by Craig Meyer, inventor/engineer/consultant/speculator
“Like unwelcome guests who will not leave, 453 container ships, 11% of global capacity, now float outside the harbours of Hong Kong, Singapore and other Southeast Asian ports.”
–The Economist, March 28th 2009, page 74
(Which means, let me point out, that if ParaTow can be made to Really Work, there’s a killer opportunity here for buying up shipping at highway robbery prices and converting it into a competitive cost structure. –Craig)
That’s the 500th time I’ve said to myself or to someone else that I’ll do work over the weekend, and the 499th time that I haven’t.
Hm. Wise-up time!
So here’s a major minor thought:
I was walking into work today and it hit me that I’ve been doing things to get things for some time now. How can I get what I need?
And to be honest, I’m not happy with the results. Nope.
So, instead, I’m going to live for giving instead. I’m not perfect or efficient or a saint, but I’m really going to try to turn this around.
I have gifts, I have ideas, I have things that make me special, etc, and the good news is that I can give those things even when I’m broke. So it’s a whole new set of rules that leave me less encumbered by the financial consequences of “living for getting” unsuccessfully.
It has to do with… with not feeling so alone anymore. Not feeling that I had to get everything I needed in life from an uncaring world. I had to trick it into letting me survive. It makes me sound like a Disney villain, but it’s true.
I’m just so glad to have made it this far.
These videos add up to 60 minutes. No one has time for that!
Instead, just pick one that looks interesting and watch a couple minutes. That’s all you need. My resume is the “hard stuff,” and these videos give you an idea of “what I’m like.”
–Craig Meyer, (206) 669-6496, craig.r.meyer@gmail.com
1: Introduction and “table of contents”
2: What I’m looking for job-wise
Product design, product development and industrial design look really good to me. I’m very good at coming up with a concept for something and prototyping it to demonstrate that concept. That’s really my key thing.
I’m also good with electronics (and avionics in particular) thanks to my experience with electronics design/packaging and also thermal engineering at Aerovironment, my first job out of college.
I’m also interested in marine engineering, like shipbuilding and the design of various underwater doohickeys.
3: My strengths, skills and talents
4: What I need from management
I call it “the privilege of focus.” I do my very best when I have just one problem at a time.
This means that I need management. I appreciate how important and hard this is now, but that doesn’t make me a master.
Also, I want to get my Masters Degree, and maybe someday a PhD. It’ll take a while, but I still want it. I’ve been accepted to the Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate school here at UW and hope to take one or two classes at a time. If I move for my new job I’ll have to establish residency in my new state and re-apply for the nearby university. ‘And I will if I have to.
5: BS Engineering, Harvey Mudd College (1992-1997)
6: Electronics and thermal engineering at Aerovironment for the NASA Centurion (1997-1999)
I did electronic and thermal engineering, design and testing for the NASA Centurion, a solar-powered UAV. It was quite a job because the Centurion had to function in some vary different regimes:
So this wasn’t just about designing electronic circuits and thermal-management contraptions, but figuring out how to affordably test them as well. No matter how awesome my ideas were, if we couldn’t test them, they weren’t possible.
7: Web development at Civilution.com and math & science tutoring (1999-2002)
8: Founding and growing ReclaimMedia.com. Automated audio digitization (2002-2009)
I started Reclaim Media when I was still tuturing. I wanted a way to make some money at home.
I figured out how to automate making CDs and MP3 files from cassettes and records.
Reclaim Media is all about integration, making a system out of various parts that were never intended to work together:
It’s really a factory. A factory for digitizing cassette tapes and records. Hundreds a day.
9: ParaTow: A scheme for propelling ships by wind power alone (my hobby)
ParaTow is an idea/invention/scheme I have for a way to pull ships across the ocean under wind power alone. I’m very excited about it!
I’m putting together a plan for making a small-scale kayak-pulling demonstrator “in my spare time.”
10: DETAILS: Electronics for the NASA Centurion at Aerovironment
11: DETAILS: Thermal Engineering for the NASA Centurion at Aeroviroment
12: What I’m Doing Right Now
Thanks for watching this! I hope we have something to talk about.
–Craig Meyer, (206) 669-6496, craig.r.meyer@gmail.com
A few nights ago, I blew out my candle (those Ikea packs last forever), lay in bed on my back, looked up at the ceiling…
…and suddenly started to pray for my brother, my parents, my friends, and all the women I’ve loved and hearts I’ve broken (and naming names, ouch)…
…and started to cry. It was important.
‘The heck have I never prayed for anyone before?
So long as I can find me an (unfunded) research advisor, I’ve been admitted to the UW Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate school!
Sometimes I need to convert units on the go (you think I’m kidding?). But, all the iPhone unit-converting programs are B.S. kid stuff. Ergo, this here:
Step 1
Step 2
Yesyesyes!
So. I’m super-duper into this ParaTow wind-based ship-propulsion scheme, right? Right.
And a remaining mystery, to me anyway, was the question of how the hell to hook it to a ship in a safe and inexpensive way. I was assuming that some kind of harness contraption would have to be bolted/welded/strapped to the boat to allow the ParaTow to attach to the ship in one place.
And that’s probably true… if I wanted to hook to the ship in one place.
But!
Take a look at this. There are these thingies on ships called bollards. They’re called bollards whether they’re part of a ship or part of a dock. They’re the hard points where you tie on ropes or chains.
Bollard (I think on a ship, but I can't tell for sure)
Bollards on a dock.
Okay. So. I finally decided to ask just how much load these things were built to take, and then compare that to how much tension a ParaTow will be exherting on a ship to pull it around at full speed.
I couldn’t figure that out, actually, but I did figure out that the “bollard pull” of normal harbor tugboats (how hard they can yank on a ship’s bollard through a long rope) is around 50 tons. Okay.
Further, the bollard pull of an oceangoing tugboat (basically, a tow truck for ships that break down at sea) is around 100 tons. Okay-okay.
So great. We know that ships’ bollards, and therefore the structure underneath supporting them, are built to take somewhere between 50 tons and 100 tons of force safely. Okay.
So how many tons must a ParaTow exhert in order to pull the ship at full speed? If power = force x speed, then force = power/speed, and the million-dollar linux utility “units” will spell it out for us. For reference, a common Panamax cargo ship goes about 20 knots and has an engine no bigger than 50,000 horsepower, so:
You have: 50000 hp / 20 knot You want: tonf * 407.33261 / 0.0024549962
Aha, so about 400 tons of thrust.
Well then, if a ship’s bollard is easily good for 50 tons of oomph, then we’d (theoretically) only need to hook to eight of them (four on the left side plus four on the right side) in order to safely yank this thing along at full speed.
The good news is that according to the pictures I’ve found in Ships Monthly magazine, they all have at least ten bollards up front.
So what do you know, there it is! I’m imagining some kind of super-tugboat platform with not just one winch and tow line, but ten or so. Their relative lengths are tuned to the geometry of the given customer vessel, and it goes through some procedure to let the ship haul up each of them and loop it over the bollard in question.
So wow. The real world is never as simple as the sixth-grade math in a casual blog post, but the basic message is still loud and clear: When working together, the bow bollards on a ship are together rated for the same range of cumulative line tension as a ParaTow needs to route into the ship’s structure.
So done intelligently, it’s looking possible to demonstrate the ParaTow concept at full scale without having to add new structure to the ship (what I think most of you have suspected all along, but I was trying to make complicated). Wow! Let’s hear it for logic!
