This weekend I’m gonna try and get rid of this blog and start blogging on the comic (which is also a blog). I’m not sure why I set it up this way to begin with… Probably a lack of understanding of wordpress categories. That means I’ll have to rejigger the livejournal plugin, so I may stop allowing comments on the livejournal mirror, but since it will just forward over to my regular site, there shouldn’t be too much difference. The only reason it might matter to someone other than me is if you (for some reason) have bookmarked www.surlyben.com/blog, you should be aware that it won’t update anymore (updates will appear on www.surlyben.com). Also, the rss feed url will change.

In other news, I’m going to let the www.spacepirateapocalypse.com domain expire. It’s too cute and punny, and I hate having to explain it. Surlyben.com will still work, and makes more sense anyway. I think spacepirateapocalypse will work until the end of the month…

People sometimes ask me “what’s new, Ben?” and I never know how to answer that question. Since when? Do they mean, in my life? Or in the world in general? “Well, it’s raining today…”

Here’s something new and awesome in my life: I appear to not have asthma any more. I used to go through the albuterol inhalers like it was going out of style. I’d burn through one in two weeks. Or a month if I was on one of those longer lasting medications as well. But over the past year, that has stopped. I haven’t needed one since November. I still get the excercise induced asthma, but it’s not bad, and it goes away on its own (it used to get worse and worse once it started).

When I was a kid the doctors always said I might outgrow it after I hit puberty, but, like, 33 is a little late for that… It’s a mystery. I thought I would mention it because I think maybe it’s the kind of good news that people hope to hear when they ask me what’s new.

Don’t look now.

This came in while I was writing the previous post:

Shirts are now buyable at fullmetaljackal.com

–K

So there you go. I should probably integrate that into my website in some way…

A couple of New Years resolution type thingies:

Set up a shop for selling buttons and comics and stuff. I have a placeholder page with a paypal button, but I’d like a google button too, and I need to test it, and maybe add some text or whatever so that people know *why* they would be giving me their money. (Hint: you can use it to buy one of those mini comics I talked about last year. I’ll even mail you one if you do. But probably most people would prefer to wait until the page is linked to from my site and has information on it to make me look trustworthy and let you know what you are buying and stuff…)

Tell people that they will soon be able to buy Cooking with Anne t-shirts from my friend Karl’s new t-shirt venture Full Metal Jackal. Which he tells me will have a live site for by the end of the year. Which is tomorrow. The actual shirts will be going out mid-january, $20 unless you live in Bellingham, in which case you can probably buy one directly from him. More on that later (probably tomorrow).

Install Linux on my main computer, at least as a dual boot. I’ve had it on my laptop for a while, and I’m getting to the point where I’m pretty comfortable with it. It took me about nine months, and 3 to 5 different distributions (do different version numbers count? They were different enough to irritate me into change…), but I am now pretty comfortable with the linux way of doing things. And I find that I really like the whole “Free as in Speech” aspect…

Update my webcomic at least once.

Speaking of updating my webcomic, I think I’ll go back to avoiding writing as much as possible. Writing, for me, is like “drawing hands”; it’s not something I really know how to do, and I guess I’m unwilling to learn. (I had an art professor who said that if you don’t know how to draw hands,you should compose your picture in such a way that you don’t ever have to draw them…) Anyway, I’ve rethought the pirate comic along those lines, so I’ll do at least a few updates to that as well in the coming year.

Get a real job. People always ask, “what kind of job?” At that point all wit abandons me and I go “Um, I can do…um.. things…” Which is true enough, I guess. Usually I am pretty good at doing um, things, too. So if you know anyone… (and really, what kind of question is that? “What kind of Job?” I have a college degree. I know how to draw stuff. And I’m pretty sharp at the ol’ computer. So customer service. Of course.)

They tell me that I have an art show coming up at one of our local coffeeshops here in Portland in 2007, so I’m resolved to put together enough stuff to show. I have some seeekret ideas. Should be pretty cool if it comes off. The show opens April 1st. In case you want to mark your calendar or anything. More on that later too. I’ll put together a flyer and press release. Whee!

Here’s another telling of the plane question. Someone in the comments on boing boing claims that this is the correct version.

Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

Alas. The ‘real’ question turns out to be so boring that you could only get the wrong answer if you misunderstood the question. And that would be the questioner’s fault for not being more clear.

Boing Boing was talking about an airplane on a treadmill problem this morning (See also David Pogue’s NYTimes blog and a thread at The Straight Dope). The problem is as follows:

Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway, and intends to take off. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels at any given time, moving in the opposite direction of rotation.

Can the plane take off?

I’ve been thinking about this all day (I also read through the various responses to the question, and they were totally unhelpful), and I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer involves a flaming plane wreck. But what kind of flaming plane wreck, I’m not sure. I did minor in physics after all.

A couple of things to start with: I’m assuming that the plane is just a regular, stock plane that exists in the world today. No superscience planes with unobtanium ball bearings or that use their wheels for thrust. The conveyor belt can be superscience, if you like, but I prefer solutions that don’t require superscience conveyor belts (only slightly less than I prefer solutions with fiery crashes).

To start with, I noticed that a lot of people in the various threads want to assume no friction. This is lame, and leads to the boring conclusions. Either the wheels and conveyor belt spin up to infinity as soon as thrust is applied (and then the plane cruises along and takes off), or the pilot applies the brakes and throttles up and the plane glides along the unmoving surface of the conveyor belt until it takes off.[edit: I just remembered that without friction the airplane’s wheels don’t spin at all (friction is what makes them spin). So the treadmill doesn’t either. So ignore the bit about infinite speeds. It’s easy to make mistakes when you are thinking about impossible things…]

The rest of my answers assume friction.

The most realistic answer is that the plane can’t take off, because the only way to satisfy the condition that the conveyor belt and the wheels move at the same speed is to have neither one move at all. This is because in the real world, there are bound to be tiny variations between wheel and conveyor belt speed. You can engineer to certain tolerances, but perfect is pretty much out of the question. Again, a boring answer.

So lets say that negligible differences between conveyor speed and wheel speed are allowed. Assume that the test has been done many times before, and the friction calculations have been made, so that the conveyor knows how fast the wheels have to spin to compensate for any amount of thrust from the engine (and thus keep the wheels and conveyor moving at the same speed), and the conveyor has been engineered to detect how much thrust is being applied, perhaps even before it is applied (you could do this by having computer program apply the thrust, or with a camera in the cockpit monitoring the pilot; there is a mechanical delay between when they push the throttle up and when the engines actually speed up).

It should be obvious that the conveyor belt is going to have to move very fast to generate enough frictional forces to overcome the thrust forces and keep the plane in one place (and thus keep the wheels and the conveyor moving at the same speeds). Without sitting down and doing the calculations, I imagine something like this: The pilot throttles up a teeny bit, the conveyor goes to a million miles an hour, and either rips the wheels completely off, or causes the bearings (and the rest of the wheel?) to almost instantly turn into white hot molten slag. But the plane might not crash to the ground immediately. At those speeds, the conveyor belt will drag a lot of air along with it. So maybe the plane “takes off” when it is thrown (sans landing gear) high into the air by the hurricane force winds generated by your giant, superscience conveyor belt. If we’re lucky, maybe the wings will get ripped off too. Then it all comes crashing to the ground.

That was fun, and I figured I had it solved until I realized that if the plane doesn’t have wheels, the conveyor belt can’t move, so it would never get to a million miles an hour (or whatever speed). In fact, the wheels are going to have an upper speed limit that is probably pretty low. Beyond that, they’ll blow or rip off or the bearings will seize up or have some other kind of failure. This means that the conveyor belt doesn’t need to be a superscience conveyor at all, because it doesn’t ever need to move faster that the max speed for the wheels. You could figure out how fast by testing the wheels beforehand. (heck, the manufacturers have probably already done that work for you)

So in that case, the scenario goes like this: Pilot applies just enough thrust to overcome the static friction on the wheels and get them moving. Wheels and conveyor belt start moving faster and faster until they reach the max speed for the wheels. At this point, an equilibrium is reached, and the pilot will probably have to throttle back to avoid having the wheels fail. If he doesn’t, the wheels quickly fail, the conveyor belt either stops or keeps moving at the last speed of the wheels, and the plane probably can’t take off.

Now I am bored and will wander off, but in the meantime, feel free to offer your criticism…

There is a small update to the apocalypse comic today.

In other news, it looks like the t-shirts are just about to get made. (I suspect they won’t be done in time for christmas, but I’d be happy to be wrong…) They’ll be the gas-mask wearing Anne from this comic, printed 7 inches tall on a gray-green t-shirt (to approximate the background of the original comic…)

I was thinking about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image recently and I was wondering if there were any SETI projects like that (in planning or actively going on). Maybe they could look for lasers or something. Sure, producing a signal detectable at those ranges would probably require some kind of superscience, but the same could be said of signals in our own galaxy.

If I can believe this faq we couldn’t detect ourselves with radio beyond 150 light years (and for that great range we’d already need to know where we were), so picking up broadcast signals in our own galaxy pretty much requires superscience aliens anyway. And nevermind that if there were aliens in our galaxy, they would have wiped us out 600 million years ago, just to be on the safe side. (Once you let a lifeform go multicellular it’s a cosmic eyeblink before they sending relativistic bombs to your homeworld.)

I went and saw Casino Royale with my friend Serena the other day. She said she thought it was the worst Bond movie ever, and she hated the dialogue. I wondered if she has ever seen The Man with the Golden Gun or A View to a Kill. (In all honesty, Moonraker is probably the worst James Bond movie, but for me it is so awesomely bad that I am always entertained by it. Probably it helps that it was so lovingly mocked by No One Lives Forever)

Anyway. I liked it. Daniel Craig does a good macho manly man, which James Bond is. (If you like him as Bond then you should see Layer Cake if you haven’t already) And I think that moving Bond towards gritty realism and away from cartoonish supervillany is a good thing (although, really, James Bond will never be as bad assedly verite as Willie Caine). It reminded me a lot of Thunderball both in terms of setting and goodness (to say nothing of all the direct thunderball references…), and that’s not a bad thing.

There were a couple of minor niggles. The card game they play in the movie is No Limit Hold’em, instead of the more exotic Baccarat. I suppose it’s a good thing, and probably made the card games easier to follow (since everyone knows how to play texas hold ‘em), but I always liked that James Bond was really good at a card game that nobody else knows how to play.

Also, I didn’t like the two false endings, but I guess they were necessary to set up the second movie in what is obviously going to be a trilogy. I wonder if they are ever going to actually say “SPECTRE” considering the copyright problems and all…

I decided to start on a new thing, same as the old thing. This time out the apocalypse story will be much more loose and quickly drawn, because I want to see how minimal I have to go before I can manage regular updates. Also, when I look at my old drawings I always like the sketchy ones.

The upshot is that I’m not gonna waste a lot of time editing out the pencil marks or whatever.

Anyway, it’s set in the same universe as Cooking with Anne, and it’s about the dog.

The pirate story will continue to have infrequent updates until I get to a stopping point… (probably back in prison…) Then I’ll probably change styles to something faster.