One of the guys at work asked me to build a model of an air inlet for a gas turbine engine. That would be a jet engine and it would be in a housing attached to the back of the gray part where the round white and black discs are. I didn't build that part so don't go looking for it. The engine would be run to generate electricity. The top of the housing would be about 50 feet from the ground, nearly as wide, and a bit longer. It would have hundreds of filters inside the large gray part with the blue panels. Those would be the access doors to go inside and change the filters. You would lift them up with a crane or a hoist attached to the top of the housing. The inlet and the framework holding it up could cost $3,000,000 to buy. Not including the jet engine. We sell them to companies like GE who build the engines. They are common in some areas, especially in the Middle East.
The model was for a display at the Science Museum of Minnesota. They put on the Science Fusion program each year. This is the 4th one. The idea is to introduce kids to science. I didn't actually go, I'm already sold on science, and I'm not a kid. But good idea. Companies help sponsor it and show up with interesting things to try to attract kids to go into the sciences. We need new scientists and engineers to make stuff to save our asses in the future. Hope they find some. Kids, not asses. Plenty of asses about. Not hard to find.
I spent about 30 hours over 4 weeks and about half of that was actual building. The rest was used on design and hunting for parts. I tried to stick to simple techniques to save time. I used the red triangluar LEGO Ruler to measure the CAD drawings from work and used those measurements to build the thing. I made a bunch of sketches on grid paper to get an idea of where I was going. I built and rebuilt some of it. I only ordered some slopes for the front. I didn't have enough time to try out too many ideas. I'm slow enough and have other things to do that I don't give it a lot of time at one sitting. Luckily I had the Xmas holidays and all those nice days off. Of course I was still working on it the day before it needed to get to the person taking it to the museum. Now I can say I've had my work in a museum. Cool, huh. Everyone liked it and I heard that it was hard to keep the kids hands off of it. I know all about that. One of the pleasures of doing public displays. Just saying No!
A while back I saw somewhere that the 1958 UK series H. G. Well's The Invisible Man was coming out on dvd. I was sort of interested. I remember seeing the series when I was a kid, and enjoying it. All the Brit shows turned up on Canadian TV. I wondered if the series was any good, it's been so long since I've seen it. Then I forgot about them, until this weekend. They turned up on the Internet Archive. They don't look too bad. The dvd's might be better but they also cost nearly 40 bucks on Amazon. Worth a quick look, you can stream them or download them in several formats. There is much more available video and audio on the site.
I have been watching some of the first season. The series has a science guy, Peter Brady, turning invisible in the first show. The authorities lock him up. He escapes and a guy he turns to for help sells him out. It turns out ok and the authorites think they should leave Peter to get back to work on finding a cure for invisibility. Next episode he becomes an invisible spy and helps a guy out of a jam in some Middle Eastern country with a made up name. One case after another follows, all wrapped up in the 26 minute running time.
Peter often has help from his widowed sister. They live in a nice big house with the sister's nine year old daughter, who's also my favorite character. She wants to be invisible too. Who wouldn't. The invisibility effects are fair to middling, pretty typical for the time. There are the usual cars driving with empty driver's seats, smoldering cigarette's floating in the air, headless overcoats out and about, doors opening and closing on their own, all that good stuff. You often see the scene from Peter Brady's point of view, which must be a great cost saver. There's even an occasional bit of humor. The producer of the series was Ralph Smart. He'd already produced some tv and would go on to produce Danger Man the following year. That would be a better series. Someday I need to cycle through those babies again.
I thunbing through some posts are Boing Boing and saw a different picture of some science themed cookies. I followed that link to Not So Humble Pie and there were several more cookies there including these lab mice and the science guys below. They are a hoot, at least I thought so.
