Word Munger

I’m a bit of a digital pack rat. I’ve got emails from all the way back to 1998 — not all of the email I’ve ever sent, but pretty close to it.

I’ve got the Excel spreadsheet Greta and I used to send out wedding invitations and thank-you notes in 1989. I’ve got a testimonial I sent to my grandma when my grandpa died. I’ve got all the books I’ve ever written.

But I still didn’t manage to keep everything. My B.A. thesis somehow didn’t make the transition from an 800K floppy disk to hard drive. I’ve got a paper copy, but that’s not the same thing. My earlier papers, composed on a Commodore 64, are digitally lost forever.

And, of course, not all these things can actually be read by my current computer. That Excel file from 1989 can’t be deciphered by any app I have. Most of the books are in Quark xPress format, and while I have a Quark 4 CD-ROM, I don’t have a computer that runs Mac OS 9 to install it on. The emails I sent from 1998 to about 2001 are, for some reason, all dated May 5, 2004.

One of the reasons I became a writer was out of a desire to create something permanent, or at least something that would last longer than my own life. Yet stuff I created less than ten years ago is now unreadable by my computer.

My dot-matrix printouts of English essays from 1985, on the other hand, are quite legible in the hanging folder they’ve now sat in for 25 years.

There’s some pretty old stuff available online these days. You can find the complete works of Edmund Spenser, for example, at several different sites listed here. But the searchable complete text, a really cool site when it was created in the 1990s and linked from the site, apparently no longer works.

All of this makes me wonder: If I want to make something that will last, is digital technology really the way to do it? Should I be blogging, or should I be writing in a more durable medium? And what medium would that be? The printed newspaper, magazine, and even book industries don’t seem to be doing very well of late.

Perhaps the web will stand the test of time and my blogging won’t be lost anytime soon. I kind of doubt it, though. The problems with spammers and hackers aside, I’m just not sure that the MySQL database that serves as the backend for this blog is going to be functional/compatible with server hardware, say, two decades from now.

Sites like Twitter are so transient that it’s difficult to find anything there that’s over a week old. Even assuming its database is technically capable of surviving, the site could be sold, go bankrupt, get hacked, or crash due to some unforeseen glitch.

And of course, as Shelley reminds us, even the strongest stone monuments will eventually crumble:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Every now and then — and this is becoming more and more rare — I acquire music the way I did back in 1985: I buy a CD. Generally it only happens when I’m purchasing from the actual artist: I’m at a concert and he or she is selling CDs. A couple years ago in Europe we saw a pair of magnificent street accordion players, and instead of giving them a couple euros as a tip, we bought a CD for 15. Of course, that’s low-tech even for these guys. Now they’re on YouTube:

But as soon as I get home with my CD, the first thing I do with it is rip it onto my computer, where it can be shared across my entire home network, copied onto iPods, and played wherever I go. Other than the ones built into computers, we only have two CD players any more — one in the kitchen that’s actually used primarily as a set of speakers for music played wirelessly over our network, and one in our 1994 Plymouth Voyager.

We have a large collection of CDs in the living room, sorted by genre, which almost never get pulled off the shelf. There’s a pile of them in the kitchen next to the CD player, typically only used by visiting grandparents.

Yet still, when I get a new CD, I’m reluctant to throw it away after I put the data on my computer. I’m even more reticent about reclaiming the shelf space in our living room. Why? I paid just as much for the music I downloaded from Amazon and iTunes.

I asked folks on Twitter what they do with physical CDs, and got quite a few responses:

• phronk: I have a CD rack I put them on. It’s basically for decoration now. (That sounds familiar)
• samplereality: Trade the CDs on Lala.com (hmmm… I don’t think I can do that in good conscience while keeping the audio files)
• jnjdad: my car will not work with my ipod, so they are for listening in the car at this point. After, I am going to make curtains (not exactly my style)
• ellembee: My dad files the liner notes in large CD cases and throws out the jewel cases. I can’t do it. I’m a sentimental packrat. (Sounds like too much work for me)
• SKasowitz: Data side up in the microwave. For a few seconds you get a beautiful show. Used to do that with the hundreds of AOL CDs we’d get (I’d be a little worried about my microwave!)
• kejames: Old CDs make great scarecrows or wall art - constellations are especially nice on walls or ceilings (Not sure about the juxtaposition of “scarecrow” and “wall art” there. Aren’t they mutually exclusive?)
• philipj: They’re the backup. (I thought that way for a while. Then I realized my computer already backs them up onto a second hard drive, plus they’re on several different iPods, which can be hacked into coughing them back up in a disaster scenario. How many backups does one need?)

Now there’s no room on the shelf in our living room, and I’m tempted to just toss my latest CD (an amazing collection of Afro-Peruvian jazz by Gabriel Alegria) in the trash. Why not? I wouldn’t even have the CD if I’d bought it on iTunes. Yet I can’t make myself get rid of it. There’s too much of a connection to the physical thing, worthless though it is, and almost certain never to be used for its intended purpose again.

Another day, another request for an El Cafe recipe. Cocimiento sauce was one of the most popular sauces at El Cafe, and I haven’t been as successful at recreating it as the other recipes. But if you simply MUST have this sauce, I’ve created a pretty good approximation of it that tastes excellent if you eat it right away (and who wouldn’t?). This recipe makes four VERY generous servings. The quantities are approximate (I just eyeball it), so you can adjust it for whatever the size of your group is.

1.5 pounds grated cheese (half cheddar, half Monterey Jack)
1 pound of sour cream
2-3 fresh jalapeno peppers
3-4 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Salt and pepper to taste

Chop the jalapenos into a fine dice (remove the seeds unless you like it scorching hot). Melt all the ingredients in a saucepan over low heat (I use an electric fondue pot, which works great — set it at about 225 degrees), stirring frequently. Then, as I said, you want to serve this immediately — otherwise the oils will start to separate out from the cheese and you’ll have a real mess. It works well as an enchilada sauce, or as John suggested, over home-fried potatoes.

One of the most popular ways to serve it at El Cafe was over half a roasted acorn squash that had been stuffed to overflowing with diced chicken, walnuts, and raisins. Lately we’ve been substituting steamed broccoli for the chicken, for a vegetarian treat.

I just found a couple of 50-Franc notes in an old drawer. Someone had them leftover from a trip to France in the ’90s, and since I was planning a trip, they gave them to me. But I forgot to pack them, so here they remain. I asked about them on Twitter and the consensus is they’re worthless. I was thinking if they had any value, I could mail them to someone in France and they could cash them in — it would be about ten Euros, maybe enough for a nice lunch or a bottle of wine.

It’s a shame, since these are absolutely stunning bills, honoring Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of Le Petit Prince. The bills even have a picture of the famous boa constrictor digesting an elephant!

Update: Turns out they’re worth about 15 Euros. If you want ‘em, and you’re in France, send me an email (remove dashes) and I’ll mail them to you.

Update2: They’ve been claimed! Helen Jaques on Twitter wants them, and will provide updates on her attempts to cash in.

Wow, my stepbrother is amazing. He had been a sculptor for many years, working with stone, metal and wood to make amazing creations. But a back injury now makes that impossible, so he’s started taking jewelry-making classes. Here’s the first piece he felt it was worthwhile to share, a Christmas gift for Greta:

The piece combines several different techniques, each difficult to master. The key technique is reticulation, which creates the background texture on the internal silver rectangle. Learning this technique is largely a matter of trial and error, but the difficulty doesn’t end there. Soldering flat wires onto the now-uneven reticulated surface is also a challenge, as is polishing the smooth surface surrounding it.

What I like most about the piece is the composition, the play between textures and shapes. It’s really a miniature work of art, and I’m proud that my brother decided to create his first serious piece of jewelry for Greta, because it means I get to look at it whenever I want.

It’s been a long, hard road for Mark to recover from his back injury, but “recovery” is a relative term. He still can’t sit or stand in the same position for more than 30 minutes or so at a time, which means he’ll never be able to hold a regular job. He walks very slowly and laboriously, and walking more than a mile or so is out of the question. His house was nearly destroyed by a flood a year ago, and only one room in his three-room house (his bedroom) has been restored to full repair. Now he’s starting work on restoring his workshop, where he hopes to be able to produce enough jewelry to supplement the $600 a month Social Security Disability check that he scrapes by on. I think if he can produce four or five pieces like the one he gave Greta each month, he’ll end up doing just fine.

Here’s a photo of Mark I took last summer when I visited him:

Commenting (and posting) on ScienceBlogs.com is going to be down starting at about 1 p.m. EST today. You can use this post for commenting on today’s Cognitive Daily Post.

If you ask nicely, I might even consider adding some additional data analysis here, since today’s post was cut a little short.

Update: I’m home by myself this evening, so I thought I’d do a little more analysis. We had a few commenters who suggested that it was only the uptight Americans who subscribed to the foolish notion that gender-separate restrooms are a good idea. So I thought it would be interesting to break down responses by where they are from. Although the vast majority of our visitors are from Canada and the U.S., the rest of the world, especially Europe, is still well-represented. Here’s a graph showing the likelihood of using an opposite-gender restroom broken down by where the respondent is from:

For the most part, the data from the rest of the world matches the US. We don’t have enough numbers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or Australia/Oceania to establish significance. The numbers for European men verge on significance: they are somewhat less likely than American men to use the women’s room when there’s a long line at the men’s room.

If there’s anything else you’re curious about, just ask in the comments and I’ll see if I can get to it sometime over the weekend.

I’m upgrading to the latest version of WordPress software. This means things may go a little wacky for a bit. I’m also going to trash my template, so if you’re used to that warm, fuzzy yellow design, I’m sorry. It’s going to disappear. I’m not going to replace it with anything fancy either, at least for the time being.

Here’s hoping this solves some recent problems with comments and the influx of spam… wish me luck!

Update: Okay, we’re upgraded. Hoo boy, this looks ugly. It may take a while for me to get things back into shape. But hopefully the spammers will be contained.

Kevin Drum has responded on his blog to my point that it’s often okay to require users to click to see the entire blog posts. He makes some good points:

Occasional long posts, especially ones that have a limited audience, are fine candidates for this treatment. Putting spoilers below the fold is fine. I’m not quite sure what kind of content would be so bandwidth heavy that this would be a good excuse, but I suppose this works too. And doing what CogDaily often does, which is to summarize a new piece of research in enough detail to let you know if you might be interested in reading the gory details, and then putting said details below the fold — that’s fine too.

But my plea is to use some discretion here. Actually, use a lot of discretion. 600 words isn’t that much, and there’s no need to cut a post that long in half. Spoilers are uncommon unless you’re running a movie review site. And scrolling past a post you aren’t interested in only takes one or two seconds. So please: do this sparingly. The world will be a better place for it.

Actually, 600 words might be a pretty decent point at which to shift from the single-page to multiple-page option. Many Cognitive Daily posts are upwards of 1,000 words, encompassing four or more screens of vertical space on my laptop display. Drum’s longest posts aren’t much longer than 600 words, so for him it makes a lot of sense to nearly always keep things in a single post.

But some CogDaily posts are shorter than 600 words, and they’re *still* split. Take a look at this post, for example. It’s just 539 words, including citation, and I’ve split it into two chunks, right after the poll. Why did I do that? In fact, even though it’s short on words, it’s got three large graphic items (including the poll), and that means it still takes up three browser screens. I don’t think it makes much sense to force readers to scroll down three screens to get to a new post if they’re just browsing my blog. It becomes difficult for them to quickly get a sense of what’s there.

Drum’s readers complain about his mid-column “recent comments” box, which forces them to scroll a significant distance if they don’t want to read his first post (admittedly Drum has no control over the layout of his blog). Whether his posts have 300 words or 700 words, the recent comments box adds nearly a full screen of scrolling just to get down to the next post, and readers do find this annoying. In my view, two screens’ worth of scrolling is about the breaking point — most readers aren’t going to want to scroll farther than two screens past content they don’t want to read.

So if you look at the main page on Cognitive Daily, you’ll find that no post takes up more than two screens, and most take less than one screen — so if one post doesn’t interest a reader, she can already see the next one and decide whether to read further.

Notice, too, that if you click on an individual post, a “recent posts” box appears in the left sidebar, above the “recent comments” box. This provides readers with another way to find additional content beyond what they see in a single post. There’s no need for “recent posts” on the main page, since you can easily scroll to see the posts you want.

The other reason to use “continued” links on posts is selfish: we get paid on a page-view basis, and if people must click to see the rest of a post, then we get two page views instead of one. We actually did an informal study a couple years back on CogDaily, and the results were convincing: page views went down when we included the entire post in the RSS feed and on the main page. We might lose a few die-hard RSS fans this way, but most readers either don’t mind our system or actually prefer it.

On one point I do agree with Kevin: You’ve got to provide enough content in the “teaser” to give readers a fighting chance at deciding whether to read your post. Just a sentence or two doesn’t cut it.

…So Kevin Drum published his list of whines for 2009. It’s a pretty good list, but I have to disagree with some of his points. Here’s his complete list, with my comments in Bold.

1. Blogs without comment sections. Or, blogs with comment sections that require you to go through some kind of painful registration process just to leave a one-sentence note. Yes! This means you, BoingBoing.
2. Bloggers who don’t put their email addresses somewhere on the blog. I don’t mind looking around for it a bit (keeps the mind sharp, you know), but put it somewhere, OK? Agreed. Doesn’t actually bother me that much, though.
3. Blogs that provide only partial RSS feeds. See also point #5, which actually bugs me a lot more. This doesn’t bug me so much either. No one makes money off RSS feeds, so there must be some incentive to actually visit their blog.
4. Bloggers who are too damn lazy to check their links after they post something. Come on, people. Yeah, come on, people!
5. “Teaser” blogs that put only the first paragraph or two on the main page and force you to click “continue” if you want to read the whole thing. This is both annoying and pointless. It only takes a second or two to scroll past a blog post you don’t want to read, after all. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Felix Salmon.) This really depends. I mean, if you’ve got a three-paragraph post, and you’re asking people to click through to read one more paragraph, I agree. But what if you’ve got a post that’s 8 or 10 paragraphs long? Or what if you’re embedding some bandwidth-heavy content? Most people aren’t going to click through, so this can save a lot of bandwidth. Yes, I’m biased, because that’s what CogDaily does, but at least you know now why we do it.
6. People who say “blog” when they really mean “blog post.” Oh, God, yes.
7. Blogs with lousy (or nonexistent) search capability. Mine, for example. Sure. But Google is usually better anyway, so it’s not a very big deal.
8. Top ten lists that are plainly larded with filler because the listmaker couldn’t actually think of ten things to write about. Yes. And whines about top ten lists.
9. Bloggers who can’t count. This bothers me much less than #8. You should have stopped at 8, Kevin.

As you can see, my main disagreement with Kevin is in point 5 above. I don’t see CogDaily as a “teaser” blog. You get plenty of information in the first few paragraphs to decide whether you want to read further. We usually include at least three or four paragraphs, and shorter posts don’t require clickthroughs at all.

I do agree in the case of blogs like Felix Salmon’s, which Drum calls out in his post. I mean, check this post out. You actually can’t tell from my link, but in this case, Salmon only gives you one sentence to decide whether you want to read the post. Yes, that’s a “teaser,” and it should be avoided unless there’s some serious bandwidth-hogging content below.

A few weeks ago, we noticed that our new local gourmet grocery store offered a wide variety of custom-colored M&Ms, in bulk. Nora and Greta decided that we absolutely *must* build a gingerbread house.

Of course, *just* a gingerbread house wouldn’t do. It would be a museum. And the museum couldn’t be an ordinary, Parthenon-shaped affair. It must have an entirely new and unique design. The result is an asymmetrical architectural “masterpiece,” with four external walls for displaying reproductions of works of art in M&Ms. Here is the process, in pictures:

Assembly, with full-scale architectural model

Supplies

Work begins in earnest

Meanwhile, Jim’s metal band is rehearsing upstairs

More construction
Continue reading →

For the past couple years I’ve preferred Weather.com over AccuWeather.com — mostly because AccuWeather had slower page-load times.

But the most recent redesign of weather.com has destroyed most of that site’s utility. I visited AccuWeather and found that they had actually improved the site significantly over the years — AccuWeather is now back on top of my weather bookmarks list.

What’s so wrong with Weather.com? Let’s take a look. This is the front page of the forecast for Davidson:

All I get on the opening screen is the current conditions. This can sometimes be useful information (if it’s dark out or I’m in a windowless room), but what I’m more interested in is the forecast: Will I need an umbrella today? How cold (or hot) will it be? What can I expect tomorrow? I can get this information by scrolling down and looking at the 36-hour forecast, but since that’s my primary interest (and, I’d argue, the primary interest of most viewers), why not put it first?

Compare this to the front page of AccuWeather.com:

Here I get today’s forecast and tomorrow’s forecast, right on the front page. Maybe I should carry the umbrella after all. It’d be better if I could get the current conditions too, but that’s a click away with the hourly forecast.

And the hourly forecast is yet another problem with Weather.com:

I took this screen shot at 10:09 this morning. See anything missing? How about the current hour? If I’m interested in the details about what’s happening with today’s weather, wouldn’t I want to know what’s happening *right now*? Sure, I can look out the window (if I have one), but that doesn’t tell me the temperature or how hard the wind is blowing. When I head out for a run, I dress differently if it’s 35 versus 40 degrees.

And don’t get me started about the inanity of the temperature graph. This graph shows that temperature increases over the course of the day (duh), but it doesn’t tell me anything actual numbers don’t. If the graph is 2 inches tall, does that mean I should wear a sweater? Why waste time with a graph when you could actually give me more information — like the weather for the entire day, not just the next four hours. Clicking on “details” just confuses things further. I only get one more hour, and the first three hours are broken into fifteen-minute increments. That might be useful for some people, but I’d venture a bet that more people would prefer to have more hours, and fewer details within each hour. Do I really need to know the temperature is slated to go up by 1 degree in the next 15 minutes?

Again, AccuWeather does this better:

Nice! 8 hours at a time. But it does concern me that I’m told the weather for the past three hours. Why do I care? Or does this just mean you haven’t updated your site for three hours?

So AccuWeather wins the battle of the weather sites — for now. There is still room for improvement though. Why not give the morning low in addition to tonight’s forecast low on the main forecast page? Why not give me the option to create my own home page — if I’d like more details about current conditions, give me the choice to have that on my page. If I prefer to start with the hourly forecast, let me do that. But don’t stoop to Weather.com’s level and force information on me that I don’t need — like a graph of temperatures over the next four hours. If I wanted a graph at all, it might be a minimalist 36-hour temperature graph at 2-hour intervals, something like this:

This gives me a sense of meaningful long-term trends, and a way to compare today and tomorrow, not just the idea that temps increase over the course of the day.

As more and more newspapers and news sites start to include “blogs” as part of their coverage, they also show that they have absolutely NO understanding of how a blog works.

On a blog, the posts are in reverse-chronological order. This makes sense, because readers follow blogs from day today, so there’s a reasonable assumption that readers will want to see the most recent posts first.

The comments, however, go in chronological order. That’s because most readers don’t follow the comments to an individual post the way the follow blogs. They read the post, and if they’re interested, they read the comments. If the comments are in reverse-chronological order, it’s difficult to follow them. Especially if the comments span multiple pages, as they usually do on busy newspaper “blogs.”

Comments aren’t written by a single author, like a blog is. The individual comments follow one another and respond to one another. The only way a person might be interested in seeing the comments in reverse-chronological order is if he is obsessively hitting “refresh” to see what the next comment will be. But this person will very likely also be motivated to scroll to the bottom of the comments list.

For the VAST majority of readers, it makes no sense to put the comments in reverse-chronological order. This means you, ESPN. And you, Charlotte Observer. Yes, I see that you have the option to change the order of the comments. But your default should be the order that 99 percent of your readers prefer.

Mark added this to his post about the downwind-faster-than-wind problem today:

It appears that I really blew it with this one. I’m the bozo in this story. After lots of discussion, a few equations, and a bunch of time scribbling on paper, I’m convinced that I got this one wrong in a big way. No excuses; I should have done the analysis much more carefully before posting this; looking back, what I did do was pathetically shallow and, frankly, stupid. I’m sincerely sorry for calling the guys doing the experiment bozos. I’ll follow up later this weekend with a detailed post showing my analysis, where I screwed up, and why this thing really works. In the meantime, feel free to call me an idiot in the comments; I pretty much deserve it. I’m leaving the post here, with this note, as a testament to my own stupidity and hubris in screwing this up.

Bravo, Mark, for doing the right thing here. I’m looking forward to seeing the analysis.

I’m amazed that Mark has persisted in his argument for so long. Honestly, it’s astounding. He still can’t seem to admit that the video I wrote about yesterday demonstrates that downwind, faster-than-wind, wind-driven travel is possible. Let’s take another tack and systematically address the objections (Update: I’m updating this post as more objections come up) (Update2: In case you’re coming to this page directly from this site: Mark has now seen the light and admits that downwind-faster-than-wind is possible).

Once again, for reference, here’s the video demonstrating that the cart works:

Now let’s consider the objections:

1. The treadmill isn’t an authentic test. Mark and others say that the treadmill is adding energy to the equation, thus, this isn’t a perpetual motion machine.

They are right! It’s not a perpetual motion machine. Wind or some energy source is required! The treadmill is simply simulating the wind. The problem does not call for perpetual motion, just wind-aided travel that proceeds faster than the wind.

The treadmill gives us an easy way to see if the cart is moving faster or slower relative to the wind. Imagine an aircraft carrier moving 10MPH across a windless, flat sea. You’re on the deck. Your experience is a 10MPH wind. There is no difference between this and a treadmill — the treadmill just allows us to extend the length of the aircraft carrier indefinitely, and easily monitor the progress of our cart. Since the cart moves in the opposite direction from the treadmill, it goes faster than our simulated “wind.”

2. Since the wind is moving slower than the cart, there’s no way for the wind to push the cart forward

This conveniently ignores the mechanism of the cart and simply declares that the device is impossible. I’ve now explained how the device works several times, and no one has explained how my explanation doesn’t make sense, other than to make declarations like this. I think this is the simplest explanation:

Assume the prop is a simple one made of flaps angled at 45 degrees. As long as the rotational velocity is greater than the relative wind speed, the wind will be “pushing” against the prop.

So assume a 10 MPH wind. The force of the wind can move the cart 10 MPH without the assistance of the prop. Now assume at this speed the wheels can drive the prop at an average rotational velocity of 5 MPH. There is an effective additional wind force on the prop of 2.5 MPH. This makes the cart go 2.5 MPH faster. We’re now going 12.5 MPH, in a 10 MPH wind!

Obviously it will take things a while to equilibrate, and the final velocity computation is complicated, but the net result is a car moving downwind faster than the wind.

I gave a slightly more complicated version of this in a comment on Mark’s blog, but an illustration might make things clearer:

The wind isn’t pushing against the cart that’s moving faster than the wind. It’s pushing against the prop, which has a relative motion that means there’s still something to push against.

3. But the wind isn’t moving relative to the cart

See 2 above. The wind doesn’t have to move relative to the cart, just relative to the propeller.

4. The treadmill isn’t moving right-to-left. It’s a trick

No, the treadmill is moving right to left. Look at video, around 4:30. You can clearly see the stripes moving right to left. Any apparent motion of the wheels in the “wrong” direction is the wagon wheel effect. Watch the wheels closely as they start up and slow down to be sure.

5. The cart can’t get going on its own. It only works because it’s put on a running treadmill

This is debunked in the original video, where they take the cart outside and it starts on its own. Look at the video again, starting at 6:20.

6. BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO SAIL DOWNWIND FASTER THAN THE WIND!

No it’s not. Consider this example, which is explained by the cart’s creator here. I’ll summarize for you:

Sailboats can and do travel faster than the wind if they tack (zig-zag back and forth). Their downwind vector is faster than the wind. A fast sailboat can beat a hot-air-balloon in a steady wind. This is established fact — ice boats travel downwind in this way more than twice as fast as the wind. Attach two boats together with a telescoping rod and sit in the middle and you’re moving due downwind, faster than the wind.

7. You can’t draw energy from wind if the wind isn’t moving relative to you.

Yes, you can. See 2, 3, and 6 above. The trick is to have something else move relative to the wind for you and then harness that power — either the propeller or the two boats or some other ingenious device.

8. If this device worked as advertised, then it would also work in no wind at all, which is obviously impossible.

No, it wouldn’t. As explained in 2, 3, 6, and 7 above, it requires the wind to operate. The force to move the vehicle comes from the wind (or the motion of the treadmill, which simulates the wind). When they set the cart down in a still room, it doesn’t move. When they lift it off the treadmill, it slows to a stop.

The reason it goes faster than the wind is because the propeller captures more of the wind energy than is necessary to move the cart at a speed equal to the wind. The larger the prop, the more wind energy is captured (just as larger sails allow a boat to go faster). The trick is to move the propeller so that this extra energy can actually be used, as explained in 2 above.

9. Ice boats can’t really go faster than the wind.

Yes, they can. Here’s a document (PDF) that gives quite a bit of data demonstrating that fact. Ice boats routinely travel 70 MPH in 15-MPH winds. They can go more than twice as fast as the wind when tacking downwind. They can most definitely beat a hot air balloon to its destination due downwind.

10. If the wind isn’t driving the prop, then the prop isn’t driving the wheels.

That’s right. The wind is driving the wheels, and the wheels are driving the prop. Remember, there’s lots more energy in the wind than what is used to drive the car forward (assuming it had just an ordinary square sail). If you had an ordinary sail and were going due downwind, you wouldn’t be able to go faster than the wind. You could double, triple the size of the sail and it wouldn’t make a difference. But you’d have to use more braking power to slow the car with a larger sail. Now, imagine if you harvested that energy somehow. You could put on the brakes for five minutes and use that to generate energy (much like a Toyota Prius works). Then you could trim the sail to a smaller size and apply that energy by running a motor to drive the wheels. At this point, you’d be going faster the wind (but the sail would appear to be filling “backwards” from the relative headwind). This vehicle effectively does the same thing, but constantly and in a simpler fashion.

11. There is no way to make the transition from slower-than-wind to faster-than wind.

Yes, there is. The vehicle works the same way when it’s going slowly as it does when going fast. Look at the video at 6:20. It starts from a stop in the wind. The propeller rotates. The car accelerates. There is no transition. You could design a vehicle like this that would go at exactly wind speed. Just add enough friction to the works, and the car wouldn’t be able to go faster than the wind. This might only work at a single specified velocity. But you could design a vehicle with a wind detector on the front. It would automatically put on the brakes whenever the relative wind speed was zero.

In fact, the vehicle’s designers do exactly that when they run it on the treadmill and slow it with the spork to keep it from running off the end of the treadmill. The vehicle is going slower than “wind” when it goes backwards down the treadmill, and faster when it moves forwards up the treadmill. Each time it does this, it makes the “transition” from slower-than -wind to faster-than-wind.

12. If this is true, then why isn’t someone making a fortune off of this fantastic invention?

Because people don’t always want to go the same direction the wind is blowing. Also the wind is unreliable, and doesn’t always blow when we need it. That’s why powerboats and cars were invented. But maybe someone should consider attaching a generator to a windmill and selling that power to the electric company… I wonder if that’ll ever catch on.

Wow, I don’t get to say that very often! But it’s true. In this post, Mark claims that it’s impossible to make a wind-powered vehicle that goes faster than the wind, while traveling in the exact same direction as the wind. He is wrong, and in his post, he gives us the empirical evidence why he is wrong.

Rather than fisk his entire argument, I think instead I’ll just show why he is wrong. Here’s the video that shows how faster-than-wind travel is possible:

The problem is, this video doesn’t do a very good job explaining the principle behind the engineering.

It’s hard to understand at first why it’s possible for a vehicle driven by the wind to move faster than the wind. Imagine a helium balloon being driven by the wind. There’s simply no way for it to move faster in a horizontal direction than the wind itself is blowing.

But think about this. There’s a tremendous amount of force in the wind. Drive a sturdy 10-foot stake into the ground. Now imagine a steady 20-MPH wind blowing across the stake. The stake’s not going to budge. Now attach a 10-foot-square sail to the stake, holding it with ropes so it stays perpendicular to the path of the wind. All the sudden a tremendous force is imparted. It may be difficult for you to hold the sail in place. Eventually the wind would rip the sail from your hands. Yet you could easily throw the same piece of cloth (bundled up in a wad) faster than 20 MPH. So that 20-MPH wind has enough energy to propel something faster than the speed of the wind. It’s stronger than you, and you can throw the object faster than the wind is moving.

Sailors know this, and there is no dispute that it’s possible to sail a boat across the wind at a speed faster than the wind speed. You can even sail into the wind. There’s plenty of energy in the wind to move a vehicle faster than the wind is blowing.

So how does the vehicle in the video work?

It’s mind-numbingly simple.

It’s just a little cart with a propeller driven by the wheels. The propeller is oriented so that when the wheels roll forward, it propels the air backwards, giving a little extra forward propulsion.

The wind pushes on the propeller, which starts by acting like a sail. This causes the car to roll forward, which makes the propeller spin. The spin of the propeller adds a little extra thrust. As long as the propeller is big enough, there’s plenty of energy to not just propel the car forward at wind speed, but a little faster as well.

In the video you can see that the treadmill is not only moving at a high rate of speed backwards, it’s also angled up. This craft can actually “sail” uphill, faster than the wind is blowing.

Mark argues that this isn’t a true perpetual motion machine, because the treadmill is constantly adding energy to the equation. That’s correct, but it’s only simulating a steady wind. Since the air in the room is still, the motion of the treadmill is equivalent to wind moving across the ground at the same speed. The vehicle is moving FASTER than the treadmill is spinning — faster than the “wind.” It’s not a perpetual motion machine, it’s converting the energy in the wind into forward motion. If there is no wind, the cart goes nowhere.

Mark also says that because the treadmill isn’t level, it’s not a fair experiment. But the treadmill is angled uphill. If it was angled downhill, he’d have a point. But it’s angled uphill. This simply adds to the force that the cart must overcome to move faster than the wind. The experiment would also work on a flat treadmill.

So now I get to truthfully say something I’ve never said before — and probably won’t ever say again. Mark Chu-Carroll is wrong, wrong, wrong. He’s a very smart guy, but he’s wrong on this one.

It’s been a while since Nora and I made a large-scale Lego creation. But a week or so back someone on Twitter complimented Nora’s Parthenon — most definitely an awesome achievement. Here’s the movie we made of it way back then:

We’ve made some other Lego structures over the years:

Working Lego train

Replica of the San Xavier mission in Arizona

But a constant problem was the lack of sufficient Legos in the desired color, resulting in the “impressionistic” effect you see in the above examples. In 2003 we bought enough black Legos to make an accurate Sears Tower:

But still, this structure lacks pizazz. So when Nora suggested, for old times’ sake, we build a new structure over Thanksgiving weekend, we spent some time seeking a subject that would be impressively large and visually interesting, but could be reproduced in a way that at least evoked the color palate of the original. We settled on the Campanile next to Florence’s massive Duomo. Here’s a shot I took of the Campanile from the top of the Duomo two summers ago when we were there:

And here’s the structure we constructed:

(click for larger version)

Not bad, eh? For comparison, Nora insisted we take a photo of me next to this structure duplicating the shot of me and the Eiffel Tower we built about 5 years ago.

They’re of comparable size, but this one has a (relatively) regular color pattern and is a much more complicated structure using many more bricks.

Here’s Nora giving you a guided tour of the structure:

Finally, a couple of shots from different angles:

Hopefully it won’t be another five years before we build our next Lego creation.