Saturday - July 24, 2010
Newest Ship In The Army
Just over six months after the official opening of Austal’s new Module Manufacturing Facility (MMF) in November 2009, Austal USA hosted a keel-laying ceremony at its shipyard in Mobile, Alabama on July 22, to signify the erection of the first modules on the U.S. Department of Defense’s next generation multi-use platform, the Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV). This is part of a 10-ship program potentially worth over $1.6b.
Keel Laying is the formal recognition of the start of the ship’s module erection process. In earlier times it was the “laying down” of the central or main timber making up the backbone of a vessel. Today, fabrication of the ship modules begins months before the units are actually joined. However, the keel laying symbolically recognizes the joining of modular components and the ceremonial beginning of a ship.
Spearhead (JHSV 1) will be a US Army vessel (USAV) and its name represents a major feature of the Regimental Insignia of the Transportation Corps. The insignia is a gold color metal and enamel device consisting of a ship’s steering wheel bearing a shield charged with a winged vehicle wheel on a rail, all gold, centered upon a brick red spearhead point up, all standing upon a curving gold scroll spanning the lower tips of the spearhead and inscribed, “Spearhead of Logistics,” in blue letters.
The ceremony signified the erection of the modular components that will form part of a 338 ft aluminum catamaran capable of transporting troops and their equipment, supporting humanitarian relief efforts, operating in shallow waters, and reaching speeds in excess of 35 knots fully loaded. This is the first of a class of 10 vessels to be operated by both the US Army and Navy.
For some old timers who might be wondering if the Army having it’s own ships isn’t some form of wackiness, what I found out about this class of vessels is anything but. For starters, these JSHV ships are fairly inexpensive at under $200 million each, ready to sail. The ships themselves are only slightly modified, armed versions of an existing commercial design, the shallow draft trimaran ferry built by Incat Tasmania Pty Ltd., of Hobart, Australia, now partnered with Bollinger Shipyards of Mobile Alabama and doing business as Austal.
The ships are 338 feet long, and made primarily from aluminum. They are wide beam, shallow draft, light weight, and very stable. They can hit 35 knots or faster, and they use far less fuel than standard ships of their length or capacity. The Navy has been testing a few of them for most of a decade now, and everything seems to work well. The design is pretty odd, and highly modern.
These “little” ships will serve mainly as “floating pickup trucks” moving goods and people. I do not know what their role will be regarding the LCS (littoral combat ship) paradigm. The Spearhead and her sister ships can carry more than 300 troops quickly to shore and back again. This is the same ship design that Hawaii used for an inter-island high speed large superferry, until the enviro-wienies killed it. Those ferries could move 866 passengers and 282 subcompact cars at one go, and used jet propulsion instead of propellers to minimize risk to sea life. But that wasn’t good enough for the greenies!
All in all, it looks like this project was put together with a miraculous amount of common sense. Off the shelf ship that uses a radical but efficient and proven design. Cost effective from one end to the other. See what that kind of ship can do - the earlier ships tested by the Navy were used for logistics support in Iraq, to ferry aid to victims of the Indonesian Tsunami and victims of hurricane Katrina - then grow a role for the military around their capabilities. That’s the exact opposite of the I Have A Hammer approach, where they try to make everything look like a nail.
The JHSV (Joint High Speed Vessel) is a new generation, multi-use platform capable of transporting troops and their equipment, supporting humanitarian relief efforts, the ability to operate in shallow waters, and can reach speed in access of 35 knots fully loaded. The project brings together United States Navy, Army, Marines, and Special Operations Command to pursue a multi-use platform.
Originally built as a car ferry, the Swift [one of the earlier test ships] is a wave-piercing catamaran, a two-hulled, multi-decked craft with the length of a football field. She has a mission bay with 15,500 square feet of vehicle and module space. Her crane can launch and recover small boats. Her vehicle ramp is sturdy enough to accommodate M1A1Abrams tanks. A 4,000-square-foot flight deck has an adjacent hangar for two MH-60S Knighthawk helicopters. She can carry up to up to 250 combat-equipped Marines resting in airliner-style seats and up to 605 tons of cargo.
Propelled by four sets of Caterpillar 3618 marine diesel engines, gas turbines and water jets, she can cruise at a top speed in excess of 45 knots.
Yet the Swift’s aluminum hull draws only 11.15 feet of water. This allows her to operate in the shallow coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico—or similar regions anywhere in the world. In the two years since the lease began, the vessel has provided transit support during the invasion of Iraq, participated in exercises off the coasts of West Africa, Honduras and Norway and provided tsunami disaster relief in the Indian Ocean.
“The Swift’s high speed makes it extraordinarily responsive, compared to other vessels,” Sodol said. “The higher payload requires fewer trips than a smaller high-speed craft, and the shallow draft enables it to enter ports and use small piers that are inaccessible to deep-draft ships.”
The Army and the Navy are alternating ownership of these ships. The first one built, Fortitude, and this one, Spearhead, are Army ships. #2 and #4, Vigilant and Fall River, will be Navy owned. So maybe it’s wrong for me to call this vessel USS? Maybe USAS instead? Naming conventions are out the window at this point, though the Fall River will be USNS.
Note to dedicated ship spotters: This is not the TSV-1X Spearhead, even though that ship is nearly identical to this one. TSV-1X was a test ship (hence the X) and this one will be a line ship. But the Army so loves the name it will get used on this one as well.
I can’t say how this new class of smaller, chunkier ships will fare in the long run, but one oxymoronic benefit they have is that they are not visually intimidating. Seriously. Maybe we all grew up understanding that the Navy was a floating steel manifestation of Force Projection, but that might be a bit unsettling for other countries when the Navy stops by for a social call.
A now-familiar gray catamaran pulled into the city of Port Antonio, Jamaica, on Jan. 4, carrying a team of sailors and Marines set to deliver a lesson in high demand among all the seafaring nations in Caribbean — how to fix small boats.
Boat repair, port security and basic law enforcement are part of the core curriculum available from the trainers aboard the high-speed vessel Swift, now three nations deep into a seven-nation tour of Central and South America as the United States’ floating embassy. Dubbed the “southern partnership station,” the Swift is becoming a regular visitor to many ports in the 4th Fleet area of operations, which is exactly what the Navy wants.
“This puts the U.S. military in good standing down here with these countries,” said Cmdr. Chris Barnes, the Swift’s mission commander, who spoke to Navy Times from Jamaica.
“In the three countries where we’ve been so far, we’ve been very, very well received. They appreciate the training, and we’re learning stuff from them, as well.”
Hearts and minds ... the theme that just won’t quit. All well and good in peacetime, but the real reason behind these ships is that they can take a quarter thousand soldiers in comfort and all their gear - the equivalent to 20 C-130 cargoes - and get them nearly up on the beach anywhere, and then offload the whole thing in under 15 minutes. Neat rah-rah video here.
Posted by Drew458
on 07/24/2010 at 03:38 PM
Filed Under: • High Tech • Military •
• Comments (7)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - May 27, 2010
High Tech Hunting Bullet
That picture may not look like much to most folks, but there is an impressive amount of science behind this bullet. What you are looking at is the dawn of the 7th generation of consumer firearms projectiles. Not only is this bullet “green”, it can also shoot through water for a considerable distance, which no other bullet has ever been able to do. When used against dangerous game - very large animals that may be actively trying to kill you while you are actively trying to kill them - it is designed to out-penetrate every other kind of bullet on the market and to create a larger wound channel than any other “solid”. It’s the best of all worlds in it’s own little specialized niche. Woodleigh is a bullet making company in Australia.
This is an elephantine post about an elephant bullet. If you don’t want the technology lecture and the history lesson on bullet design you can skip ahead to the end. Or go on to the next post, which may have titties. Or not.
In the beginning, back before John Moses Browning (PBUH) created the world as we know it, there was the lead ball. You poured a charge of black powder down the long thin barrel of your musket, wrapped a bit of greased cloth around the big lead ball, and stuffed it down the tube. When fired, it accelerated to about 900 feet per second and generally went forward. If the distance was very short, say less than 75 yards, you would hit what you were aiming at, mostly, and the big soft lead ball would put a large hole in it. Providing that what you were shooting at wasn’t really thick; unrifled muskets don’t put any spin on the ball, so the round bullet isn’t stabilized at all, and has no forces acting on it to help it burrow in in a straight line. But lead is soft, and that 3/4” diameter ball squashed itself out to 1 1/2” across on impact, and created a pretty damn big, if shallow, hole. And that was enough. Unless you were hunting bears or lions or big angry buffalo, in which case you wanted half a dozen friends along with their own muskets so they could shoot too. And then you could all run in different directions, and hope that the critter chose to chase someone else.
At some later point rifling was invented. Exactly like the threads on a screw, but with a much longer spiral, rifling imparts an axial spin to a bullet as it is fired down the barrel. This made that ball fly much straighter, which allowed those primitive boomsticks to have some degree of accuracy for the first time. The spinning also caused the ball to penetrate much further, or at least straighter. It was a big step forward. Now you only needed a couple of friends along.
Pointed bullets came next. Conical projectiles, the Minie ball. Paper patching, lubricated grooved bullets, better metallurgy, better casting, harder alloys of lead and tin and antimony, a bit of aerodynamics, and soon thereafter reliable weather resistant metallic cartridges, repeating rifles, smokeless gunpowder with a whole lot more energy. There was a tremendous technical leap forward in the 30 year period from 1860 to 1890. So much progress that the old raw lead bullet could not (literally) take the pressure, and would smear itself to pieces inside the barrel upon firing.
So the chunk of lead got squeezed into a copper jacket. “Gilding metal”, a soft and smooth brass alloy, soon replaced copper. A few years later it was found that the “spitzer” shape, a pointed bullet with a mathematically derived pointed ogive on the front, was highly aerodynamic. This allowed bullets to to be accurate to extraordinary ranges and to retain considerable kinetic energy all the way there. The modern rifle was born. 110 years ago.
In the interim folks have fussed and tweaked with the design of the bullet. A longer point, a shorter point. Flat base, tapered base (ie boat tail) Exposed lead tips vs. full metal jackets. Lead cores cast in place in their jackets, glued in, electrochemically bonded in, locked in place with swaged grooves. Different thicknesses and hardnesses of the metal jacket. Bronze points, plastic points, steel and tungsten rods inserted in the lead cores. All attempting to build a bullet that worked the best on a certain sized creature at a certain velocity range. And with pretty good success too; there is an amazing variety of very effective bullets on the market today, so many that it’s almost work trying to figure out which one is the best for your hunting trip. Bullets have become highly specialized.
A few decades ago solid copper and bronze bullets came on the market. This is where the “green” part comes in, tangentially. Environmentalists have been quite successful in getting lead shotgun pellets banned in many places. Lead has always been used for shot pellets and for bullets, because it is very dense, malleable, abundant, and cheap. But when you shoot at some birds with your shotgun, not all the pellets hit. Some fall to the ground or into the water, where a poor little birdie or fishy might eat them. And get lead poisoning. It’s a helluva stretch, but it is just barely conceivable. And it shows you just how much political power the anti-gun, anti-hunting brigade really has. So the shotgun ammunition world is moving away from lead shot, using steel, bismuth, or tungsten pellets instead. The bullet makers can read the writing on the wall, and now lead-free, solid copper alloy bullets are all the rage. Primers don’t even use lead styphnate (C6HN3O8Pb any more because that’s a “toxic explosive” and you mustn’t be exposed to even microscopic amounts of lead vapor. God forbid actual lead. So let’s use copper bullets. “Problem” solved.
So, while “green”, copper bullets have a whole pile of issues of their own. Copper is much less dense than lead, so a bullet of a certain size and shape will weigh a lot less. Which means that at equal velocity it will carry much less kinetic energy; it will not have as much power. Conversely, copper bullets of equal weight to their lead cored counterparts will be much longer, and may not chamber properly in the magazine or the chamber throat of the firearm. Sure, easy, seat them deeper into the case. But that takes up a lot of internal volume that the gun powder used to use. Copper is also much harder than lead, and solid copper is much less malleable than the thinly jacketed bullets we’ve been using for 100 years. This makes the engraving process - the act, upon firing, where the suddenly accelerating bullet is forced out of the cartridge case and into the barrel’s rifling lands and grooves - much more difficult, and that raises chamber pressures. Chamber pressure is what you get when you light off a charge of gun powder inside your gun. The stuff burns real well and turns from a handful of powder into a huge volume of white hot gas in half a millisecond. This pressure pushes the bullet down the barrel. The pressure exerted is tremendous, sometimes reaching a peak of 65,000psi. While the steel used in a modern rifle can withstand more than 120,000psi, the brass case of a cartridge has an elastic strength of no more than 75,000psi. So you can see where jacking up the engraving pressure by 10 to 20,000psi could lead to problems. Back to the drawing board.
The solution came from looking forward into the past. At first, various lubrication coatings were tried. After all, that worked for cast lead bullets 120 years ago. “Moly” (molybdenum disulphide) was tried, along with Teflon™ and several others. They worked. Sort of. They were good at reducing friction as the bullet traveled down the barrel, but couldn’t do a thing to reduce engraving pressure. A better fix was needed. And the fix was found by Gerard Schultz of GS Custom Bullets of South Africa. Who looked forward into the past, and realized that the “driving band” technology used on artillery shells for the last 150 years could be used on bullets too, but only if those bullets were cut on a lathe. Driving band technology? WTH? Artillery shells are made of iron or steel. Both of which are much, much harder and less malleable than copper. It is just about impossible to engrave one on the steel rifling in a cannon barrel without wearing the barrel out in a very short time. So artillery shells are made quite a bit undersize relative to the barrel they get fired in. They are all “bore riding” designs. (to make a rifled barrel, first you bore a hole in the steel, then you cut away the rifling grooves from the outside of the hole. This means that a rifled barrel actually has two hole diameters, the bore {or “land"} diameter, and the slightly larger groove diameter. On a rifle that difference is usually about 0.008”. On a cannon barrel it can be nearly half an inch for the big guns) The shells get a few copper bands tightly wrapped around them at the factory, and it is those driving bands that get engraved with the rifling. And also seal the bore so that the powder gases don’t leak past the projectile. Think of them as the rings on a piston. It works great, but the concept was impossible to apply to bullets, especially small ones. Once Schultz pointed out the obvious fact that they could be added to lathe cut bore riding design bullets everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. GS Custom still does it best by using the most minimal and most aerodynamic bands, but the squared off bands the other companies use work almost as well (see the picture at the top of the page), and are probably less expensive to make. The Barnes company turns the concept inside out and just cuts a few grooves in their copper bullets. That works too. The whole idea works because copper and it’s alloys are much firmer than lead, and a few driving bands are enough to properly support the bullet in the barrel. Using just enough support for the bullet results in a whole lot less friction in the barrel and allows for much more normal engraving pressures. Problem solved.
So, two problems down, several more to go. I’ve already mentioned that copper bullets are longer for a given weight, shape, and diameter. This gives them what physicists call a “longer moment arm”, and in the real world that means that they have to be spun a bit faster to be properly stabilized. Very long nose ogives, like the Von Kármán-Haack design on the GS Custom bullet shown, give great aerodynamics but also require more spin. So the gun makers have begun to build rifles with faster pitch rifling. You AR-15 shooters know all about this already, but it’s carrying over to other barrels as well. The ancient Greenhill Formula, used to determine the minimum rifling pitch for a bullet in the air, is dead, dying, or at least needs some extension. Not that it really matters too much, as the gun makers have been using faster and faster rifling pitches for a long time now. And it turns out fortuitously that faster twist allows any bullet to penetrate it’s target in a straighter line. Well duh, really, since flesh is many times denser than air ... and Greenhill can be extended to show that the optimal twist rate for shooting in water is about one turn in 3”. So the 1:9 to 1:12 twist rate most barrels have today is much more effective than the 1:66 to 1:20 twist rates from way back when. But if you are building a rifle to shoot these long modern lead free bullets you want as tight a twist as you can get. 1:7 to 1:9 is about right for most situations. Problem solved by the barrel makers.
Are we ever going to get to the freakin’ supercavitation bit Drew? Jumping Jeebus on a pogo stick, you wrote a whole friggin’ book just to get this far. Yeah, I know. This is one of those long winded posts that I write about things that really interest me. The ones where I’ve done hours and hours of research and have dozens of links I won’t even use. But I’m doing my best to boil it all down so that readers who don’t know beans about firearms will understand why the Woodleigh bullet I’m writing about really is such an exciting advance. Bear with me, it’s coming soon. I’m trying.
The theory of supercavitation is not new. It exists because all fluids, from air to water to flesh, can be considered laminar in nature. Layered. Aerodynamics is the study of how to minimize the disturbance to those layers. Supercavitation theorizes that by abruptly disturbing a small fluid layer out ahead of your moving body a laminar pocket can be formed that will smoothly go around your moving body and thus drastically reduce the friction that would otherwise act upon it while it moves through that medium. In other words it will go faster for longer with less drag. It’s real. Dolphins use it. They actually fly through the water inside a curtain of micro-bubbles of air. The military has been using it for a long time now on missiles and certain types of artillery shells. These days there are torpedoes that travel through the water at over 230mph. And that’s slow compared to the Mach 1 rocket driven torpedoes under development. Supercavitation works.
But the theory has been difficult to apply to bullets. Let’s face it, even the big ones are still pretty tiny things. When your moving body is hardly a third of an inch in diameter and only a little over an inch long ( and spinning at 300,000rpm ) there isn’t much room for strapping on high-tech doodads. Even the Navy’s RAMICS projectile, 30mm in diameter, is much larger. So it had to come from design.
As far as I can find out, much of the fundamental work of developing a supercavitating hunting bullet was done by Norbert Hansen about a decade ago. He may have had quite a lot of knowledge gleaned from the military, but he worked things out with math, patience, and a really good lathe. And it worked.
So now we are finally back to the Woodleigh bullet. Solid copper alloy. Driving band bore rider technology for minimal barrel friction. Short ogive nose for reduced tumbling and normal rifling. Supercavitation design for maximum penetration. Lead-free “green” design. Pretty damn impressive. As I said, it’s the dawn of the 7th generation of bullets. And it works.
Why does anyone need a supercavitating bullet in the first place? Because elephants are about 8 feet thick. And Cape Buffalo are about 4 feet thick. And you rarely get a perfect broadside shot, so you need every last bit of penetration you can get.
Ok, so why not use a blunt? A flat nosed, non-expanding solid, whether it’s a hard cast Elmer Keith style, or one of the high-tech blunts that GS Custom makes?
Because, as the picture on the right show, either one of them will deform. And while that deforming, called mushrooming in the world of bullets, will carve a large wound channel, it will slow the bullet down tremendously and imbalance it. Which means eventually it will bend from it’s path while penetrating. Which means you might be aiming at the heart, but the bullet winds up in the tail. This happens frequently when shooting at the largest of creatures. Also, standard blunt bullets like this only create a permanent wound channel slightly larger than their own diameter, unlike typical expanding bullets. You might find it harsh to think about, but an ethical hunter wants to create the largest possible wound in the creature he’s shooting, to kill it as fast as possible. Modern expanding bullets do a fantastic job of this, but at the cost of overall penetration. Which is fine, as deer and antelope are barely a foot to a foot and a half thick. You don’t need all that much penetration for a broadside shot at them, but you do want to “use enough gun” so that your bullet will reach their vitals from any angle and have enough oomph left to do the job. Bullet selection is always a trade off. Always. But when you may have to shoot through 7 or 8 feet of angry animal to get to the killing zone, you want every last bit of straight line penetration you can get. And if you can get a bigger permanent wound channel in the process, all the better. The supercavitating bullet drives straight through, creates a larger wound channel than a typical blunt, and then the leading pressure wave tears out a massive chunk of flesh on exit. That’s as good as it gets. It’s probably useless on deer, but bullets are a very niche item these days. In it’s own niche, I think this one is supreme.
To me, the first bullet in the gel pack photo above is obviously a Barnes XFN. Obvious because that’s exactly the size and shape of a wound channel that the XFN bullet makes. If you would like to learn about how bullets actually work on game, the whole world of terminal ballistics, and why Woodleigh’s “hydrostatically stabilised” name is a deliberate misnomer that caters to a poorly educated shooting audience, please spend an hour or two and read the Terminal Ballistics treatise written by my digital friend Ulf. You will never think of bullets the same way again, guaranteed. Or you just click here, zoom to the very end and look at the picture, where you’ll see that his test results diagram of the Barnes bullet is exactly like the top one in the above picture.
You can read a bit more about the Woodleigh bullet in their new catalog. Click here. But be forewarned that there are some pictures of bloody dead animals in it, including the large chunk of flesh I mentioned above. Come to think of it, if you follow the links from Hansen’s pages you will see some blood and guts too.
If you’ve read through this whole post, and followed the links and read those pages and done the same for a few of the links they contain, you should now consider yourself an expert on the behavior of bullets at the target end of things. For a whole lot of information on how they behave in flight and in the gun, plus a huge pile of info on reloading and the capabilities of most of the safari cartridges new and old, pick up a copy of Art Alphin’s Any Shot You Want loading manual and read it several times. You can learn about the art of paper patching online, or you can pick up a copy of Paul Matthews The Paper Jacket if you can hunt one down. It’s the very best, but it’s out of print right now. Amazon has a few copies left.
Posted by Drew458
on 05/27/2010 at 10:06 AM
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control • High Tech •
• Comments (6)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - March 04, 2010
Those wacky Japanese…
Seems the world-wide recession has even hit Japanese pet owners. Instead of sending their pets to the usual pet groomers, they’ve opted for the pet washing machines
Japanese pet owners are trying to save money in today’s recession by having their dogs and cats washed in a specially designed machine instead of using groomers.
More and more people in the suburbs of Tokyo are using the vending machines that wash, rinse and blow dries their pets in about 30 minutes, Ananova reports.
A groomer at Joyful Honda pet market claims the process uses pure ozone water and is completely safe for the pet. One user, however, admitted it took his Yorkshire terrier a while to get used to the dryer.
The vending machine wash costs about $5 compared to approximately $30 for grooming.
Small print: $150 may be needed for pet therapy afterward.
Why yes! Thank you for asking. There is a video:
Posted by Christopher
on 03/04/2010 at 08:38 PM
Filed Under: • Animals • High Tech • Humor •
• Comments (10)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Wednesday - January 06, 2010
No More Bat Boat
Personally, I’m not in favor of whale hunting. Leave them alone. You want meat, grow a few hundred cattle. That being said, the “whale warriors” have to be the most annoying greenies out there. They have their own television program ... in which they take pictures of themselves harassing Japanese fishermen and fishing boats. Lately these “warriors” have turned somewhat violent, pelting the fishing boats with chum, water balloons, paint guns, etc. The fishermen respond with the standard anti-piracy tool: fire hoses. Reality TV drama with a green theme! Much more exciting than watching guys catch crabs in the dark!!
Well, the inevitable happened. The Save The Whales people put their super hi-tech speedboat in front of a full size ship, and stopped. The whaling ship was underway. Ships don’t have brakes you know. I remember a little bit from driver training, about the impact power of things out on the streets: bicycle beats pedestrian, motorcycle beats bicycle, car beats motorcycle, pickup truck beats car, bigger truck beats pickup truck, bus beats bigger truck, train beats bus. And you know what beats train? Ships. And bigger ships beat smaller ones. Oh sure, rules of the road say that pedestrians always have the right of way ... but don’t be a dope and set out to prove it. Rules of the sea say that a kayak probably has right of way over anything else on the water too ... but you’d be a fool to force the issue with an air craft carrier.
The “whale warriors” decided to force the issue. Naturally they lost. Boo frickin’ hoo. And now their two million dollar batman boat is all stove in. tsk tsk tsk. On the other hand, leave the whales the hell alone. Go catch some stingrays if you’re hungry. We’ve got loads of them. Or start up a fish farm like everyone else is doing. So honestly ... I’m not sure which side I’m on here. But the “whale warriors” seem like floating stinky hippies to me, so they probably deserve punching just on general principle.
A conservation group’s boat had its bow sheared off and was in danger of sinking as it took on water Wednesday after it was struck by a Japanese whaling ship in the frigid waters of Antarctica, the group said.
The boat’s six crew members were safely transferred to another of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s vessels, the newly commissioned Bob Barker. The boat is named for the American game show host who donated $5 million to buy it.
The clash was the most serious in the past several years, during which the Sea Shepherd has sent vessels into far-southern waters to try to harass the Japanese fleet into ceasing its annual whale hunt.
Clashes using hand-thrown stink bombs, ropes meant to tangle propellers and high-tech sound equipment have been common in recent years, and crashes between ships have sometimes occurred.
The society said its vessel Ady Gil — a high-tech speedboat that resembles a stealth bomber — was hit by the Japanese ship the Shonan Maru near Commonwealth Bay and had about 10 feet (three meters) of its bow knocked off.
Locky Maclean, the first mate of the society’s lead ship, said one crewman from New Zealand appeared to have suffered two cracked ribs, but the others were uninjured. The crew members were safely transferred to the group’s third vessel, though the Ady Gil’s captain remained on board to see what could be salvaged, he said.
The group accused the Japanese ship of deliberately ramming the Ady Gil.
“They were stopped dead in the water when the incident occurred,” Maclean said of the Ady Gil. “When they realized that the Shonan Maru was aiming right for them, they tried to go into reverse to get the bow out of the way but it was too late. The Shonan Maru made a course correction and plowed directly into the front end of the boat.”
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society claimed its 78 ft protest powerboat the Ady Gil was “sliced in half” by the Japanese security ship Shonan Maru 2 as it loitered near the whaling fleet.
Jeff Hansen, the group’s director, insisted the Ady Gil was trying to get out of the way when it was hit, but Japan’s government-backed Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) has accused the protesters of causing the collision. Mr Hansen said the incident occurred after two activist vessels intercepted the Japanese fleet near Antarctica’s Commonwealth Bay.
“The Ady Gil has been cut, hit by one of the harpoon vessels,” he said. “It was stationary at the time. It tried to back out of the way but the Shonan Maru 2 had it in its path. It came through and took off a section off the fuselage.”
There wreckage of the boat was still afloat, but it was expected to sink in the next few hours as it took on water, he said. All six crew members had been rescued and transferred to Sea Shepherd’s new Norwegian harpoon ship the Bob Barker. “Everyone aboard is safe, we’ve managed to get everyone off and they’re ok,” Mr Hansen told Australian media.
“We have it all on film and we’re getting onto all the authorities at the moment.”
Paul Watson, captain and founder of Sea Shepherd, said the attack “seriously escalates the whole situation”.
“If they think that our remaining two ships will retreat from the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in the face of their extremism, they will be mistaken,” he said. “We now have a real whale war on our hands now and we have no intention of retreating.”
The activists have a ship named the Bob Barker? Yeah, him. Mr. Gameshow host, Bob “have your pets spayed or neutered” Barker. They have another craft named the Steve Irwin. Crikey.
When it [ the Ady Gil ] was launched on Dec 19, the $1.5 million carbon fibre trimaran was touted as Sea Shepherd’s secret weapon. The Ady Gil was designed to run on low-emission, renewable fuels and was built with materials that would make it difficult for radars to detect so that it could sneak up of whaling vessels and disrupt the hunt. But its lighweight design, which allowed the vessel to reach higher speeds than the group’s larger ships, meant it was far less robust and more susceptible to attack.
This was the maiden voyage of the Ady Gil. Previously known as the EarthRace, it’s a very high performance open ocean racing boat. “Couldn’t get out of the way in time”? Horseshit. EarthRace holds the record for the fastest motorboat trip around the globe; just under 61 days. On two tanks full of fuel I gather. 78 feet long, but only drawing 4 feet of water, the EarthRace could hit 40 knots with it’s 1040hp engines and it’s dry weight of only 14 tons.
(October 18, 2009) At a fundraising event in Los Angeles on Saturday, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society unveiled their newest “ocean defense” vessel: the Ady Gil. Formerly known as Earthrace, the ship was renamed to honor the benefactor that helped the anti-whaling group acquire the ship.
“We’re very excited that the Ady Gil will be joining the Steve Irwin in Antarctica this campaign,” Captain Paul Watson said. “With these two ships, we will mount the most ambitious and aggressive effort to date to obstruct the slaughter of the whales in the Southern Ocean.”
We’ve been following the transformation of the Earthrace/Gil from a world-record holding speedboat to an anti-whaling vessel since it was rumored back in April that it would be joining the Sea Shepherd fleet. With the new paint job and a few additional high-tech goodies now installed, it looks like the ship is ready to join the Irwin for Operation Waltzing Matilda this December.
As expected, Watson made it clear that he intends to place the Gil in harms way — particularly as an “intercept and blocking” weapon against the Japanese fleet. Sounds like a risky game of “chicken” — but Ady Gil Captain Pete Bethune is ready for the challenge.”If they ever hit us with an explosive harpoon it’ll be massive damage,” he told Ecorazzi during the summer. “But certainly we’ll do our best to get in their way. If they hit us it will always be their guy that pulled the trigger — but hopefully things won’t come to that.”
Consider yourselves fortunate that the fishermen didn’t hunt you down and kill you. I’m sure it was very tempting.
Commercial whaling is banned inthe Southern Ocean, but the Japanese have exploited a legal loophole to continue whaling for “scientific purposes”. This season the Japanese fleet aims to harpoon up to 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales, both of which are classified as endangered.
Minke whales and Fin whales are both baleen whales, like their cousins the Humpbacks and the Blues. Minkes are rather small, about 24 feet and 9 tons. Fins are the second largest creature on earth, reaching 88 feet and 75 tons. Both are endangered species, although the minke population is thought to exceed 900,000 worldwide, roughly 30 times the fin whale population. Actually, minkes may not be endangered; it’s hard to tell.
Is Japan full of it? I think so. You don’t need to kill whales to study them. Certainly not by the hundreds. And you especially don’t need to kill any of the seriously endangered ones. None. But stopping whaling altogether? Or at least stopping commercial, floating factory whaling? Sounds to me like this is a job for the UN and the One World Navy. Not a job for floating hippies in their little plastic speedboats.
UPDATE: Video from the whaler’s perspective here.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/06/2010 at 09:20 PM
Filed Under: • Animals • High Tech • Politically-Incorrect •
• Comments (6)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Wednesday - November 25, 2009
Higher MPG For Big Trucks
Which saves more fuel - improving an 8mpg vehicle to 10mpg, or a 25mpg vehicle to 50mpg? Run the numbers and you’ll see that you save the most from improving the 8mpg one. Naturally, you use the least fuel with the 50mpg job, but that’s not the question.
And what kind of vehicles are out on the roads that get 8mpg? Tractor trailer trucks. Those great big rigs that bring us everything from everywhere. The ones that, while cars have become slipperier, have only been partially streamlined at the tractor end, and still very much resemble their original giant rectangular box on wheels shape, especially at the trailer end. Is that ever going to change? Maybe so. Several lines of research have been going on for quite a long time, and the fruits of those labors might be about to blend together into a tasty pie.
Once upon a time, trucks looked like the one above. That’s a COE, a cab over engine design. They were made that way because of rules and regulations that limited the length of the tractor trailer to 42 feet overall. That was around 1932, and things stayed that way until deregulation occurred in the early 80s. While the COE design maximized the amount of trailer you could pull, it was about as
aerodynamic as a billboard.
When the price of oil started to go up, and the price of diesel along with it, people started looking at ways to make these things more efficient. Early designs put deflectors up on the cab roof. Those grew into wedges. Wedges grew into full on fairings. The Peterbuilt company also tried rounding the corners, which resulted in their 374 model, which many people thought looked like a football helmet:
But it worked. Rounding out the corners, smoothing the edges, and getting the airflow smoothly over the cab and out over the trailer helped fuel economy a good amount. Deregulation, in the form of the Motor Carrier Act, and later the Surface Transportation Act of 1982, eliminated the overall length rules, and set maximum lengths for the trailers only. The cab over design faded away over the next decade, and now we have long nose trucks hauling 52 foot trailers everywhere. Almost all of them have the air wedge up on the roof, but
the aerodynamics have only come so far:
What’s left to do? Actually, quite a lot. The two models pictured above are the top of the heap in terms of aerodynamics. But the tanks are still exposed, the wheels aren’t covered over with fairings, there’s still that big gap between the back of the cab and the front of the trailer, etc.
And the trailers themselves? Very little has been done to them in the real world due to practicalities. But there have been studies for both tractors and trailers. And it all began with a rocket scientist on a bicycle ...
It was in the 1970s when researchers at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, began conducting numerous tests to refine the shape of trucks to reduce aerodynamic drag and improve efficiency.
Already working on the effects of drag and wind resistance on different kinds of aircraft and the early space shuttle designs, the researcher transferred their considerable knowledge to the design of large trucks.
Aerospace Engineer Edwin J Saltzman and his team found that rounding a tractor’s edges, placing a smooth fairing on its roof, and extending the sides back to the trailer could cut drag by more than 50%, increase highway fuel economy by more than 20%, and help with vehicle handling.
Assuming a typical truck drives 100,000 miles annually, these modifications translated to fuel savings of more than 6,000 gallons per year per vehicle. The research revolutionized truck design. The modifications the engineers tested have now been widely adopted around the world.
I wondered why Saltzman decided to investigate truck design in the first place.
I discovered he was motivated while bicycling through the California desert. He noticed the push and pull of large trucks at highway speeds while riding to work.
As a tractor trailer overtook him, he first felt the bow wave of air pushing him slightly away from the road and toward the sagebrush. Then, as the truck swept past, its wake had the opposite effect, drawing him toward the road and even causing him and his bike to lean toward the lane. This got him exploring the flow of air around a moving truck.
Learning Saltzman’s story brings to mind the quote: “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
Since the internet is forever, that study is still kicking around. It seems a bit primitive today, but they came up with some good ideas.
The NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (Edwards, California) became involved with ground vehicle aerodynamics during the “oil crisis” of the early 1970’s. At that time, most designers of motor homes, buses, and heavy-duty trucks ignored aerodynamic considerations when determining vehicle shape. Primary emphasis was given to ease of fabrication and avoiding rounded corners that would diminish inside volume. The resulting configurations were box-like and represented great opportunity for aerodynamic refinement.
And what did they come up with? This little bugger, to which the Peterbuilt 372 bears an uncanny resemblance:
But they didn’t stop there. Further study showed that the conventional, or long nosed, truck was almost always more aerodynamic than the older cab over engine design, simply because it’s frontal cross sectional area - the parts that get pushed into the slipstream - are multiphasic. “Significant forebody slope discontinuities”; that’s rocket science speak for “it’s in two parts”: the bumper/radiator hits the air first, then throws it up and over onto the windshield. Moving the air this way is less work than the “one big billboard” that the COE design has. And what do you know ... you hardly ever even see a COE truck anymore.
Further research showed them that smoothing out the underbody, and even adding a boattail to the back of the trailer all contribute to better laminar airflow. They were able to lower the coefficient of drag from the typical COE rig’s CD of 0.89 all the way down to a CD of 0.238. That’s a huge amount less than the .30 figure for the current Infiniti G37, which is a very slippery vehicle. Impressive!
But not really practical. You can’t go around with a trailer with a giant point on the back that sticks out 10 feet. Plus, it’s a real pain to move the thing to open the back doors. So they claimed success, concluded that more research was needed, published, and pretty much walked away from it all. But they did prove that the various drag factors had shifted: as forebody drag decreased, base drag increased. Um, well, yeah. Nobody could determine base drag when the old big flat truck noses were pushing the air all over the place.
But free enterprise took over, albeit slowly. If you and I both sell a truck of equal size, power, comfort, price, and durability, and mine gets another 2mpg, then you’ll be out of business pretty soon.
We’ve seen wheel and fuel tank fairings come and go. They work, but I guess they get in the way a lot. We’ve seen amazing amounts of aerodynamic progress for race cars, but not much more than that for the big trucks. But that’s about to change.
From what I’ve been reading it looks like side fairings on the trailers will soon be allowed here in the US. I think it’s a great idea. I’d like to see full wheel fairings on the trailers too, just because those back wheels spew so much water onto my car when it’s raining on the highways.
Freight Wing Incorporated is a company that sells fairings for trailers. They have a full line of products, made from strong but flexible HDPE plastic. They have a fairing that fills the cap between the cab and the trailer. They have several fairings that clean up the underside of the trailer. Their products are all tested to approved standards, and their best under fairing, the AeroFlex, is worth a 7.5% fuel savings alone. Tests have shown that a trailer with all their products attached can save over 1500 gallons of fuel per year.
Pretty neat. Combine all this airflow management with today’s improved engines, stronger yet lighter bodies, and all sorts of high tech computer controls, and you’d think these big jobs would be getting 30mpg on the highway. Right? Well, no. Still no fairings over the wheels. And remember that impractical boattail that NASA developed? It covered the back of the trailer and came to a giant, intimidating point. But the flat back end of the trailer is the source of a huge portion of the overall drag. What to do?
It’s too bad too. That thing is worth another 7.5% fuel savings according to Dutch engineers. Under fairings, wheel covers AND a boattail add up to at least 15%. Well, how about a virtual boattail instead? You don’t have to actually build one. Air is laminar; it flows in layers, and each layer is affected by the layer above and below it. So point the air in the proper direction, and it will act as if you’ve got such a goofy extension off the back.
And it works just fine! It’s actually a direct conceptual steal from the flaps on an airplane wing. But you know how those aeronautical engineers and rocket scientists are. They can’t just have a fixed flap. No, they want a movable one. Then they realize that they could hook it up to a computer and a couple of servos, and use these back flaps to counteract the trailers being pushed around by crosswinds. And then they dawn on the idea that More Is Better, and realize that if they blew their own air over such a device, they’d have real time vectored thrust control. Awesome. Jobs for all those out of work missile designers, woo hoo!!
And that finally (FINALLY!!!) brings me to what I wanted to post about in the first place. I read the “aero blows” article in this month’s Motor Trend last night and found it impressive. Using compressed air to extend the laminar flow of a moving body is called the Coanda Effect. It’s been around a long time. Since the first jet propelled airplane in fact. Which was during World War I. It crashed on takeoff though. But the idea was sound. And it’s so cool.
The Coanda Effect is the tendancy of a fluid (like air) to stay attached to an adjacent curved surface, which causes natural airflow above it to also attach, reducing turbulence and providing the lift effect of a wing shape without the wing shape.
-Motor Trend, 12/2009
Certain helicopters use it on their rotors. Instead of building an airfoil into the rotor, just round out the back and put in some air vent slots. The harder you blow air out the back, the longer the virtual chord of the airfoil is, and the more lift it generates. You don’t even need to build pitch controls for the blades; just vary the compressed air pressure.
So Motor Trend ran a one pager on this, about the work Robert Englar and his team are doing at Georgia Tech Research Institute. You can read more about that here. The take away money quote:
“ We have shown that this technology now works quite successfully, and we expect that the industry will find a potential 12 percent fuel economy improvement worth pursuing,”he adds. “At highway speeds, each 1 percent improvement in fuel economy results in savings of about 200 million gallons of fuel for the U. S. heavy truck fleet.”
So a 12 percent improvement would save 2.4 BILLION gallons of diesel fuel. How much does that go for these days? $3 per? So we’re talking $7.4 BILLION? That’s getting to be real money, even in government bailout terms.
The problem lies in the source of the compressed air. Do you hook up another pump to the engine? Drive an air compressor off of one of the trailer’s wheels? Mount a little engine underneath somewhere? It’s a sticking point, for now. But maybe not for long ...
Renault has been researching this exact same thing on their cars for several years now, and it seems to work quite well on their bluntly shaped Altica hatchback:
One of the more unique features of the car is the “Synthetic Jet” subsystem designed to optimize the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance—which, in turn assists in lowering fuel consumption.
Located at the rear edge of the roof at the point where the vehicle and the passing air flow separate, a discreet mechanical system generates jets of air which are alternately blown and sucked through a 2mm wide slit.
The Synthetic Jet system actively controls the separation of the air flow according to the vehicle’s speed, reducing drag and controlling the structure of the air flow. The Synthetic Jet, patented by Renault, can reduce the car’s Cd at 130 km/h by 15% at an energy consumption of just 10 watts.
At 745.7 watts per horsepower, 10 watts doesn’t seem like that big a price to pay. Actually it seems like just about nothing. Even if it took 100 times as much to power such a system for a tractor trailer, it’s still nothing compared to the 600 or more horsepower that those things make.
Saves money, saves fuel, lowers emissions, more stable on the highway ... useful aerodynamics looks like a great way to go. And I’d bet a fully faired truck with it’s little air pump going doesn’t kick up nearly as much spew on a rainy highway either. And that makes it much safer for the rest of us to share the road with them.
Posted by Drew458
on 11/25/2009 at 04:43 PM
Filed Under: • High Tech • Miscellaneous •
• Comments (5)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Saturday - October 17, 2009
The Power of the other Red State
Environmental impact? Da, cloud will leaving big dent in ground when hits!
Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow [I didn’t know they had Democrats in Russia. A like this big just has to be a campaign promise!]
Pigs still can’t fly, but this winter, the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won’t need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.
The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God.
Controlling the weather in Moscow is nothing new, he says. Ahead of the two main holidays celebrated in the city each year - Victory Day in May and City Day in September - the often cash-strapped air force is paid to make sure that it doesn’t, well, rain on the parades. With a city budget of $40 billion a year (larger than New York City’s budget), Moscow can easily afford the $2-3 million price tag to keep the skies blue as spectators watch the tanks and rocket launchers roll along Red Square. Now there’s a new challenge for the air force: Moscow’s notorious blizzards.
“You know how every year on City Day and Victory Day we create the weather?” Luzhkov asked a group of farmers outside Moscow in September, according to Russian media reports. “Well, we should do the same with the snow! Then outside Moscow there will be more moisture, a bigger harvest, while for us it won’t snow as much. It will make financial sense.”
The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 - and only to prevent “very big and serious snow” from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, the head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow.
So far the main objection to the plan has come from Moscow’s suburbs, which will likely be inundated with snow if the plan goes forward.
I seem to recall this old wizards battle game (D&D perhaps) in which one of the offensive spells was “solidify cloud”. Just what the suburbs need, right, is wet concrete falling from the sky. But that’s the power of the modern super state. They can do anything! So think big, comrades.
And just for fun, or to test your gag reflex, here’s another example of Cosplay, Done Right and Done Wrong:
Posted by Drew458
on 10/17/2009 at 12:41 PM
Filed Under: • High Tech • Humor •
• Comments (0)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - September 10, 2009
I love my ISP
think you have slow internet? Think again. And count your blessings YET AGAIN that you don’t live in Africa
A South African carrier pigeon has transported data faster than sending it via the country’s internet network.
Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.
Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80km from IT company Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.
Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds—the time it took for only 4 per cent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.
SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times.
The plucky 11-month-old homing pigeon took on state-owned Telkom’s ADSL line on Wednesday to see which could deliver four gigabytes of data fastest to an address around 85 kilometres away.
Winston was racing on behalf of The Unlimited, a telemarketing company based in the port city of Durban, which wanted to transfer the data from its call centre in Howick, north of Durban, to its offices in Hillcrest, on the city’s norther outskirts.
Announcing the race on its website Unlimited complained about the “great challenges in getting data from its locations across KZN (KwaZulu-Natal province) back to its central location for storage.”
Unlimited had decided to test the contention of a member of staff remarked it would be faster to send the data by pigeon than through Telkom, the fixed-line operator which has a monopoly on ADSL.
Visibility was poor on race day but Winston completed the flight in one hour and eight minutes
Sucks to be Telkom SA.
Posted by Drew458
on 09/10/2009 at 09:40 PM
Filed Under: • High Tech •
• Comments (0)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Thursday - May 21, 2009
I’d Call It Blue Dragon Stadium
The Japanese architect Toyo Ito planned the ultra-modern stadium in accordance with the ecological requirements of a “Green Building”. 8,844 solar panels on a surface area of 14,155m2 are integrated into the roof construction of the sports facility. The unique solar roof, which emulates the form of a flowing river, can, depending on the strength of the sunshine, cover 75% of the energy needs of the stadium which can hold 55,000 spectators. On days when no competitions are taking place, the electricity generated is fed into the grid. The new stadium is the main venue for the competitions of the World Games 2009. International athletes from more than 90 nations will be competing against each other next June under the impressive roof construction that is simultaneously a solar power station.
Construction work on the main stadium for the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung is ahead of schedule, an executive of Fu Tsu Construction Co, which won the bid to build the stadium, said on Monday. Fu Tsu vice chairman Laio Nien-chi (廖年期) said the project was now 16.17 percent complete, slightly ahead of the scheduled progress of 16.08 percent.
The stadium, which covers 19 hectares, will cost NT$5 billion (US$150.6 million). It will have a seating capacity of 55,000. The stadium will be the world’s first multi-functional stadium powered by solar energy. Its solar generators will supply 1 million kilowatts of electricity a year.
The generators will meet the stadium’s power needs for lighting and air conditioning during the Games. When it is not hosting a sports event, the surplus electricity could be sold to Taiwan Power Co and net NT$5 million per year for the city government, officials from the Kaohsiung City Government’s Public Works Bureau said.
The project is scheduled for completion by January 2009, allowing enough time to prepare for the World Games, which will be held from July 16, 2009, through July 26, 2009
If this is true, then income from the excess solar power could pay for the place in 30 years. Pretty neat. Lots more excellent pictures over at Deputy Dog’s blog.
Somebody is going to have a helluva job keeping all those panels clean. Job? Phooey. That’s a lifelong career, probably for a small army of squeegee dudes. And for no reason at all, because I can’t think of a decent segue, here’s poor little Paloma, caught outside in the cold rain. Very cold rain!
Posted by Drew458
on 05/21/2009 at 01:29 PM
Filed Under: • Architecture • High Tech •
• Comments (3)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Saturday - April 04, 2009
A Debatable View
You can find your house on Google Earth. You can zoom in pretty well, but not right down to the ground. And the images aren’t real time. Yet!
Microsoft has a similar thing online. You can do “bird’s eye view” and change the angle low enough to almost look into people’s windows.
Not to be outdone, Google’s online Map has Street View, which puts you right down on the ground and let’s you spin around and zoom in on things close enough to almost read a car’s license plates.
And now that a large part of the urban areas of the USA are mapped out, the Google camera crews are moving to Europe. As their add page puts it:
I moved from Amsterdam to London last year and even though I’ve enjoyed getting to know London, I can’t help feeling a bit homesick sometimes. Which is why I’m really excited that today we’re launching Street View for both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; now I can take a trip down memory lane and explore my new home, even if it’s raining. Starting today you’ll be able to view 360º street level imagery for Amsterdam, London, Rotterdam, Manchester, Liverpool and several other cities in these countries—25 cities in all!
Now whenever I feel like going back to the Netherlands I can use Street View to admire the beautiful canals in Amsterdam:
...or visit my old university in Rotterdam:
...or even take a look at the bike I left behind:
... and they include the pictures to prove it.
Is this proper? Should this be done? Is it an invasion of your privacy? Well, this is all coming to the UK too, and some folks don’t like it.
Gang of villagers chase away Google car
Google’s ambitious plan to offer a 3-D street level view of communities across three continents hit a snag when angry residents of a UK village blocked the search engine’s camera car from photographing their homes.
Fearing the appearance of their well appointed properties on the Web site would attract criminals scouting for burglary targets, villagers in Broughton, north of London, summoned the police after spotting the car.
“I was upstairs when I spotted the camera car driving down the lane,” resident Paul Jacobs told The Times of London.
“My immediate reaction was anger: How dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent? I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime.
“This is an affluent area. We’ve already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.”
A Google spokesman, quoted by the UK Press Association, said: “Embarking on new projects, we sometimes encounter unexpected challenges, and Street View has been no exception.
“We know that some people are uncomfortable with images of their houses or cars being included in the product, which is why we provide an easy way to request removal of imagery. Most imagery requests are processed within hours.”
The spokesman added: “We take privacy very seriously, and we were careful to ensure that all images in our Street View service abide by UK law.”
Yeah, sure they do. And it’s just so easy contacting ... a search engine. How the hell do you talk to a webpage? Oh sure, you can fill out a CGI form. And hope somebody reads it eventually.
But back to the story of “Pegman" in the UK… pull up the map ... move the pegman about, over to ... there. Hit zoom ...
... hey, while we’re here, let’s pan the camera around. This is cool! Ah, I figured out how to “walk” down the street. Neat!! What’s that, further down the lane? Looks like a crowd of protesters! Zoom in ... look, it’s Peiper, holding the pitchfork, and Mrs. Peiper with her burning torch! Nice sweater mum! So glad to see them properly arrayed for storming the castle, to kill the dread Googlestein monster.
But, all jocularity aside ... has this gone too far?
Posted by Drew458
on 04/04/2009 at 12:20 AM
Filed Under: • High Tech •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Five Most Recent Trackbacks:
LAAR She Blows! Part One
(2 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Planes Ideas Blog
[...] CABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEB [...]
On: 07/12/11 01:57
The Tactical Cowboy
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Sights Service Blog
[...] E LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE [...]
On: 07/10/11 08:30
Nasty Dirty Money
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Money Reviews Blog
[...] ONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLES [...]
On: 06/17/11 08:31
Amazing aerial images taken by daring Allied pilots on secret missions during WW 2
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Hookers and Booze
peiper over at Barking Moonbat EWS found some absolutely kickass aerial photos from WWII. I grabbed this one because I’m a big fan of the movie A Bridge Too Far.…
On: 11/23/09 04:14
Clear Thinking and Straight Talk
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at baldilocks
Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home Read all of it--and tell every American you know to do so. (Thanks to BMEWS) UPDATE: The author of the above blog is…
On: 10/02/09 09:29
DISCLAIMER
THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.
Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.
- Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
- Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
- Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
- Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere
THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.
Copyright © 2004-2008 Domain Owner
Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
RSS 2.0 
Atom 
