Giants and a Rock Made of Cheese

Posted on July 14, 2015November 19, 2016 by McCoy

I’m not much of a fiction reader, but I did come across a rather entertaining folk tale a while back while researching historical ramps. There is a rock formation in Northern Ireland called the Giant’s Causeway, made of thousands of hexagonal basalt columns, which can form when lava cools slowly.

Giant’s Causeway

Local legend tells that the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill built the Giant’s Causeway—across the sea from Ireland all the way to Scotland—in response to a challenge from the Scottish giant Benandoner. When Fionn saw Benandoner, though, and realized how much bigger he was, he would have fled, but his wife, Oona, had him dress up as a baby. She tucked him into a crib, then began cooking.

When Benandoner arrived across the causeway, Oona told him that he was away, and invited the Scottish giant inside to wait. When he saw Fionn in the crib he decided that, to have a baby that big, Fionn must be truly enormous. Benandoner then tried to intimidate Oona by crushing rocks with his pinky finger, but she just smiled at him and handed a rock to Fionn, who crushed it to cheese. (It helped, of course, that Fionn’s rock had always been cheese).

Oona then gave Benandoner and Fionn each a griddle-cake (Irish name for a pancake). Benandoner bit into his and broke a tooth, which probably had something to do with the pan Oona had baked into it. Fionn, meanwhile, ate his with gusto.

Fingal’s Cave

Oona invited Benandoner to feel how sharp and strong the baby’s teeth were. Benandoner, feeling his broken tooth and watching Fionn eat his griddle-cake, declined. He politely begged leave of Oona. He then fled across the causeway, destroying it behind him, not wanting to meet the father of that monstrous baby. Only the two ends were left inact—the columns of the Giant’s causeway, and the columns of Fingal’s Cave, in Scotland (which has plenty of legends of its own).

Fionn hopped out of the cradle, praising Oona’s wit, bravery, and beauty. Oona just laughed and handed him a broom to clean up the broken rocks and food.

The Egg Drop Competition, Reconsidered

Posted on May 19, 2015May 19, 2015 by McCoy

The egg drop competition has been a staple of elementary and middle school science classes since long before I was born. You create a container that will allow an egg to survive a drop of several stories, while still being able to put the egg in the container on-site. It’s a good exercise in creative thinking for kids, not to mention the fun factor.

An egg

You’ve got a few basic strategies: the first—and simplest—is the “giant wad of padding” strategy, which usually works pretty well. The most common version of this is the big box filled with packing peanuts, but I’ve also seen bags made out of pillows and bubble wrap spheres. (Natch: I made all my kids and grandkids think more “outside the box” than this.)

The next most common is the parachute design—usually one of the more reliable ones, assuming your parachute works. Pretty self explanatory…and it’s the design I used myself as a kid. (A little extra padding didn’t hurt, of course.)

There are also a ton of weirder designs out there: flexible chopstick frameworks surrounding a bubble-wrap core, eggs padded in breakfast cereal or popcorn, containers filled with water (although that’s banned in many competitions), the panty hose box (suspend the egg in panty-hose in a box, and the stretchiness of the fabric will keep it from hitting the sides and breaking), and the small padded box covered in springs.

Then, of course, you have my cousin John’s approach. He always was too smart for his own good, so he decided to come up with something a bit more unusual. When he showed up for school that day, it was with a container shaped like a rocket; the thing even had landing struts. It was even weighted so that the container always fell bottom-first. What he didn’t tell anyone, of course, was that the rocket was weighted with an actual radio controlled model rocket engine and had a thin paper coating over it.

When the teacher dropped his off the roof (all us kids standing below), John, who’d been hiding his remote in his pants, pulls it out to activate it. Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite as anticipated and shot off sideways toward the kids. Guess who it hit?

And that’s the story about how I got a broken rib, minor burns, and a face covered in egg. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time that hanging out with my cousin got me injured, either. At least that time I didn’t get in trouble for it.

Learning from The Tacoma Narrows

Posted on May 5, 2015May 5, 2015 by McCoy

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse is one of the best known architectural failures in modern history, and it is used as a lesson by everyone, from architects and civil engineers to insurance agents.

Built in 1940 across the Tacoma Narrows in Washington State, the suspension bridge lasted less than a year before collapsing. The only casualty was a dog stuck in a car.

Due to a very tight budget, the bridge was constructed with lightweight girders, as per the lowest bid design. (In my work, that Tacoma Narrows lesson is one of the many reasons I don’t just go for the lowest bid). During construction, the bridge’s thin design, low weight, and less-than-durable construction resulted in frequent vibrations and shaking whenever the wind picked up. It got so bad that the workers nicknamed it Galloping Gertie. Not exactly a trust-inspiring name.

The Bridge Collapses

The bridge began undergoing severe oscillations (or, to be a bit less technical about things: the bridge shook itself to bits) under heavy winds on November 7th, 1940.

I won’t go in depth on the science behind the collapse; you can find that easy enough. I’m more interested in what lessons it gives us about ignoring nature. For all the amazing things mankind has done, we still need to respect nature or it will come back to bite us. All of our technology and inventiveness allows us to stand up to nature, but push it around? Not a chance. We need to foster a design philosophy that promotes working with nature, not against it.

This sounds like hippy talk, I know, but it’s nothing new. Heck, the idea goes back millennia. Look at any number of cultures that lived in hot climates—high ceilings, big windows, light colored paint. Cultures that live with heavy rain? You build your foundations strong, angle your roof, and pick your building site really carefully.

Why’d I decide to blog about Tacoma Narrows, when so many people already use it as a lesson? Well, I think some people missed that one—like my son-in-law, who decided to have his shed built by the cheapest contractor: at the edge of a hill, with no real foundation to speak of. He’s going to be picking his tools out of the stream for weeks.

Orion: They Belted Out the Name

Posted on April 21, 2015April 21, 2015 by McCoy

NASA’s Orion Spacecraft

NASA recently had an unmanned test flight of their Orion spacecraft—a new vessel meant to replace the space shuttle, and to take humans beyond low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo 17.

I’ve been following the program with avid interest for years now. I’m a sucker for the space program. Always have been, always will be. Orion is reminiscent of Apollo in many ways, yet now it’s a bigger, beefier Apollo craft. One thing that bugs me about Orion, though, is the name.

See, years ago there was another Orion. Project Orion never actually got a vehicle up into orbit, but that’s probably a good thing, since it was fueled by nukes.

Project Orion

Note that I didn’t say nuclear power, either. I said nukes, as in actual nuclear bombs. Project Orion flew by detonating nuclear weapons right behind it to launch itself forward. It would have worked, too: absurdly well, in fact. It would have made anywhere in the solar system easily accessible, in fact, and may even have opened up the neighboring stars to us.

The real problem, though, was that most of the designs involved launching from the Earth’s surface, which, as it turns out, was a bit of a bad idea. Detonating a big sequence of nukes in the atmosphere? Good way to give everyone in a thousand miles cancer. The program was canceled in ’63 after the Partial Test Ban Treaty.

It’s not to say the new Orion isn’t impressive in its own right: there are plans to use it for prospective Mars missions, or even for potential asteroid explorations. I just think that the government could have chosen a better name for the thing.

I do know this: I plan on being there for the first manned launch.