Beagle ... alas

Scott Hedrick wrote:


That night, I asked them how they overcame something that the 21 other teams
couldn't solve. When I learned what they did, I laughed so hard I almost got
tossed from the hotel.


James T. Kirk would have approved.

Scott Hedrick wrote:

Pat, it sounds like you have old, gummy three-way switches. It requires 4
wires, white (neutral), black (hot), red (swings either way) and bare
(ground).

Old switches (especially with Bakelite) can get gummy and slow down the
internal workings, depending on how warm they get.

These didn't slow down, they would just try, sometimes dim the light
momentarily, or make it illuminate momentarily... and go right back
off...then give up...at least the house ones.
The apartment ones are obviously wired in series. God knows how the
house ones were wired.
Would it be possible to wire them in such a way so that they were
connected in two different ways at once? Sort of in series, and sort of
the way they were supposed to be?* The effect was like the electricity
couldn't make up its mind immediately as to what it wanted to do...you
could flip the bottom switch up and down till you were blue in the face
without any effect on the upstairs light's illumination status. Could
they have been wired in series in such a way that they were normally in
the "on" position, and to turn the light off required _both_ to be
turned to the "off" position? That- plus your sticky switch hypothesis-
would seem to come close to explaining the observed behavior.

(*Remember...you are dealing with _North Dakotan_ electricians here...I
will tell you a story about what happens when Nodak electricians and
plumbers get together to work on a hot-water heating furnace:
A few years ago, my landlords decided to install a new high-efficiency
furnace in my apartment building (an 8-plex). This would seem a
straightforward job for a plumbing company and a electrician ...and if
they had lived in a larger- and more competent- city, such professionals
could be found.
But Jamestown is a dinky-town, and full of dinkytown dinks, among them
"Jokeoid's Plumbing And 'Tricity Works; Home Of The Prairie
Incompetents"- these whiffle-headed semi-sentients have been spreading
wreck and ruin across the city like a thin but clinging layer of manure
for decades- they are the ones who sent the Roto-Rooter into one
toilet....and out of another one in the same building...luckily, while
no one was sitting on it. They are also the ones that repaired the
ruptured radiator pipe in my apartment, and were ready to turn the water
supply back on when I reminded them that all the best plumbers solder-
rather than merely press fit- the copper pipes together...
The work of these rude mechanicals in regard to this project was up to
their usual 3 Stooges standard; they replaced the furnace, backed their
truck into my parked car, smashing the headlight; and left the scene of
the accident without notifying myself or the police. It was only later,
when I discovered that my apartment thermostat had no influence on the
flow of water through the radiator, that the slight oversight in their
workmanship revealed itself- having removed the old furnace after
detaching the eight sets of wires that led to the control valves to each
apartment's hot water supply, they had neglected to number them, and
reattached them at random...so that I controlled the temperature in one
of the other seven apartments, and another unknown apartment controlled
mine.
This took a few hours to fix; while they were fixing it, the managed to
shut off the water heater... and forget to restart it.... so that
everyone got to have cold showers that night.)

Pat

In article , Chris Jones wrote:
The U-2 was a highly modified F-104 Starfighter at heart.

Could you elaborate on this? The two aircraft seem almost nothing alike
to me. The F-104 couldn't glide to save its pilot's life, while the U-2
was basically a powered glider.

Some of the early U-2 design sketches show a Starfighter with greatly
stretched wings. It evolved somewhat from there, but Pat's comment (note
the "at heart") part is basically correct.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In message , Chris Jones
writes
Pat Flannery writes:

[...]

The U-2 was a highly modified F-104 Starfighter at heart.

Could you elaborate on this? The two aircraft seem almost nothing alike
to me. The F-104 couldn't glide to save its pilot's life, while the U-2
was basically a powered glider.

Pat probably knows more than I do, but Chris Pocock's book "Dragon Lady"
explains how the CL-282 proposal "married an F-104 fuselage to a new,
500 sq. ft wing. The aircraft would have been launched from a wheeled
dolley and landed on a single skid which retracted into the lower
fuselage".
--
Rabbit arithmetic - 1 plus 1 equals 10
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 14:47:42 -0500, Chris Jones wrote:

The U-2 was a highly modified F-104 Starfighter at heart.

Could you elaborate on this? The two aircraft seem almost nothing alike
to me. The F-104 couldn't glide to save its pilot's life, while the U-2
was basically a powered glider.

NASA TV showed an old film on the X planes last night, with emphasis
on the X-15. I'm not sure when it was made, but they said a couple of
times that the X-15 had flown 120 missions to date, so I guess I could
look it up

Well, they didn't say (IIRC) that the U-2 was derived from the F-104, but
they did show footage of a modified F-104 G (I think that was the variant)
that pilots used to simulate/practice the landing phase of the U-2 before
they flew the real thing. So, at least this modified F-104 must have had
characteristics pretty similar to a U-2...

Dale

Incidently, I have "gummy" 60 year old three-way switches between
my house and garage controlling the back porch light that act as
though they are possessed as well

Chris Jones wrote:




The U-2 was a highly modified F-104 Starfighter at heart.



Could you elaborate on this? The two aircraft seem almost nothing alike
to me. The F-104 couldn't glide to save its pilot's life, while the U-2
was basically a powered glider.

The U-2 got started as one of Kelly Johnson's UFO's (Un-Funded
Opportunities). When Lockheed came up with a new aircraft design, they
started looking for other tasks for other customers that the same basic
design could be modified into- to up orders, and profits, for the
company; some examples of this were the bomber variant of the U-2 (I kid
you not!) for the U.S. Navy; and a SAC bomber variant of the SR-71, as
well as the YF-12 fighter variant.
In this case it was the F-104 that got the once-over in regards to what
could be done with the basic design; a proposal was put forward that it
be equipped with long sailplane-like wings, have its landing gear
removed, be launched from a jettisonable trolley, and belly land on a
strengthened belly or skid at the end of it's mission- this was the 1954
project CL-282: http://www.ufx.org/images/cl282.jpg Johnson told the
CIA and Air Force that this could be done fast and cheap if they were
interested, as an alternative to the Bell X-16, Martin RB-57 and
Fairchild M-195 responses to the classified MX-2147 reconnaissance
aircraft program.
They _were_ interested, but wanted the CL-282's J73-GE-3 engine replaced
with their preferred choice, the J57; and this was not going to fit well
into a stock F-104 fuselage, so Lockheed began to modify and optimize
the design some more to make it into a more practical machine (the tail
got changed; the landing gear returned in a lighter bicycle arrangement)
and CL-282 evolved into the U-2.... and Bell Aircraft got screwed over,
having won the MX-2147 program with its X-16 "Bald Eagle" entry... only
to find out it had lost to a company that wasn't even in the original
competition, and whose design it had no knowledge of- as it was highly
classified!
Now you know how the other competitors felt when Lockheed arrived with
it's unsolicited design in the Have Blue competition for a stealth
aircraft demonstrator....
The U-2's other possible ancestor is not well known- during W.W.II, the
Luftwaffe wanted a high-altitude reconnaissance plane that could operate
above the altitude limits of Allied interceptor aircraft; since jets
weren't well enough developed yet to reach the designed altitudes with
reliability, the hydrogen-peroxide and methanol fueled rocket motor of
the ME-163 was chosen, and the the airframe design entrusted to the DFS
glider-building establishment; they built the DFS-228
(CL-_282_...DFS-_228_...h-m-m-m):
http://www.luft46.com/roart/ro228-2.jpg , and test flew it in gliding
flight, but the Walter rocket motor did not react well to the cold of
high altitudes, and the project went nowhere.

Pat

In article ,
says...
Kevin Willoughby wrote:
One corollary of Moore's Law that is well known within the software
industry: as the capabilities of computer hardware increase, the
difficulty of writing the software to exploite these capabilties
increases exponentially. A more powerful computers can be a liability as
it encourages a much more complex system with many more points of
failure.

Wierdly enough, you generally don't *need* all the capabilities
of the new chip.

True. Resisting the temptation to make use of all the goodies is often
hard. It takes engineering good taste to just ignore all those
interesting new doodads.

Also, there is a misunderstanding of the fact that good software
development is *hard*. Often, it is harder than the hardware
engineering. Yet the hardware guys often make their life easier by
pushing new requirements on the software, make the software ever harder
to get right.
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

Well, I can tell you what it did, and maybe you can figure it out from
there; the switches were at the top and bottom of the
upstairs/downstairs staircase- I think

Improperly wired 3 way switch. I have personal experience with that unpleasant
problem

Pat Flannery wrote:

The house had one other oddity about it...everything ferrous in it would
get magnetized to a greater or lesser degree over time


Maybe the wires formed a helix and you grew up in a giant solenoid.
Hmmm. This might explain some things.

Did Evor Shandar design the house?

--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Hop David wrote:



Maybe the wires formed a helix and you grew up in a giant solenoid.
Hmmm. This might explain some things.

Did Evor Shandar design the house?


Are _you_ the Gate Keeper?

Pat