San Diego - USS Midway Museum

5/10/2010

Having left the mission, I went for a bit of a cruise through the Mission Bay area (see point C on the map linked in the title). As it turned out, the most interesting parts were navigating the freeway system and catching a small glimpse of the SD Sea World complex. Wetlands I'm aware are genuine natural reserves, but in this case stretches of green-brown around water dulled by the cloudy sky and criss-crossed by freeways didn't feel super photogenic. That and the difficulties of vantage points mainly being freeway bridges precluded much in the way of pictures.

Next stop however was the USS Midway Museum - aboard the retired USS Midway aircraft carrier. In contrast I've spent quite a bit of time thinning out photos from here. From the outside - it's difficult to get the scale of it into the pictures (the wiki article linked does have some good aerial shots though). Additionally the wide-angle lens tends to make things look a little shorter (both vertically and horizontally) but here it is...

In the wiki pictures the 3 configurations for the deck are pretty clear:

• 1945 Straight deck with 18 5-inch 54 calibre guns + light defense
• 1957 Angled deck (2.8 acres), 10 guns only, new steam catapults
• 1970 Angled deck (4 acres), light defense only

First up is the crew quarters - in particular a comparison of enlisted and junior officer fit-outs:

More on Taps

In an earlier post on the constraints of hotel bathrooms, I lamented the scarcity of dual-input water sources in the US.

In the (well furnished) basement in which we now reside I present to you a wholly different animal. Look and lament ye unlucky.

So, now feeling more than fully resourced, I offer a contender for your "groaner of the day" - it never sprays but it pours?

The third spigot does have a reasonable use, but I invite you to suggest some more exotic potential applications.

Andrew and Apples

(2/10/2010 and 4/11/2010)

Well, after much wrestling with analytical solutions for the volume of an expanding spherical flame within a pent roof combustion chamber (sound familiar anyone?) I decided that a change of pace for my brain might be nice. So here's a quick look at our new place during the chaos that arises when moving house and imminent international travel meet devoid of goodwill.

But first, a shot of a healthy snack being put to good engineering use as a visual aid (compare with this image of a cylinder head).

Now, Andrew St. The good:

Engineering Notes 1

H/Motel Spigots and Faucets

Generally, for a sink, shower or other wet area that requires water of varying temperatures one will install either two spigots mixing into a single faucet or a single "mixer" spigot and one faucet (these last two may be integrated). I'm ignoring the older style of two spigots and two faucets.

These two setups allow control of two oupts via two control inputs. Either:

1. Temperature (T) and Flow (f) via Hot flow (H) and Cold Flow (C)
2. Temperature (T) and Flow (f) via Hot/Cold Ratio (r) and Flow (f)

However many motels here seem to have gone a different route - simplify things for the guest by denying a variable, aka a mixer spigot with only one axis of rotation (off, then rotation from cold to hot). Indulge me in my MatLab presentation. Let's assume the hot source is 80degC and the cold 10degC. This leads to:
oneT=(10C+80H)/(H+C)
onef=H+C
twoT=70r+10
twof=f
Normalising all input variables to the range [0,1] we can create the following:

Or as contours:

In any case, the bottom line is the hotel picks the flow (and it's generally pretty high, I prefer falling water over jets) and you don't get that "spiral staircase" (see contour) temperature discontinuity as you would with traditional home-brew water management

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