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WEEK 10 2013

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2012



Saturday 9 March 2013
Saturday - Doing various chores, not a lot to say. The weather is improving.

Seriously, cat, WTH?

riley and pillow

The house is 1800 SF. The cat takes up, maybe, 1/2 SF. The odds against him randomly picking my pillow to sleep on are therefore 3600:1.


So, about time to start the 'book read' table for this year, it being Week #10 already. Not much to tabulate, actually.

#1 Domes of Fire (Tamuli Book #1)
#2 The Shining Ones (Tamuli Book #2)
#3 The Hidden City (Tamuli, Book #3)
#4 The Magistrates of Hell
#5 The Snitch, Houdini and Me,		#6 Into Uncharted Seas
#7 Hide Me Among the Graves,
#8 The Legion of Time



Friday 8 March 2013
Friday - In the morning I worked a bit more on the GIS, and went over and visited with the client. It's time to wrap this project up. He pointed out some more defects, two channels that have their names switched, and is concerned about a third who's GIS as mapped doesn't quite jibe with what it should be doing. He wants to make a separate field visit to check on it, but the statement of work says "no field work". I don't mind, really, but it's up to the boss.

Back to Lancaster in the early evening. It snowed in the hills the previous night, and the hills were white even late in the day, but the road was dry.


Book #8 was The Legion of Time, by Jack Williamson. I read this book years ago (Vacaville, so I was in junior high, maybe), and had long forgotten the title and author, until seeing it on a blog somewhere. It is, like most books of it's era, very "thin" feeling, with cardboard characters. But it's the first time I ever encountered the idea of parallel worlds in a (semi) scientific way, and the main themes stuck with me...

Thursday  7 March 2013

Thursday - On the road, down to Ventura. I got a fair amount done, basically checking some underground channels against the as-built s. They seemed off, and our draftsman, much better at this stuff than I, agreed. We also cleaned up a bunch of old hard drives that were cluttered up with files, so that's a plus, though not billable. Still, it's all in one place, so that's good.


The boat was OK. There was a damp spot from the rain on the cushion that I normally sleep on, but I dried it out before going to bed. It rained off and on during the night - a nice sound.

Wednesday  6 March 2013

Wednesday  -  I had a lousy night, woke up sick with an upset stomach, and and felt pretty rocky all morning (no coffee when I don't feel well!). I finally went back to bed, before noon, and felt better in the late afternoon and got some work done. I want to get DONE with the GIS job, and move on to other things, but there always seems to be just one more thing. I was trying to use an SQL script for part of the updates, but finally just got tired of that, and started moving points by hand...


I did run across a remarkable picture online, of a 74 gun ship of the line. It was American, laid down in 1824 as the USS Alabama, but not launched until the Civil War (as the USS New Hampshire), and kept in duty as a training ship until it burned in 1921 (renamed by then to the Granite State, to free up New Hampshire for battleship a name). It's unbelievable to me that no-one thought such a thing worth preserving, or rehabilitating.

uss new hamprhire after fire
The USS Alabama USS New Hampshire S/V Granite State after the 1921 fire.


Tuesday  5 March 2013
Tuesday - Working away on this, that, and the other thing. I feel spread kind of thin right now...


Parallels works pretty much as advertised. I have it running from the Bootcamp partition, and it runs either in stardard mode, or "coherence". Coherence runs things slower, but it allows you to bring up Excel, say, when you click on an Excel file - even if it's on the Mac.

The downside is that it can get rather confusing, figuring out where things came from or are being saved to.


Monday  4 March 2012
Monday - Ah. Taxes are done. And I don't owe anything...


Over at The Endeavour, John Cook has a series of blog posts on the differential equation of motion. One of his reader's commented that the Millennium Bridge issue looked like a case of negative damping.

I'd guess the Millennium Bridge issue was more of a driving function issue (with feedback), rather than a modification of the innate bridge damping. People adjusting their movement at about 0.1 to 1+hz to oppose the perceived local movement of the walk...

I'm not sure how'd you go about analyzing this sort of problem. Aeroelasticity uses the rather funky "k" and "pk" methods but at least the aero forces are predictable from a superposition of the normal modes local inclination of wing sections. A bridge is randomly and sparsely populated to heavily populated by individuals of varying weight and reaction times - what's the worst condition? Maybe some sort of statistical testing for worst case? Perhaps you could monte carlo things, put an "agent" at some nodes, programmed to apply a forcing function equivalent to leaning against the motion.

"Work" done is an interesting aspect of this sort of problem; dampers have started to become an integral part (heh) of the design process in new structures such as bridges and office towers in the last couple of decades. They've been retrofit to existing structures such as the Millennium Bridge and much older Golden Gate Bridge.

Sunday   3 March 2012
Sunday - A cool day (interesting clouds in the morning) and blowing quite hard. I wanted to do a 5 miles walk, but not into a 33mph wind and sandstorm. I should have gone yesterday, when it was nice, but decided to concentrate on taxes.


I did a bit of work on the taxes, about 5 or 6 hours worth.




Picture of the Week
Tall Ship Visit to San Francisco 
Photo Notes: Tall ship [Lady Washington] visit to San Francisco, Ca.



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