Author Archives: McCoy

Harrison’s Chronometer

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Navigating the High Seas

Lat and long

Getting from here to there.

Until a couple hundred years ago, sailors never strayed far from the shipping lanes if they could help it. Many ships stuck to the coast whenever possible.

Not that the ships were of low quality, or that they were manned by poor sailors. It all came down to the fact that navigation was much more difficult then.

In order to navigate at sea, you need three things: location, speed, and heading.

Heading simply required a compass, or a clear view of the sun or stars. Speed could be arrived at in a variety of different ways.

Location, though, was the tricky one.

Everyone’s heard of latitude and longitude—the line grid on every world map. Latitude measures the distance North or South from the equator and is represented by the lines parallel to the equator that run East-West. Latitude is easy to calculate from star positions. Longitude measures the distance East or West, and is represented by the lines perpendicular to the equator that intersect at the poles.

Longitude was the difficult one to calculate—and the reason navigation was so difficult. Ships, convoys, and even entire fleets ran aground on a regular basis due to the longitude problem. The situation got so bad that the English government put up a massive fortune as a reward to anyone who could solve the problem.

sextant

A sextant

For years, we thought the answer was in astronomical observation. In fact, we solved the problem that way with the sextant. Unfortunately, the sextant was cumbersome and difficult to use, and the calculations involved could take hours.

Enter a man named John Harrison, who tried a different approach—a mechanical one. If you could keep track of the exact time of your starting point, comparing it to your current time, you could determine your longitude.

Harrison spent 31 years developing the marine chronometer, the first clock capable of keeping time at sea. He had to solve a bunch of problems to do so; heating and cooling of the metal parts could cause inaccuracies in timepieces. We couldn’t use a pendulum, due to the swaying of the ship. Grease would eventually wear off.

In the end, he managed to solve all of these problems, and with one little device he changed history. After that, oceanic trade and exploration became easy, reliable, and economical. Harrison’s marine chronometer helped fuel a multi-century economic boom.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: do you know where you’re going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you?

“The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.”

— Thomas Reid

Engineering Feats (on a Finger)

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A Ring Ritual

Quebec Bridge Collapse, 1907

Engineers in Canada wear an iron ring on the little finger of their working hand.

It's usually stainless steel these days, though a few are still made of wrought iron. When they get one, it's still sharp-edged and drags on everything, then smooths out over the years.

The legend is that the ring is meant to memorialize a bridge that collapsed twice, both times due to faulty calculations regarding the strength of iron.

More elaborate versions of the legend claim that the rings are all made of the steel of the bridge, and that the bridge had a gold bolt installed after the second collapse.

Specifically, this supposedly was the Quebec Bridge collapse in 1907, which killed 75 of the 86 workers working on the bridge at the time.

McCoy Fields, phoning it in

The Ritual of the Calling of My Accountant

In reality, the ritual was the brainchild of a group of Canadian engineers in 1922. They wrote to Rudyard Kipling—yes, the Rudyard Kipling who wrote The Jungle Book—for help in creating a suitably dignified ceremony for new engineers. Kipling loved the idea and created a ceremony called “The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer.”

The whole thing is meant to bind members of the profession together and remind them of the responsibilities of their work. The ritual is administered by seven Wardens, who are chosen from prominent Canadian engineers. There are seven Wardens because that was the size of the group that came up with the idea and administered it in the first place.

Every group has its rituals. So: what makes this one special?

Well, we commonly worry about the responsibilities of soldiers and doctors and people in other professions…and their potential to do harm by negligence. Engineers also frequently bear that kind of responsibility, but society doesn't seem to remind them quite so frequently of that fact.

Society wouldn't function without our engineers. That little reminder is important. And Canada has a ring reminder.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: this quote-off is kinda like a ritual, yes?

“When you're writing, you're conjuring. It’s a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.”

— Tom Waits

Conquering the Far Reaches of Space

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Zoom Zoom

Rocket-powered McCoy

In space, nobody can hear you complain.

Regular readers of this blog know that I turn into a little kid when the subject of space comes up. I watch NASA TV all the time. And I've got a model of the space shuttle hanging in my workshop. Seems that I’m running out of space for my space.

Anyone who follows NASA launches knows that it takes years and years for probes to get to the outer planets. Chemical rockets simply aren't powerful enough and can't carry enough fuel.

But…we do have plans for ships that can go faster:

  • Closed system nuclear drive: They come in two varieties—nuclear electric rockets, which use nuclear power to power any number of different electrical thrusters, and nuclear thermal rockets, which merely heat a reactant and propel it out the back to create thrust.
  • Open system nuclear drive: Extremely straightforward. It's a big old nuclear powered rocket.
  • Bussard Ramjet: A variant on the nuclear rocket, with one main difference—it has a giant electromagnetic “scoop” projecting out of the front. The scoop funnels interstellar hydrogen into the ship, where it's then used for fuel. Hypothetically, this design could allow travel much farther than many of the other designs on the list.

McCoy Fields, astronaut

Me, practicing on my tractor for space flight.

  • Solar Sail: A bit of a Gordian knot-style solution to long-distance space propulsion. It's a sail in the literal sense yet doesn't actually propel itself. The sails are made out of lightweight, reflective materials like Mylar that harness the solar wind instead of sea winds. A ship with a solar sail would actually be capable of tacking and maneuvering quite effectively, but in three dimensions rather than the two of an Earthbound sailing ship. While the acceleration from this is quite low, it never stops…just keeps accelerating as long as the ship is in the solar wind. The solar sail could, potentially, even reach another solar system, then brake using that star's solar wind.
  • Laser Sail: This is where things get especially bizarre. The laser sail functions in a similar way to the solar sail but, rather than using the solar wind, this heavily armored ship instead gets its propulsion from a massive, artificial laser trained upon it.
  • Orion Ship: The most insane of our rocket ship ideas. We've been able to build this one since the 1960s but haven't…for what should be obvious reasons: it's propelled by nukes. Not a nuclear rocket. Actual nuclear bombs. The ship has a large, shielded pusher plate. A nuclear bomb is fired behind the ship and detonated. The resulting shock wave propels the ship forward. An Orion ship could reach Pluto in a matter of weeks.

With that last one, I’m imagining astronauts turning into the equivalent of bugs on a windshield on the highway. Thanks, but no. I’ll stick to creating more space in my earth-bound man cave.

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Quotable

Oh, Yard Ramp Guy: I’m boldly going where no man has gone before with these quotations. You?

“When you launch in a rocket, you’re not really flying that rocket. You’re just sort of hanging on."

— Astronaut Michael P. Anderson

Pattern Recognition

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Or: Statistics, with Commentary

The Ramp Rules: Statistics

Fun with numbers & patterns

How did the statistician die on his camping trip? He tried fording a river that was three feet deep on average.

I suspect most of us know that statistics can be misleading, but they're still one of the most important tools we have for understanding the world around us. Just ask any baseball fan. Or meteorologist. Or political analyst. (Actually, maybe not political analysts. Best to just slowly back away and not make eye contact with them.)

One of the biggest problems with statistical data actually comes from one of our greatest strengths: our pattern recognition ability. No computer in the world comes close to our ability to spot patterns, but sometimes that very ability backfires on us.

We often start looking for patterns in the data that aren't actually there. An absurd example is the correlation between pirates and global warming—as the number of pirates goes down, global temperatures go up. Sports superstitions are another good example: my favorite team won when I wore my lucky hat, so they'll lose if I don't wear it while they're playing.

Even if you entirely avoid the false pattern recognition pitfall, you still have a lot to consider.

McCoy Fields: Pattern Recognition

McCoy: Searching for Patterns

Humans also tend to remember the negative more often than not: when the weatherman's wrong, you remember that better than all the (many more) times he’s been right. Commercial weather channels often artificially inflate low chances of rain—say, from 5-10% up to 20%—so that if it doesn't rain it seems like a nice bonus. And if it does rain, well, 20% isn't nearly as low risk as 5%. We like it when errors fall in our favor.

So you're keeping your eyes open for suspect statistics. Great. Now you just have to keep on the lookout for the possibility that the people presenting the statistics are deliberately misleading you. Assuming they haven't just made up the data entirely (less common than you'd expect, since it's so easy to mislead with real data), you've still got to worry about them changing the scale of one of the axes of a graph, switching the axis themselves, or using one of a thousand different tricks within the math behind the data.

A quick example of another trick people can play with data: I recently saw a chart that was supposed to show Victorian England as a safer place to live than the modern day by comparing crimes per capita.

The problem with that? Society's definition of a crime. Crimes that we legislate against and prosecute tend to change over time. We currently have more laws today than at any other point in our history, so it's not surprising that we have more criminal charges per capita. In my example, what historians and criminologists actually use for comparison is murders per capita, because that's always a crime. By that metric, we're a lot safer than Victorian England. (Among other things, muggers today are less fond of garroting their victims.)

It's easy to play tricks like this—using categories of data that seem comparable but really aren't.

How can you look out for statistical shenanigans, if they're so easy to pull off? First, and easiest, try to stick with reliable, well known publications with solid reputations. (Of course, if you're far to one side or the other on the political spectrum, you're probably convinced they're a tool of the other side.)

Second, and much more difficult: Educate yourself. Learn to read data in a discerning matter and familiarize yourself with the subject matter. A good book to start with is Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.

Of course, you could just look for data and news sources that agree with what you already think. Confirmation bias is fun!

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I kid a lot with my pal Jeff at The Yard Ramp Guy. And now, also this: I'm seriously proud of my friends and colleagues at that fine company on their receiving the Blue Star award from Bluff Manufacturing, which has recognized them as a Gold Dealer of Excellence. Absolutely fitting, and absolutely right.

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Quotable

Okay, enough mush. Dear Yard Ramp Guy, statistically I stay quotable each week more than you (but who’s counting?).

“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

— Mark Twain

Ig Nobel: Sometimes Nobel-Worthy

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Or: Why Stinky Cheese Helps

telescope2Some science results in vital, society-altering work. Think about our creating vaccines, researching earthquakes, and discovering new construction materials.

Other science makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the universe around us—theoretical physics or marine biology, for example—and these very often produce society-altering work.

Then, of course, there is the science that doesn't quite have the same sort of impact, like magnetically levitating a frog or creating a chemical recipe to partially unboil an egg.

The Ig Nobel Prize is given out each September, around the time of the real Nobel prizes. It's broadcast every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving on NPR's program “Science Friday,” which makes for a much better use of my time than hunting Black Friday deals.

The awards either criticize (awarding a prize in “science education” to the Kansas State Board of Education for their stance on teaching evolution in schools) or to gently rib scientists for absurd research (testing the “five second rule” for eating food off the ground, which they proved to be false).

A few of my favorites:Discovering that the word “huh” or an equivalent seems to exist in every language.

  • doctorRealizing that if you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, it then walks in the same way that dinosaurs were thought to have walked.
  • Measuring the friction between a banana skin and a shoe, and a banana skin and the floor, when we step on the banana.
  • Investigating whether cat ownership is mentally hazardous (I could have answered that).
  • Testing how reindeer react to seeing humans disguised as polar bears.
  • Finding that some people could run on water, if that water were in the Moon's gravity instead of Earth's.
  • Discovering the biochemical process by which onions make people cry.
  • Figuring out that leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.
  • Calculating the balance of physical forces inside a human ponytail
  • Discovering a way to extract vanillin (the active component of vanilla) from cow dung.

All of my favorites are in the real-but-absurd science category: the awards given out to people doing homeopathy or predicting the end of the world are grin-worthy…but not all that interesting.

experienceThe absurd science category sometimes becomes relevant: Sir Andre Geim won both the Ig Nobel Prize (he was the one to levitate the small frog with magnets) and the Nobel Prize for his work on graphene.

And the Ig Nobel award-winning study showing that malaria mosquitoes are attracted to Limburger cheese has been used to create large-scale mosquito traps in strategic locations in Africa.

Mostly, though, I just find that the real science is funnier.

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Quotable

Yes, Yard Ramp Guy—I remain blog relevant. You?

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That's funny…’"

— Isaac Asimov