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September 4, 2020
There is no “dark side” of the moon… but given tidal locking, there is a near side and a far side… with the near side always facing earth, and the far side forever pointed away from us. It gets plenty of light… we just can’t ever see it.
And if you happen to be orbiting the moon, when you’re flying over that far side… that’s when there’s the radio blackout. Apollo 11 famously began their LOI (Lunar Orbit Insertion) rocket burn while orbiting the far side, which made for a very nervous group of people in mission control.
Several minutes later, communications was re-established and telemetry data was received, and everything looked perfect, much to everyone’s relief.
Going into the weekend these days feels like that. We’re totally blind to data, so all we can do is wait 70 hours till we re-establish contact with the BCCDC spaceship, and Commander Dix and Pilot Henry. The data going into it is about what’s to be expected these days.
We’re headed to Whistler one last time; the last gasp of summer… and I’ve seen license plates from Alberta, Saskatchewan and California… and tons of traffic. There’s a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam 10km… which is where I’m posting this from. I’ll update the graphs and data later with the complete picture… but note… we won’t get the real complete picture until we come out from the far side on Monday at 3pm.
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September 3, 2020
When I was a kid, I loved playing with radio-control planes. It took a while to build them, but it was always worth it to see them take off and fly around. Not a single plane survived, but that’s ok… the crashes were inevitable. Then, I’d salvage the electronics (batteries, servos) and just build them into the next model. For me, and the way I flew those things, that was just part of it.
What wasn’t inevitable was how I lost a couple of helicopters… those, I didn’t build. But I did try to figure out how far away I could fly them before the radio control lost contact.
When you think about it, there’s really no good way to figure that out… it works, it works, it works, it doesn’t work. Oh. Then you watch it drift off into the distance. Modern drones will fly back to their home point, but not these old cheap plastic things. They landed on some distant rooftop or tree, never to be seen again.
What was I thinking? I was a kid, so don’t judge too harshly… flirting with that edge of possibility was part of the fun.
Similarly, Dr. Henry and Minister Dix gave one of their comprehensive updates today; lots to digest, but the summary of it is that things are pretty good… and that, as usual, it’s entirely up to us with respect to how things go from here.
On the “it could go this way or it could go that way” projections, we’re right at the edge. It’s actually flirting with that “out of control” tipping point much the same as the anchor brakes I talked about yesterday… and much the same as the helicopters mentioned above. Perhaps the range is 500 feet… and at 490 feet away, it’s flying perfect under control. And then it ever-so-gently drifts out to 510 feet and I give it a little right-turn nudge on the stick but nothing happens… and now I give it full-right, full-left, oh shit, up, down, engine off… etc etc, no response… and I watch it drift away, till it’s nothing but a little dot in the sky, lost forever.
If you look at the epidemiological (thank you auto-correct/spell-check) modelling, there are always these various lines… in this case (slide 20 on today’s presentation, … [Continue Reading]
September 2, 2020
If you’ve been around long enough and/or know something about hockey and/or Olympic history, you’re probably familiar with “The Miracle on Ice”. It happened back in 1980, at the Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games, where the Americans won the gold medal.
It all took place in the midst of the Cold War. The Soviet Union showed up with a veteran team of experienced superstars, who’d been crushing their opposition for years. They’d won the last 4 Olympic gold medals, and hadn’t lost an Olympic match in that entire time.
The Americans, on the other hand, showed up with a group of very young (average age 21) college players with zero NHL experience. A bunch of excellent amateur players… but way out of their league.
To make a long story short, in one of the most epic David vs. Goliath moments ever, the Americans defeated the Soviets and won the gold medal… but if you’re not too familiar with it all, you may not realize that when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R., that wasn’t the game that won them the medal. They still had one more game to go, against Finland… and the winner of that game would win it all.
U.S. coach Herb Brooks (played by Karl Malden in the made-for-TV movie) was well-known as an excellent motivator, but he had his work cut out for him. After the mental and physical exhaustion from beating the Soviets, they had to dig down and find it all again, one final time.
Needless to say, Finland was no pushover. They were playing for the gold too, and it was Finland that had the lead, 2-1, going into the final period. The entirety of what Herb Brooks told his players during that 2nd-intermission break isn’t known… but the last thing he said to them was this:
“If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f#@%ing graves.”
Then, he stormed out of the locker room… but, not quite. He stopped at the door, paused, turned around… and solemnly said, “Your f#@%ing graves.” Then he walked out.
Perhaps that was the differentiator. Who knows. Great coaches, great techniques, great ideas, great execution. The Americans scored 3 goals in the 3rd period, and the rest is history.
On a more recent but less important similar event, the Canucks, last night – facing playoff … [Continue Reading]
September 1, 2020
Recently, having just clicked on a YouTube video, I was reading the comments below it. The top comment said something like, “If you’re watching this video, you’re probably procrastinating.”
Very accurate… I was probably eight levels deep, down the “Up next” smorgasbord. I’m not sure what powers the algorithm that fuels the suggestions that populate my curated list of suggestions, but it’s gotten pretty good at knowing me. Good bot.
So I somehow wound up watching videos of “anchor fails”. This is where a ship (the bigger the better!) is trying to drop their anchor, and they make a hot mess out of it.
I’ve learned a lot… I used to have the misconception that it’s the anchor that holds the ship in place, but it’s just as much the weight of the chain, a lot of which lays on the bottom as well. The anchor prevents the chain from moving, and the weight of the chain prevents the ship from moving. It answers the question I never quite understood… if the anchor is “anchored” to the bottom, how do they ever dislodge it when they want to leave?
The answer is… they simply lift it. If you imagine trying to claw wet sand at the beach… dig your hand in, and try to claw along the ground… it’s hard. But lift it straight up, no problem. The anchor doesn’t move laterally very easily, for the same reason… but lifts up no problem.
And… especially on the huge ships, the anchor weighs a lot. As does the chain. The mechanism to unspool it is huge… and is manually operated by some guys who operate the brake. The idea is to let the chain out… slowly, but not so slowly that you’re there forever. And certainly not so quickly that it gets going too fast because, like a runaway nuclear reaction, once it gets out of hand, there’s nothing to do but step back and watch the impending catastrophe… and when the brakes fail or the guys screw up and that chain is unspooling faster and faster… and now there are sparks… and now there is fire, and it’s so deafeningly loud that you can’t even hear the sailors screaming… well, you know what comes next.
There are colour codes on those chains, white markings every 15 … [Continue Reading]
August 31, 2020
Numbers are out, and they’re pretty-much what was to be expected… relatively consistent, but slowly creeping upwards. Dr. Henry today talked about it with an interesting spin… that when this all began, we answered the call, did what needed… and it worked.
Then… we purposefully took our foot off the pedal a bit… took the Summer off, as it were… hung out, visited friends, had a good time.
But now, as before, it’s time to take it seriously again, and we know how to do it because we did it successfully the first time. The case counts we’re seeing are higher than ever, but it’s no reason to panic. Fair enough… the first time around, nobody really knew what was coming… and that, possibly, despite our best efforts, this whole thing could blow up.
There doesn’t seem to be that sense of urgency this time around… which isn’t necessarily a good thing. We think we know what we’re dealing with, but it was a lot easier back in the Spring, when we weren’t heading into “respiratory season”.
The fact is, given all of the social distancing and masks and care, “respiratory season” really shouldn’t be as big a deal this year. The precautions we’re taking against transmitting C19 should prevent common colds and flus from spreading as well. We shall see.
I was curious to hear Dr. Henry’s response to a question that was sure to be posed to her today, related to the TV ad she’s in which you may have seen… where she’s in a completely unrealistic classroom set-up, answering kids’ questions. It was, in fact, the first question asked.
The classroom has like 6 kids in it, all spaced out… there’s a sink, for hand-washing, off to the side… all of it not looking like any B.C. classroom any local teacher has ever seen. Her answer was that indeed, it was just a comfortable setting for kids to have their questions answered. There was no intent to imply that this was the way classrooms would look. Hmm.
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