Time off to unwrap prezzies

Recent holes in the blog are attributable to my birthday, prematurely celebrated over the past bank-holiday weekend. Today being the real thing I sit at the keyboard and wonder whether Blogger has automatically ratcheted up my age in the profile.

So, the technology of birthdays. One key item is of course the corkscrew. I once bought a £75 corkscrew that had been generously reduced to a mere £50. The design converted a simple act of leverage into a screwing action. Ingenious but not thought through. The forces were enormous and both the screw and the helical slot it engaged with quickly wore out. Strength is what’s needed, especially with non-cork corks.

Birthdays involve the accommodation of grandson Zach whose cot is erected in my atelier, denying me my computer. He, however, is well supplied with advanced technology. His mic/speaker not only communicates with the saloon bar downstairs but also plays Wiegenlied. Another device projects a rotating pattern of stars on the ceiling. He rarely troubles us as the corks pop.

The evening after, with Zach at his other grandparents, we left in a seven-seater cab for one of the county’s many gastropubs. Most Herefordshire taxi-drivers have satnavs but ours claimed not to need one and proved his point by approaching the pub by an unknown narrow road with grass growing in the middle and solid hedges that provided a tunnel-like effect through the windscreen. Hedges are sacred in this part of England and one is taken to the pillory for damaging them

Welcome to the fall-off rule

Remember the demo in physics? Bunsen burner standing on its base (stable equilibrium), on its nozzle (unstable equilibrium), on its side (neutral equilibrium). With a motorbike only the latter state is available without assistance and a bike on its side is no use to anyone.

Working for a weekly newspaper I used to call on the town's men of the cloth. Father Michael O’Sullivan noticed my parked bike. “I see yiz ride a bike. I did win I was a young priest. Niver had a cold. But yiz'll fall off once ivery year and a haf.” The transition from a temporary form of (often very) unstable equilibrium into neutral.

Fr. O’Sullivan was right about the fall-off rate. Once my friend and I were riding Indian file on our bikes and a dog darted out. My friend swerved and I did too, but a microsecond too late. My clutch lever (on the left-hand side of the handlebar) caught his raincoat, swung the forks round on full lock and I was tossed on to the tarmac. People at a bus-stop nearby watched with interest but none moved to my aid. They would have lost their place in the queue. The adamantine West Riding.

A subsequent event contributing to my fall-off quota occurred when a car pulled out into a steepish hill down which I was travelling. No escape. The bike hit the car amidships and I somersaulted over the car and landed some yards (we were still Imperial then) down the road. Tucked into my raincoat was a box containing my complete LP collection, perhaps 25 discs. None was harmed.

Young people believe they are immortal. The assumption of a mortgage tells them they are not.

Not magic, just hard work

In one Olympic sport competitors appeared to flout the laws of a branch of physics known as mechanics.

Remember I said “appeared”. But here’s how. Getting a stationary car to move off requires lots of power (called torque) from the engine. But the engine develops most torque when it’s revving. To ensure the car can move off even on a steep hill (highish engine speed) and subsequently run quickly but economically (lowish engine speed), a gearbox is inserted between the engine and the back wheels.

Same with a bike. Mine has fifteen speeds, giving me the technical wherewithal – if not, alas, the requisite leg power – to cycle away easily and deal with any gradient.

But the bikes of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, et al, at the vélodrome didn’t have gears. Since they often crossed the finishing line at 70 kph where did the compromise occur? If the rider can cycle away from a standing start why aren’t his legs an impossible blur at maximum speed?

The answer lies in the riders' thighs – Hoy’s are like tree trunks. The bike’s single gear is unbelievably high and most of us would be incapable of getting going, let alone riding up the banked track. Not our goldmeisters though. The high gear serves them well during sprints when the legs move up and down quickly but controllably.

All you need to create the illusion of defying physics are huge thigh muscles. Or, funnily enough, a steam engine which develops torque at very low revs and can thus dispense with a gearbox.

Beautiful game? How about this?

Now it can be told. When I wrote job application letters in the sixties to forty US magazine editors I lied about why I wanted to work in the USA. Fact is I wanted to watch live baseball. Not that I even knew the rules.

I arrived in Pittsburgh in winter and couldn’t wait until the season started. I dragged a friend to the freezingly cold Pirates’ opener in Forbes Field and had him explain the game. Thereafter I watched a huge amount of telly.

What’s this got to do with technology? Well, that’s my baseball glove in the inset. Because I’m right-handed I wear it on my left hand and, with luck, it helps me gobble up grounders and snag fly hits (even fungos!). After which I use my right hand to hurl the ball wherever it should go.

What a glove does for a baseball pro is something else again. Batting and pitching are easy to understand. What makes baseball special is that gloves transform fielders into figures of grace and efficiency. They reach balls that would elude even the most determined cricketer. What’s more they’re often expected to do this. If they don’t an error is charged against them.

Grace and efficiency – what do I mean? The shortstop is an infield player, lurking somewhere between second and third base. The batter, 40 m away, cracks a hard low drive to the shortstop’s right. But he doesn’t try to catch it with his right hand (“the meat hand”). He swings his gloved left hand down across his body turning the palm towards the ball. With practised elegance he makes the catch and tosses the ball insouciantly to the second-baseman. It’s quite routine but it makes me swoon.

A ton up - but not on a motorbike

My hundredth post so let’s celebrate the metric system. Inevitably the French were the first to adopt it (as an exercise of pure reason) though I thought they’d designated the metre as something like one ten-millionth of the distance of the equator. Not so. A French abbot and scientist proposed the milliare as a minute of arc along the meridian. Which conceivably might be the same thing.

Benefit 1. Arithmetic. Remember the longwindedness of performing calculations in fractions (eg, 7/16 x 14/57). The decimal point blew all that into the weeds.

Benefit 2. Technology. Nuts and bolts in the GB were designated like this: 3/8 in. BSW (standing for British Standard Whitworth) and there were other systems. Now – as far as I know – they’re all metric and it’s so much simpler. “Give me a 5 mm bolt, 2 cm long please.”

Benefit 3. Science. To the unitiated it may not seem simpler but expressing 0.000,000,0008 mm as 8x10-9 mm (Sorry. Need to work out HTML superscript here) obviously does save paper.

Benefit 4. Peace of mind. Got a long journey ahead of you on the Continong? Change the settings on the satnav from miles to kilometres and be encouraged (Yes, I know it’s illusory, but illusions have their uses) as they whistle away behind you.

Disadvantages. The USA remains agnostic. Metrics does away with a useful height benchmark for homo sapiens and, at 6 ft 1½ in. (“just a little over 6 ft”) I find myself lacking a familiar definition.

Marja-Leena plays a straight bat

Denied any ability in the graphic arts, I am forced to look at the subject technologically. A wide viewpoint. Take the media: there are oils, acrylics, watercolours, ink, crayons, frottage (I love that one), bits of glued newspaper and no doubt much more. Surfaces embrace canvas, paper, board, wood and the sides of buildings. In the service of which are tools which range from sable hair brushes to small – perhaps big – trowels. Where do you start?

Having encouraged Marja-Leena to write the definitive post on 3D scanning I emailed her a deceptively simple question: A subject for a painting occurs to you. How do you go about deciding on the appropriate technology for rendering that subject?

Needless to say M-L was far too fly to fall for that one. A Canadian might have, but not a Finnish-Canadian. For one thing she regards herself as a printmaker. She used to paint “years ago” (visit her blog archives) but these days she finds painting “comparatively boring”.

However, in the best tradition of people born in a cold country who go to live in another cold country she offers:

“One starts with some kind of an image then chooses the best way to present it, to fit it to one’s own sensibility" she says adding, as if she'd never heard of Jane Austen, " if that's the correct word."

There are no shortcuts in Finland or Canada. "That comes with some years of practice with different materials. I've been a printmaker for over 25 years, and I'm always learning new ways of image-making, which keeps me on my toes and interested.”

Memo: Must find out more about printmaking.

Deficient ears can save you money

As I loll on my couch I am grateful I am off the hi-fi treadmill.

Thirty years ago, for a modest expenditure, you could verifiably improve the performance of your LP-playing equipment (pick-up, amplifier, twin speakers). You then stepped on to a ladder whose length was dictated only by the depth of your pocket.

Then CDs replaced LPs. I for one was unable to detect improvements from more expensive CD players and it was only when I needed twin-drives that I bought a new unit. By then, an amplifier upgrade appeared futile and the reviews proved it. Performance graphs for quite inexpensive amps showed virtually flat curves. Distortion was only detectable by bats.

That left loudspeakers. My friend owned Quad electrostatics which were easily the best. But they resembled central heating radiators and cost £1000 a pair. I made do with rather less. Later in life and comfortably off I decided to relegate my speakers to the kitchen (Cooks find Mozart encouraging - see pic) and buy something better for the salon. I spent an embarrassing hour at a specialist hi-fi shop. The owner patiently switched between speaker pairs widely differing in price. To no audible avail.

I had of course reached a defining hi-fi moment: ears inadequate through age. Comparatively cheap speakers would do. Sad, but at least I’m off the treadmill.

This was how I saw it

WORLD WAR TWO: A child’s view of
technology

Metal shortage. To build more battleships the railings round the school were removed with oxy-acetylene torches. Sparks and glare for fascinated (totally unprotected) kids. Afterwards the remaining stumps of metal were removed from wall tops, allowing us to walk along them unhindered. Rumour had it the collected metal was never used.

In the sky. This was the West Riding so no baddies during the day. From time to time the big names (Spitfire, Lancaster) appeared, but mostly it was the twin-engine Avro Anson (presumably a bomber trainer) and the single droning-engine Harvard.

Camouflage. Close to the present Leeds/Bradford airport was an operative factory making goodness knows what. Earthworks were built round the single-storey structure and the top was then disguised with fake trees and a simulated duck pond. Even at ground level this was quite effective.

Health scare. Housewives were urged to hand in their aluminium pans to make more planes. Few did. Then came a story – almost certainly promulgated by The Daily Mail – that cooking vegetables in aluminium pans caused cancer. Could these two themes have been related?