Grand Canyon

Posted on August 8, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Geology is still interesting. Big time. đŸ™‚

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Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco

Posted on August 5, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Today I stopped in to Berkeley and Oakland to see family. I didn’t actually see the Bay on this trip except a glimpse as I was coming over the hill towards upper Berkeley. I always love visiting, swing dancing, hitting Amoeba Records, hiking in the Marin headlands, and so on, but the coolest thing I ever saw in the area is the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Bay Model on the water in Sausalito.

picture of San Francisco Bay Model

The major impression you get from the thing is that it’s big. The building is cavernous, the surrounding floor and walkways vary in height so workers (and visitors) don’t always have to bend over to reach the water in interesting places, the channels that feed the bay are quantitatively representative but are not always laid out according to the map, numerous copper fins are attached to the bay and ocean floor to help calibrate the model, and there are instruments and labels everywhere.

It was built in the 1950s to assess the feasibility of damming off the north end of the bay (with a negative result). The model is a form of analog simulator, which is not to be confused with a simulation run on an analog computer. Nowadays such investigations would be carried out using (digital) computer simulation, which renders the Bay Model obsolete for serious research. However, it remains open as an educational tool and a fascinating reminder of how really smart people did really smart things not too long ago.

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Yosemite

Posted on August 4, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Yup, geology is interesting.

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The Spruce Goose and Crater Lake

Posted on August 3, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Transportation and engineering are cool, but geology and topography turn out to be pretty cool as well.

I rushed through the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, OR, just south of Portland, when it opened, and then hustled down to Crater Lake, which I was able to enjoy at a more leisurely pace.


The Spruce Goose is so large it’s difficult to get a good picture of it from inside the building.


Taking the tour of the flight deck was especially impressive. I’ve ridden on a C-5 Galaxy full of heavy equipment and that was big. The Spruce Goose is bigger.


The blues are blue, the slopes are steep, there’s snow in August, and everything is right where it’s supposed to be.

In the absence of actual data I always envisioned Crater Lake as being eleven or twelve thousand feet up and only a half a mile or a mile across, but it turns out to be seven thousand feet up and five or six miles across. It looked just like the pictures, the drive around the rim road was a lot longer then I expected, and the reality was both more and less impressive than I imagined–with respect to elevation. The scenery is stunning, well worth a look.

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Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, Home of the Spruce Goose

Posted on August 2, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Today I visited with friends and family in Seattle, got my car in for routine service (oil/filter/rotate/fluids), and pre-positioned down to McMinnville, OR, home of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum and the Spruce Goose. If feats of engineering and forms of transportation are going to be a theme, then I might as well make ’em interesting.

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Hell’s Gate Airtram

Posted on August 1, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Finally dropping down out of Canada on the way to Seattle took me through a long section of the Frasier Gorge. I’m meeting friends and family in Seattle so I didn’t have to kill myself driving every minute, which allowed me to stop and check out the Hell’s Gate Airtram. I’m always into interesting scenery, feats of engineering, and forms of transportation so this was a welcome chance to relax and enjoy something different. Check the link out for details.

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Hello, Skagway, AK

Posted on July 28, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

The die rolls for today’s maintenance actions came up with good numbers and progress resumed, ending in Skagway, Alaska. The Yukon was the eleventh Canadian province I’ve gotten to, and Alaska the fiftieth state. That’s enough accomplishment for one day.

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Hello, Fort Nelson, BC

Posted on July 27, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

Couple of things to report. One, the simulations of maintenance logistics I worked on with RTR Technologies, while working on and with the Aircraft Maintenance Model, incorporated a number of concepts. Many of these were defined in the NAMP (Naval Aviation Maintenance Program). Among the events considered, both implicitly and explicitly, are these:

  • Time between failure of parts
  • Availability of personnel, tools, and facilities to perform maintenance
  • Scheduled and Unscheduled Services
  • Availability of parts in local supply
  • Time of delivery for parts not in local supply
  • Time to begin work on repair (after other items in queues are addressed and sufficient personnel are available.
  • Chance that correct part is not delivered
  • Time between failure of ad hoc repair not using correct parts

There are a few additional factors in play as well, but I report these because they have become annoyingly germane in my life over the last couple of days. Nothing evil, dangerous, or particularly expensive, just annoying. Tomorrow I will execute a new set of dice rolls for a new iteration of the Monte Carlo simulation that is the automotive portion of my life, and we shall see what happens. With luck I won’t have to mention any of this again. If you need to know what this is about, check yesterday’s post–and then check a map. Then consider the human costs of things we blithely attempt to simulate using computers.

In the meantime I reworked the way that my JavaScript code handles default parameters, so the animations work correctly on a wider variety of platforms, including my iPhone.

I had experimented with statements that did the same thing in different ways, but the interpreters balked. This method is both cleaner and doesn’t cause the interpreter to puke.

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Hello, Fort St. John, BC

Posted on July 26, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

I’m getting to spend some quality time in Fort St. John, BC, only three hours from today’s starting point in Manning, AB. It wasn’t unexpected, having spent a lot of time simulating scheduled and unscheduled maintenance procedures. The stuff that had to be looked at was more or less due, especially after 5,000 miles in eight days. The towns in this part of Canada are small, and parts need to be overnighted.

This was a great opportunity to do laundry, get a haircut, see a movie, and learn how to debug some Javascript on an iPhone, while connected to a Mac via USB. I haven’t been testing the animations I’ve been doing on my phone and apparently they’ve been broken since July 5th. The problem appears to be with supplying default values for function parameters, which I introduced around that time. This seems to work fine on Firefox and Chrome on the PC, and with Safari on the Mac, but not with Explorer or Edge on the PC or with Safari on iOS. I haven’t tested this on Android. This behavior matches most of the description provided here.

Hmmmm. It seems pointless to use features that aren’t widely supported, so when I get a chance to do some serious rework I’ll change the code so it handles default or implicit parameters more gracefully. This will represent a reversion to the way I wrote it the first time.

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Yellowknife, Northwest Territory to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Posted on July 25, 2016 by R.P. Churchill

It’ll be longer, but smarter, to go the long way through Grande Prarie, Alberta. As a bonus, there’s a Starbucks in Grande Prarie đŸ™‚

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