Holidays

I hope that everyone had a great time over the holidays. I had a ton of leftover vacation, so I had a really long break. You would think that would equate to a lot of relaxation and TV-watching, but Heimlich and I are crazy people. It is almost impossible for us to actually relax, so I ended up getting tons of stuff done with the cars and the house. I also did a ridiculous amount of cooking and baking.

Plus, we visited family and friends, where we saw dogs:


And more dogs:


And even more dogs. At this point, I think it is safe to say that we are not in contact with a single person in the state of Pennsylvania (which is a considerable number of people) who doesn't have a dog.

Happy Holidays

I hope that everyone had a great holiday and traveled safely. In the meantime, here is a link to the International Herald Tribune's 2007 in pictures [iht.com].

ESPN's New Year's Even No Limits

Apparently, ESPN is going to have a crazy New Year's Eve broadcast this year, featuring two different motorsports stunts sponsored by Red Bull [redbull.com]. From their website:

"Maddison, a freestyle motocross star from Australia, will attempt to jump the length of a football field (more than 300 feet) to set a new motorcycle distance jumping world record. Millen, a champion drifter and movie stunt driver hailing from New Zealand, will attempt the first-ever backflip of an off-road racing truck."

As a guy that is into motorsports, this is something that I will definitely want to watch.


The thing about doing a backflip in a vehicle is that you are trying to get the vehicle to rotate about an unstable rotation axis. This is why it hasn't been done before. Take a typical book for example. Hold it in front of you so that the cover is readable to you. The longest dimension should be from the bottom of the cover to the top of the cover. Let's call that the x-axis. The 2nd longest dimension should be the width of the cover. Let's call that the y-axis. Try flipping the book up into the air so that it makes one complete rotation about the y-axis, but not rotating about any of the other axes (most notably the x-axis). You could spend all day attempting (and failing) to do that, because it's an unstable rotation axis.

People have tried (and failed) to do this before with a four-wheeled vehicle -- people who don't understand dynamics. My guess is that they have altered the mass distribution of the vehicle in this new stunt such that the lateral axis is no longer the intermediate inertial axis. For instance, if you made the mass distribution more like a motorcycle, the lateral axis would be turned into a stable rotation axis, and the stunt would become possible. Otherwise, that driver is in for a world of hurt.

Canada's Ice Road

Recently, I saw an article about Canada's Ice Road [popularmechanics.com].


Way up north in Canada, there is mining for diamonds. Canada is now the third largest producer of diamonds by value. Fuel and other supplies going to the mines are carried by trucks along a road that mostly consists of ice over frozen lake beds.

I have been fascinated by the articles I have read. Here's a quote:

"As a laden truck moves over ice, it creates a shallow depression all around it — a sort of bowl in the ice, several inches deep and many yards across. The greater the speed, the deeper the depression. Above a critical velocity that varies with local conditions, a truck can damage the roadbed so severely that the next vehicle to come along will break through the ice. For this reason, the top speed on the Tibbitt to Contwoyto route is usually about 22 mph. In some stretches, as on Waite Lake, the maximum is just a few miles per hour."

The water that is displaced by this depression forms a wavefront in front of the truck. And that wavefront can cause the ice to break when it reaches the shore. So, the roads are constructed so that the trucks have to make s-turns as they approach the shorelines, so that the wavefronts are directed away from the road. They also have to keep the roads plowed, because any snow will insulate the ice and cause it to warm up, weakening it.

Plus, the trucks have to travel in groups, so that if any fall through the ice, the others can radio for help. But obviously, the ice can only support so much weight, so the trucks have to keep their distance from each other.

Picture of the Ice Road from Andrew Johnson's Flickr photostream [flickr.com]

You Can't Handle the Tooth

I have to admit that I haven't really be going to the dentist regularly since high school. Back then, the tools that dentists used were scary. For instance, he x-ray machine was a hulking beast of scary electronics put in a special room that was lined with lead 50m underground, and a quarter mile away from the nearest people. And it couldn't be used without warning the power company of the impending current draw, and without having klaxons blaring to scare away any people or wildlife in the area.

I recently went to a dentist that apparently is using all of the latest stuff. There were tons of random gizmos lying around the office, such as a fiber-optic camera they could stick in your mouth -- they could then hit a button and immediately have a photo printer print the shot. The exam chair I was in was in a room with several other exam chairs. And they took several x-rays, despite the fact that there were other patients and all of the highly-efficient dental hygienists running around just a few feet away.

Anyway, I learned that I had all of the classic signs of a teeth grinder -- mainly worn down teeth (but expressed in needlessly complicated medical jargon). I occasionally grind my teeth when I am asleep. This is no surprise to me, since people have been complaining about the noise that it creates since I was a child. My new dentist theorizes that a lot of people develop a teeth grinding habit as a reaction to having braces.

Apparently, if I don't have any corrective measures taken, I will eventually wear through the enamel on some of my teeth, and may have jaw problems down the road. According to wikipedia, the disorder is called bruxism.

Jeremy and Jodi's Wedding

This weekend, Heimlich and I went to what had to be the swankiest wedding we have ever seen.


The waitstaff was coordinated, the food was incredible, and the ceremony was beautiful.


We also got to catch up with a lot of old friends, and make some new ones.


Best wishes, Jeremy and Jodi! More pictures here [flickr.com].

Luxury Vehicles Going Weird Direction

I feel that a lot of the luxury car companies are going off in a weird/bad direction with their features and/or styling. Every year, their cars get more and more unappealing to me.

Let's start with BMW. All of their new cars are equipped with run-flat tires, which might be the worst solution ever. No reputable garage will patch them if you puncture one, new run-flats in the right size are difficult to find in stores (unless you go to the dealer), and they're horrendously expensive (even if you don't go to the dealer). That's enough of a reason not to buy one.

But then BMW decides that it's also going to remove the oil dipstick from the engine compartment (which is just annoying from a usability standpoint [jalopnik.com]).

And every review that I have seen of iDrive has been negative [roadandtravel.com].

Then there is Lexus, which apparently hired the designers of the Pontiac Aztek [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the ugliest car in history). Take a look at the latest IS:


The rear end (especially the tail lights) looks way too much like the Mitsubishi Lancer (pictured below). You should never have a situation where a really expensive luxury car is almost indistinguishable from an econobox.


It's not that I don't like the styling or features of new cars. Just the ones of several luxury manufacturers that should know better. I dig Mercedes, Honda, Audi, VW, Saturn, Volvo, etc.

Visa Class Action Lawsuit

I recently heard about yet another class action lawsuit that I may be eligible to benefit from. Apparently, Visa and other credit card companies illegally charged customers for additional fees related to currency conversion [bizjournals.com].

The way it worked is if you used your credit card in a foreign country, the credit card company converts the currency so that the bills on your statements show up in US Dollars. And apparently, they were overcharging for this service. Here's a quote:

"The suit alleges that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks and Diners Club conspired to hide the price of foreign transactions by card holders outside of the United States, including fees of up to 3 percent, in violation of federal and state law, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated base exchange rates before applying the fees."

They recently settled this case, and people affected are starting to receive letters. Between 1997 and 2004, I think that I visited Europe at least 4 times.

Hiking the Grand Canyon

A bunch of people I know have hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and hiked back out. The experience sounded pretty interesting to me, and I would love to try it sometime.


We already have a major vacation planned for 2008, so I think that it is too early to start planning another one.

But we haven't done any major hiking since our trip to Hawaii in 2005. I would love to make sure that our next trip (after Berlin) will include some major hikes. Especially since I have seen all kinds of inspiring pictures from inside the Grand Canyon.


Pictures of the Grand Canyon from Ms. President's Flickr Photostream [flickr.com]

Slide Rules

I have been looking for a slide rule for a while now. You know those people who believe that they need to know how to light a fire using nothing but twigs, just in case that nuclear war destroys all civilization, and someone will need to light fires without having lighters?

Well, I'm the same way. In my mind, the definition of a cataclysm threatening the future of mankind is if we can no longer use Matlab [wikipedia.org]. And if there are only 100 people left on the face of the planet, there damn well better be someone that still knows how to calculate logarithms and trig functions.


Anyway, I got some slide rules and some manuals from Heimlich's grandfather. So, in my free time over the holidays, these are the sorts of things I will bring with me when I curl up in front of the fire.

New Nissan GT-R

I've been seeing a lot of articles recently about the new Nissan GT-R [nissanusa.com] (latest version of the legendary Skyline GT-R [wikipedia.org]).


The thing is, did anyone else see the pictures of the new GT-R and not think that it just looked like a Toyota Celica (picture below) with a really bad body kit?


And when I say "bad", I don't mean "good bad". I mean, "bad bad". A Toyota Celica is really an econobox, to top things off. It really doesn't have the type of image that you would expect to be emulated in a venerable super-car.

Fish Eating

Ok, you know those crazy people who are constantly shoving their cell phones in your face to show you pictures of their pets? Yeah, we're turning into those people. Heimlich recently convinced me to take video of our fish eating. And then she took one of them and posted it to YouTube:



By the way, our panda cory cats (which are most of the fish in that video) are still having babies, so we're still giving them away to good homes.

Also in the video is our red-finned shark (which is actually a kind of catfish), which is a total ham. Let me tell you, whenever he sees a video camera, he's got to ham it up and totally hog the lens.

Yes, I realize that we are insane...

Random Car Thoughts

A couple of random things that are car-related:

• I frequently am asked questions like, "What is the difference between understeer and oversteer?" Recently on a message board (related to autp-racing), I saw perhaps the best explanation I have ever heard in someone's signature:

  "Understeer is when you hit the wall with the front of the car and oversteer is when you hit the wall with the rear of the car.
  Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall, torque is how far you take the wall with you."

• In the past few weeks, I have had to drive a lot of cars that I don't own. And what I have noticed almost universally (in other words, independent of manufacturer) is that I use the tilt steering feature most often in order to make the instrument cluster fully visible -- and not for the purpose you would think, which is to put the steering wheel in the most comfortable position possible. It seems that packaging constraints these days are such that you can't have both.

Babby Daddy Birch

Holy shit! Last week, Birch announced [livejournal.com] that they are expecting their first child. Here's a choice quote:

"I am pretty sure both of our parents had given up on us ever having children. I am presently somewhere between exhilaration and terror."

Let me just say that I cannot WAIT until that child is about 10 years old, so that I can corrupt him or her with all kinds of stories about their father.

"Really? You're not allowed to ride your bike out in the street? Did your father ever tell you about how they used to make body armor and then have JOUSTING matches on their bikes, using tomato sticks as lances?"

"Hey, it's snowing out. I guess it's time for your father to teach you how to make black powder land mines that you can hide under the snow to scare the shit out of all of the other neighbor's kids."

"Hey, your father taught me a great game of tag, where you tape roman candles to your forearms, and go around lighting them and trying to hit each other with the rockets. We also had firecrackers taped to our chests, and the object was to light up the ones on everyone else. Has he taught you that one yet?"

"Do you find yourself wearing safety glasses around the house 24/7?"