Atlanta airport

On way to San Diego (OK, Carlsbad, for those who care) California, I flew via Atlanta, GA airport. This is not normally an airport I fly though except when going to Florida, and it has been a while. This is a fairly new airport (maybe they built it for the Olympics 8 years ago, I don't know), and it has several peculiarities.

After eating lunch, I was walking to my gate I needed to attend to my biology, so to speak. No problem, just follow the signs. Well, I walk, and walk and walk down the terminal corridor, and the helpful signs gave up directing me. No bathroom! I turn around, and walk the 100 m back to where I had started. I go the other direction, and finally have to walk another 150m before a find a place. Do they really space their bathrooms 250 m apart?

Inside it was very clean, very modern, very new. And of course had a fancy sink with a "touchless" design. Two faucets, identical - one to the left, one to the right. Well, I want HOT water, so I select that one.

Green soap gets deposited onto my (dry) hands. Not what I wanted, and not my style. So, without thinking I go to the right. Yup, a gushing stream of cold water is deposited on my hands, what takes the dose of soap and splashes it onto my shirt. Really, I am not lying!

GRRR. I look at the taps - surely these should be labeled! Well, they were - when you hold your head just right with the light you can tell that "soap" and "water" (they didn't say cold) are etched into the shiny metal. A bit too subtle for me, I guess.


The rest of my bathroom experience went normally, I am happy to say.

Now back to the airport corridor. I bought a strawberry smoothie (only on business trips, I am always too cheap to pay for them myself). After drinking it, I throw it in one of the many shiny trash containers every 10 meters down the hall it seems (guess they figure more people throw out trash then go to the bathroom). No problem. I then stand nearby waiting in line to board my flight. Several minutes later, the garbage can I tossed my drink into starts making noise. They are electric trash cans! A light goes on, there is a whirring and crunching noise, the can burps (just kidding), and it becomes quiet and smiling again.


Next time I come back to this airport I think I'll bring a really heavy weight plastic bag, and fill it with some air!! Or bubble wrap. Or an aerosol can of, say shaving cream. THAT ought to be fun!

Speaking of such things, while I was standing in the luggage screening area in Rochester, I overheard a snippet of conversation - don't know how it turned out--

Screener person, sitting at the X-ray machine to traveler: "Hey, is that a football you have in your bag here?"


Passenger - "yup, you got it - bringing with with me to Florida to play on the beach!"

Screener - "Yeah, only one problem - we're going to have to cut it open, you know to see if anythings inside".

Passenger - "You gotta be kidding!"

Screener - chuckles..

Sometimes you just have to say something, and this one is a week overdue now:

It took several years, but certainly no one can say you hardly know each other! We look forward to your upcoming wedding, presumably this summer.

VERY cool!

Aurora watch...

Today has been really warm - it got up to about 12 degrees today. Now, just around midnight, it is still a bit over 10. I walk outside - there is a warm wind and it is very quiet. I hear the dry oak leaves left on the tree cracking in the wind. A coyote is heard in the distance. Wth some imagination I could easily believe that it late September instead of mid-December.

There is an aurora watch tonight! Here we are, in the minimum period of the solar sunspot cycle, and there was a big solar flare yesterday. Well, I was looking during my walk, and unfortunately there are some low scattered clouds filling in. Did I see some light green flickering in the northern sky? Well, maybe. It would be good to believe. But I expect it was my imagination.

Today's highlights

Christmas is coming! 11 days until Christmas! I have actually started my shopping, if you count mail order as shopping. Next week is going to be pretty busy because I am in California!

I am surrounded by students. Two in my own household. I came home from volleyball at 10:30 pm, and both Gwendolyn and Nina were working on papers, each due Friday. For Gwendolyn, this is the end of a semester. For Nina -- well, just the end of a week.

Now 11:15 - G is going upstairs to "rest" - I'm supposed to come get her at midnight so she can start on her next paper. Nina also is getting done with her first paper, and has not started her second one yet. Me? Typing a blog - a waste of time by comparison.

Speaking of volleyball, Thursday night pickup was very good tonight - everyone was good, and I was one of the weaker players on my team, which is how I like it. Everything went well, and I didn't kill myself (always an option).

A new solution to an old problem...

Here is the problem - you have a canal, and it either needs to change height (think long "sloping" canal), or intersect another canal system or river at another height (this would correspond to the "waterfall running into another river".

Well, there is a classic solution to this problem, one that has developed over the years into a fine art - the "Lock". If you never actually sat down to think how they work, it is fascinating in its simplicity. Here is a cool simulation that shows the basic idea.

Summary of cool points:

1. The lock can operate in both directions - boats can go up and down


2. It theoretically takes no energy to run the lock, if you don't count the change of height in the water. Put another way, no water is pumped, and there is only friction on the doors.


3. It is pretty fail safe. By angling the doors slightly toward the upstream end, it can be arranged that the pressure of the water against the doors forces them closed - only after the water level is equalized will it be possible to open them. Terrorist-proof!

This does not mean that locks are not without a few problems:

1. There is a practical maximum height to a lock. If the lock gets too high, those really tall doors have to be quite strong to hold back the water. Note that the door height it not the depth of the canal, but rather then drop required plus two times the canal depth. When there is a big drop, a sequence of locks must be used - in some cases upwards of a dozen. It takes a long time to traverse these, and people get bored.


2. You have to fill those big locks full of water each time, and the water height is again twice the canal depth PLUS the drop across the lock (this is true even with cascaded locks). And of course the volume is proportional to the length of the lock. All of this filling takes a lot of time, and it can actually take a lot of water. If the drop is high and the canal shallow, the canal gets to flow like a river, even if it is flat!

Well, there is another way, it has just been impractical until recently. Consider if you could take a strip of the canal, ship and all, lift it with a crane (think LARGE bathtub!), rotate the crane and place it alongside the (lower) canal. Then open the walls to the bathtub and off goes the ships.

Well, cool idea, but not practical. Consider:

1. One hell of a big and heavy bathtub! No crane is going to be able to life it.


2. It would take a lot of energy to move the bathtub uphill! Bundles of energy.


3. Big disaster in the making. Heck, we can't even build bridges without them falling down occasionally.

And that's how the world stayed - until 2002. But not so fast - it wouldn't be fun for me!

The first step is to take a lesson from a vernicular. There are the cable cars that ride up and down a mountain, usually in pairs. They take little energy, because the car going down helps to pull the car going up - if the passenger weights match exactly no energy is required.

How does this relate to our canal problem? Well, let's take the bathtub now, put it on wheels with a cable arrangement, and make a vericular. Now we have solved the energy problem, provided the cable does not break. And you get a bonus - it doesn't even matter how much the ships weight, because they displace exactly their weight in water (think about this some...).

Now we get to our modern solution. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, take a look at this link on the Falkirk Wheel.

Talk about cool things! If you want to see it in motion, click this link and select the "presentation video".
Now, a couple of things I find are really cool about this:

1. The two sides exactly counterbalance each other. They claim that to perform a rotation uses about as much energy as boiling 6 tea kettles of water!
2. It is pretty fail safe - no cables to break
3. It uses some really techie gear work to keep things from spilling. Interested? Read about it here.
4. Form followed function, but the form is really nice!
5. It uses very little water - only to the depth of the canal. And water is returned, in a way. Put another way, although some mixing occurs, the same water keeps going back and forth (except that "vacated" when the boats leave). So you could say that no net water is transferred between the canals (or two rivers). Compare that with the canal lock system (it is estimated that if the Falkirk wheel was built, the previous system in the same place took 11 locks).

Isn't technology wonderful?

Normal weekend day, nothing special

Well, today has turned out to be pretty normal. It was finally time to put the snow tires on the cars (OK, only one car, havn't gotten around to the others yet). Chocolate chip cookies were baked (yumm), and Nina cooked some Borsch. Ok, LOTs of Borsch. Also yumm. So I guess it was a yumm day.

Oh, one other amusing thing. G now officially has purple hair! This just proves that you are never too old for this. Here she is:


Heck, not only is her hair purple, but she can be color coordinated as well!