Engineer Zero

Seattle will get a light rail system in 2020, except of course there will be political and financial delays, so we’re looking at 2030. For a light rail. Meanwhile, China is building 300 mph maglevs today. Or should I say, 500 kph, because mph is so Medieval.

(BTW, in case you don’t know, the first image is cgi. The second is, of course, e0gi.)

I was out walking in the park and saw a circular hole in the clouds, so I took this picture with my phone camera. I’ve got Mary Hopkin’s cover (no pun intended) of Clouds on my MP3, but I didn’t think to play it.

Anyhow, this reminds me that I’ll need to design a cyanobacteria-killing robotic minisub. Another time.

This is cool, but sixty dollars is a bit out of my budget.

I made this sketchup model of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in twenty minutes. With another hour I suppose I could try details and maybe even photo-wrapping. Also, I now notice that the solar panels appear to emerge from holes within the main cylinder rather than being bracketed externally to it. So don’t go building your own satellite based on this.

Anyhow, the stats on the real spacecraft are to be found here.

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Sufferin’ succotash! I got a bad case of the surrealities, so I had to make this. Sang is brave (and strong) for climbing to the lectern. Braver still are the members of the audience, who attempt to hold their perch on the sloping stadium!

I put in the shadows and shading and realized, “Gosh, the sun’s in their eyes.” Brave indeed!

I saw a video about a guy who is being evicted because his trailer is off the grid. No electricity, no water — so in the interest of protecting his health, the government is going to make him homeless.

Well, as it turns out, electricity is pretty easy to get off the grid. Just buy some solar panels, an inverter, and a few batteries, and you’ve got power.

Water is another matter. I looked up the average water usage per person, and the Internet tells me ridiculous numbers, like two hundred gallons a day. That’s a lot of toilet flushes, so I presume industrial usage is in there somewhere.

Anyhow, I came up with this rain water collector concept:

Around here in Greater Seattle, we get 40 inches of rainfall per year, which works out to about thirty cubic feet per square yard. Two of these and you get more than a gallon a day. Which is okay for a ration of drinking water, providing your lifestyle includes outhouses and sponge baths. Ah, the simple life.

(NOTE: This entry revised 9 Dec because I failed to convert from cubic feet to gallons. DOH!)

If the last one was for Vulcans, then this one is for Klingons. Mabel isn’t too sure, and I don’t think she wants the forehead ridges either.