Key West

Blogs are neat I guess. I have wanted to write one since I started out on the road. I wanted to write a log of my travels and what I was thinking about or doing while I was on the road. There have been some impressive similar things in my lifetime, like Charles Kuralt's journals of his travels across America for CBS in the 1960's and 1970's. Kuralt was an interesting American like other TV journalists, including Chet Huntley whose life was a lot like the movie "A River Runs Through It" Bob Schieffer is also a good example of a hard working serious journalist whose life was not ruined by notoriety.

Another example of pre-Internet travel logs is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" In that one the scenery runs together so much that all you really get is a course in freshman level philosophy. And because I am an engineer at heart it seems to me that that interesting book is really just a lot of hoo-ah. Robert Piersig is an interesting writer though, and if you have trouble sleeping, then his captivating book will cure your insomnia for about a month.

Because I am travelling in the twenty-ohs, one title I considered for this blog is "33 Walton Drive". People travelling nowadays spend a lot of time in Wal-Mart parking lots, and also public rest stops along the highway. If you think about it, I can spend about sixteen dollars for a spot in a campground, or I can buy 8 gallons of gas and drive 150 miles, if I stay at 33 Walton Drive. The campground includes a hot shower usually, and that is an essential for travellers. I am in a van that I fixed up myself, and it does not include a shower stall.

Anyway I decided not to call it 33 Walton Road, because Wal-Mart is not the focus of my blog. I did, today, enter recent expenses into Quicken and found that 35% of my recent expenses were at various Wal-Marts. Most people don't realize that there are only about 4 or 5 different floor plans for Wal-Marts, so that for people like me, I can go into the store in the morning and find what I need - ketchup and other condiments are in aisle 8 - most types of Wal-Mart have a restroom in the back that is cleaner and quieter than the one if the front.

I hope I don't do a lot of writing about Wal-Mart. What I want to write about is, mostly, what I think about things, mainly engineering things, and some thoughts about the ones I think are important and should not be forgotten. This is stuff they don't cover in undergraduate engineering, and I get the feeling that most engineering professors of graduate students are too busy with their research contracts to gaze at the stars and realize all the gaps in our knowledge. For example about 4 years ago a physicist retired from Lawrence Livermore and spent a few years writing a book about starlight, and filling in some of the gaps in our knowledge about starshine. Starshine and twinkling aren't crucial, we didn't need to know about it to get to the moon, but I'm glad that he took the time to write that book, in case anybody ever wonders. The knowledge he had about starshine will not be forgotten.

So I'm going to write about engineering problems, mainly. If you want to know what I think abouit the progress of science or computers you might look on Lawrence Lessig's blog for some comments I put on there. And if its political you might just get some email from me, or email that I wrote and mass-mailed around. I started my emails about 1999, when I took my first long trip, and its interesting because although media people picked up some of my ideas starting back in 1999, the media won't comment on them. Private messages are not news, but what people write in public places is news, and the media comments on it.

This is the nature of the new network: There is a private level of email, a public level of blogs and newsgroup messages written by individuals, and thirdly there is a public level of commercially produced news sites that feature RSS (XML) for those who want custom news. All these together remind me of an old science fiction story where the news was downloaded over radio waves. Everyone had a two-sided piece of plastic to take on the bus with them. The plastic was filled with formatted text and as they read one side, information for the other side was downloaded and composed onto the back page according to their specific instructions. You could do this today with HTML, RSS and a cell phone. All you need is a monitor that is somewhat paper like, and can be folded up and put under your arm.

So if you don't want to learn about engineering problems, then don't RSS my blog. Just put it away or use it to cover your head during a rainstorm. But if you have some engineering and have forgotten it all, there isn't a lot of time to do refresher courses, and I'm not qualified to teach it accurately. I am a good teacher though, and if you are patient you might see some new ideas, or ideas that will make you say "Sure that is obvious" even though no one you know ever mentioned it before. I will start tomorrow, in Key West, which is where my trip will begin, even though, like I say, I have been living at 33 Walton Drive for over seven months now. The first topic will be fluid mechanics.