Nuclear Reactors

Nifty nuclear reactor cut-away illustrations

Superman

Superman by Chris Appelhans

House Plans

House plans in DC are about as realistic as plans for the Death Star.

David Macaulay

DCist points to a neat David Macaulay exhibit at the National Building Museum on drawing architecture. I will have to run down there post-haste!

Upstairs Downstairs

Miller Time

Buying expensive things and expecting them to make you happy is completely foolish, but still, one thing on my to-do wish list is to own a car with a Miller-Offenhauser engine. The odds of this happening are vanishingly small, but whatever. Harry Miller was a mechanical genius, and the engines he built were way ahead of their times and won races for decades; First developed in the twenties and thirties, the engine powered dozens of Indy Car winners. By the sixties, descendants of this engine were turbocharged and producing 800-1200 hp. They only really disappeared because of rule changes.

I can appreciate a little the desire of people who like flat-head Fords, but really, it's such a backwards design, and so it's much more about the retro-culture than the engine itself. Most things end up being about the process and not the end result anyway. Still, if you had the money, an Offy would be a thousand times cooler to me.

This running quarter-scale model (or this one) might be a little more in reach (although if you buy the plans and can machine the 1/4-scale version, why not larger?)(you can also buy reproduction engine blocks for ~$10k, but that's still pretty steep).

Best Homework Ever

The Best Homework Ever?

Evil TA that I was, I would still have given him an A+.

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Sorta digressing from a strict Metro = train interpretation, but it's still people watching none the less:

[heads up, largish file]

For some reason, I was just fealin' a little Giaccameti, which isn't the same as Minnesota.

House plans 2

Hey, how's it going? It's nice to be back. I can be forgetful, which I counteract by adopting habits, eg, the metro pass always goes in the same pocket, etc and so forth.

So who else forgot to Fall Back and showed up at work an hour earlier than usual?

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