Ever been to the Royal Burgh of Auchtermuchty? Neither have I. It’s north of Edinburgh on the A91 on the way to St. Andrews, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay. According to Undiscovered Scotland, the name comes from the Scottish Gaelic phrase uachdar muc garadh, meaning “upper pig enclosure”.
Hey, I really dig Scotland.
So, there is this Swiss fellow named Ives Rossy who has developed a strap-on wing assembly complete with a small turbine engine. His flight profile goes like this- He launches from a high wing single engine aircraft (a Pilatus) at altitude. As he drops, he deploys the folded wingtips and achieves a stable glide. I can’t tell from the video, but I suspect that he starts his engine prior to leaving the plane. Once he has his glide established he throttles up the engine and begins powered flight. Clearly he is maintaining level powered flight and even appears to climb. This is no mere glider. He ends his flight at altitude near the intended touchdown point and deploys a paraglider-type chute and lands by parachute.
This is nothing short of amazing. There are other video’s showing different flights and a few details of the wing. As flying folk know, when you go aviatin’ you are actually flying the wing. Passengers may focus on the fuselage, but the pilot is busy up front making sure the airstream is moving over the wing properly. However, the fuselage is not just a cargo space or place to sit and leer at the stewtrons while munching pretzels. Significantly, it connects the empannage, or tail assembly to the wing.
The job of the empannage is to hold the vertical and horizontal stabilizers in place. The horizontal stabilizer and its articulated control surface called the “elevator” is a concession to an unfortunate aspect of wing behavior. A “normal” wing (i.e., a Clark Y) is just an oddly shaped truss built to develop a pressure imbalance in an airstream. This imbalance gives rise to lift which counteracts the force of gravity. But a normal cross section wing will also develop a pitching moment, or the tendency for the trailing edge to pitch upwards and the leading edge pitches downwards about the center of lift. The job of the horizontal stabilizer downstream of the wing is to counteract this downward pitching moment.
One of the critical design features of the flying wing was to counteract this downward pitching behavior. One way to do it is to shape the trailing edge of the wing upwards to cause the airflow to impart some counteracting downward force on the downstream side of the wing. So, if you look at the details of Rossy’s wing, you’ll see this upward curving lip on the trailing edge. He is a clever boy.
My hat is off to this guy. Yves, my next glass of Fat Tire is in your honor!
As a gastronaut, I have been in pursuit of the perfect chili verde for quite some time. Fundamentally, chili verde is a type of gravy: a dispersion of lipid phase (preferably pork lipids), a dispersant (starches), an aqueous phase, phytochemicals (capsaicin, cumin extracts, etc), pork, and assorted plant tissues. It is called green chili mostly because it is not red. That is, it lacks red chili’s. It is more or less green by default owing to the minor jalapeno or other chili components.
Chili verde can be consumed as a soup with or without tortillas. It is also a wonderful sauce to drown a burrito or other variations of foods wrapped in tortillas. When used as a sauce the rheology is quite inportant. The chili verde must flow readily, but it must also coat the burrito or enchilada in a fashion so as to form a layer substantial enough to impart flavor and release enough heat to melt any cheese that might be applied.
I’m an experimental gastronomer, not a theorist. Much can be said about what constitutes authentic Mexican food. I happen to prefer what tastes best, not what is stringently authentic. When we use the word “authentic”, what do we really mean anyway? Mexican food is now a kind of gastronomic diaspora- it has been dispersed in all directions (well, except for Europe) and is evolving.
Here is the latest revision– To a large stock pot is added 454 g of pork sausage or diced pork. As the pork is browning, one half of a medium onion is diced and added to the browning meat. Several cloves of minced garlic are added to the mix. After the meat is browned, 6 cups of water is added and the mixture is heated to a gentle boil. To the vessel is added 1 tsp of NaCl (or to taste), 1 finely diced jalapeno pepper, 1/3 cup diced Anaheim pepper, 1 tablespoon of cumin, 1 teaspoon of ground chili pepper, 1/4 cup corn meal, and one finely diced tomatillo. The mixture is allowed to simmer for 30 minutes. To a cup with 1/4 cup of warm water is added 2 tablespoons of corn or arrow root starch and the solids vigorously dispersed in the water (no lumps). The starch slurry is added to the pot and the resulting mixture is simmered at low heat for 10 minutes to afford a mixture that should have the consistency of a gravy. Beware- it is possible to overheat the composition and wreck the dispersion.
Comment on the above lot: Pretty good, I’d give it a 9 out of 10. Perhaps a bit more cumin. Actually, a fresh salsa with cilantro & jalapeno would do the job on a burrito.
In a later post I will discuss fabrication techniques related to the burrito. For now, bon appetit!
Having flown a recent round trip on Untied Airlines- I’ve scrambled the letters in the name so they shall remain anonymous \;-), I’d like to post a few comments about the experience. This recitation of grievances only covers the latest experience with air travel.
Untied airline, with it’s eternal financial and labor crises, seems to be economizing by restricting customer contact with its sparse staff. These poor sods who work for UA seem to be in a constant crisis mode. To be fair, the Untied staff seemed chipper and even displayed moments of good humor. But fundamentally this company is a dinosaur limping along by artificial means.
The few staff who work behind the now ubiquitous self check-in stations rarely look up to see who might need help. By requiring customers to select limited options from the computer check-in stations, you freeze out degrees of freedom in the customer interaction process and make life simpler for the airline.
Untied is now requiring that customers pay to use the curbside Sky Cap check-in services at Denver International, one of it’s bigger hubs. So the guys humpin’ luggage out in the weather and breathing car exhaust are taking credit cards and quizzing folks on who touched their bags. I thought that curbside check-in sped things up for the airline and its use was to be encouraged. Now it’s a nickel & dime profit center.
Saturday March 17, we were waiting for Untied flight XYZ from John Wayne to Denver. An hour before departure another flight of Denver customers moved en mass from another gate to ours. The ensuing delay and confusion was painful to watch and I won’t bore anyone with the details. It was pathetic.
Another beef with Untied. The pilots switch on the seatbelt sign at the slightest indication of turbulence. So if you had designs on a trip to the lav in your ticked section, just forget it. Other Airlines like Frontier seem to have a more realistic threshold for this.
Isn’t First Class seating in what you might call the “crumple zone”?
Here is my fantasy- I’ll invite airline executives to our home for a dinner party. As they arrive, they’ll wait in line for entry with their shoes off. I’ll randomly pull guests out of line for an undignified search but refrain from answering questions. Once inside, they’ll sit in the foyer until called to the “dinner table”. The dinner table will actually be several rows of chairs with TV trays, all tightly packed together in a closet. Tiny bags of processed foodstuffs will be issued. After some delay, the scraps will be picked up, making sure to knock a few elbows in the process. After more delay, the exectuves will be asked to exit, single file. I’ll be standing at the door to issue a smarmy farewell.
Air travel used to be fun and exciting. I looked forward to it. Now it is just a series of indignities and minor outrages. Pity. I get to the stratosphere so infrequently that it should really be fun when I get there.
And now for a week in southern California. DisneyLand with the family. See the ocean. Maybe visit the La Brea Tar Pits. A high consumption burn to that fabled Lagrange point of life- Hollywood. Ah yes, LA.
While touring the Kremlin I was warned not to take this photo, but I did it anyway. I felt it was important for people in the west to know just what the Russians were doing with American Bobcat technology. For the love of God, where will it end?
Th’ Gaussling is on the case.
Here is a picture of a younger Gaussling with chums Leon, Joe, and Karl. Of course, Leon was never quite “right” again after his tragic incident with the ice-axe.
[Editors note: Many thanks to Les for the image “enhancement”. ]
Cheers!
I’m just back from the ACS Meeting in San Francisco. More on that later. Of immediate interest to me is how air travel has changed and how we are blithely accepting the loss of a sort of egalitarianism that has only become apparent as it is lost.
In this age of security theatre, we are being required by Homeland Security to adopt a passive posture as users of airline services. But despite all of the visible security measures, turns out that good old-fashioned police work may be the best approach to terrorism. The Brits defeated IRA terrorism that way.
This afternoon while boarding at Gate 86 at SFO, ticket holders were required to queue up behind two distinct openings that were literally side-by-side and distinguished only by the presence of a short piece of red matting on the floor of one of the two entryways. The strident young male gate attendant (United) was adamant that only First Class passengers and certain other flying gentry were to walk across the red mat. All others were to trod upon the common carpet adjacent to the red mat. He did not come out and vocalize it, but he did demonstrate his intent through the use of crowd control cordons commonly found in airports. It strikes me as tragic yet exquisitely comical that this enthusiastic fellow is forced to perform such an absurd dance at every departure. You pay an extra kilobuck and you get to walk across the red mat.
I pointed this out to other Zone 4 coach passengers and was met with the usual “my-gawd-why-is-this-guy-talking-to-me-why-doesn’t-he-shut-his-cake-hole” look. They looked at their watch or cell phone and found a reason not to talk further. It’s amusing. Most of us are only too happy to adopt a passive stance and tough through it. Humans can adapt to fantastic incursions into their civil liberties and not utter even the most plaintive bleet of protest. Stalin knew this. So did Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, and others.
Another observation is the recent attention to the seat-belt sign by the flight crew. Flight crews on airlines that I have flown lately, United and Frontier, have been real sticklers for obeying the seat-belt sign and keeping passengers in their ticketed toilets. It doesn’t matter that your bladder is about to discharge a dilute urea solution on their expensive seats. At the slightest indication of turbulence, the pilot switches on the sign and that’s it- gotta sit down pursuant to FAA law.
The facile conclusion is that they are practicing loss avoidance by keeping passengers from being plastered to the ceiling during extreme turbulence. But such events are really scarce. I might suggest that this is a subtle means of keeping passengers in their seats and away from the cockpit or the galley. After all, we need to keep a clear line of fire for the air marshall on board.
<End rant>
Lamentations on Chemistry 