Surviving Absurdity
Or: How to Make a $1,500 Sandwich
Thinking 'bout making a rich sandwich
Have you ever made food from scratch? If you said yes, you're probably thinking of cooking bread from flour and yeast and so on.
You probably aren't thinking of growing the wheat, harvesting it, milling it, and all that jazz. One guy in Minnesota, however, decided to actually cook a chicken sandwich from scratch. It took him six months and cost him $1,500.
Little bit ridiculous, right? We’ve evolved our modern society toward specialization in order to reduce the workload on people and prevent us from having to do such outrageous things.
The most interesting aspect of this is, of course, the salt: the guy from Minnesota had to fly to the West Coast to harvest his salt. If he wanted to be a purist, he would have needed to either walk all the way to the ocean or build his own airplane from scratch.
Obviously, that’s too much work for a YouTube video.
If he wanted to be even more of a purist, he would have needed to build all his tools himself. No stove; rather, an open fire. And no metal pot; he would have needed to fashion his own cookware instead. You can see how quick the absurdity things would’ve gotten.
So where am I going with all this?
I made me a sandwich…for $3.45
Believe it or not, I wanted to talk about survivalists. The typical survivalist strategy is to master a certain number of survival skills and to accumulate massive amounts of resources for survival purposes.
The missing ingredients? Almost everything, really. Our society has accumulated unbelievably huge quantities of knowledge dedicated toward merely keeping civilization running, mostly in the form of working professionals.
If someone were to make all of society's doctors disappear, we wouldn't be able to just set a bunch of people to the books and expect them to become doctors in a decade or so. Civilization reconstruction is a problem of a magnitude more significant than assembling a sandwich from scratch.
Any society emerging from survivalists in the wake of the collapse of civilization is going to be fairly primitive, by necessity.
And just to reassure Maggie and the kids and my gaggle of grandkids: I'm not investing in survivalist gear. Modern civilization is pretty durable. Gambling on it failing seems like way too much of a sucker bet to me.
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Quotable
Hey, Yard Ramp Guy: you might want to put one of your loading docks in a safe bunker, just in case…
“The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.”
— Aristotle
Harrison’s Chronometer
Navigating the High Seas
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.
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)
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.
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
Zoom Zoom
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.
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