Freesteel Blog » 2018 » July

Friday, July 20th, 2018 at 10:54 am - - Whipping

To me, your justification for Brexit seems incoherent and illogical.

Your basic premise — in common with a lot of superficially thoughtful criticism — was that the EEC began as a treaty to regulate trade and harmonize regulations, and has then metamorphised into a superstate taking on powers and imposing new laws far beyond this remit. The people are not ready for this.

You gave as an example of super-state over-reaching powers, something from Intellectual Property law — your area of interest. The example was Copyright Extension, which you claimed — correctly — was not about harmonizing some regulation across Europe, but of extending it far beyond what anyone had before.

Really? This is your example?

But we’ll go with it.

Regulations have to change and move forwards with the times, and the point of European system is to make these changes in harmony across the whole of Europe at the same time.

Otherwise, your definition of “Regulatory Harmonization” implies that EU can only impose regulations onto the UK that had existed elsewhere in the EU prior to 1973.

Put into that context, it’s easy to see why the early years of the EEC would be mostly about harmonization of regulations, while the later years became more about drafting new regulations when those pre-1973 regulations grew out of date through processes we can call time passing. To expect otherwise is illogical, Captain.

But, on the subject of Intellectual Property, let’s look at the pragmatic situation. We all know where the policies of successive UK Governments on this issue lie. For sure, if we had not been part of the EU we would have experienced Copyright Extension and Software Patents good and hard since 1998, via a trade treaty with the US.

And good luck with lobbying our supposedly more democratic UK MPs to vote against Software Patents, as we did with European MEPs. They will either not understand it, or agree that it’s harmful but consider it something well worth selling out in order to get a better trade deal with the US. It’s give and take in the negotiations, you see, and we are a small country who don’t get to impose our will on an international super-power. Anyway, Software Developers already do well enough to make a living on the job market; we can trade them to protect our sheep farmers.

Ah, but there’s Taking Back Control.

My turn for an example.

After Brexit, the French police can Take Back Control over who is allowed to drive on the French highways. So if I cross the Channel by car, the French police can arrest me for not having a valid MoT on my car, the lack of which means it’s officially unsafe to drive and could kill someone. Bad idea.

Fortunately, there’s an international court called the ECJ to enforce the treaty/contract between the French and UK Governments that says my MoT certificate for my car issued by the UK Government is as good as the French paperwork.

Now, the French Government can only sign such an agreement to respect our MoT certificates if they have the assurance that our safety and inspection standards are up to scratch — both in terms of the quality of the regulations and in their enforcement.

We have to allow the French Government to potentially take the UK Government to court if they think the UK Government is not doing a good enough job of prosecuting cowboy garage operators who are issuing MoTs to unsafe cars that could then kill people on French motorways.

Otherwise, without the ability to seek redress in court, the French would just have to ban all cars with UK MoTs until the UK cleaned up its act.

However, in such a dispute, it is possible that the French are simply wrong and are being too picky about their standards, and are deliberately making safety requirements that just so happen disadvantage UK cars. So we’d like this matter to be considered in a Competent Court that values its reputation for impartiality — not just some ad-hoc tribunal made up of three dudes deep into conflicts of interest appointed by both sides that has to come up with an answer in 30 days or else.

And we’d like the decision to be worked out and enforced justly, without threats, organized disinformation in the Press, counter-measures and political grand-standing hanging over it — which is what happens when you don’t have a framework of functioning law that punishes such disruptive activities.

This story about the MoTs and car safety across borders generalizes to every other field of regulatory cooperation. Basically, if you plumb your toilet into the main sewerage system instead of to a hole in your back garden, you give up control over how many tampons you can flush down it. What was so important about having Control again?

And finally, you suggested a time-frame of five years. It could be bad and painful during the transition period, but we need to hold our nerves while we take back control, until it all works out.

This time-frame, quite frankly, is pulled out of someone’s arse. No basis on anything. Here’s one way to make a number. Trade treaties take about ten years to negotiate, so why not say ten years, plus another five to account for the fact that no one in the UK Government has negotiated one in 45 years. Does 15 years of chaos and closed borders feel worth it?

I mean, I’ve got an estimate for the time horizon for how long this takes to work out. But it’s not expressed in years; it’s the length of time it takes for enough of the Brexiteers to come to terms with the fact that their slogans of Sovereignty, Control and so-called Democracy (with an electoral system that does worse than if you picked 650 citizens for Parliament completely at random) are totally vacuous.

Maybe it takes one month. Maybe it’s fifty years. Nobody knows yet. How long can this society carry on with an unbroken layer of denial and mendacity at the top when the shit gets real?

I’ll check back with you in about year after it hits the fan. The gradient of the learning curve will suggest a more numerical estimate. By then there will be four-and-a-half out of the quoted five years remaining for things to get sane. My theory is that because it’ll actually be happening to us, and isn’t some foreign game like a war, the Friedman Unit trick of always quoting five years in the future from now won’t work.

The main consequence of taking Control is that we must take the Blame.

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018 at 7:50 pm - - Flightlogger, Hang-glide

We had a go, where I rigged my U2 hang-glider in the front garden with the VG full on to make it rigid, and then standing it on its nose so that JR could take lots of nice high definition photos of it from a variety of angles with a proper camera with a big lens.

The Agisoft Photoscan thing initially got it right, with a good looking 3D image:

But then I started doing things with the point scan — in particular finding its symmetry so as to compare the left wing with the right wing.

The code is here.

Basically, I loaded the 9653216 points from the csv file with this one Python command:

k = pandas.read_csv("hg1a1b.txt", sep=" ", names=["x","y","z","r","g","b","nx","ny","nz"])

And then worked out that I could perform vector calculations on the columns of coordinates, like this

# Reflect about the plane through x=2 parallel to the YZ plane
mv = pandas.Series({"x":2, "y":0, "z":0})
mvsq = sum(mv**2) # (scalar)
mvfac = (k.x*mv.x + k.y*mv.y + k.z*mv.z)*2/mvsq - 2  # 9million value column
kmirr = pandas.DataFrame({"x":k.x-mv.x*mvfac, "y":k.y-mv.y*mvfac, "z":k.z-mv.z*mvfac})

The alternative more memory efficient calculation method, performed row by row runs many, many times slower:

kmirr = k.apply(lambda R:R[["x","y","z"]] - mv*((R.x*mv.x+R.y*mv.y+R.z*mv.z)*2/mvsq - 2), axis=1)

There’s something curious about this column mathematics and how it applies to computational geometry.

In any case, have produced an animation melting through from one wing tip to the other, like so:

It seems that one wing is much fatter in depth than the other.

I think this is a photogrammetry error in its understanding of how far apart to put both sides of the wing. The gap at the leading edge on the fatter wing gives it away.

As is my observation in freeform CAD/CAM: you can get away with a lot of deviation from the required surface because no one can tell when it’s wrong. They can measure the flatness of the square edges, but errors in the middle of the freeform surface (so long as they are smooth) pass without notice. I suspect a lot of photogrammetry works on that principle. It’s only when we scanned something with two sides that was supposed to be symmetrical could I tell there was a big a problem.

(To be fair, the Agisoft failed when we reran it to get a better fit. It is better to

Well, so much for that. I had hoped I’d have something good enough to trace up and enter into XFLR5 as a series of contours, but it’s not quite.

However, I should just make up a series of contours based on this anyway (since it has things like the washout/twist approaching the wingtips) so that when we get good data (eg from a laser scanner) we are all ready for it.

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018 at 5:50 pm - - Kayak Dive

# date site depth divetime
1 25 June 12:00 marine park pinnacle 20.5m 47 minutes
2 25 June 14:42 Citrine (wreck) 15.4m 52 minutes
3 26 June 10:41 Sugarloaf caves 12.7m 61 minutes
4 26 June 16:42 Thracian (wreck) 32.7m 29 minutes
5 27 June 11:00 The puddle 18.1m 58 minutes
6 27 June 17:26 Burroo 21.3m 54 minutes
7 27 June 20:14 Bay near Burroo 18.7m 56 minutes
8 28 June 11:30 Gibdale Bay 22.4m 47 minutes
9 28 June 14:24 St Mary’s Ledges 19.8m 57 minutes
10 28 June 22:19 Port Erin 11.3m 63 minutes
11 29 June 11:04 Thousla rock (wreck) 20.8m 50 minutes
12 29 June 14:04 Sugarloaf caves 11.0m 57 minutes
13 29 June 19:19 Spanish head drift 21.6m 40 minutes

Really very much good diving stuff with Discover Diving on the Isle of Man last week. We went over loaded up on our bikes (can’t find the pics) on a trip with LUSAC from the ferry terminal about a mile away from our doorstep. My logbook records over 11 hours underwater in 5 days of luxurious cold water diving.

It was insanely hot and the sea was mirror flat most of the days. We stayed on for an extra two days for a cycle to Peel and back to Douglas, though actually we spent most of those days sleeping to escape from the heat.


We saw some amazing sights, like this bird swimming underwater:

That was at the end of the dive in the Sugarloaf Caves, which in every way (except the kayaking) outmatched our cavern dive on the LLeyn a couple of weeks before.

As usual, we had problems with the fact that air goes only upwards when you try to fill a blob. “No,” I shook my head.

We got better at deploying it later in the week. Here’s a dive to the anchor chain and half a giant anchor on the Thracian. When you release the blob to the surface you realize just how deep 32 metres actually is.

On the night dive we annoyed an octopus who was trying to do its hunting in the dark.

Our final dive was a fast(-ish) 2 knot drift with the current from Spanish Head which left us feeling happy, going with the flow.

I don’t have a lot of time to write this up. Maybe there will be some other vids later on when I’ve gone through them a bit more. (Most are terrible.)

In the meantime, here’s me in black on the deep dark wreck, startled by someone else’s light.