Keys Corner » Engineering

Map showing the quakes in Japan

John — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:52:25 +0000

Realtime quake map of Japan

Paul Nicholls in Christchurch, New Zealand, has produced a continuously updating map showing the location and depth of the quakes which have struck Japan since the magnitude 9.0 quake on the 11th March 2011. Today (17th March), there were 34 quakes, including one measuring over 6.0 on the Richter Scale. Bear in mind, that the Richter Scale is logarithmic, which means that a difference of 1.0 on the scale is a difference of 10 times the magnitude, and a difference of 2.0 is a factor of 100 times difference in magnitude.

(The Christchurch quake this year was 6.3 on the Richter Scale).

If you are interested in an informed view on the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, and on background information about radiation and nuclear processes, try the well-written MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub, which is written and maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

The Internet is pretty big too…

John — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:42:38 +0000

Interesting facts about the Internet

Not only Africa is large (see the previous post), the internet is too. If you have 3-4 minutes, take a look at the slide show above (click on the screenshot to start it).

The first internet web browser to be created was Mosaic in 1993, which is when the Internet as we know it today, though the eyes of a graphical interface, was born. Google was founded in 1998, only 12 years ago. It is amazing how quickly new technologies and tools have been accepted and used by billions of users (1.7 billion internet users were on the internet in 2009; Facebook serves over 6 million page views per minute).

Thorium could be the answer to the energy crisis

John — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:34:40 +0000

The Daily Telegraph points to thorium as a way out of the energy crisis.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. “Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

The problem seems to be that the nuclear industry isn’t really interested in investing in new technology, they have invested too much in the current ones. Nuclear plants which are on the drawing board today will be around for up to another sixty years, so why try to master a new technology when you could refine the existing one?

There are advantages, however, to thorium plants:

It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed.
It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving.
Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. (The plants would be much smaller and less expensive).
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, and it’s available all over the globe, so there’s no possibility of a cartel of thorium producers who could block its use.
It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. (It emits too many high gamma rays)

Maximizing the chance of surviving a plane crash

John — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:30:22 +0000

Back in 2001 the US National Transportation Safety Board published a report on the survival rates in air crashes (PDF, 800 KB). They are much better than you might think:

Nearly 96 percent of the occupants involved in a Part 121 aviation accident over the past 18 years survived the accident, and in over 46 percent of the most serious of these accidents (accidents involving fire, serious injury, and either substantial aircraft damage or complete destruction), more than 80 percent of the occupants survived.

Nonetheless, there are several things you can do to improve your chances of surviving a crash. There is an article on Wired’s “How To” Wiki, summarising the main points – it’s not long, and is worth reading if you are going to be flying in the near future.

autonomous quadrotor helicopter

John — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:18:15 +0000

… the thing moves with the speed and grace of an angry bee, while accompanied by the perfectly menacing whine of its little engine.

Wow!

(via Engaget)

How car safety has improved in 50 years

John — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:37:59 +0000

An interesting video by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showing a crash test where a 1959 Chevrolet is crashed into a 2009 Chevy. It shows the massive advance in occupant-safety over 50 years. I would not want to be the driver in the older car.

(via Boing Boing)

The Zweistil Bike

John — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:28:08 +0000

This cool bike is an entry for the 2009 James Dyson Award design competition.

There’s a neat video of the prototype in action on YouTube. The prototype can change it’s configuration while in motion!

Wired: Amazon will deliver books via the sewer

John — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:40:06 +0000

I don’t find Phillip Hermes’ idea for beating the traffic jams of the future particularly attractive:

…the Urban Mole is a capsule that travels through existing networks of underground pipes in order to transport packages as diverse as groceries, signed documents and any title that appears on Oprah’s Book Club. The Mole frees up our streets and roads for important matters, like mobilizing armies against the cyborgs that will inevitably plague our future cities.

Able to move parcels as large as a shoebox, the Mole fully encapsulates its contents from surrounding wastewater…

…We like to think of the Urban Mole as a combination of Mr. McFeeley and the Ninja Turtles, skulking through sewers only to emerge when it can be of use to human civilization. But we pity the poor guy who has to open those capsules.

There really must be a better alternative…

A mechanical precursor to e-mail

John — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:46:34 +0000

I read Molly Wright Steenson’s blog girlwonder on an irregular basis – she has lived in Italy, India and several other places – which is pretty unusual for an American, and she’s interested in modern architecture, various aspects of using the web, and design. Which are all things she blogs about.

She published a short video a few months ago of an ignite eTech talk she gave (these talks are limited to 5 minutes and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds!), about the use of pneumatic tubes in Paris and the USA in the period from the mid 19th century until the mid 20th century. You might have seen these in use in banks, chemists and businesses delivering money and paperwork, if you are old enough. I can remember seeing them in my childhood, but they died out in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

These tubes were surprisingly widespread. In Paris in 1945 they had a 450 km network of tubes running along the walls of the sewers delivering telegrams all over the city. The screenshot in the picture above shows just how many there were in some sewers.

I didn’t know that if tube-post got stuck in the tubes, they could identify to within a couple of meters where the blockage had occurred by firing a pistol down the pipe work and measuring the sound-waves! An interesting talk, worth investing five minutes to your time to listen to.

Ideas around the home

John — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:24:22 +0000

Today I finally got around to correcting the programming for our outside lights, which I screwed up when we switched from summer time several weeks ago. The programming for the lights and for the outside blinds is performed by complicated sequences of button-pushes on the above controllers. The sequences are so complicated, and the handbooks so poorly written, that we usually manage to screw up the programming for at least one of the units each year. They drive me mad.

So the next time we move, there is one “must”. We are going to have lights and blinds controlled by a home automation (HA) unit which can be programmed using a personal computer using either a USB interface, or better, via a WLAN connection. At least, I hope so.

At the moment, the situation in Europe is pretty dire.

The leading manufacturer of reasonably priced HA seems to be SmartLabs, who have developed a standard called Insteon. However, despite having announced a year ago that they were going to announce products for the non USA markets, they still haven’t done so. As their US products use the same frequency as the GSM mobile phone networks in the rest of the world, and 110V instead of the more common 220/230V in many other parts of the world, you have to be a hardcore hardware hacker to get them working here. Most of the HA devices in Europe seem to use the X10 standard, which seems to be fairly difficult to get working reliably; Insteon is apparently much less susceptible to interference from household devices than X10. There are other standards which are more reliable than X10 – one is Z-Wave.

One interesting vendor in Europe (more precisely, in the UK) seems to be Dianemo, who have developed produces using the Z-Wave standard. However most of their focus at the moment seems to be on remote control of light switches and multi-media installations in the home. Fortunately, we aren’t moving house right now, and we hope that by the time we do, the situation regarding HA in Europe will have improved.

I have another bee in my bonnet about the electrical installations in the home. We have eight 12V or 5V power adaptors in our office (which is where the computers and WLAN equipment are installed). We have additional power adaptors in several other rooms too, and on top of that, whenever we charge our mobile phones or the power packs for our cameras, we need to plug in additional power adaptors while we are doing that.

I offer the following idea to anyone who wishes to manufacture it. I think new houses should have a single heavy-duty 12V/5V transformer mounted in the fusebox. It should feed an electrical track (similar to that used for ceiling-mounted low voltage halogen lamp track systems) mounted above or in the skirting board in every room, which allows power leads to any low voltage device to clicked into the track at any point in it’s route around the house. That would save manufacturers delivering a power unit with each mobile phone, WLAN access point, router, etc., which would also reduce the amount of electrical waste to dispose of when the devices are eventually scrapped. It would keep the overall costs of new devices down, and it would offer the possibility of being able to install devices where ever in every room they are needed.

The same concept of not supplying unnecessary hardware is already implemented today by most printer manufacturers – when did you last buy a printer which included a USB cable? Most people have boxes of them lying around at home and don’t need one if they buy a new printer. If they do, they buy it extra when they buy the printer. Why not apply the same principle to power adaptors too?

The world’s tallest building

John — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:21:06 +0000

OK – the Burj Dubai is not completed yet. That’s scheduled for September 2009, at a cost building of three Millau Viaducts. But it has already set a number of records:

Tallest structure: over 636 m
Building with most floors: 164
Highest vertical concrete pumping: 601 m

It actually looks most impressive photographed from above. More photos here. There’s a short animation showing the speed of construction (which started on 2005-02-01) here.