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Solis posted:Toronto still uses these for GO Transit, or at least they did a few years ago when I was taking it for uni. Nope, they've all been replaced by RFID chip cards.
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Jul 10, 2013 14:05
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VikingSkull posted:Smokey himself is a great read for both successful and failed inventions, in addition to his wartime heroics and general status as a legendary crumudgeon. My father knew Smokey. His "prowess" wasn't just aerodynamics and invention - The man was a legendary loving cheat. He was the real-world god damned Snidely Whiplash. Half the regulations in place for NASCAR today (cars must fit a defined pattern that is verified by NASCAR with dimensional tooling, fuel lines must be straight, fuel tanks must be unmodified and a regulation size) are thanks to Smokey Yunick pulling tricks like "shrink every dimension of a car by 10%", "pigtail coil the fuel line so that it holds enough fuel for half a lap", "inflate a basketball inside the fuel tank so that it holds regulation quantity of fuel when tested, leave the valve outside the tank, deflate the ball and fill remaining capacity." Edit: None of this is intended to disparage Smokey at all. It's a testament to his ingenuity, resourcefulness, and tremendous balls that he's The Guy They Wrote The Book Around. Exit Strategy has a new favorite as of 14:25 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 14:17
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Goldskull posted:Obselete Train/Plane chat has been amazing in this thread, but I'm going to take it to a Bus tip: The Saverstrip. We had those for everyone in Manchester, but they were called Clippercards and they only packed ten journeys. The better analogy isn't Oyster cards, though, it's the Carnet tickets that are still in use wherever First Transport get to screw their customers.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:07
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Exit Strategy posted:My father knew Smokey. His "prowess" wasn't just aerodynamics and invention - The man was a legendary loving cheat. He was the real-world god damned Snidely Whiplash. Half the regulations in place for NASCAR today (cars must fit a defined pattern that is verified by NASCAR with dimensional tooling, fuel lines must be straight, fuel tanks must be unmodified and a regulation size) are thanks to Smokey Yunick pulling tricks like "shrink every dimension of a car by 10%", "pigtail coil the fuel line so that it holds enough fuel for half a lap", "inflate a basketball inside the fuel tank so that it holds regulation quantity of fuel when tested, leave the valve outside the tank, deflate the ball and fill remaining capacity." Goddamn. That level of cheating (without breaking the rules) takes true ingenuity.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:12
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Exit Strategy posted:"shrink every dimension of a car by 10%" To two cars, one of which he used as a daily so he could tell the judges "It's stock, come out and have a look at my street car to confirm".
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Jul 10, 2013 15:21
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Hey, if you're gonna have one set of parts made, you might as well have a couple and daily drive one to work the kinks out. Setup time/dies/molds are a massive part of production cost when doing low-quantity runs  (this is why I generally order 5 of any printed circuit board I design, the last one I did was $72 if I ordered one, $75 if I ordered 5... and parts to solder down ended up being $11.07 per board)
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Jul 10, 2013 15:28
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kastein posted:Goddamn. That level of cheating (without breaking the rules) takes true ingenuity. I wouldn't call him Snidely Whiplash, though. There's two types of cheating in racing. One form is doing something that is expressly against the rules, but hiding it so the inspectors don't find it. If Benetton managed to hide a traction control system in their car in 1994, this would be an example. There's been reports of teams hiding nitrous oxide systems -- specifically banned -- in Indy cars. I can think of one local racer who had a custom gearbox built and then fabricated documentation to prove it was a stock gearbox sold in Japan. That kind of cheating is not just frowned upon, it's the kind of thing that gets you banned. You'll always be known as a cheater and your records always suspect. But there's another form of cheating -- finding loopholes. Sure, the rules say you can only have a 14 gallon fuel tank .... but they never mention how long the fuel lines can be. It says the fuel cell must measure 14 gallons during inspection and cannot be replaced prior to the race ... but it doesn't say you can't change the internal volume after the measurement. The rules say the body panels have to be from a stock car ... but it doesn't say they have to be stock thickness, and you could theoretically acid dip them until they're literally paper thin. No one said you couldn't mount a big-rear end wing on the back or a sucker fan under the car. At least, not until you did it and started winning races. This kind of cheating isn't just tolerated, it's celebrated. This is where the best stories of racing come from -- and this is where Smokey Yunick excelled. He enjoyed it, and they had to write the book around him because he was going to find and push and manipulate every single loophole to gain an advantage, real or imagined. Calling him Snidely Whiplash does a real disservice to the man and what he stood for. Smokey never saw himself as a cheat, just a very clever manipulator of the rules. He might have been the best at it that the sport of racing has ever seen. A perfect example of this in modern racing is Adrian Newey. He's going to use every loophole and workaround he can find to bring back previously banned technology. You say he can't use traction control, but how exactly did you define it? Can you use a computer to watch revs and speed and gear ratios and estimate wheel spin based off those numbers? Is that traction control in the strictest sense of the word? It's crude and not nearly as good as the real thing, but will it provide an advantage? Can you even prove he's doing it?
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Jul 10, 2013 16:16
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Base Emitter posted:Speaking of weird aircraft, my Dad was an engineer for Avro Canada back in the day. They built this, the VZ-9 Avrocar: This thing was a classified project in basically every arm of the military, one at a time, for years, because it sucked. The original concept for it was a high speed aerial interceptor. It was supposed to lift off from a stationary spot on a runway and go zipping after enemy planes. Then they realized it was pretty slow so it became the "jeep of the skies":  seen here in concept art basically bouncing slightly upwards to fire a big gun. Then they finally got one built and it basically created a false seal to the ground, because it was forcing a tough cushion of air under itself. If it rose any higher the air would displace off in a random direction, and that displacement would send the aircar whizzing into a wall or something. They tried a bunch of fixes but they all either failed or just made the thing too heavy. For a real fun "floating on a cushion of air" vehicle, you want to talk about this thing:  That's the Russian Lun Ekranoplan. It weighs 440 tons. The big tubes on the back there are air to ground missile launchers. It takes a tremendous amount of thrust to get one of these (wingships) off the ground, thus the 8 hammerhead jets up there, but once they're up they basically float on a cushion of air they make, and can fly for long distances at low altitude. The concept was that they were basically the world's fastest boat, and could be kept in rivers and bays as mobile missile platforms. This one still exists, it's in drydock on a river somewhere, I think it was recently scrubbed from Google Earth for some reason.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:35
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Gwaihir posted:We used to have Wangs The trans thread is in E/N, bud
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Jul 10, 2013 18:05
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Exit Strategy posted:My father knew Smokey. His "prowess" wasn't just aerodynamics and invention - The man was a legendary loving cheat. He was the real-world god damned Snidely Whiplash. Half the regulations in place for NASCAR today (cars must fit a defined pattern that is verified by NASCAR with dimensional tooling, fuel lines must be straight, fuel tanks must be unmodified and a regulation size) are thanks to Smokey Yunick pulling tricks like "shrink every dimension of a car by 10%", "pigtail coil the fuel line so that it holds enough fuel for half a lap", "inflate a basketball inside the fuel tank so that it holds regulation quantity of fuel when tested, leave the valve outside the tank, deflate the ball and fill remaining capacity." The "they" in The Guy They Wrote The Book Around was actually Smokey, too. It's my favorite book of all time. You should make a post in the SAS NASCAR thread if you have any cool personal stories, we absolutely adore Smokey over there. I didn't want to post about his cheating here because that stuff was effective as all get out and most of it still works today. Obsolete by rules, maybe.
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Jul 10, 2013 22:08
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Goldskull posted:Nope, what you'd get (in my day anyway at Highschool, bear in mind I left 1995) were Public buses at the end of the school day at 2:50pm roll into the drop off point at the front of school, just off a main road, wait for the kids to roll out at 3, get on and go to you nearest stop near home. No such thing as Schoolbus picks you up from outside your house, more carpooling on a morning, walk in, or walk home, depending how far you lived away. Big rear end yellow schoolbuses we saw in films, and then my American Ex-girlfriend taught me what a Shortbus was about 6 years ago. Metro have decided to re-livery some buses and take school buses out of the control from private coach operators.  My school experience, however, was riding these:  They were just as rusty in 2004.
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Jul 11, 2013 00:33
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VikingSkull posted:The "they" in The Guy They Wrote The Book Around was actually Smokey, too. It's my favorite book of all time. Awesome second breath this thread has found, by the way.
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Jul 11, 2013 01:06
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Flipperwaldt posted:I don't know anything about motor sports, but from context I'm deducing that you meant to say Smokey is "The Guy" in The Guy They Wrote The Book Around. Well in the context of the rulebook, he's the guy "they" wrote it around. He also wrote an autobiography called The Best drat Garage In Town, and that was what I was talking about. He was a farm boy high school dropout born in the Depression, so it's filled with misspellings and quasi-racist poo poo you get from guys of that era. Though it's pretty easy to tell he wasn't a bigot in the stories he tells. Except maybe against the Japanese and Germans, which is kind of understandable. Seriously, if you're a fan of automotive/racing technology or history, WWII history, early alternative energy experiments, or just general badass stories, it's an excellent book. Everything from him inventing power steering, bending the rules in NASCAR, Indycar, or Trans Am, flying combat missions over Germany and his time with the Flying Tigers out of China. It's all in there. Here's a speech he gave at the end of his life at an awards banquet. Dull in spots, but it gives you a glimpse of what the guy was all about.
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Jul 11, 2013 01:34
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KozmoNaut posted:We still use those (same format, different design/coloring) in Denmark, they've been in use for at least 40 years now. Mostly because they just work. Even Boston has a proper working electronic fare system. Denmark is doing worse than Boston on public transport systems.
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Jul 11, 2013 04:09
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Imaginative bendings of regulations have lead to some interesting workarounds - for instance, rocket fuel for Formula 1 cars in the 80's. The ban on skirts and other ground effect devices meant manufactures had to go back to concentrating on making engines that went fast. One emerging technology at the time was the introduction of the turbo. The Renault RS01. I'm a little teapot...  This was the first turbocharged car to appear in 1977, and it didn't impress, other teams called it "The Yellow Teapot". The car's function was to be a working prototype and was extensively worked on over the seasons. Turbo suffered from lag when you accelerated making for unwholesome surges forwards. It also placed immense stress on the motor, the RS01 had cast-iron internals to try and cope. Renault persevered until finally scooping pole in 1979. Then people took notice. By then Renault had the advantage from years of development. The turbo era was characterized by flame spitting monsters that released tremendous horsepower. Despite the removal of skirts it was discovered the greater speed allowed for steeper wings so you now had increasingly fast and grippy cars on the tracks. So how do you go faster? BMW-Brabham had an answer. The rules stated that the cars must run on petrol similar to road cars - notably it must be at 102 octanes. BMW discovered adding toluene into the fuel kept to the octane limit, and delivered quite a kick - around 1300hp out of a 1.5L turbo engine. The downside is this stuff was expensive, $300 a liter as well as being poisonous. Of course BMW + rockets = rather nasty rumors that the fuel they had used was derived in part with BASF, a company that was part of IG Farben back in WWII and who had developed the fuel for the Nazi's. It wasn't actually true, but it made for a nice tale to spread around the pits. The FIA naturally responded by enforcing low engine pressures and banning turbos. However coming in 2014 is the return of turbocharged engines, in part from the efforts of creating a greener F1.
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Jul 11, 2013 05:44
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Call Now posted:Trolleybuses still function in my city and they totally own, dewiring happens incredibly rarely. Also they are more comfortable than normal buses Confirming that trolleybuses own; there's a line in front of my house here in Seattle. Metro bought a bunch of hybrid diesel/electric Breda buses back in the 90's for use in our downtown bus tunnel. Once the engines and drivetrains inevitably shat themselves they converted 59 of the Bredas to electric-only trolleybuses. They're surprisingly awesome, much quieter and faster than diesels, I can't understand why they wouldn't want to extend the overhead wire network to more areas or why they aren't more common nationwide 
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Jul 11, 2013 06:38
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Trollybuses are awesome over in Vancouver, too. Something tells me they've been slowly growing in popularity for 10-20 years now on a pretty large scale, but I could be wrong.
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Jul 11, 2013 08:42
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edit: ^heha rowdy mullet posted:Confirming that trolleybuses own; there's a line in front of my house here in Seattle. Metro bought a bunch of hybrid diesel/electric Breda buses back in the 90's for use in our downtown bus tunnel. Once the engines and drivetrains inevitably shat themselves they converted 59 of the Bredas to electric-only trolleybuses. They're surprisingly awesome, much quieter and faster than diesels, I can't understand why they wouldn't want to extend the overhead wire network to more areas or why they aren't more common nationwide Yep, just a bit farther north we have hybrid trolleybuses that can be separated from the overhead wires in seconds when needed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFFSrovWQDw UnfortunateSexFart has a new favorite as of 08:46 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 08:44
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Foxhound posted:Been waiting for a while for this sentence to pop up, as it inevitably would. Ansaldobreda bolloxed up their delivery of trams to Gothenburg too! The new Ansaldobreda trams are the #1 reason I started using my bike to commute to work. Thank you, Ansaldobreda, for helping me lose ~20 pounds over the course of a summer and generally staying fit.  Content: I've still got one of these babies up on a shelf, in working condition.   The Intellivision
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Jul 11, 2013 08:46
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Comrade Koba posted:
When I was a kid my cousin had a job at Toys R Us and for some reason these things were still on sale well into the NES era, well my cousin decided he liked his intellevision too much and swapped out the internals from his old model for the current version being sold. I think he still has it some 25 years later.
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Jul 11, 2013 08:55
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Someone made a joke in a D&D thread about wanting a government run by a benevolent AI. Then someone linked PROJECT CYBERSYN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn quote:Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 (during the government of President Salvador Allende) aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer.[2] Just check out how rad 70s sci-fi the control room was:  This sounds bonkers for the 70s, and the name Cybersyn sounds like you're just asking for it to go insane and evil, but apparently it worked quite well. Unfortunately when the military took over they destroyed the systems 'cerebral cortex'.
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Jul 11, 2013 10:56
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theironjef posted:
Oh man, there are a few videos of that thing in motion on youtube and they are inexplicably rad. Seeing one of those flying (hovering? air...boating?) in person would be so cool. Bonus: the guy in this video has an insanely strange voice. Reminds me of the guy on NPR who says URL's like "dubble-u dubble-u dubble-u dot NPR dot oh ar gee." Content edit: Some doof in my fifth grade class spilled a weirdly-large bottle of white-out on my classroom's carpet, so our teacher decided we could only use these horrible bastards from that point on:  "Yes, let's take an already dying concept like white-out and make it so that the tape only sticks to the paper once every three days! Bonuses all around!" Radio Help has a new favorite as of 12:29 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 12:16
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Someone made a joke in a D&D thread about wanting a government run by a benevolent AI. Then someone linked PROJECT CYBERSYN: Oh come on, any fool can see Cybersyn is only 1 step away from Cyberdyne. The military did what they had to do.
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Jul 11, 2013 12:28
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Someone made a joke in a D&D thread about wanting a government run by a benevolent AI. Then someone linked PROJECT CYBERSYN: Just machines to make big decisions Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision We'll be clean when their work is done, We'll be eternally free and eternally young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sogYgHlNnqo (I have this album on vinyl, the best obsolete technology)
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Jul 11, 2013 13:24
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That album is a textbook case of perfection in digital recording, which was new technology at the time. It's a reference grade recording and is great for system demos. Speaking of which, remember SPARS code? Those three letters on CDs, tapes and records that told you the analog and digital status of the production chain. wikipedia posted:The three letters of the code have the following meanings: It was pretty much abandoned essentially because it's a limited system.
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Jul 11, 2013 14:38
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Goldskull posted:Obselete Train/Plane chat has been amazing in this thread, but I'm going to take it to a Bus tip: The Saverstrip.  PS: Sorry to be a party pooper, but this train, plane, car and bus chat really belongs in AI.
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Jul 11, 2013 14:40
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edit: Probably got too carried away with Chair Chat, carry on.
an AOL chatroom has a new favorite as of 14:52 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 14:41
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einTier posted:I wouldn't call him Snidely Whiplash, though. Make no mistake, here. The Snidely Whiplash bit up there wasn't meant as an insult, just a nod at the ridiculously inventive lengths to which the man would go to get an edge, which is something that any engineer can appreciate and should celebrate. The only time I met Smokey was when I was about twelve, and from what little I remember, he was an awesome guy. I don't have any personal stories involving him, but I'll try and press my dad for some.
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Jul 11, 2013 15:29
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[quote="Ron Burgundy" post=""41734556"] Speaking of which, remember SPARS code? Those three letters on CDs, tapes and records that told you the analog and digital status of the production chain. It was pretty much abandoned essentially because it's a limited system. [/quote]I've got some cds with a code like that. I get that it's not terribly useful or relevant for the end user, but I don't see how it's a limted system.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:14
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Ron Burgundy posted:It was pretty much abandoned essentially because it's a limited system. Funny, I always thought it was abandoned after all new releases were DDD.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:58
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Mr. Flunchy posted:
Businesses these days are all about decision support systems, dashboarding, etc - for example, Proctor & Gamble's Decision Sphere, which looks like at any moment a Bond villain is going to appear on the screen to demand a few billion dollars. I thought that the idea of automated/computerized decision support/analytics was a fairly new one since the technology wasn't there to support it... boy, was I wrong!
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Jul 11, 2013 17:59
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There was a time when all the indexing and filing done in libraries was manual. Actual people needed to keep track of where a book was, what it was about, who had checked it out, and when it was due. This took a lot of intellectual and manual work. Originally books' metainformation was tracked in handwriting in books, later by typing on cards. The game-changing mechanical device was the Gaylord Model C Book Charger, introduced in 1930. This device made a mighty ker-chunk that anybody who used it has never forgotten.  In the Gaylord Model C system, every book had a charge card in an attached pocket. The charge card had the book's author, title, and call number. Every patron had a library card that had a metal (later plastic) charge plate.  The charge plate usually had a number; somewhere else in the library's filing system was a list of numbers and the corresponding patron name/address.To check out a book, you put the patron's library card in the front slot of the charger. Then you pushed the charge card down into the back slot. There was a ker-chunk (this was the important part) while the machine simultaneously bit a chunk out of the edge of the card and impressed the current date and the library card on the charge card in purple ink. The librarian then stamped the date the book was due on the date itself and filed the stamped charge card under the due date. Working librarians breathed a sigh of relief when this process was automated. To keep it running required a lot of hand-filing and hand-searching, not to mention typing replacement cards, repairing cards and pockets, and replacing the ribbon in the charge machine. I miss the whole system, although I don't miss the work it took to keep it running.  .
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Jul 11, 2013 18:52
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Arsenic Lupin posted:There was a time when all the indexing and filing done in libraries was manual. Actual people needed to keep track of where a book was, what it was about, who had checked it out, and when it was due. This took a lot of intellectual and manual work. Originally books' metainformation was tracked in handwriting in books, later by typing on cards. I had no idea those were so old. Our local library upgraded to those in the early 90s. Don't think it lasted the decade.
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Jul 11, 2013 19:07
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Radio Help posted:Content edit: Some doof in my fifth grade class spilled a weirdly-large bottle of white-out on my classroom's carpet, so our teacher decided we could only use these horrible bastards from that point on: Old school white-out was obviously superior in many ways (eg. pranks, trying to get high), but there was no fun taking it apart. I must have carefully disassembled at least twelve of those in my final years in grade school... always a fine distraction from education – not that there was much to disassemble. a rowdy mullet posted:They're surprisingly awesome, much quieter and faster than diesels, I can't understand why they wouldn't want to extend the overhead wire network to more areas or why they aren't more common nationwide Go into AI and ask that. Car culture killed mass transit in North America, and buses killed trolley cars - it's a pretty interesting story and all of the big plays were accomplished before 1960. There are probably lots of posters in this thread who know how, for instance, GM bought out trolley car lines, demolished them, and replaced them with bus routes. Profit ober alles, etc...
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Jul 11, 2013 19:12
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Call Now posted:Trolleybuses still function in my city and they totally own, dewiring happens incredibly rarely. Also they are more comfortable than normal buses  And no I'm not actually joking either for some bizarre reason certain trolley buses are actually dual mode meaning that they switch over to diesel or electric.
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Jul 11, 2013 20:14
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MadScientistWorking posted:Unless your in Boston where it happens every single time you take the bus. That's only the silver line though, right? Or do you mean like the green line west of Kenmore?
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Jul 11, 2013 20:42
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MadScientistWorking posted:Unless your in Boston where it happens every single time you take the bus. Philadelphia has that as well.
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Jul 11, 2013 20:54
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Pilsner posted:PS: Sorry to be a party pooper, but this train, plane, car and bus chat really belongs in AI. Agreed. It has drifted away from "obsolete and failed technology" and into just technology in general. For example, trolleybuses are a well-established and successful technology. Here's an example of obsolete technology: the Stanley Steam Car:  It looks like a normal early automobile until you open the hood:  Here's a video by Jay Leno demonstrating how to start the car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnab5sG9PQs
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Jul 11, 2013 21:25
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Elim Garak posted:That's only the silver line though, right? Or do you mean like the green line west of Kenmore?
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Jul 11, 2013 22:14
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Brother Jonathan posted:Steam Car stuff Steam engines are so cool  Here's a picture of an early locomotive that I saw last month:  And here's another Leno video about a car with a propulsion system that never caught on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2A5ijU3Ivs If I could have any classic car, it would probably be a turbine car, because holy hell they are neat.
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Jul 12, 2013 00:25
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