Aerospace Challenge Finals at Cranfield

Last week I was in Cranfield participating in the Aerospace Challenge Finals. The challenge this year was to come up with a design for a device to drop humanitarian aid accurately (within 20 metres of a target) from 3000 metres up. Our idea managed to make it to the finals which turned out to be a week of lectures on general aerospace engineering, activities and flying! Photos are here.

Flying

Each person got two flying experiences, both of which included some time piloting the aircraft: about 10-20 minutes in a helicopter and about half an hour in a fixed-wing plane.

My first flying experience was with a small Robinson helicopter, which can only really be described as terrifyingly, exhilaratingly awesome. The pilot managed the take-off which was one of the most breathtaking experiences I’ve ever had – in a helicopter you’re literally sitting in a big transparent flying bubble with the engine behind you, so the view and experience is truly amazing as the land falls away beneath you… I later took over and found control extremely difficult – even a tiny movement of the stick causes the vehicle to tilt violently in that direction making a beginner like me very prone to overcorrection leading to a serious case of increasing-amplitude SHM! The actual stick is situated between the pilot and the copilot and a rotating handle is stuck on the end allowing dual control, so my rather flailing and uncontrolled flight was abruptly and expertly rectified when the pilot took control (though not before I turned and prepared to land by erratically lurching towards a patch of grass). The pilot then demonstrated some cool things one can do with a helicopter including skid landing and take-off, going backwards and sideways while spinning etc.

Here you can see how control over steering is shared between pilot (me) and real pilot (instructor)

The next day I got in a PA28 – my first fixed-wing experience. The pilot had to go through an enormous list of things to check before taking off and explained a little about what she was doing (mostly checking the engine could rev at certain RPMs and wouldn’t give out in certain situations, flicking on and off various lights and calibrating [and pointing at] instruments). The runway was also ridiculously long so she didn’t even bother with flaps for takeoff. This was much easier to fly than the helicopter and the dials and instruments in the cockpit didn’t obscure the view as much I had inferred they would from MS Flight Sim’s portrayal. I did a few rather ginger turns and pitch adjustments before relinquishing control back to the pilot who then demonstrated some steep banks, a stall (which sounded dangerous and seemed to imply the engine cutting out) and a dive (which was extremely cool). Later that week Matthew and I were inspired enough to ask about possible places to get flying instruction – flying has always been one of those things I’ve wanted to learn but I’ve always ended up not having enough time or money to start…

Here the instructor is doing a steep bank. She even did a pretty steep dive totally relaxed and with that pen in her hand!

Me flying the PA28!

Activities

The week started with some group leadership exercises which consisted of attempting to place 30 cards in the correct pattern (easy) and work out the shape and colour of two missing shapes while blindfolded (hard) – both were much more enjoyable than I had expected from that genre of exercises.

The first engineering challenge we were given was an egg-drop challenge – the idea was to construct a package which will protect an egg from a drop of 4 metres. We were given limited materials and each material had a price; the idea was to make the cheapest package that doesn’t crack the egg. Our attempt turned out to be the most epic non-fail in history – literally seconds before the end of the construction phase we managed to pop two balloons which made us completely change our plan and in the last few seconds and in great haste we crammed stuff into a crumple zone and added a parachute … and it somehow worked and turned out to be the cheapest package (if wastage is deducted)! I guess that really proves the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid.

The second engineering challenge was along similar lines – dropping aid – though it was from a more macro perspective. The game was called ‘airlift’ and sold by Elite – the idea was to plan an air route through several African villages which uses the least fuel, while dropping packages of aid which we had to construct out of wooden blocks, paper and tape while making sure everything fits in the cargo hold. The first thing I pointed out when time started was that both problems were NP-complete: the packing problem was almost exactly the same as the knapsack problem and the route planning was basically the Travelling Salesman problem with fuel added in as a factor. In other words we had to be either very good at intuitive problem solving or somehow get lucky. As it turned out, as perhaps a combination of the two, we somehow managed to come up with both the the optimum packing configuration as well as the best route, and finished literally as the final buzzer went – not bad!

The rest of the week was dotted with things like paper plane competitions (which included an awesome flying paper ring which seems impossible when you first see it fly), a game of (actual) CTF and some sports.

Lectures

Over the week there were daily lectures. Much as I would love to discuss them all here in depth I haven’t got that much time / space and besides most people aren’t as interested as I am in the effect of negative angles of attack… But I’ll go a little into some of the most interesting lectures.

Fly by Wire (FBW)

The problem for a long time had been that when going sufficiently quickly, adjusting the controls from the cockpit was really quite hard work – the air going past has so much momentum and the mass flow rate is so high that to change its direction by (for example) adjusting the ailerons requires a lot of force. To make things worse, at supersonic speeds a shock cone is developed (some awesome videos of this are on Youtube) – if this touches the aileron the stick can be wrenched out of the pilot’s hand. Some of these controls were partially solved by making the stick adjust small tabs in the wing instead of the entire aileron, reducing the force required to steer, and by making controls non-reversible (force on the aileron doesn’t affect the flying stick). There are of course some problems with these such as lack of ‘feel’ of the controls. So recently manual stick-aileron transmission was replaced with an electronic motor which receives instructions from the cockpit and adjusts the ailerons itself. Not only does this take all the strain off the pilot, but it also allows a computer to neutralise bad judgements on the part of the pilot such as initiating a sharp dive at 50 feet, implemented by a feedback mechanism from the aircraft to the computer. It also simplifies the cockpit – instead of filling the area with controls, dials an instruments, a computer screen with a joystick and throttle suffices to fly a FBW plane. I asked whether, since FBW significantly reduces the pilot’s direct control over the aircraft, FBW might actually make complicated manouevres more unsafe or indeed completely impossible. John Farley, who was giving the talk, said that, from his vast experience, pilots, however experienced, cannot really be trusted to fly planes safely all the time, and in fact he would feel safer trusting a computer’s judgement and letting a computer do such manouevres than a pilot. That talk also proves that a Boeing 747 probably has non-reversible controls so that scene in Snakes on a Plane (I think it was that film) in which the pilot asked the co-pilot to help pull back on the stick very hard was probably a load of rubbish. Not that you needed to be told that.

Basic Aerodynamics

One of the interesting things from this talk was the reasoning for why helicopters don’t go fast. There is always one part of the rotor going forwards, and if the helicopter moves forwards sufficiently quickly that part of the rotor travels at supersonic speeds generating a shockwave that could rip apart the rotor. In addition, even at lower speeds, there is an imbalance between the airspeed of the fowards-going part and backwards-going part of the rotor meaning a gimbal has to change the angle of attack of the blade depending on which way it’s going: the angle of attack of the rearwards-going blade has to increase to increase lift on that side otherwise the helicopter would just roll over. Of course, there is a maximum angle of attack this blade can be set to before it stalls which is about 20°. This limits the helicopter’s speed at subsonic speeds.

An RAF Hawk landed at the airstrip for us - here is the pilot demonstrating how the entire tailplane rotates

Automation and the future

This was probably the most interesting talk of the week; unfortunately it was cut short for us owing to a jetstream flight. Apparently currently pilots of Euro Fighters get sensor fused info presented to them in the form of advice as to what to do and they simply act upon that, which means half the time the plane is telling the pilot what to do: it is telling the pilot how to control it: semi-automation. Even in commercial aircraft a system called TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) senses other aircraft and advises the pilot on how to manoeuvre. There is clearly room for improvement: unmanned aerial vehicles are coming. This of course led to the whole humans v computers discussion but for every example of a pilot doing something heroic and saving the plane, there are several examples in which pilots screwed up and computers would have saved lives – Chris Roberts, the speaker, asked whether it *really* is desirable to have a pilot flying the plane, and whether the problem of pilots becoming de-skilled from letting the autopilot take over really is such a problem after all. I also found it very interesting and surprising that currently many landings of commercial aircraft are performed by the autopilot in low-visibility situations.

Anyways overall it was a fantastic week. Whatever the results of the competition turn out to be, I for one got a lot out of six days in Cranfield. I learnt a lot, made some friends, made some good contacts in the industry, and had some great fun relaxing in the English countryside!

Walking in the English countryside

Snowdonia Walking Trip

I’ve just (yesterday) returned from the annual walking trip (this year to Snowdonia) in the mountainous midge breeding ground that is Wales. I managed to write a brief record of our daily activities so here is (more or less) an illustrated account of our adventures.

I’m trying out Picasa as an alternative to Flickr so all the photos I’ve published of this trip are in my Picasa Web Album.

Sunday: Journey up

This was rather boring until we stopped at Betws-y-Coed (the teachers pronounced it roughly as ‘Battersea Coyd’ – I’m pretty sure that’s wrong) for lunch. It appeared that they were having some sort of summer festival so we grabbed some burgers and sausage rolls from a rather smokey and carcinogenic-looking stand and sat on a bench contemplating a police car that appeared to be on show (pop music emanated from its speakers, its sirens went off at apparently random intervals, and members of the public kept crawling in and out of the car while two police officers stood nearby sipping pints), a madman standing in a fenced area wielding a chainsaw (there was a sign saying ‘wood carving’ though the ‘toadstools’ that he produced were arguably less aesthetic than the original stumps) and a van with ‘water incident unit’ painted on its side (we postulated it had something to do with rescuing vehicles / people from lakes, hence the dry suits hanging up inside. I prefer the hypothesis that it rushes to the rescue whenever it rains and erects a large umbrella). We sauntered further into the town and saw the railway station, though we decided the ice cream shop was far more interesting.

We left Betws-y-Coed and passed by Beddgelert (where the most awesome and famous ice cream shop of Wales is) where we saw this rather amusing advert on the back of a bus:

Amusing advert on the back of a bus as we went over the bridge in Beddgelert

Finally we pulled into the campsite with Queen blasting through the minibus’ stereo and set up our tents in the otherwise deserted campsite.

Abuse of a mallet for hammering in tent pegs

In the absence of KPZ, it was GL’s turn to cook – dinner was rather good but plagued by a flashmob of midges (which lasted for the next six days). We 8th formers did the washing up to set an example and returned to find the entire campsite had been invaded by a small battalion of siege cows.

Easily visible in the backgound is a herd of cattle that somehow managed to get into the campsite.

We retreated from the insect-mammal assault into the minibus (where we could observe the campsite owner attempting to chase the cows off his land with a quad bike) and played a game of mafia (very difficult in a minibus). We eventually got to bed at around 10-11 pm.

Monday: Light walk, blazing sun

Everyone was awoken by the dawn chorus at the unholy hour of 6am – if not for the cows joining in I might have been able to get some more sleep before the planned 8am breakfast, at which GL described the previous night’s cooking as ‘look[ing] like a polluted river’: he’d cooked it in Specked Hen which created a substantial amount of froth…

Alastair looking triumphant at the top of the mountain

People in Wales seem to have a great sense of humour. We'd also seen a sign in Betws-y-Coed saying 'Children left unattended will be sold to the circus'

We split into three groups for the walk, after which two groups stopped by at Beddgelert for ice cream. DAE decided to pull an amusing trick on GL: since GL had already parked when we (DAE’s bus) had arrived, with endorsement from TCIM (‘what could go wrong?’) DAE moved GL’s bus somewhere inconspicuous and parked our bus in its spot, and went as far as transferring GL’s sandals to DAE’s bus! After a most satisfactory ice cream we watched mirthfully through binoculars from an unsubtle distance as GL became increasingly stressed!

Several hours after we returned to the campsite, we witnessed the much anticipated arrival of Max and Marius, two OPs who left the U8 last year but wanted to join us for a laugh. After dinner we all sat in the TV room and watched one of the most drawn-out tennis competitions I have ever seen which lasted until 10:30 and resulted in Murray winning 6-3 (I think). It was about then that I discovered the campsite offered free wifi and began downloading the missed episode of Top Gear (S13 E02).

Tuesday: Snowdon

The weather was perfect on the ascent: it was cloudy and breezy which made walking uphill effortless and chilled. As we reached the top we began the customary cursing of fat tourists sitting at the top of Snowdon wearing snow white trainers who had evidently taken the train up but still had the impudence to buy badges and T-shirts with words to the effect of ‘I walked up Snowdon’. Suggestions were made about using the fattest ones as train fuel (!), making the train treadmill-powered, not providing a train journey back down the mountain, and stopping the train half way up Snowdon, forcing everyone to do some work before reaching the top. I was also disappointed by the lack of free drinking water at the cafe – apparently tap water there is straight from the lake.

DAE found / remembered a tunnel off the beaten track which led to an abandoned quarry

Max & Marius appear to have found a rather good vantage point

The train to the top of Snowdon seems to run partly on steam though the actual lifting is probably a rack and pinion affair. I don't really know much about trains...

We were fortunate and managed to get a pretty good view (not much mist)

The descent was extremely hot and humid which made most of us feel like jumping into the remarkably clear plunge pools of the river running alongside the path. GL was keen to return quickly to the campsite to grab meat for a BBQ that night so we would have been unable to grab an ice cream from Beddgelert if not for a rather timely and extremely spectacular incident involving the contents of a 5th former’s stomach and several people around the epicentre who took some … splash damage. This event occurred precisely outside the ice cream shop, forcing DAE to do an emergency stop in the shop’s car park. I jokingly suggested to the Reverend (who was with us on that trip) that God must have really wanted us to have an ice cream. Max and Marius arrived and chauffeured GL away to do some meat shopping leaving us with the rather iconic image of a grinning Max sitting in the back seat clutching two double ice cream cones. That evening after the BBQ some of us watched Top Gear and played Dawn of War on my laptop until about 11pm.

DAE found a (slightly shorter) shortcut down Snowdon

When you're hot and sweaty it is unbelievably tempting to just jump in...

Sir we found a reverend!

Wednesday: Cnicht

When I was on the same trip three years ago this was the first day mountain. On Wednesday we approached it from a different face which involved quite a lot of scrambling. It was hot and humid but the steep ascent and striking view from the top made it all worth it and not much of a slog. We made our customary stop at Beddgelert for another ice cream, then we downloaded and watched ‘Night at the Museum’ (both I and II).

There was a pretty awesome view from the top of Cnicht. According to Marius the name Cnicht means Viking Helmet which is what the mountain resembles from the sea

Don't fall off!

A helicopter appeared while we were descending Cnicht and the friendly guy waved at us. None of us dared wave back lest we be mistaken for hikers in distress

Thursday: Beach / Campsite

We awoke to the soothing (or alarming, depending on who you are) sound of a torrent merrily splashing onto the tops of our tents. The weather forecast was unpromising so we had the option of going to the beach or staying at the campsite (by now there were several people feeling unwell from the heat of the previous days). Max and Marius left (but not before tearful goodbye hugs from everyone who happened to be around), and Guy and I stayed at the campsite (I wanted to get on with some reading and he played an 8-way dawn of war battle). I ended up cooking a rather sumptuous sausages and eggs for us at which point I discovered what a mess the kitchen was.

Dinner was lamb, mushrooms and potatoes with cake dessert, after which we watched Alien v Predator 2 until midnight. It had rained most of the afternoon and night.

Friday: Half-day walk, getting lost

We woke up to an extremely wet morning so we cowered in the communal tent for breakfast. We had lunch in the campsite then ventured out in the sunny afternoon to where we had gone the previous trip to do orienteering. We got lost several times, and I managed to get a large number of amusing photos of our leaders peering confusedly at the map. Most of my downhill journey was spent making witty banter with the Reverend about religion terminating in us finally agreeing on where we were on the map. Again the trip ended in ice cream at Beddgelert, and we returned at about 5:45 to the campsite where we discovered rather rude campers had decided to pitch their tent between the school minibus and our tents!

Here are several pictures of our group leaders getting extremely lost:

… and the absolute classic (caption competition anyone?):

After GL’s slightly tipsy Scheherazade (all teachers are young at heart, especially after a few pints!) some of us congregated in the TV room to watch Saw (which seemed to have quite an impact on the subject of conversations for the rest of the trip) followed by Jonathan Ross interviewing Emma Watson. I then made some attempts at taking night photos before going to bed.

Saturday: Rainy walk

We woke up for the third day in a row to torrid rain, but at 10:30 the teachers decided we might was well do a walk around the base of Tryfan. The highest point of the walk was extremely windy and wet making for freezing horizontal rain. We lunched inside the (extremely) orange emergency shelter which wasn’t quite large enough for all of us which caused us some entertainment. We also got a bit of a laugh from imagining people outside asking a heaving, seething, complaining, munching orange mass in the middle of the footpath on the side of a mountain whether it was OK, and whether it had seen a party of six people walk past!

Eventually the sun came out and even though we’d been shivering some of the way down the mountain we decided an ice cream at Beddgelert was called for (I went for a double cone: Chocolate & Ginger and Run & Raisin).

At 5pm the internet was abruptly cut off while I was downloading Saw II and we were told we’d been downloading too much and were using up the monthly cap. We’d been getting 600KB/s; I knew there had to be a catch. So instead of watching a film we rebuilt our dam from three years ago I took some more photos.

The classic trick with rapids - take a long exposure. For some of these I had to put the stand in the middle of the stream - I hope it doesn't rust

Sunday: Journey back

There’s not much to say about yesterday: we packed everything up, woke the apparently unwakeable 6th formers and helped them pack their tent, and drove back to London. We all cheered when we saw the sign welcoming us into Shropshire at the Welsh-English border and listened to Queen’s Greatest Hits as we coasted down the bus lane on the M4.

Final Thoughts

I thought it was an altogether highly enjoyable trip. The mounds of earth that had segregated our part of the campsite from everyone else three years ago were gone and there was no electricity near our tents which was a slight inconvenience, and I felt too many days were rained off / taken lightly … but overall I think most people had a great time, nothing / nobody got broken, and it was a great way to relax after the end of a tough school year.

Meanwhile – this is too good not to repeat:

Perhaps if someone thinks up a good caption … ?

๏̯͡๏﴿

Techie’s Take on Snow

White grass?

I don’t think there’s anyone out there who needs to be told that the UK ground to a halt today thanks to a freak downpour of snow. But I think some of the stuff that happened today was actually a great metaphor for the current status of technology in the UK as a predominant part of virtually everyone’s daily life, a phenomenon that I hope will flourish in the future.

Denial of Service

Slashdot and Lifehacker tend to inflict DoS attacks on websites and webapps whenever they feature them simply owing to the sheer traffic generated. This morning several sites began to have problems due to similar reasons: thousands of commuters simultaneously looked out of the window, smacked their heads and immediately tried to find a way to get to work … using TFL, subsequently causing the route planner to slow to a crawl for a few hours. The school intranet also managed to get DoS’ed from all the 900 Paulines attempting to discover whether the wonderful terrible rumours of school being snowed off were true. I suspect this reflects the current trend in general load balancing (including non-techie things: apparently electricity usage peaks just after some TV show ends in the UK owing to kettles being put on) and the clear necessity to move computing power to the so-called ‘cloud’ where it can take the strain of flash-flood traffic.

'The Lifehacker Effect' occurs when a site goes down owing to overload from traffic emanating from a Lifehacker post

Social Websites

The majority of Paulines used Facebook as their primary source of information regarding the school snow-off. Sitting there watching my Facebook feed reload every few seconds, I couldn’t help but notice that virtually every wall post, status update and note seemed to be asking and/or confirming rumours about school being snowed off. Twitter was also buzzing with activity which concluded with a jubilant remark from @the_unnameable:

No school. Yipppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Eventually intelligence was obtained from the few people who had managed to contact the apparently grumpy porters by phone (and of course sons of teachers) and information was seeded in the form of status updates on both Facebook and Twitter which spread virally and reached most people. Of course, this merely illustrates the increasing reliance on the web for up-to-date information and the power of viral marketing (well, spread of information). As a sidenote, David Smith, a teacher at the school with the foresight to see what is needed, has created a Twitter account for one-way updates from the school: @stpaulsboys.

And of course, since the school was closed for the sake of safety and preventing us from having to brave the weather, everyone was out and about, efficiently organising events through Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone.

Social Website Logos

Cameras

Of course, every such event is a photo op. There was a point when digital cameras were associated exclusively with Japanese tourists, but today during a photography outing with George, virtually every person we saw who wasn’t building a snowman was pointing a camera at something (often with flash still turned on *sigh*). In the age of twitpic and flickr, digital cameras have become day-to-day objects embedded into just about everything which are used as a means to record moments of one’s day. If this had happened just a few years ago, I don’t think anything like the number of cameras I saw today would have hit the streets, as the idea of having to record every precious last moment of one’s life on an SD card hadn’t quite caught on.

My Flickr Photostream

Personally, I ended up with a pretty cool collection of photos (including some of Doc Mayfield & co. having fun), a new way of getting school updates (@stpaulsboys), the beginnings of a raging cold, a free Sodexho school lunch and confirmation that school is off tomorrow as well.

John Colet Statue looking rather cold

Shanghai: First Impressions

I’ve only been in Shanghai for a bit and have just about got over jet lag. I ended up doing an all-nighter last night, taking some night shots of the cityscape from my (highly elevated) bedroom window and watching the smoggy sunrise in awe, just to get my sleep-cycle right and ended up snoring through a Chinese music concert in the evening – oops… So, first impressions.

Immediately after touchdown, the first thing to greet my sleep-deprived eyes was a colourful and gleeful rendering of the cheerful glory of an olympic host, painted onto the side of a member of the China Airlines fleet. Up till now, that remains the only apparent relic I’ve seen of last Summer’s excitement.

Beijing 2008 Advert

As I expected, apart from the airport which was magnificent and unbelievably (to a Londoner) efficient (somewhat different from dear old Heathrow), there are aspects of this place which are somewhat … different. The most striking part is probably the population density. Officially Shanghai has a population of about 20 million, although I suspect that figure is a gross underestimate owing to the number of homeless and unregistered civilians living in this district. With such a population squashed into only 6500 square Km, the city has over 3000 people per square kilometre. Not bad one might think, but the crowds are multitudinous and dense. It is a result of this crowd culture that Chinese people get their (deserved) loud reputation. Even in the most serene places, people will communicate at top volume, choosing to shout rather than to talk normally so as to be heard. Walking around just about anywhere constitutes shoving your way through a throng of people – which itself wouldn’t be so bad if they were normal people. The sad fact is that every person here, without exception, appears to be dying of some disease or other and every line of sight seems to end in someone spluttering, coughing and/or blowing his nose into the air. Hygiene awareness when coughing and sneezing (often while cooking) is approximately zero – bodily fluids/gases exit bodily orifices liberally into the open air without thought or care for anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Combined with such a high person to square kilometre ratio and you end up with a fantastic disease spread rate. The smoking situation is also quite chronic. The taxi from the airport reeked blatantly of cigarette smoke. Crowds emit smoke puffs as you push your way through and buildings stink of nicotine. Oh, did I mention the pollution? Don’t get me started on the smog.

typical crowded street

my photo of the iconic view of Shangai showing smog

me cynically photographing more smog

Meanwhile, the traffic is absolutely manic. Shanghai is very much a biking city (electric scooters and bicycles are much cheaper than cars), and such vehicles, when combined with a cavalier disregard for pedestrians, traffic lights and other road users, make for quite deadly weapons. Crossing the road is like waging a war. Seas of pedestrians from both sides of the road meet in the middle in a cacophony of shouting, bustling, coughing and spitting while being constantly punched through by honking road bikes and the occasional impatient taxi. Sometimes there’s a policeman in the middle of it all pretending to direct traffic (both pedestrian and vehicular). There are effectively no real rules for the road. Cars cut lanes and cross junctions at full speed without warning or looking around, and diesel motorbikes frequently mount pavements, pushing aside pedestrians. My dad while he was here personally bore witness to an accident in which an infelicitous pedestrian was hit by a car whose driver just drove off, without care for whatever mess he had left behind. You’d think people would at least take out some sort of physical insurance against such a dangerous road situation, but it seems that taxis deliberately disable seatbelts (the ones I’ve been in have had them ripped out and covered over with cloth).

My camera can only do max 4 second exposure. This is the result

no seatbelt

When most people think of the police, the first two words that jump to mind tend to be ‘law’ and ‘bastards’, often in reverse order. In China, things are very different. During my very first trip to the market I saw a policeman grab an item from a shop and stroll away calmly with the ill-fated shopkeeper running after him, tugging his arm. They are far from law, but they sure are bastards. There are no rules, no morals, and few properly enforced civil rights laws (thoughtcrime law on the other hand…) – the police are just bullies with sticks and uniforms (and guns).

As far as first impressions go, the internet actually isn’t bad. I’m using the [still censored] connection in my dad’s apartment (he works in Shanghai) and the upload speed is faster than what Virgin Media give me back home in good old London. The download speed, about 1Mbps, is still one tenth what I get in London, which is still perfectly ample for surfing. Remote desktop on the other hand is torturous. I’m still worried about thoughtcrime and censorship, and since my blog is on the blocklist (well, all wordpress blogs are, I think) I’m typing this up on Notepad and subsequently posting it through remote desktop.

There are though good things about Shanghai. I’m overdramatising the bads a bit as, well, that’s what I do as a cynic. But the prices are undeniably good and conversion is convenient (10Y = £1 almost exactly). Stuffed bao (sort of buns) go for 10p in the supermarket, and clothes prices beat Primark hands down. The underground actually works (unlike London), and there are some great photos to be taken, particularly night shots while I’m recovering from my jet lag.

my attempt at night photography without a tripod

So, that’s what I think of Shanghai after about 3 days. Brilliant place, though a little crazy. If you want me to test some websites to see if they’re blocked, do comment / contact!

London Underground

I’m furious. This is what happened today: I was intending originally to go bowling with some friends at Queensway. The only way to get there was, of course, tube. So I journeyed up there, taking about half an hour, including interchanges and slow walking on my part. No problem; in fact I was early. Next thing I know the location had changed – bowling was booked out and I was supposed to get to Hammersmith (where I had originally started). No problem, I should be able to do it in about 20 minutes. So I thought.

The best way was to take the central line onto the circle/district and go south. I quickly noticed the trains were running slow (I spent about 20 minutes waiting for one southbound at Notting Hill Gate). When it finally arrived I was ferried to Earl’s Court where nothing but fun awaited me. At first lit up signs on both sides of the Westbound platform indicated every single train seemed to be going to Wimbledon. About 15 minutes later I gratefully hopped on a train which was going in the right direction only to discover, about ten minutes later, that it was to be redirected south, to … Wimbledon. After waiting for about half an hour for the next westbound train, customer service decided to tell us all that there had been a ’signal failure’. Which meant there was zilch going from Earl’s Court to Hammersmith by District. Dashing down to the Piccadilly line (I was about an hour late at this point) I was confronted immediately with a motionless closed train and an announcement about the lack of westbound Piccadilly trains. I bailed out of the station and called a friend, asking how to get to Hammersmith by bus. Predictably, such a manoeuvre is apparently impossible without the aid of the tube. Returning to the station I waited a further 5 minutes for a northbound train in the hope of somehow tricking God into giving me an easy journey – hopefully he wouldn’t notice and continue throwing crap at the Hammersmith-Earl’s Court link. Notting Hill Gate forced me to walk a long way to finally get on the Central Line. A barrage of expletives later, I eventually made it to Shepherd’s Bush where I bailed out again and used Bus 72 to get back home. Tricking God had worked.

I had left the house at 6:45 and arrived back home at 8:30 – I had spent almost *two hours* shuttling back and forth between Notting Hill Gate and Hammersmith. I will count this as evidence for God’s lack of benevolence if he indeed exists.

The problem is that there really is no way of getting around London these days. My only real option was to use the tube and being at the mercy of such incompetence is really quite scary. They can’t even spell ‘St James’ Park’ right:

Surviving Black Ice on Bike

I present you with my new God Hypothesis: if and only if God exists, he is far from benevolent. It would appear the legendary Pure Mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy agrees: “Another example of [Hardy] trying to fool God was when he went to cricket matches he would take what he called his “anti-God battery”. This consisted of thick sweaters, an umbrella, mathematical papers to referee, student examination scripts etc. His theory was that God would think that he expected rain to come so that he could then get on with his work. Since Hardy thought that God would then have the sun shine all day to spite him, he would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine” (Toller made me aware of this; quotation taken from here). God, in order to spite me, over the last two weeks has strategically placed black ice in exactly the same spot of road causing me to fall spectacularly on both occasions causing grievous (= light) damage to my elbow followed by my face, as some sort of obscene joke.

Click for original image

In fairness I shouldn’t be blaming some being who was invented a long time ago and exists solely in books. The real reason is that my bike’s tyres were worn almost smooth by regular trips to Richmond Park over the Summer and Autumn. But as Winter is setting on, a relatively high tyre pressure (pumped up in the hope of improved speeds) and non-grippy road (rather than mountain-biking) tyres are hardly ideal for the conditions. So I decided to do some research on how not to die at the hands of Winter, squashed between a bus and a centimetre of ice. I’ve organised my incoherent thoughts into a list of tips for anyone who is, like me, foolish enough to attempt to overcome whatever God throws at him, including icy road conditions. Since my expertise with ice cycling is evidently somewhat lacking, I’ve nicked half of these from different sources.

Technique

Keep upright and turn slowly

Both times I fell it was because P was too great; too great to be resisted by friction (F). To minimise this you want to minimise the torque created by N and W, i.e. minimise the angle theta: keep as vertical as possible as increased torque increases the effect of P. You also need to slow down (as Dr Zetie has just taught us, centripetal acceleration v^2/r where r is the curve radius and in this case it is provided by friction – if friction isn’t enough to resist the centrifugal force created by high-speed turns, God wins and you fall). I’ll shut up about Physics now.

Brake gently

This might seem obvious but it’s actually even worse than you might think. Friction with the ice when braking melts some of it creating water, which on ice is amazingly ‘fail’ at friction. Bad.

Brake with rear wheel

When you brake, torque makes the bike lean on its front wheels, so if that front wheel locks you’re screwed. Don’t brake with it. Braking with the rear wheel is also great for skidding down icy hills (apparently).

Let the bike get it

If it does come to it and you’re about to crash, a friend of mine advises you just throw the bike at whatever you’re going to hit and either land on it or hit the ground at a much reduced velocity. Not sure how good this advice is, but it’s probably a good idea on the personal safety front. Maybe not for other road users or indeed the bike…

It’s also better to get scrapes than go head-first into a solid object – I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure grazes heal faster than fractures.

Ride the gravel

There tends to be a load of crap at the side of roads, especially gravel which is great for cyclists when the rest of the road resembles an ice-rink. Snow is also better than ice.

Kit out your bike

Use studded tyres

These are the best tyres for grip in icy conditions. Also consider chaining your tyres.

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Lifehacker also did a post on it.

Also, slightly underinflating car tyres helps for low-grip surfaces. Presumably the same applies for bikes, especially for wide tyres.

Dress for the Arctic

Wear an anti-God outfit complete with crash-helmet so you’ll just bounce if you hit the road.

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Hopefully when I try (most of) this next week I won’t die in the process. And don’t blame me if you do attempt it all and still get hit by a bendy-bus after skidding into the middle of a road.

Most of these ideas and images came from here.

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The depressing state of transport in London

The transport situation in London has always been a disgrace. But the thing that has caught my attention recently is the sad situation for the few people hard-core (or stupid) enough to mount a bike and brave the streets of London alone and without protection just in order to save the environment (or a few pennies).

On many an occasion I have attemted to get from point A to point B in London within an acceptable amount of time. These numerous occasions have frequently left me disappointed to say the least, and more than a little stressed.

It is always said London is full of history. But nothing can convey the meaning of that better than living in the city itself. Everything about London is Victorian. The technology used for congestion charging (taking photos of cars and getting monkeys to write down number plates) is Victorian and that used for the tube is Medieval.

Let me try to explain what goes through my mind whenever I plan a journey. Walking is out of the question – it would take forever and be about as good for my lungs as smoking ten cigarettes at the same time, not to mention the broken bones from being run over. Driving in London is equally dangerous, this time owing to the risk of high blood pressure, lateness and the associated anger caused, and the occasional desperate idiot on the road and the associated dangers. The tube is out of the question; just listen to the surprised note in the announcers’ voices whenever they declare there is a ‘good service on the District Line’. The only alternative is cycling which I only began considering recently and almost immediately dropped as an alternative since London is built to combine quite neatly all its crap into a single vehicle. The second you venture onto the street you are honked at by some 18-wheeler accelerating towards you like in Duel while simultaneously verbally abused by a cigarette-smoking idiot gesturing at you while overtaking on the inside lane. While you swerve to avoid the greater of the two evils you are run over by a bendy bus and end up in hospital. After you recover you discover your bike to be stolen and receive a fine for swerving into a bus lane, and to add further insult to injury you discover pieces of your bike (or perhaps it in its entirety) to be stolen. Finally you die at the age of thirty of lung cancer. Such is the life of a cyclist in London.

Fortunately I note steps are already being taken to counter this. London is currently being made such a miserable place to drive in that no driver in his or her right mind would even dare to venture within its labyrinth. Such a mess of one-way systems has been created that one might run out of petrol before finding a way out, and the designing of the parking system has been delegated to a person sufficiently intelligent to understand how a phone can be used to run a pay service but not quite smart enough to grasp the idea of actually providing that service (to any acceptable standards). I applaud these changes and hope to see London clear of all traffic by 2012; I guarantee if things continue as they are, this vision will become a reality.