Author Archives: Ravi Narasimhan

Exploded Views: Animagraffs on the SR-71

Jake O’Neal’s meticulously researched and lovingly rendered engineering animations are one of the highlights of modern-day Youtube.  He’s outdone himself with his recent masterpiece on the SR-71’s innards and outards.  The Blackbird is one of the last century’s artistic triumphs and has inspired admirers all over the world.  O’Neal dove deeply into the literature and pulls back the covers from beak to tailfeathers.  The section on the inlet and J58 powerplant is as accurate as the 2015 benchmark from “Tech Adams.”

O’Neal goes beyond the “glamorous bits.”  Pay close attention to the “mixer” that translated pilot stick inputs into precise actuator motions to control a plane flying at Mach 3+.  I’ve been following the Blackbird family for decades and I never knew about this.

On top of that, he has just released a behind-the-scenes film on how he created the model and animations using the free Blender program.

Youtube Channel: Animagraffs

LAX Maintenance: Stig Aviation

SpeedbirdHD has dramatically cut back on his insider views of LAXStig Aviation is a new channel that fills that gap.  SpeedbirdHD focused on insane closeups of takeoffs and landings thanks to his unparalleled access.  Stig is a maintenance technician for a major airline who documents interesting aspects of the job through sixteen hour shifts which he nevertheless enjoys.  Tires, engines, cockpits, or fluids, he’s got the scoop.  He optimizes for mobile phones so the videos are all in portrait mode but other than that, there’s a lot of good stuff for the aviation curious.

Youtube Channel: Stig Aviation

 

King Louis: The 2023 Nobel in Chemistry

It’s always great when one of the good guys is justly rewarded.  The Nobel Committee put a smile on many faces this morning when it announced that Louis Brus was among the winners of this year’s Chemistry Prize.  I had the great fortune to know him in the early 1990s during my postdoctoral years at the old Bell Labs.  I did not work with him directly but I was in the same organization, talked to him many times over coffee and at the famed “lunch table.” Always a respected scientist, he had achieved interdisciplinary fame in the late 1980s for initiating the quantum dot work recognized today. Despite the then-accolades, he was always gracious, patient, and willing to listen. When it came time for me to leave the Labs, he reviewed my research statements, listened to my practice job-talks, and gave me excellent advice. Although postdocs had a principal collaborator/sponsor, the culture was that we were the responsibility of the institution. We could go anywhere, walk into any office, and get the attention of the top person or people in any field. That industrial lab was everything a great University wants to be and I still can’t believe I got to experience it. It was taken for granted that Louis would go to Stockholm and frankly, it is long overdue.

Youtube Channel: Nobel Prize

 

Stop! It’s Hammack Time: The Engineer Guy returns

Bill Hammack of UIUC built and built-up the “Engineer Guy” Youtube channel into one of the most popular and respected technology-focused sites on the platform.

Then, he disappeared for four years.  His audience checked in periodically in the comments section but there was not much information to be had other than hints that he was still with us and might someday return.

In years past he had brilliantly explained the unsung inventions enabling coffee makers, microwave ovens, and injection molding.   His explanation of the prosaic aluminum beverage can and the 16-mm film projector are masterpieces – short stories as fine as any in written literature.  He also did longer-form works including a book on the history of British airships.

But now, he has returned and one hopes to stay, examining the “engineering method” as he describes it.  A complement to the much better-known scientific method.

In addition to the steam turbine below, he looks at cathedrals, turbulence, and revisits the microwave magnetron.

Welcome back, Professor.

Youtube Channel: The Engineer Guy

 

Talking Giants: Dirac and De Broglie in their own voice

Two founders of quantum mechanics speak.  Dirac is interviewed (and too frequently interrupted) by Friedrich Hund, himself an eminent physicist known to spectroscopists everywhere.  De Broglie lived to 94 and his post-Nobel career included the premier seat at Académie Française.  Dirac had a reputation as a man of very few words.  80 years old at the time of filming,  one senses that this discussion was difficult for him.

Youtube Channel: mehranshargh

Youtube Channel: Nomen Nominandum

 

Virtue of Reality: Peter Dibble on Modulex

The pendulum of modern engineering has swung to asserting that digital models can always represent reality faster, cheaper, and better than any physical manifestation of it.  Mockups, prototypes, and test articles are out, “Digital twins” and augmented reality are in.  More’s the pity.  While much can be represented in CAD/CAM, the compute horsepower required to mimic the real world drains budgets as fast as it drains the power grid.  Very few have the savvy to accurately represent the range of physical phenomena in bits and then know when the model can be trusted.  The craftsmen who enabled the preceding revolutions are in retreat and in exchange we get ever increasing development times and costs despite the glowing promises of hype men and the C-suites that golf with them.

In that spirit, Oregonian Peter Dibble looks back fondly at Modulex, a Lego spinoff for architects to present concepts to their clients.  An ingenious change in dimension yielded bricks ideally suited to metric and Imperial drawing scales.  Sliceable parts, slopes, ridges, and custom colors yielded a system that grew well beyond its original intent into project management and signage.  A Mark-1 eyeball can look at, around, and  into such a physical representation and get some idea of its strengths and weaknesses.  Digital design software and Lego’s surprising hostility to the product line unfortunately sealed Modulex’s fate as a modeling tool.  The company lives on for signmaking.

Dibble’s channel is a trove of meticulously researched and well-presented histories emphasizing  the Pacific Northwest.  The Spruce Goose’s move from Long Beach to McMinnville is eye-opening.

Youtube Channel: Peter Dibble

 

Canon Fodder: “The Penelopiad” at City Garage

Maids of “The Penelopiad”
Photo by Paul Rubenstein, courtesy of City Garage Theatre

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
— Brecht A Worker Reads History

Whose and who, indeed?  In 2005, Margaret Atwood shook the dust off of The Odyssey and turned it to her own purpose looking at those left behind as Odysseus went off to war and wandering.  The stage adaptation of The Penelopiad receives a bracing, audacious performance as Santa Monica’s City Garage returns to full swagger.

Atwood casts a gimlet eye on the great men of Sparta and Ithaca where most lives didn’t matter and all the standards were double.  Her sympathies are squarely with Penelope and even moreso her maids who receive an untimely end upon Odysseus’s eventual return.  The novella is set in a timeless Hades as Penelope narrates her very lonely life.  In the play, she watches it unfold.  Despite ostensibly high station, she is pitiable – an afterthought to all  and always second fiddle  to her cousin Helen.  But that isn’t the generational servitude into which so many were born or taken as spoils of war.  “We too were children” say the maids, “We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen.”   It snaps how little has changed through the centuries.

The all female cast of thirteen portrays twenty five roles and the adaptation is a corker.   Peggy Flood is a wistful, melancholy spirit-Penelope watching Lindsay Plake relive her life.  Odysseus (Emily Asher Kellis,) woos, weds, and beds her before sodding off to recover her hated cousin – “the septic bitch,” in one of many fine turns of phrase.  Flood is one of two singly-cast, the rest weave in and out of a fluid, polymorphous chorus budding here as a suitor, there as a son, and collectively as a boat or an army through chant and shanty.  The script is eminently suited to Frédérique Michel’s idiosyncratic style and discreetly supported by Charles Duncombe’s production design.

Peggy Flood and the cast of “The Penelopiad”
Photo by Paul Rubenstein, courtesy of City Garage Theatre

With even Telemachus (Courtney Brechemin) taken from her to be raised by a nurse (Geraldine Fuentes,) Penelope bucks tradition and her in-laws to make work and a life for herself.  “Remember this – water does not resist. Water flows” said her Naiad mother (Angela Beyer) and daughter dutifully goes around obstacles she can’t go through.  She takes up weaving and stewards her husband’s estate in hopes of his pleasure upon his return.  Yes, she deals in slaves and selects twelve young ones for her inner circle.  They do her bidding in the house, at the loom, and much, much more when the suitors arriveThe maids are her eyes, ears, and arms in keeping the youthful louts somewhat at bay through directed canoodling.   When the shroud artifice goes awry, the suitors turn from mere pillaging to the rape of Penelope’s favorite, Melantho (Marissa Ruiz).  In a play full of CG’s hallmark nudity, this fully clothed scene shocks.   Atwood progressively ratchets the cynicism.    Penelope and Helen (Marie Paquim)  – both knowing how things turned out – lob barbs at each other, the latter as unrepentant and caustic in death as in life.  Clever Odysseus is a conniving businessman and silver-tongued devil.  The chorus snarks at his supposed heroics and marvels at his ability to avoid getting home for ten years.   And, no break for the lady of the house even upon his disguised return.  While she sleeps, father and son slaughter the suitors.  Egged on by the nurse, they snuff the loyal maids in thanks for helping the house stave off total ruin.   Isolated from birth, estranged from son and husband, Penelope can’t explain, complain, or mourn her only real family and has to accept the collateral dommage.

Although a couple of the choral interludes are a tad silly, the author’s concept and political vision come off like fine espresso – fragrant, dark, and bitter with an eye-opening kick.    The adaptation omits two chapters: “Anthropology Lecture” proposing an interesting literary theory and lobbing preemptive strikes against critics would have been draggy and hard to stage.  “The Trial of Odysseus” would have presented its own problems but starkly showed the man getting away with it to the horror of his victims.  Then as now, justice punches down.  Despite the sprawling saga, the production is a tight, symmetric two hours with intermission.  “Penelopiad” was in rehearsals in March 2020 just before the world went on hold.   In that time of shutdown the carpet pulled back and we saw at least briefly the countless, nameless “essential workers” risking all to make the world fit for the profiteers.  Atwood performs a similar service by turning a well-worn story on its head for a different perspective.  Wily Kinbote was right,  it can be the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and it is the commentator who has the last word.

Bergamot Station was alive and hopping on opening night with multiple galleries having their own events.  CG’s neighbor BBAX hosted the opening of textile artist Carmen Mardonez‘s solo show.  Brilliantly colored and explorable sails of cloth and yarn along with eerily humanoid sculptural shapes offered both preface and counterpoint to the equally nautical although somber play next door.  The artist echoes Penelope in her statement, “As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others.”  It is one of those confluence of forms that in an ideal world would be much more frequent in an art colony.  Unfortunately the galleries close up shop long before curtain leaving a mostly dark and unfestive parking lot for theatregoers.  The exhibition runs through January 2023 and is worth a stop.

Youtube Channel: L.A. Art Documents

The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood
Directed by Frédérique Michel
for The City Garage

11 November to 18 December 2022
Friday and Saturday 8pm,  Sunday 6pm
at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave, Building T1
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Admission: $30, Students/Seniors $25
Sundays “Pay What You Can” at the Door

Box Office: (310) 453-9939
or online

Running time: Two hours minutes with intermission
Masks requested but not required

Unspeakable Dreams, Smothering Desires
A solo exhibition by Carmen Mardonez
Curated by Marisa Caichiolo

12 November 2022 through January 2023
Tuesday – Friday, 11:30am – 5pm & Saturday, 12 – 6pm
at Building Bridges Art Exchange
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave, Building F2
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Free admission

A Shaft of Gold When All Around is Dark: JWST is operational

One last glorious gasp from a decayed and dead civilization.  JWST’s Mid Infrared Instrument observes Stephan’s Quintet.   What else will it be allowed to do before the American Taliban takeover?

JWST’s MIRI looks at Stephan’s Quintet. Courtesy NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute