Engineering Truths

I really like engineering and design. Its one of the reasons I was attracted to Firearms, and later Scooters and Motorcycles. These are mechanical tools that continue to be refined and perfected, with varying degrees of success. My wife was fascinated by Trains, and I have a ton of pictures and movies I took while chasing them with her.

I shot this one myself, with a little pocket digital camera. The Pinnacles above look really amazing, btw. This was near Dunsmuir, which is on I-5 north of Lake Shasta. Its in serious mountains south of Mount Shasta (volcano). The engine pulling it is a monster diesel. I actually got to talk to the engineers prior to this run, because they were having coffee in the shop closest to the railyard where I went to warm up (there was frost that morning and I'd been up all night driving there with my wife, who was napping). She ended up pretty jealous of that. And this video, which got more views than her standard 3/4 train shots. I have to say, video trumps stills when it comes to working mechanisms.

This is also mine. Its a little fuzzy, but same camera. The sound of the engines was fantastic.

This video (not mine) shows how to rebuild the engine in a scooter. This is the heart and soul of what makes it work. Its very simple, as you can see. I like that kind of brutal engineering, though I easily figured out how to take the weight of the engine off the back wheel yet retain the CVT advantages using a simple chain or belt linkage. Mount the engine to the frame and the handling is dramatically improved and the bike is much safer. Its so obvious I'm honestly baffled why this isn't how ALL scooters are built. AFAIK, only Honda does this, and only on one model, which is massively overpriced so nobody buys it.

Someday I'll get a Go-camera so I can shoot HD video on my scooter, because really, how else can I show the joy of motoring really slowly? People don't get that until they see it. The stop and smell the flowers kind of riding. There are so many places to do this in California. So many places to utterly ignore the Rat Race and remind people that California is about Tourism and Agriculture. Mining is mostly over, the computer industry went to China and coding can be done anywhere and mostly is.

Why are there still corporate buildings in California? Bad investments, really. The executives who made them are still pretending they didn't screw up because they might get fired and lose that comfy lifestyle, access to hookers special assistants, and the esteem of wives that need better hobbies. I think that in time some of those buildings will end up taken down, if they can't be converted into apartment housing or hospitals or hotels for the tourists. Many are in bad locations for that so aren't going to work out in the long run.

This is a ghost town called Bodie. Its in the high desert in California, north of Mono Lake. The previous owners donated it to the state so its a historic park now. Anybody can visit there and see what's left. The most amazing thing to me, is that it was still occupied into the 1930's and so has a gas station. There are dozens of buildings still standing since it is too dry for them to rot and fall apart.

Its really funny to realize that Real Estate mistakes are still the ongoing madness of the Gold Rush, all these Computer office buildings in the Bay Area are essentially the same as the ghost towns in the Gold Country, brick shopfronts with shared walls and cheap wood behind them with jacked up prices. Modern computer companies aren't conning as many people as they used to. The "technology" has moved into the coding phase more than hardware. Computers are close to being a mature technology like bicycles.

Not one of mine, but this is a good place to ride a bike or take a walk and a picnic. Bicycles are a mature technology. We have a few newer materials to work with, but they haven't changed much else in the last 40 years since the invention of the 10-speed. A few more gears, a bit better interchangeable format, but the engineering is solid and the bike only goes as fast as you can sustainably pedal and breathe. Everybody is going to end up knowing WAY MORE about bicycles than they ever thought they would, thanks to peak oil.

And Peak Oil is fascinating from an Engineering standpoint. I mean, I love Top Gear as much as the next red blooded male. Its English Tool Time, really.

See? But these are also examples of engineering and man's enjoyment of it. Perhaps not the most practical, but still.

If I'd gone into an engineering program back when I still knew how to do Calculus so I could have actually gotten a degree in that, I'd probably be happier and wealthier today. My local school did not offer an engineering program. And going away to college would have cost enough to prevent my folks from retiring as soon as they clearly needed to. I wasn't interested in Student Loan Debt, though I suppose I could have. I just avoid debt in general. I paid off my cars as soon as I could. If I can't afford to buy something outright, I generally do without. Since I'm not paying lots of interest, I'm thus wealthier than most other people and while there's transitory dissatisfaction with not having examples of modern engineering (stuff), it passes. Especially when further reviews show it to be crap later. Whatever it is. I think most things could be good, if the engineers were allowed further time for refinement and testing. Most capitalists just want to sell first and vanish with the money to some villa in Brazil. One with bikini hookers lounging around a pool. Fast cars and hookers and beer. This is what men really want. Take note, Ladies.

Its really funny to realize Capitalists just want to get rich and get away, while the Socialists just want to control and micromanage absolutely everything. I'm sure that the exercise people get bicycling because the socialists bankrupted us with free healthcare we couldn't tax enough to pay for will help balance the scales. I'm glad I like bicycling. I don't feel great about these hills though. Down in the flatland its fine. Up here in the mountains? Not so much. When it is the Socialist's turn to pedal? Yeah, that's going to be funny. Why are socialists nearly always fat women? And lesbian to boot! Or skinny AIDS-infected Gay men. There's that kind too. Normal people just don't care for it. Its too extreme and really only attracts the crazies.

Socialism's only successful engineering still around.

Socialists don't build great feats of engineering, other than murder weapons. The AK-47 was based on a Nazi design, they quietly captured from Tankers during the war and re-engineered into a battle rifle that mostly misses. Really, the AK is about as accurate as a Revolutionary War musket, and that's really terrible. Even Civil War rifles are more accurate, and those use black powder! The Russians DO have some good engineering, mostly stolen from the Germans and refined in a different direction. The world famous Ural sidecar motorcycle is just a copy of the German BMW the Nazi scouts were using on the Eastern Front.

Its pretty rough. Its not a refined design so much as one that's tough and easy to fix with limited tools out in Siberia where spare parts are hard to come by. In its way, this is good engineering because it accepts the compromises of the real world. And its not a murder machine like this:

I honestly LIKE Siberia. It's a more honest, less desperate Alaska. The people there accept reality and are reasonably comfortable despite conditions. Someday rich people will build their summer homes there. Oddly enough, I learned in my research that during the Pleistocene ice age, Eastern Siberia's river system was NOT covered in glaciers and was quite inhabited by people for at least 40,000 years. This is where the migrations into the Americas began. I was shocked. That makes it a great place for archaeology, provided you can locate sites among all the river sediments. That will be difficult, and a job for remote sensing and ground penetrating radar (GPR). I was watching Long Way Round, my favorite bit which starts in Kazahkstan and then goes into Mongolia. Of the entire journey, this is the most spiritual. Long Way Round: Barnaul to Western Mongolia on Hulu. Even on the wrong bikes, massively overloaded, they still found amazing sights to see, and while they complain bitterly about the roads because their bikes are too heavy for conditions, the landscapes are fantastic.

Did you know that GPR was used to find ancient roads across the Sahara, buried under the dunes? Turns out the pressure of people's feet walking on them compressed the soil sufficiently for it to become a permanent feature on the land. Amazing. Oh, and how did we know it was people? The roads are in straight lines. ONLY people walk in straight lines. All other animals go in circles. This is also a cool use of engineering. GPR was designed for the military, to find bunkers. It just happens to be really useful in archaeology.

Now that Peak Oil is screwing up everybody's idea of what the future is supposed to be, including the Dystopians hoping we'll end up in mud huts, chucking spears at cows, dead before we hit 30, engineering is hugely important. Its fortunate that our transition from cheap energy (oil) to expensive energy (solar) is happening so slowly. People aren't freaking out about it. There's no energy riots. The wars over oil are far away, barring 9/11 events. Really, it could all be quite a lot worse. This pleases me. As a Determined Pessimist, seeing things work out is exactly the sort of surprise I like. This makes me good at engineering because I expect things to break and look for the sources of trouble. I'm good at that. Optimists die on the roadside from a flat tire, but a Pessimist has a repair kit, water to drink when they're thirsty, and a cellphone to call for a tow if the kit doesn't work. An optimist is literally incapable of thinking that. They exist to die first. Optimists have NO PLACE in Engineering.