Watching yesterday's Congressional hearing on BP was kinda like watching a bull fight. You know how it's going to come out, you watch it to see the blood flow. The congress critters demanded confessions from BP CEO Hayward, and Hayward wasn't about to confess to anything. They repeatedly asked Hayward to admit that BP had taken short cuts to save money, and Hayward wasn't buying that one. Committee chair Henry Waxman, came across as clueless and vindictive.
Hayward missed several opportunities to defend BP's drilling practices and paint the blowout as an unavoidable accident. He finally resorted to stonewalling the committee's "have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife" questions. Hayward clearly is not at his best public speaking to a hostile audience.
Neither side had slides to illustrate what they were talking about.
In actual fact, the well had a leak that allowed natural gas under great pressure into the drillpipe. BP skipped three important leak checks, any of which would have detected the problem. Then they pumped the drilling mud out of the well, and the well blew. The committee interrogators failed make this clear to the TV audience. Hayward kept his cool, disclosed nothing, and came out of it looking better than he went in. Which isn't saying much, but it could have been worse for him.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The sun is exploding
A NASA scientist announced that a super magnetic storm on the sun, strong enough to do all kinds of bad things, is expected in 2013. Instapundit picked up the Slashdot story and passed it on.
Gotta wonder about that one. In actual fact, sun spot activity is at an all time low. The 11 year sunspot cycle is almost stopped. Astronomers and radio amateurs are waiting for it to start up again. So a prediction of intense solar activity three years from now arouses a certain amount of skepticism among those who pay attention to the state of the sun.
By that as it may, how much badness could an intense solar storm do? The last really bad one was back in the 1850's and it scared the bejesus out of telegraph operators. It was strong enough to cause sparks to fly off the telegraph wires, lighting up the telegraph offices.
Today we have built more targets for solar storms to disrupt. Telephone, cable TV and electric power wires, plus all the station and central office equipment, and everything electrical plugged into those wires. However, all these networks have been hardened against lightening hits. It is doubtful that a solar storm is a bad as a lightening stroke, which can toast anything electrical and set the place on fire to boot. So the networks will stay up. We may have truckloads of melted modems, scorched stereos, and toasted TV sets, but I think the lights will stay on, and the phone will work.
Gotta wonder about that one. In actual fact, sun spot activity is at an all time low. The 11 year sunspot cycle is almost stopped. Astronomers and radio amateurs are waiting for it to start up again. So a prediction of intense solar activity three years from now arouses a certain amount of skepticism among those who pay attention to the state of the sun.
By that as it may, how much badness could an intense solar storm do? The last really bad one was back in the 1850's and it scared the bejesus out of telegraph operators. It was strong enough to cause sparks to fly off the telegraph wires, lighting up the telegraph offices.
Today we have built more targets for solar storms to disrupt. Telephone, cable TV and electric power wires, plus all the station and central office equipment, and everything electrical plugged into those wires. However, all these networks have been hardened against lightening hits. It is doubtful that a solar storm is a bad as a lightening stroke, which can toast anything electrical and set the place on fire to boot. So the networks will stay up. We may have truckloads of melted modems, scorched stereos, and toasted TV sets, but I think the lights will stay on, and the phone will work.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Hor rodding ain't what it used to be.
Things have changed. Used to be you could pull an engine out of a junker and drop it into something cool and it would run. Not any more. This Hot Rod magazine story shows how things have changed. The "junk yard jewel", a 4.6 liter Ford V8, won't run as it come out of the junkyard. The electronic boxes that make the fuel injection run don't come with the engine and the electrical harness to the injectors is toast.
Solution. Simple. Go with a carburetor. OK so far, except the carb needs a new Edelbrock intake manifold for nearly $600. The whole damn engine only cost $400. So before they can even crank it over, the $400 engine becomes a $1000 engine. I can remember replacing the entire engine in a hobby stock racer for $50 total. Speed costs, how fast do you want to go?
And then, Hor Rod magazine had access to a dyno. Us shade tree mechanics used to judge improvements in engine power by the seat of the pants, or quarter mile times, or looking at manifold vacuum. Dyno was a luxury far beyond our pocket books.
I shouldn't carp. Following this article you can produce a very strong engine from readily available parts and the whole project is less than $3000. They pushed the stock Ford mill from 200 and a skosh horsepower to nearly 400 horse and it's still driveable in the street.
Solution. Simple. Go with a carburetor. OK so far, except the carb needs a new Edelbrock intake manifold for nearly $600. The whole damn engine only cost $400. So before they can even crank it over, the $400 engine becomes a $1000 engine. I can remember replacing the entire engine in a hobby stock racer for $50 total. Speed costs, how fast do you want to go?
And then, Hor Rod magazine had access to a dyno. Us shade tree mechanics used to judge improvements in engine power by the seat of the pants, or quarter mile times, or looking at manifold vacuum. Dyno was a luxury far beyond our pocket books.
I shouldn't carp. Following this article you can produce a very strong engine from readily available parts and the whole project is less than $3000. They pushed the stock Ford mill from 200 and a skosh horsepower to nearly 400 horse and it's still driveable in the street.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, June 14, 2010
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.
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.
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