Life on the Rails

[Razgovory]

I looked at a picture of that thing.  I'm not sure those towers are straight.

[Josquius]

Why no drunk tax payers in particular?
Drunk kids are fine?

[Savonarola]

Seems this place and its people would fit in well with those in your other thread who have founded their own nation states. 

Heh, true

[Savonarola]

How on earth did this guy get the cash to make this place?

I'm not entirely sure, but he had a gift shop (that was a casualty of the fire) and takes donations now.  He got a lot of his building material from illegally taking rocks from the National Forest.  He does most of the work himself. 

[Savonarola]

I looked at a picture of that thing.  I'm not sure those towers are straight.

They might not be; some of the foot bridges weren't level.

[Savonarola]

Why no drunk tax payers in particular?
Drunk kids are fine?

Who knows, (although you can ask him if you ever go there; he's more than happy to share his opinions with anyone.)  It would be a really bad idea to come to that property drunk, like I said safety wasn't a major consideration on the project.

[Razgovory]

Looks like Sovereign Citizens BS to me.

[Savonarola]

When I was there I kept thinking "This is just like being in a Werner Herzog movie."  You've got the utterly mad protagonist on his outsized quest which he pursues obsessively.  All that it was missing was Klaus Kinski.

[Savonarola]

I also got a chance to visit the Great Sand Dunes National Park while I was out there.  The park has the tallest sand dunes in North America.  Pueblo is the nearest "City" to them, but it's about a two hour drive.

In Michigan we have a large set of dunes at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore.  We used to go there almost every summer when I was young.  By the time I was an adolescent I thought "This is a just a lot of sand, and it's a pain to climb them."  The Great Sand Dunes are even more sand and even more of a pain to climb; but I'm no longer a bored teenager.  They really are spectacular; they're right at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.  To the south is a vast, empty plain.

The tallest dune is right by the entrance drive.  You need to walk along an empty stretch of sand.  In the spring months this is the Medano Creek, but when I was there it didn't look like it could ever have been even a wadi; it was just a bone dry stretch of sand.  The first part of the climb is the worst; the sand is loose on the hill and it requires a lot of effort to climb.  There are some smaller hills or ravines that people sand-sled or sand-board down, but it's such a pain to climb back up that everyone seems to hand out rather than going up or down the hills.

Once you get to the first ridge the climb gets much easier.  There the wind has compacted the sand, so you don't sink as far as you walk.  I made it to the summit of the highest sand dune; there's always a little crowd there.  I walked beyond that and there was no one.  It's a vast sea of sand with nothing but solitude.  I was trying to navigate my way to the second highest peak, but I kept running into dead ends on the ridge line.  I had no desire to trek through loose sand again, so I turned back.  It was good that I did, as the sand had started to heat.  The sand can get as hot as 150 F (66 C).  I didn't have proper hiking boots, but my steel toed Red Wings.  In the winter those are never warm, and on the sand the toes had started to turn red hot just as I got back.

[Savonarola]

Also I had more of a chance to sample some of the local food this time in Pueblo.  Their cuisine is based around the Pueblo chili; which is somewhat milder than the Hatch chili used in New Mexican cooking.  They turn this into a sauce which they put over everything; eggs, macaroni and cheese, burgers, it's the catsup of Colorado.  I even had chiles rellenos with a Colorado chili sauce.  (A similarly recursive cuisine is found in Flint, Michigan they make hot dogs with a meat sauce made from ground up hot dogs.)  The true Pueblo dish is "The Slopper," which is an open faced hamburger smothered in Colorado green chili and covered with cheese, onions and french fries.  It lives up to its name.

I had a slopper at Gray's Coors Tavern.  At the end of Prohibition Coors franchised with a few taverns throughout the state of Colorado.  This is one of the only ones remaining.  They say a Guinness tastes better in Ireland; a Coors doesn't taste any worse in Colorado.  My brother has a theory that the cooler the beer's sign, the worse the beer; Coors has some really cool bar signs (especially at Gray's where they had signs dating back to the end of Prohibition.)

[Savonarola]

The BBC has an article about The Hejaz Railroad (the one that Lawrence of Arabia blew up sections of.)  There are two sections of it that operate in Jordan with good old fashioned steam powered trains.  The one that the article focuses on goes from Amman to the suburbs; but there is a section that goes through Wadi Rum, where parts of Lawrence of Arabia were shot

I thought it was interesting that the entire Hejaz line is considered a Waqf (a property dedicated to a charitable group.)

[Syt]

Nice.

Much of the Ottoman railways were built with German help or by Germans, so you still get random train stations in Turkey that could just as well be somewhere in Germany:

[Savonarola]

Like most electrical engineers I had to take chemistry in college; and like most of them I forgot it all.  Well not entirely all of it; I remember our prof tried to demonstrate the "Fun" side of chemistry by writing the following equation on the board:

NaCl (aq) NaCl (aq) / 7 C

NaCl is the chemical compound for table salt (sodium chloride), aq means that it is aqueous solution; in the case of a salt that is known as a saline solution.  So that is saline, saline over the seven Cs.  (C is the chemical symbol for Carbon.)

So, yes, I forgot mostly about chemistry; (which in turn proved to be a huge pain since I had to learn it all over again fifteen years later when I took the Fundamentals of Engineering test, and they don't test you on dumb chem puns.)  One of the other things I do remember is learning the PV = nRT formula.  P is pressure, V volume, n is the number of moles of gas, R is the ideal gas constant and T is temperature.  To make class "Challenging" profs would switch up the units they used; not into English units, fortunately, but metric has plenty of room for slip up.  Pressure, for instance, can be measured in Pascals, atmospheres, N/cm^2 or mmHg.  In the ideal gas law formula pressure is measured in Pascals, but under most circumstances it's much easier to measure barometric pressure (mmHg.)

I'm in the lab again today and I'm measuring the response of an RF filter over various environmental conditions.  One is pressure, and I have the filter in a pressure chamber.  Their pressure gauges are set to mmHg; since we're almost at sea level our atmospheric pressure is at standard (764 mmHg).  We need to test 200 feet below surface (769 mmHG) and then 12,000 feet AMSL (360 mmHg.)  It's a funny test; the trains are going to be running at most 300 m AMSL, and we're verifying that it will work at the peaks of the Rockies.  Still, it's interesting to see once again something I learned in undergraduate pop up later in my career.

[Malthus]

Like most electrical engineers I had to take chemistry in college; and like most of them I forgot it all.  Well not entirely all of it; I remember our prof tried to demonstrate the "Fun" side of chemistry by writing the following equation on the board:

NaCl (aq) NaCl (aq) / 7 C

NaCl is the chemical compound for table salt (sodium chloride), aq means that it is aqueous solution; in the case of a salt that is known as a saline solution.  So that is saline, saline over the seven Cs.  (C is the chemical symbol for Carbon.)

So, yes, I forgot mostly about chemistry; (which in turn proved to be a huge pain since I had to learn it all over again fifteen years later when I took the Fundamentals of Engineering test, and they don't test you on dumb chem puns.)  One of the other things I do remember is learning the PV = nRT formula.  P is pressure, V volume, n is the number of moles of gas, R is the ideal gas constant and T is temperature.  To make class "Challenging" profs would switch up the units they used; not into English units, fortunately, but metric has plenty of room for slip up.  Pressure, for instance, can be measured in Pascals, atmospheres, N/cm^2 or mmHg.  In the ideal gas law formula pressure is measured in Pascals, but under most circumstances it's much easier to measure barometric pressure (mmHg.)

I'm in the lab again today and I'm measuring the response of an RF filter over various environmental conditions.  One is pressure, and I have the filter in a pressure chamber.  Their pressure gauges are set to mmHg; since we're almost at sea level our atmospheric pressure is at standard (764 mmHg).  We need to test 200 feet below surface (769 mmHG) and then 12,000 feet AMSL (360 mmHg.)  It's a funny test; the trains are going to be running at most 300 m AMSL, and we're verifying that it will work at the peaks of the Rockies.  Still, it's interesting to see once again something I learned in undergraduate pop up later in my career.

Practically the only time I've had something I learned as an undergraduate pop up in my career happened many years ago. I may have told this anecdote before ...

Anyway, I was working at the time for a lawyer who did a lot of municipal law, and one day he got a client in who was a very upset and puzzled Hindu gentleman, recently immigrated from India.

Hos complaint was this: he was organizing a major Hindu community effort to build a religious meeting hall and associated community center in a suburb outside of Toronto. At first, the bureaucrats he was dealing over the phone about municipal planning issues with were very supportive - but he wrote them some innocuous letter on the community organization's letterhead, and all of a sudden they turned inexplicably hostile, throwing all sorts of "bullshit" obstructions in the way of building the project, and refused any offers of meetings to resolve whatever differences or objections they may have had.

The client wondered: were they bigoted against Indians? Why all of a sudden were they basically making the project impossible?

One look at the letter indicated what the likely problem was.

The letterhead proudly proclaimed the community was to be one of "Vedic Aryans". The decorative border on the letterhead consisted of swastikas. It was pretty obvious that someone among the bureaucrats thought these guys were building an "Aryan Nation" community center or something. 

My task was to write out an explanation to the relevant bureaucrats, taken largely from my undergraduate text from an anthropology of religions course, as to what "Vedic Aryans" were (and that they were not neo-Nazis or white supremacists).

The irony is that this particular community were Dravidian, and Dravidians are quite dark skinned as a rule ... but of course, because the bureaucrats had refused all meetings, they had never actually seen these folks! 

[mongers]

Sav, what do you think of the SLJ900* machines?



*not sure that's the exact designation, I'll check.