Paddles around Britain

Ian and Julia have given themselves an interesting little project - to paddle in the sea at every seaside town and village in Britain. Their blog at http://www.paddlesaroundbritain.me.uk/ details their efforts.

They have only just started, so a few places in North Devon, North Wales and Dorset have so far been completed. It must be a great way to see the coast of Britain.

Ice creams are optional.

Stupid blogpost comment of the day

The Internet allows anyone with half a brain to make comments and pronouncements on topics that they have not the least knowledge of. This blog is, of course, a supreme example.


I allow most inane comments to wash over me, but some are hard to ignore. Today I was browsing a FlightGlobal article about the A380 engine failure. FlightGlobal blog posts are often worth reading as knowledgeable people comment, and the signal to noise ratio is quite high.


However, a comment by someone called Jen made me both furious and amused:

RR do not have the metallurgy expertise that GE or Pratt & Whitney Rockedyne have unless they steal the technology. Advanced metallurgy is an extremely important factor in modern turbofan engines.

Which shows that (s)/he is just a fan boy who knows little about the industry. The last sentence is, of course, true: metallurgy (and especially the weird mechanics of crystal growth in superalloys) is essential in modern engines design. The idea that Rolls Royce could not do it without stealing the technology is the bit that gets my goat. S/he offers no evidence, just wild accusations.


Materials science is one area of technology that we Brits are particularly good at. It requires both scientific and engineering prowess, and the presence in the country of Rolls Royce and others has allowed us to be competitive. We should not rest on our laurels, however: China, Russia and others have the capability and desire to overtake the West in this and other areas.


This is where blind patriotism such as Jen's is so dangerous. The mere idea that another country might be capable of making competitive technology to America is such an anathema that s/he has to accuse them of stealing it. After all, only American engineers can do this cool stuff, okay?


And whilst s/he is in this happy la-la land, other countries will continue to make progress. And if they do a good job and actually beat American technology, then it can only be because they stole it.


Putting your fingers in your ears and downplaying the competition is not a way to advance.

Review of the 2010 Formula 1 season

So it is finally over. 19 weekends spent glued to the TV, my heart racing as the red lights go out and 24 cars accelerate away. 19 weekends of joy, anger, excitement and hope; 19 weekends showcasing of the best in engineering (and HRT [*]).

In previous years I have said that I would stop watching Formula One. The politics and chicanery was becoming too much, detracting from the important thing: racing. Despite the threats, I have never actually stopped watching; there is always a drama awaiting. Fortunately 2010 repaid my commitment in spades.

It has been a truly great season, with six competitive drivers in three competitive cars. There have been crashes, brainfarts and controversy, but also some great racing.

For the final race this weekend, there was an unprecedented situation with four drivers in a position to win the championship. Alonso was in the lead, and Hamilton would have needed a miracle to win. My wish going into this weekend was for the following outcome.

• Webber to win the championship. He is the older driver, and will not have many more opportunities to win. He had probably made less mistakes  than the other top drivers this season, but also found it hard to match the speed of his competitors, especially in qualifying. In my opinion, he would have been the most deserving champion.
• Hamilton. He has done well in what is probably the third-most competitive car (behind Red Bull and Ferrari). He has made a few mistakes, and also had some poor luck, for instance his puncture in the penultimate lap of the Spanish GP.
• Vettel. The young gun; I was full of admiration for the way he has handled himself before this year, but some arrogance has crept in during 2010. Blaming Webber for their collision in Turkey was by far the lowlight of his stellar year.
• Alonso. I really did not want Alonso to become champion after the German GP team orders debacle. If he had won by less than seven points (the amount he gained from the enforced swap with Massa), then the championship would have been seen as a joke by many.

So I am satisfied, if not overly happy, with the result. Perversely, perhaps the biggest winner is Alonso, who has done an amazing job in recovering during the second half of the season. He will be remembered for a number of superb drives in the second half of the year that brought him right back into contention.

It has truly been a great season. Red Bull's early lack of reliability prevented them from romping away with both championships, and Ferrari and McLaren worked hard to catch up. I can only hope that the 20 races next season are just as exciting, despite the wide-ranging rule charges and a change in tyre supplier.

* I find it amazing that the newcomer Spanish team this year, Hispania Racing Team, named themselves in such a way that the abbreviation in English is the same as a treatment for menopausal women. Surely they realised the problem before they named themselves, or did they not care?

Richard Noble

Richard Noble is a unique man. In 1983 he beat the land speed record in his Thrust 2 car, recording a maximum speed of 633.468 mph.

Thrust 2 was designed, built and run on a shoestring budget, much smaller than some of his rivals. Due to the work of his team, Britain regained the land-speed record.

Move on 14 years, and other teams were looking at breaking that record. This, of course, is the way that record attempts go: one team breaks a record, and other teams look at how they can respond; national honour is at stake. Richard Noble saw this activity, and wondered if he should try and increase the record, to put it out of the reach of the other teams. A milestone figure lies a short distance above 733 MPH - the sound barrier.

Thus Thrust SSC was born. On October 15, 1997, Thrust SSC, driven by RAF pilot Andy Green, reached a speed of 763 mph on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, breaking the sound barrier in the process.

In doing so, Richard Noble became a unique man in the annals of the land-speed record. Most holders of the record raise funding, build and drive the machine themselves, or lead the team that does so. That is utterly understandable; if you are going to risk your life, you want to be in charge. Yet Richard Noble, the fastest man on earth, knew that he did not have the skills to drive Thrust SSC. What it needed was someone who had reactions and experience far greater than his own. So a competition was started to find a relevant driver, and RAF pilot Andy Green was selected. In the process, Richard Noble organised for his own record to be broken by someone else.

It was an incredibly noble thing to do.

Move on another eleven years from Thrust SSC, and again Noble is working on the Bloodhound SSC project. Having broken the sound barrier, they are going for the next obvious target - 1,000 MPH. This is an amazing speed - 237 MPH over the current record, and it will be by far the biggest ever jump in the land-speed record.

Noble has not been resting on his laurels in the intervening years . In 1998 JCB, a British construction company (and based right under where I used to go to school), had a problem. For decades they had used engines provided by British company Perkins for many of their machines. Then it was announced that Perkins was being taken over by JCB's massive US competitor, Caterpillar. Not wanting the control of their engines to be in the hands of their competitor, JCB set about the task of designing and making their own. In 2004, the first JCB444 engine rolled off the production line.

JCB wanted to do something to publicise this new capability. As well as having the JCB 'Dancing Diggers' display team (which I saw on several occasions when I was a child), they also built the JCB GT, the fastest digger on earth, capable of easily reaching 100 MPH. But JCB wanted something extra, and decided upon the diesel-powered land speed record. But who could they get to run such a project?

Step forward Richard Noble and Andy Green. They and their large team designed, built and drove the JCB DieselMax car. In 2006 this got them the diesel-powered land speed record, a speed of 350 MPH, and improvement of 90MPH over the previosu record. In doing so they only ran in the fifth out of six gears - the limitation on the speed was down to the tyres. If they had wanted, they could have pushed the car further.

So I wish Noble the best of luck with the Bloodhound SSC. Not all of his projects have worked out, but I hope this one will. We can all dream impossible dreams, but it takes a special man to make them possible.

Moorlands and City Railway

On Saturday Sencan and I went on a little train trip in the Peak District. This was the first day of operation (as part of a gala) of the old Leek to Cauldon Low railway line. Regular passenger services last ran along this route in 1935, and freight operation ended in the early 1990s.

The track was left in place, but by earlier this year it was a mess, with young trees growing between the rails, and the track itself was invisible through the vegetation. The Cauldon Low quarry is at the northern end of the quarry, and the twenty miles of line between Stoke and Cauldon Low were bought by a new company called Moorlands and City Railway. Their website has some pictures of the work in progress.

The gradients on the newly-reopened lines are severe, and an indication of the late construction of this line - it opened in 1902, when locomotives could cope with these gradients, even with long trains. The trains on Saturday had a banking locomotive in the form of a diesel-electric Class 33. What is more, I got to see 'my' 8F steam locomotive, 48624, running for the first time (I am a very small shareholder in the 8F).

It was an interesting day, and their plans look interesting but expensive. If you had told me last year that this route would be reopen by now then I would not have believed you - a great deal of monry must have been thrown at this project. The train was absolutely packed, with standing room only, but the fantastic scenery more than made up for the crush.

They have future plans to extend their lines north into Leek, and south towards Alton, the latter of which will connect Alton Towers with the national rail network for the first time. The next work will connect their lines with Network Rail at Stoke next year, after that stretch of overgrown track has been renovated.

It is interesting work, but poses one obvious question: where are they getting all the money for all of this work?

Hacked websites

I have often heard of various websites being hacked, but I have never accidentally stumbled across one. Today, however, whilst looking for a campsite in Stanedge, I went to the Carriage House Inn website (http://www.carriage-house.co.uk/). Their site has been hacked and the front page replaced by a pride screen.

This appears to have been done by a group based at king-hack.com who, I guess, are Saudi-based. Quite why a small pub in the middle of the Pennines caught their ire, I do not know. Perhaps it was just easy game.

Strangely, the website of the White House Inn on Blackstone Edge also appears to have been hacked, not necessarily by the same group.

This sort of thing always makes me slightly nervous about my own website. Web security is difficult at the best of times, and there are many attack vectors that the unscrupulous can use. Writing secure software is exceptionally difficult, especially when using legacy languages such as C that were designed to produce efficient, rather than secure, code. Then you have the problems in  correctly configuring server software, ensuring that software is up to date, and the inevitable human factors play a large part.

At uni a lecturer, seeing that I was already a competent coder (I had worked as a freelance programmer for several years), tasked me to write a simple worm that would spread around the network of computers in the room. This proved to be exceptionally easy using assembler and well-known bugs in the Novell software. Within half an hour, the other computers in the lab all displays my 'Hello World!" message. It was harmless, and I was careful to place limits on what the worm would do.

That was the last time I ever attempted to do anything like that. It just does not interest me, and there is little you can do that will be meaningful and not cause harm. I understand the excitement of hacking, but wish that they would put their energies into more constructive pursuits.

Inspirational songs when writing

Below are some of the songs that I can listen to over and over when writing; songs that do not distract me, yet take my mind soaring to undiscovered places.

Many of these take me back to previous times and places; this seems to disconnect my mind if I'm having trouble writing.

Kate Bush, the Wedding List.
This video is particularly weird, in a way that Kate Bush could only achieve. It is such a shame (albeit understandable) that she only ever toured once.

Al Stewart, Old Admirals.
I have admired this song for some time. It is about the life and times of Admiral Fischer, who revolutionised the Royal Navy. Sencan and I got married on HMS Warrior, which was one of the ships that Fischer served on early in his career.

Al Stewart, Roads to Moscow
This song is about a Russian soldier's experience in the Second World War. The acoustic work on this song is superb, as are the lyrics: "Two broken Tigers on fire in the night flicker their souls to the wind."

Kate Bush, Pi
A song about a man obsessed by numbers, sung by Kate Bush. How can it get any better (or geekier).

Pet Shop Boys, Fugitive (Richard X Extended Mix)
There is something about this song (especially the intro) that sends my mind soaring.

Phil Oakley, Together in electric dreams
Gloriously dated, dreamy, ecstatic electro-pop.

Momus, The Homosexual
A great song by the king of perverted pop music

Momus, the Hairstyle of the Devil
My wife gave me a CD years ago, whilst we were working together but not in a relationship. She specifically pointed out this song to me - I wonder if she was trying to send me a message? Again, it is a song that can be playing in the background as I write, the words and tune just sweeping over me.

New order, 1963
No-one seems to really know what this song is about, yet it moves me every time I listen to it.

Suzanne Vega, Tom's Diner
A simple, gentle song, which the music (literally) does not get in the way of. It takes skill to make a capella work. Unusually, the D.N.A. remix (which includes music) is also eminently listenable.

The Beautiful South, The Table
For many years the Beautiful South were one of my favourite bands, and it is hard to pick the one song that means the most to me. Yet, for listening to whilst writing, there can be only one. The Table is a simple song about an ordinary table. The official video (sadly not currently online) - featuring the table being dragged all over Ireland - is instantly memorable, and when I hear it I think of long journeys and the coast.

The Beatles, She's leaving home
I am unsure why this story helps me write - McCartney's speaks rather than sings most of the song, yet it sends my mind flying, although not necessarily to good places.

Joan Armatrading, Love & Affection
A song that takes me back to a walk that I was doing along the Grand Union Canal in London in 1994; I had just talked to my then-girlfriend on my mobile, and was looking across the water towards a canalside supermarket. This song always transport me back to that time, when I was a very different person. The song never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Pet Shop Boys, A man could get arrested
One of their early songs from the mid-eighties. Somehow I can disregard the heavy electro-pop beat and the words take me away. Usually best when I am writing a fight scene.
The linked video has the song liked marvellously to the recent 'Sherlock Holmes' film.

Kate Bush, Babooshka.
The favourite song of an ex of mine, for years I could not listen to this song without crying. Oh, and Kate Bush is absolutely gorgeous in the video.

Madness, the Bed and Breakfast man.
Another little-known song by a famous band. This is another song that should not really help someone concentrate, but for some reason it really sends my mind soaring.

So there you go, a fairly strange mix of pop songs. And yes, I am a child of the eighties.