around the museum shows the stacks on all the locomotives rise to exactly the same height, namely the height of the lowest bridge on the mainline.
Follow on design, which lasted until the end of steam, was the horizontal boiler. Technical difficulty of horizontal boilers is how to get the heat of the fire to flow sideways thru the boiler. Heat rises as we all know, and sidewise is a long way from up. The solution was to put the stack at one end of the boiler and the fire at the other. The draft of the stack sucked the flames thru the firetubes of the boiler. The final trick was to vent the waste steam from the cylinders up the stack. As the steam rushed up the stack it created a strong draft that kept things burning merrily.
In the museum you can see all these design improvements coming on very rapidly. It took less than 20 years to go from Tom Thumb to the American standard locomotive design that stayed in service until the end of steam.

I wonder what they are slipping thru in Washington

While the news media are totally consumed by the BP oil spill?

Why I hate Windows.

Was out with the laptop doing an inventory. Bring the laptop home and try to back up the new data to the desktop. Plugged a criss-cross network cable between the two machines, expecting to be able to move files between them. This used to work, in fact it used to work with these two computers and this cable.
Well, it doesn't work any longer. I futzed around for an hour. Turned off the firewalls. Each machine could ping the other machine, but Windows file sharing would not work.
I finally burned the files into a $1 CD and moved them that way.
Damn Microsoft.

It takes money to make money

Or, it takes energy to get energy. This graph shows how much energy is required to make various energy sources work.
The red is the amount of energy consumed by drilling engines, explosives, refineries, pressure vessels, stills, etc. The blue is the amount of useful energy yielded by the process.
Notice the broad yellow arrow marked "ERoEI Required to sustain current Industrial Civilization." Notice also that favorite energy sources of the left and the right (bio mass, nuclear, tar sands, ethanol) are on the wrong side of that arrow.
Bottom line. We need conventional oil and gas unless we accept dropping back to a pre industrial standard of living.

Words of the Weasel Part XVI

"Hold accountable". Same as "bust their chops, but good".

To bust or not to bust BP

President Obama is under pressure to "do something" about the BP oil spill. Problem is, objectively there is nothing he can do. The men, equipment, and expertise all belong to industry, not the government. The well will be capped as fast as BP can do it.
Groping around for something to do, Obama is threatening BP with criminal prosecution. Legally speaking this is possible. US law is riddled with loopholes, and aggressive prosecutors with plenty of budget can indict even a ham sandwich, let alone a multinational oil company with an accident prone record. Now, with pictures of oil sticky pelicans all over TV news, no American jury would have any trouble convicting.
According to the Wall St Journal, the only paper to cover the issue, the spill happened because of bad judgment calls by the BP manager aboard the rig, and failure of the blowout preventer. The BP man omitted or cut short two important tests for gas leakage. They cemented the well shut, assumed the cement job was tight. In actual fact, the cement job leaked, allowing natural gas at 3000 pounds/square inch into the 13000 foot long drill pipe. The only thing preventing this high pressure gas from rising up the well was the weight of 13000 feet of heavy drilling mud in the pipe. BP pumped that out and refilled the well with sea water. The natural gas forced its way up to the surface, caught fire and exploded. BP tried to shut the well off with the blowout preventer but that gadget malfunctioned. This is dumb and dumber, possibly rising to the level of negligence, but not criminal in the ordinary sense of the word.
Plus, we are depending upon BP to cap this runaway well. Somehow I don't think the threat of indictment, trial, and punishment is going to make BP work any faster or harder. In fact it will slow them down. BP is lawyering up, and lawyers always slow things down.
Obama would do better to call the BP people and offer them help. Navy submarines, Air Force transports, Army helicopters, could help, and won't hurt, and the support would help the morale of the BP personnel struggling with heavy equipment in 5000 feet of water.
And, to prevent this from happening again, there ought to be a clearly written set of safety regulations covering leak testing, fire fighting equipment, chain of command aboard the drill rig, life boat drills, fire drills, and testing of blow out preventers. I don't think such a book exists right now and it ought to.

A tale of two boats

Boat, aka traditional American car. Like six passenger, V-8, four door sedan. There was a time then that was all Detroit made. Then they started confusing the issue with station wagons, compact cars, intermediate cars, pony cars, mini vans, SUV's and crossover SUV's. The breed has been thinned down a lot, and there are just two survivors, Cadillac DeVille, and the Ford Crown Vic/Mercury Marquis/Lincoln.
My beloved '99 Cadillac DeVille bit the dust a few weeks ago. I just replaced it with an '03 Mercury Grand Marquis. The two survivors are an interesting contrast. The Caddy has better styling and more groovy gadgets then the Merc. Caddy's have, in addition to the standard electric seats and power door locks, power antenna, power trunk lid latch, power gas filler door, hands-off air conditioning & heating, all digital dashboard. Caddy engine is the magnificent all aluminum, double overhead cam, 4.6 liter Northstar. It's lighter and more powerful than the Merc's plain jane cast iron V8. Step on the Caddy and the Northstar would launch the car into orbit. Step on the Merc and it does accelerate, but it is modest. The advanced engine bought Caddy better gas mileage, 27 on the highway where as the Merc only gets 20.
The Merc is built stronger. The Caddy got scrapped because the rear axle loosened up and nearly came off the car. The combination of New Hampshire potholes and road salt caused the fasteners holding on the axle to loosen up and make an unnerving banging noise over bumps (of which NH has plenty). Two different body shops opined that 1. It couldn't be fixed; and 2. It wasn't long for this world. Caddys have also have heat gasket problems because you cannot torque up the head bolts enough to keep the head gasket in place with stripping the threads out of the aluminum block.
At 125K miles the drivers seat upholstery in the Caddy was sagging.
The Merc has a reputation for longevity, and long hard service as police car, taxi cab, airport limo, doesn't faze it. It has a better radio than the Caddy. Signal seek actually finds stations out here in the deep fringe area, the bass is stronger and it will play CD's AND tapes. The Merc does the plain car things well. It feels better charging thru a narrow slot between the Jersey barrier and the 18 wheeler at 80 mph. Ride on the interstates is smooth and solid, ride over bumpy back roads is confidence building. It doesn't bounce up and down.
In short, Caddy is a more advanced design, but the Merc is more rugged.