Innovation Story

A History of The American Diner.

Posted on by jccarlton

I was looking for a plan of an old fashioned railroad car diner so that I could make a 3D model for cover art an I found a lot more than I was looking for.
This picture from Flikr shows what I was looking for.
The Lunch Box Diner
This old diner is in much better shape than the two I found in town.
This is my local diner.
http://oremsdiner.com
There are a lot of diners around and they are great way to get a nice meal that isn’t too fancy.
https://www.dinerville.info/
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The Very Early Days Of CAD

Posted on by jccarlton

I’ve been looking at computer graphics and engineering CAD systems for most of my life.  I’ve been a more or less continuous user of CAD systems for over thirty years now and I thought I knew most of how it came about.  There have been things I never really understood about how the way things worked in CAD as opposed to how a designer or drafter thinks, but I didn’t think to look into that very deeply.

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Pratt’s New Engine, The PW1000g

Posted on by jccarlton

Pratt has finally completed it’s geared bypass engine for commercial aircraft. The development for this engine has been going on for a long time. There are reasons for that.  Some of it’s FAA red tape. The biggest part though, is the expected long life of the engines themselves.

It’s not like the old days where you did all your development in a backshop. Of course the aircraft aren’t enlarged kites anymore either.

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The End Of Moore’s Law On The Streets Of Shenzhen

Posted on by jccarlton

Bunnie Huang goes shopping in Shenzhen.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/08/features/moores-law/viewall

He makes some very good points about how the end of Moore’s law has come for processor speed.  The end of shrinking the gate size is coming shortly as well.  Not necessarily because the physics don’t work but because the machines to make the transistors will have gotten prohibitively expensive.  It seems that there was another exponential in Moore’s law.

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Space Suit, Space Suit And More Space Suits

Posted on by jccarlton

 

I ran across this blog post recently.  It’s an overview of all the sorts of space suits out there.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacesuits.php

I’ve since found an amazing amount of stuff and links, most of which will end up in this post.  I think that, if nothing else, this post demonstrates the power of the internet for research. When I was in school finding information on this scale would have been impossible.

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