This weekend I worked in the control tower at Calabogie Motorsports Park for the inaugural Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada event. I was an assistant to the series Race Director Terry Dale and I also helped the clerk of the course Peter Manganelli with the running of the other races during the weekend.
Just last weekend I went to Mosport to take the training course for the Clerk of the Course. I also wrote the exam and submitted it to CASC-OR for review. I found out then that the exam review is face-to-face. The earliest I can have the review is next weekend at the Victoria Day Speedfest.
So this weekend at Calabogie was not a signature event (an event where I can get a signature on my new logbook). But I did get to work in the tower for the entire weekend, and it was a real pleasure.
Aside from my racing (Solo-II from 1997 to 2003, road racing from 2003 to the present), I have always been an active volunteer for regional motorsport. I have held licenses as a flag marshal and pit marshal, I have worked in the pace car for a number of events, and I was a former Secretary of the Meet for MCO‘s Ted Powell Memorial Race Weekend and their regional Race Schools. I also instruct at the Race Schools and high performance driving schools, such as for the BMW Car Club of Ottawa.
I want to expand my experience into the role of clerk of the course. It will take years to really get the experience I need, but I am determined to do what is necessary. It’s part of my desire to be more ambitious about what I want in life. Becoming a clerk is one of the things I’ve put off for years, so it’s time to seize the moment. Only by inaction do we give up before trying something.
Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada
I was excited to be working with a professional series like the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge. I downloaded and read all of the IMSA race regulations, series regulations and all of the supplementary regulations too. I also put PDF copies on my laptop and on my iPhone. I was able to easily quote some of the rules when required during one of the sessions – I was proud of that!
During the invitation races, I worked with the Clerk as one of the emergency dispatchers and Peter let me run the course during short periods of time (typically when nothing much was happening)!
There were practice sessions, qualifying and two Porsche GT3 Cup races on the weekend. As well, there were GT Invitational and Formula Libre Invitational races during the weekend. The entry list was a little sparse as the event was non-championship for all the series except Porsche GT3 Cup. Next year, the fields should be much larger.
Aujourdui, j’ai reçu ma premier spam ou pourriel en français. Normalement, je recevais pourriel en russe.
Dans le dernier mois, j’ai répondu deux courriel en français. Le premier pour le club Motorsport Club du Ottawa (MCO), et le deuxième fois (heir soir) de le Coordonateurs des Instructeurs de la BMW Club de Quebec.
Aussi, en le questionnaire du recensement de 2011, Rosa a ecrit que je parler français.
I am really surprised at how bad the Obama administration has been at stopping ridiculous conspiracy theories. I had higher hopes for this administration than what I’ve been seeing over the last 2 years.
On Friday President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. I thought that there was no such document, that Hawaii only had birth registration documents. Now, years later and it turns out there is a birth certificate. Seeing how the silly Birthers have been making fodder of this issue since before the election, why in the hell did it take this long to provide this document?
What could have been an amazing story in a year of stunning news – history being made – was soon sullied by a changing story that has cast doubt on the veracity of any part of the account.
Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA (soon to take over at the Department of Defense) provided much of that story. For example, in a television interview on PBS, he said “There were some firefights that were going on as these guys were making their way up the staircase of that compound.” The Pentagon claimed that bin Laden was shot while holding an AK-47.
The easiest way to prevent changing stories in the fog of war is to wait until the full data is available before releasing the information to the press. There was no need to hurry on the story details – the operation was over and did not need to be timely (as it would for an on-going event). The administration cannot be changing the story. This is like catnip to people who believe conspiracy theories.
Finally, the administration has stated that they will not release any photos of bin Laden. This seems to leave a huge hole that can only be filled with more conspiracy theories.
I think the U.S. will have to release photos of bin Laden. Otherwise, it will blow up into another conspiracy theory. But to stop that from happening, they have to do it now. The longer they wait, the more likely that people will think that there is something they are covering up. For example, Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay. They released photos in the days following their death in Mosul to prove to the Iraqi people that they really had killed them.
When the government, or members of the government, lie or exaggerate, it causes a loss of faith and trust. This is damaging to the country as a whole. I cannot believe how bad the US government is at understanding this. It seems so self-evident. They should provide the confirmed evidence as soon as possible and don’t change the story.
Tonight, I’m feeling really centered. Everything in my life is so good.
I’m finally debt free. I have been contributing as much as I could into my RRSP to catch up, but I didn’t put aside enough to keep my line of credit zeroed out.
My BMW is ready for the summer – new Hawk HPS brake pads, oil change, and my summer tires (Bridgestone Potenza RE-11) are filled with nitrogen and mounted. I also replaced the ridiculous BMW lug-studs with proper studs and lug nuts, so I can change my winter and summer tires myself without worrying about breaking the lug-studs again.
I finally bought a Jawbone ERA Bluetooth for my iPhone so that I can (legally) receive phone calls when I am driving.
I finally bought some new glasses. I bought a pair of sturdy regular glasses I can wear in my helmet when racing, and a pair of stylish sunglasses. My old sunglasses will still be my primary glasses for when I race.
Today, I visited the Canadian Museum of Nature. I continue to find some place new and interesting to visit each month if I can.
The collection of the Museum of Nature first started as the collection of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1856 when Canada was being explored scientifically. The current building, known as the Victoria Memorial Museum Building, was completed in 1912. At one point Parliament was using some of the rooms after the Centre Block burnt down in 1916.
The building recently completed an extensive renovation. I wanted to visit after the re-opening, but I read that they would have a temporary photography exhibit opening this month, so I waited until today.
Chasmosaurus Irvinensis
Before entering the museum, I took some pictures of the life-sized Chasmosaurus Irvinensis on the lawn outside. This dinosaur is very interesting for having over 20 horns – one on the nose, two on the sides of the head and the rest around the top of the frill. I thought originally that the horns on the periphery of the frill were flaps of skin not bones until I read more. Imagine how hard it would be to find a hat that fits!
When I entered the museum, the first place I went was the art gallery. The current photography exhibit is about Northern Canada. There were beautiful landscapes, some nature photos and many photos of the people who live in our far north. I was very glad I waited before visiting the museum – the photos were amazing.
After the gallery, I thought I would start at the top of the building and work my way downward. The fourth floor contains the Bird Gallery. Not much to see there. I mean, lots of birds of course, but I am mostly interested in birds of prey, and there were not many on display. There was not even a bald eagle. When I lived in Port Williams, we had Bald Eagles roost in the pines trees behind our house. I always loved to hear their calls and watched in awe as they leapt into the air.
The third floor had the Vale Earth Gallery. The collection is surprisingly large and varied. I was very interested in the examples of very ancient stones, some of which date back billions of years to when the earth was first cooling. There was also a small collection of meteors. Looking at a 4.55 billion year old meteor is to imagine the fiery birth of our solar system.
The gallery of crystals was also very interesting. There are so many shapes of crystals. However, I found that some of the displays were too low (presumably for young viewers); it was too hard for me to stoop down to see the displays with a camera and heavy camera bag around my neck.
Blue whale skeleton
The second floor houses the RBC Blue Water Gallery. The highlight is the extraordinary blue whale skeleton in the centre of the gallery. It is so massive – 19 metres long. And imagine that it was not close to being full-grown – blue whales can each 33 metres in length and weigh more than 180 tonnes. That’s as much as a fully-loaded Boeing 767-300ER! Blue whales are the largest animals that have ever lived.
Also on this floor was the Mammal Gallery. They had some large dioramas with stuffed bears (polar and brown), moose, Dall sheep (thinhorn sheep), cougars, beavers, and some smaller animals. I finished this section quickly, taking in each of the dioramas and moving on.
When first entering the Fossil Gallery, you are greeted by a Daspletosaurus torosus towering over everyone. These carnivorous dinosaurs were between 2 and 4 tonnes and could be 9 metres (30 feet) in length. They lived between 77 and 74 million years ago. They had about 6-dozen teeth!
Carnotaurus Sastrei
The other meat-eating dinosaur on display was the Carnotaurus Sastrei, which was as long as the Daspletosaurus, but thinner and less massive.
The museum has a connection with the Chasmosaurus Irvinensis, as the museum staff did some of the original research. There are skeletons in the Fossil Gallery, plus the diorama I saw outside the museum, and another diorama of a family of Chasmosaurus Irvinensis being hunted by an unidentified family of Theropod.
Other horned dinosaurs were also on display, such as the well-known Triceratops. Where were some aquatic skeletons mounted along the ceiling, such as the biggest damn turtle I could ever imagine (Archelon) and an Elasmosaur.
Behind the dinosaurs were some extinct mammal exhibits. A diorama of a family of Megacerops was interesting. They are distantly related to rhinoceroses and lived 38-33.9 million years ago here in North America.
Evolution of the whale
For me, the most fascinating exhibit in the entire museum is the evolution of the whale. There were three skeletons mounted in succession – the Pakicetus, Ambulocetus and Dorudon. The Pakicetus lived 55.8-40 million years ago and was a terrestrial carnivore. The Ambulocetus is also known as the ‘walking whale’. It is larger than Pakicetus and looked more like a crocodile with a long head like a whale. You can see the enlargement of the legs as one step in the evolution to flippers. It lived 50-49 million years ago and would have been a branch off the Pakicetus family tree. The final specimen is the Dorudon. It was entirely aquatic and lived 41 to 33 million years ago. It is obviously related to the whale at this point. It was fantastic to see these three specimens lined up showing how the species changed over tens of millions of years from a land animal to a fully-aquatic animal with whale-like body structures. It’s a great example of evolution that is easy to see and comprehend.
Another fossil that was very cool was the skull of a Parasaurolophus. This dinosaur has a long cranial crest that contained air tubes. It seems that it would be used for producing sound. Next to the skull were a pump handle and a long metal tube. Pushing the plunger forced air through the tube and created a sound similar to what the Parasaurolophus. Imagine – hearing a long extinct animal call, the sound of a dinosaur.
In the basement was the Animalium. There were many terrariums with various insects, spiders and small mammals. By far the creepiest were the Giant Spiny Stick Insects (Eurycantha calcarata). They are from New Guinea and can grow to about 6 inches in length. They look like H.R. Giger designed them.
It was an interesting film set tightly around a young married couple. It used flashbacks to show how their relationship built up and how it was slowly tearing apart. The flashbacks captured those wonderful moments when the two begin to fall in love. The falling apart, mostly due to communication issues, was also well played. It was well written and accurately acted. It really seemed more like a hidden camera capturing a real couple – a high complement for the actors Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.
It felt me thinking a lot about the evolution of relationships. In some cases, the break is understood. People do fall out of love. People cheat. I understand that. But the couple in ‘Blue Valentine’ genuinely seemed to still be in love. I’m sure it’s common but it is such a shame that people in love can have so many problems when they genuinely want to be together.
I was also reminded of an incident when Rosa and travelled to Rome.
We were in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican. The weather was great, and we were a week before our wedding day. A man and woman walked by yelling at each other.
“You’re so stupid,” she yelled at him.
“That’s right I am stupid. I married you!” he retorted.
Their teenaged son followed ten feet behind them, staring at the ground.
And I remember thinking, ‘how could anyone end up like that?’ How can two people who must have once loved each other enough to get married and have a family then deteriorate into that kind of caustic, hateful relationship?
I am so grateful for my relationship with Rosa. Everyday we find new ways to renew our relationship. Not a day goes by were we do not express our love for each other.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and marks the 30th anniversary of the first flight of the Space Shuttle, STS-1.
It is remarkable that only 20 years separated the two events, and that so little has changed in the most recent 30 years. In that short initial span of time, space technology advanced at an incredible pace.
Yuri Garagin flew one orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961 (Vostok-1). So little was known about space at the time that the controls of his capsule were locked to prevent him from operating them – it was thought that zero-G would induce madness.
About three weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, although with a sub-orbital, 486 km flight (Mercury-Redstone 3 aka Freedom 7). Less than three weeks later, US President John F. Kennedy publicly set the goal to putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was an incredible challenge. The US had less than 16 minutes of manned space flight experience at the time of the speech.
Mercury 12B (boilerplate spacecraft)
The American manned space programs moved at a breakneck pace. The Mercury program completed 2 years later. There was a 2-year gap before the first Gemini flights, which saw the first American two-man crews, the first American space walk, the first spacecraft rendezvous and docking, and much longer flights (Gemini VII was 13 days, 18 hours). The Gemini program wrapped up at the end of 1966, making way for the Apollo program.
The first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, was 2 years after the end of the Gemini program. Part of the reason for the gap was the deadly cabin fire on Apollo 1 in January 1967, which was being tested for a possible first flight in February. The fire and investigation, combined with program challenges for the Apollo CSM and LM landers, led to the delay. Boldly, the Apollo 8 mission actually reached moon orbit – a daring objective for only the second manned flight of the program.
With the goal of a manned landing on and returning from the moon accomplished on July 16, 1969, winning the moon-landing race against the Soviets, the funding for Apollo was drawn down. It was only 8 years and 3 months from Gagarin’s flight to the touchdown of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
Apollo 14 Command Module
The final flight to the moon was Apollo 17 at the end of 1972. Some of the Apollo equipment was used for the Skylab space station, manned for 171 days in 1973 and 1974, followed by the mid-decade Apollo-Soyuz flight. From that point, there were no manned American space flights until STS-1 on April 12, 1981.
The early designs of the Space Shuttle systems date back even before the moon landing. President Nixon approved the program in 1971. It took 10 years to build and test the first two Shuttles – Enterprise, which was only used for approach and landing tests from a converted Boeing 747, and Columbia which was a fully functional orbiter. It looks less time to move from the first manned suborbital space flight to landing on the moon.
STS-132 Atlantis
Since the start of the Shuttle era, I feel the US manned space program has stagnated. For 30 years, the US has entirely depended on the shuttle for all manned flights. Again, that’s three times longer than it took to go from Yuri’s flight to landing on the moon. I feel that the US should have been spending more on trying out new technologies.
While I am fully supportive of the International Space Station, and feel that it should be the springboard for any future above-low-orbit manned missions, it hasn’t really pushed forward the manned program. It has provided a workspace for research of course, but it’s not about manned flight really. It’s about a zero-G research facility. It’s also not the first space station – it’s been done before.
Without producing any new vehicles for the past 30 years, it would be like the aviation industry stopping creating new planes with the Boeing 707, or if computer science stopped once IBM created the System/360.
In the future, I would like to see the US exploring new ways and new vehicles for its manned program. Allowing private space companies to provide services is an interesting direction but I am concerned that NASA would be without any space program, should these private companies (who are doing it for a profit) either fail or decide that it is not financially viable for them to continue. Then what will NASA do? It seems directionless at the moment.
I have some strong opinions and I’m working on an essay about the future of NASA.
In the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, Stephen Covey used the phrase “when you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other”. This suggests being prepared for the consequences of your actions.
In this case, the pastor’s ill-thought-out project triggered violence in Afghanistan that killed more than 30 people. If he had been clear-headed about what he was doing, he should have understood that there would be consequences and that others could use his actions for their own purposes.
In this case, it appears that the protests started peacefully, as people expressed their outrage that someone would attack their religion. Then the Talibanmay have become involved and escalated the protests into their violent peak. They used the protests to advance their own political goals, much like the Florida pastor used the media to advance his own agenda and bigotry.
The disaster at Fukushima was due to a failure of the cooling systems. The root cause was the loss of power to drive the pumps. When the earthquake hit, the reactors were SCRAMed immediately. This terminated the on-going critical reaction. All that was left to do was to cool the reactor from the residual or decay heat is dissipated (typically a few months).
Normally at that point the plant would have been switched over to the electrical grid becoming a consumer of power instead of a producer. However, the earthquake damaged the grid in that area. And even had the grid escaped unscathed, many other power plants had shut down after the earthquake, and it is not likely that there was enough power available.
Satellite view of Fukushima I
The next level of safety equipment were the back-up diesel generators. The generators kicked in almost immediately at Fukushima. However, due to design flaws, the generators were not protected against the tsunami. The seawall was only 5.7 metres tall, which was easily topped by the 15 metre tsunami. The generators were located in the non-water-tight turbine room instead of inside the watertight reactor building. The Fukushima II plant had the reverse layout and it better survived the tsunami.
The final line of safety was to go to batteries to power the cooling equipment. The batteries ran out after about 8 hours.
This is when the cooling stopped and the nuclear crisis really began.
The disaster at Chernobyl was caused by a bad reactor design and a badly created test plan.
It was well known that the loss of power can cause problems for reactor cooling after the plant is no longer generating power. The Chernobyl Reactor 4 was being shutdown for normal maintenance that night, nearly 25 years ago. A test was planned to see if there was enough steam left after a shutdown and from the residual heat, to power the turbines and generators to provide power for the cooling systems during the time from emergency shutdown until the diesel generators are up to full power. This can take a minute or two.
The test was to be run during the day shift; they had been trained on the procedure. However, an unexpected shutdown at another plant meant that the power from Reactor 4 was still required for the city of Kiev, so the test was postponed until later in the evening. This meant that the test would happen with the next shift, who were not trained on the procedure.
Around 1AM, the power levels were reduced at the plant to prepare for the test. However, due to the design of the old reactor, power levels fell too far to start the test, so the control rods preventing the reaction were withdrawn. Poisoning of the reaction by accumulated xenon-135 meant that the decision was made to remove more control rods to increase the reaction back to the level required for the test.
This, and changes to the flow rates of the cooling pumps, caused more water in the core to turn to steam. This had the detrimental effect of increasing the reaction (positive void coefficient of reactivity). This is because water is denser and can absorb neutrons, but steam is much less dense (and less mass per volume) and thus the neutrons are free to continue the nuclear reaction. More reactions means more heat. This caused more steam, which meant more reactivity. The reactor was nearly out of control at this point.
The final step occurred at 1:23AM. For reasons not fully explained, the reactor was manually SCRAMed. It might have been an accident, or it might have been to attempt to control the reactor; many alarms had been sounding in the control room during the test.
This is where the final, fatal design flaw sealed the fate of Reactor 4. The first 4.5 meters of the control rods used in the RBMK reactor were not made of neutron absorbing materials such as boron, but rather graphite which does not absorb neutrons. As the rods were lowered, the graphite tip displaced even more water, which greatly increased the reaction. The power levels quickly rose to over 30 gigawatts, over 10 times the normal operating maximum. This massive spike in power flashed the remaining water into steam in a runaway reaction.
Chernobyl Disaster
This caused the steam explosion that destroyed the reactor and the building. It blew the 2,000-ton upper plate off the reactor and utterly destroyed the reactor building.
And here is the irony. Had the test been successful (combined with correcting the design flaws at Fukushima I), it might have provided a method to temporarily power the cooling systems at Fukushima. It seems inconceivable, but it is possible that the best solution at Fukushima might have been to let the reactor continue to operate, in order to power its own pumps.
This of course would not have been the safest course of action, based on the lack of hard data at the reactor in the hours after the earthquake. While continuing the reaction to power the cooling at Fukushima would seem like a good thing, it also meant that a large aftershock could further damage an active nuclear plant. Shutting down and stopping electrical generation was the safer option, based on the vast number of unknowns in the hours after the earthquake.
Tonight, Rosa and I went to the NAC to see David Sedaris, one of my favourite authors. He was just starting his new tour, and had all new material, including some readings from his diary and a few short stories. Interestingly enough, as he was reading them, he was marking the paper with a pencil, presumably to indicate if something needed a little work, or perhaps notes on how to read the stories. He was also noting how long it took to read each of the short stories. Some of the stories had never been previously read to an audience.
For the other author nights (Douglas Coupland and William Gibson), I took their pictures. David Sedaris does not want his photo taken, so instead I took a photo of the sign saying not to take his photo.
I wish I had even the smallest fraction of his talent at telling stories.
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