smart roadworks

One of my regular travel routes includes lengthy roadworks where a stretch of motorway is being converted into 'Smart Motorway'. It's one of those phrases that I've always guessed I understood, but finally googled it to be sure. Like I expected, it's all about active traffic management with overhead gantries and automatic speed limits based upon time of day.

Ahah, you think - surely that's a 'controlled motorway', like large pieces of the M25?

Well, the difference appears to be that a smart motorway doesn't have a hard shoulder. Like those bits of motorway around Birmingham, the hard shoulder is converted into a live lane.

It is supposed to be a way of widening a road for less money. I gather the widening cost for changing from hard shoulder into a lane is between £5-15m per mile. That compares with a mile of new three lane motorway costing about £25m per mile. It is all so expensive that that the latest figures are starting to quote the costs in £ per kilometre, which I suppose is designed to make it all sound less.

The curious thing is, the new extra lane is the repurposing of an existing lane, so I'm not quite sure how the figures really stack up? Let's take a figure somewhere in the middle of the £5m-15m quotation for the repurposed lane. £10m for change of purpose from hard shoulder to fourth lane.

Now lets take a mile of typical motorway. Three lanes and a hard shoulder.

Quick sums. One re-purposed lane = £10m. Three lanes = £25m. So one lane = £8.5m (approx) or £6.5m if we take the hard shoulder into account. There's something that doesn't quite add up properly about these numbers (I know I've rounded the figures). Why would the Smart Motorway mile cost be higher than laying a brand new stretch?

Then we get the safety question. No hard shoulder, so cars that conk out have to stop in lane one (if they can make it across).

I already regularly see people going through the red crossed lanes on motorways or down the hard shoulder in traffic jams, so there's going to be some challenges if they move to no shoulder and refuges at presumably one kilometre intervals.

It'll be soon enough that we get to find out. The current roadworks and narrow lanes have been in place for over a year now. Just over one more year of cones to go and then we'll be back to normal, albeit with the smart motorway running.

asteroid approach apropos apophis

Today was one of those asteroid near miss days. We had 1.5 mile wide asteroid 86666 (2000 FL 10) pass by earth. When I originally looked at some of the artist pictures, I thought it was surprisingly close to not be mentioned more prominently.

Then I noticed the distance. 15m miles. Yes 15 million miles. The moon is about 230,000 miles away, so that asteroid is more than 60 times further away.

How about Mars distance? Mars ellipses around the sun at between 141m and 228m miles. We're around 94m miles from the sun, so the closest gap between us is somewhere around 40m miles. That would make the asteroid's passing gap something like between a third and a half the distance to Mars at its closest point to earth.

They set up a global Asteroid Day this year, for the first time ever, to spend the looking for potential asteroids on track for earth. I don't think they have found any yet needing Bruce Willis (or substitute) to be called out. The Americans are building a so called space fence which goes live in 2018, but seems to be more about clearing paths for warplanes through low-earth orbit space.

The next identifies biggie asteroid moment isn;t until 2029. It's an intriguing one called Apophis, which has already passed us once recently and is coming back for a second close look.

Apophis is predicted to whizz past earth at around 24,000 miles distance, which is actually slightly closer than geostationary satellites. Given the 2,271 satellites in current orbit plus 200 defunct satellites and space debris, I guess there's a real chance that something might get pranged by that asteroid?

don’t count your owls before they are delivered*

Those night owl logos are starting to appear on parts of the Tube, ahead of the opening of the all-night service.

The design is quite clever, modernising the old night bus owl logo and even working in the dot from the lower case "i" from TfL's preferred typeface.

There's a great TfL style guide which describes their entire signage design in around 200 pages, for anyone THAT keen.

I can't help also noticing the Seoul night bus symbol, which somehow seems to be a step on the route.

And now I'm wondering whether they will put one on platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross?

*Albus Dumbledore

shiny happy crunchy building

I've had plenty of office moves over the years including every form of floor repacking, and experienced many of the ergonomic trends to get more people into the available space.

Yes, I've had those boinging seats, the relaxation swing area, the beach scene, the special hoteling pedestals and even the electric height-adjustable desking favoured by certain Scandinavian countries.

I've also probably been in more temporary offices than proper permanent ones, as a by-product of corporate lifestyle where whatever office space is found isn't quite enough and then another building nearby has to be leased for the over-spill.

I'm finding a current situation slightly amusing, where the building I was in yesterday was built as overspill for another building nearby. In order to do it, the previous building on the space had to be demolished. The construction crews brought in every form of Tonka Toy imaginable and that included a Rock Monster building eater.

Simply put, you could point the big yellow machine at a building and it would somehow ingest it whole and spit out rock pebbles at the back. Before the current building was constructed, we'd look out of the windows of the one nearby and watch the Rock Monster at work. It's not every day you see a whole headquarters building gobbled to dust.

Or is it?

I was in the shiny-shiny replacement building this week and when I looked out of the window I could see the old building. When I say old, it was late 20th Century.

Guess what?

The bright yellow Extec C12+ was at work crunching its way through that very building. I could marvel at the 350-hp Caterpillar C-9 industrial diesel engine and the large vibrating feeder with grizzly and separate discharge conveyor for fine rock. Now I was in the new building watching my old vantage point destroyed before a new even shinier building would take form.

And the overspill of people from the current building? They are over the road in yet another temporary building.

Time for that Queen song maybe?

"And another one, and another one, and another one bites the dust."

all watched over by machines of loving grace (rebooted)

One of the side-effects of the kitchen replacement is the shock testing we've given to the various electrical circuits in the house.

The electricians had to test the 30 amp and earth leakage trips (sounds like a space movie?) in order to issue a new certificate. It meant having the power turned on and off about 10 times, sometimes in quick succession.

We've an ever-increasing number of connected devices here - along the lines of the internet of things/thingyverse - so it was a good test of general robustness.

I'd already switched off the servers, but realised the house nowadays has myriad home automation devices. I wondered if they would all survive and restart or whether it would be like the olden days with VHS recorders, where everyone eventually had them with the flashing clock because it was too much trouble to re-programme.

In practice everything seems to work.

The wifi, the BT broadband router, and the various computers all regained their links to the internet.

The home automation hubs for the hue lights, harmony media control, nest heating and smoke detectors also seem to have resynchronised. I'd previously mused about whether a 'home reset' would be troublesome, but so far everything seems to have figured out how to restart gracefully.

As Richard Brautigan said:
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

almost time to reboot the kitchen

Now we are on the last leg of the kitchen refit, it's time to take a peep at the manuals. There seems to be more than, say, with an Aga. The user guide for the oven came with a huge set of software licences, similar to the kind of things you get when installing Windows.

It seems to include software from Texas Instruments, jpeg, The Wide Project, Kronos EGL, Open GL ES, Freetype, ucdn, GIF Workspace, Harfbuzz and Imagination Technology GPU drivers. The copyrights include references to Codethink, Google, Red Hat, MIT, World Wide Web Consortium and even SGI.

What could possibly go wrong?

taking the biscuit

A slight diversion today, into the world of biscuits.

We've had a few tradespeople around over the last couple of weeks, and as well as coffee and tea, there's been a need for an ample biscuit supply.

That includes the currently half price choccy selection from Marks, which is an easy crowd pleaser. They are mainly traditional biscuit types and disappear at a great rate.

Co-incidentally, this week Time Out has just done a survey of the top 27 retro biscuits, ranked worst to best and I couldn't help but take a Peak Freans at the result.

No great surprise or spoiler that the fig roll was bottom at 27.

Shockers further up the chart though, with one of my favourites languishing at around number 19.

That's the Chocolate Bourbon, which should, by rights be in at least the top 10 and probably the top 5. Even the Hobnob proved controversial and garnered a surprise ranking.

I won't spoil the rest by describing Time-Out's so-called winner, but let's just say that anything that needs an animated furry padger or banda or whatever it is to advertise should automatically be disqualified.

Wordless Wednesday: a skip in time?

OK, two pictures.

white engine or black engine TDi?

Driving along the motorway today I noticed several commonplace situations. High powered sports cars with one occupant. Outside lane speeders. Tailgaters using their brakes to keep a minimum distance. Cars parked in jams in the cone sections with the engine left running. Plenty of easy ways to create higher emissions.

Later I found the definition for the UK emissions test, devised in 1970 and last updated in 1997. It uses the Urban, Extra-Urban and Combined tests. The Urban is self explanatory, simulating stop-start driving from cold in a built-up area. Extra Urban is actually about driving at speeds averaging 39mph and up to 75mph in a non-urban environment. The Combined is simply the addition of the two tests. I was interested to see how many miles of variation were covered.

Any guesses? 10 miles urban and 30 miles non-urban? Maybe a combined varied total of, say, 40-50 miles?

Oh no.

Urban is 2.5 miles. Non-Urban is 4.3 miles. Combined is therefore 6.8 miles.

They do repeat the tests multiple times, but it is still a very simple and predictable formula.

I decided to have a pry into the world of car testing. There seem to be several basic ploys:

1) Thin, low rolling resistance over-inflated tyres.
2) Changing the wheel geometry to optimise it for the test conditions.
3) Changing the car lubricants to low resistance variants that don't need to be warmed.
4) Adjusting the engine management software to optimise the test *cough*
5) Disconnecting the alternator, which otherwise sucks power.
6) Switching off all the ancillary systems like air-conditioning, heating and similar.
7) Removing passenger wing mirror and taping over car body gaps to reduce drag.
8) Using the agreed ability to reduce the findings by 4% to cover experimental inaccuracies.

There's more, but this is enough to get an idea of how the test results will start to veer 20%-30% away from the figures stated in advertisements and brochures.

The above situation isn't the basis of the current emission testing claims, but is possibly another example of how a whole industry routinely deploys ruses to achieve the best results in their marketing outputs. No-one has cared that much about the exaggerated claims.

A quick example is the popular Ford Fiesta, which I arbitrarily selected to check the numbers. Autocar's review said "all 1.0-litre Fiestas apparently do 65.7mpg...expect something in the mid 40s from the turbos and early 50s for the non turbo." Parkers review of the 1.0L Fiesta said "...claimed to average 65.7mpg. Driven normally it'll probably return between 40mpg and 50mpg." Okay, these are respectably high figures, but still less than the 'apparently/claimed' figures.

So now we get the outrage about Volkswagen leaving a test detection mode enabled in the Bosch supplied engine management systems. I love that the press talk about a special defeat device as if it is another piece of hardware.

My simple view is it depends whether it's a white engine or a black engine.

The 'white' 2.0L TDI was an older design without a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. An SCR squirts atomised urea into the exhaust to cause the nitrous oxide to break down, creating lower emissions. The white engine was about to be replaced with the black engine which one includes an AdBlue system to do the NOX reduction.

Maybe the naughty engine management software was originally intended for the bridging period between the older white engine and the newer black one?

It's fascinating now that cars are more or less computers on wheels or X-by-wire as the trade calls it. One of my prior cars had the then new technology of brake by wire, also supplied by Bosch. It self-reported an error at a certain point and I took it to the man at the service department.

"Ahah," he said. "That'll be the Sensotronic brake system, one thousand guineas please, sir..." He winked.

It turns out that the software counted braking actuations and was designed to report itself after a certain number. Fortunately it also transpired that the car manufacturer abandoned the system and recalled all the vehicles that used it. The service guy's wink indicated that I could have the whole system replaced under warranty (just before I sold the car). I shall watch for the re-emergence of this type of system (iBooster anybody?) in electric and hybrid cars over the coming years.

So in the current situation Volkswagen did something wrong. The lawyers and 'traders' will make sure that they take a huge dive. I suppose there will be class actions as more lawyers sniff the polluted air. But there's also a kind of hypocrisy as many folk still aspire to gas guzzlers.

The immensely popular Ford F150 truck in the USA only manages around 16-17mpg and splutters out 407g per mile of CO2. That's about 4 times the CO2 of the aforementioned Fiesta, or more than double the emission of a Ford Transit van. Curiously the NOX emissions don't feature on the general marketing blurb, while the 0-60mph, mpg and CO2 do.

I still wonder how many people even know their car's CO2 level?

Yet we are now all hearing about the NOX emissions in the VW saga, which will presumably kill the tiny US market for all types of diesel car for the foreseeable future.

To my surprise, that F-150 monster is still petrol (gasoline) only. With a rumoured first ever diesel version perhaps slated for 2018.

But that was before the scandal.

Blood supermoon eclipse

I took a mid-evening snap of the moon on Sunday, thinking I might have a peep at the blood moon eclipse at around 3.15am on Monday morning.

I somehow woke at 2.45am and decided to take a look at what was happening. Would there be a clear sky? Would I be able to see anything?

Although the moon had moved to a completely different part of the sky, I could see the unfolding of the supermoon eclipse. First the arc created from the shadow of the earth, creating the white to black curve across the bottom of the moon which gradually decreased in size.

Then, as the shadow completely covered the moon, the white light gave way to the red light creeping around the edges of the earth and showing that -oh yes- the complete moon was really still there and highly visible.

My drowsy snapshots were taken on the weird camera I constructed the other day from the Nikon lens on the little OM-D EM-10 body with 8 second exposures.

restoring power to the kitchen

Next job will be prepping the walls.

And restarting the electricity.

The ethernet cable in the cupboard could be handy to connect the backup server.

quick video test of a Nikon 300mm zoom on an Olympus OM-D EM10

I've had to suspend the video camera rig experiment for a few days whilst the kitchen work proceeds. I did get my hands on a new lens converter though and I've taken it for a very short spin.

It's a simple converter from Nikon format lenses to micro 4/3 and cost the princely sum of £10.99.

It's amazing.
I've only had a few minutes to try it, but I can already tell it shows great promise. The knurled silver ring can be twisted to adjust the aperture, even on Nikon 'G' lenses.

I took my most modest Olympus EM10 (which has the least sophisticated stabilisation) and added the biggest Nikon lens I could find (a 70-300mm zoom). On a micro 4/3 format this is the equivalent of 600mm at the zoomed out end.

Then I tried a few hand held zoom and focus tests through a window. There were plenty of little glitches, like focusing manually in an impromptu situation and keeping the whole camera steady and framed. Of course I failed on most of these points (!), but I'll regard this as a 'before' test which I'll aim to recreate with the adapter and lens stabilised on the camera rig.

It might be another week or more before I have time to do that however. Today it's all about reconnecting the rest of the household electricity. I may have to power down the wi-fi for a while.