I have long found reviewing complex but comprehensibly engineered objects very useful for relief of mental and emotional pain and discomfort caused by rampant insanity and irrationality. As I loaded videos up for use late tonight I thought some of you might find the same to be useful for the same purpose.
European sailships of the 15th through 18th Centuries are perfect. Here are two superb CGI videos, first Francis Drake’s world encircling Golden Hind, and second Horatio Nelson’s HMS Victory, shown and displayed with voice over in classic, calm, clearly enunciated engineer-eese.
I read an article long ago that said that almost half of all vocabulary in the modern world is either about food and cooking or sailing and navigation. Lots of exceedingly complex yet crucial and very real distinctions between superficially similar things, e.g. ropes.
But actually, I was not referring to the amazing number of specific names of specific “ropes” doing their various different things, but the amazing number of different specific “lays” of “ropes” for different uses:
Here is a Union Pacific Big Boy (a monster 4-8-8-4, 16 drive wheels!!!) my favorite locomotive of all time, one I have seen in full steam roaring along twice in my life, once with me aboard. It was the last great steam locomotive design, and played a crucial role in moving huge amounts of USA war freight over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada during WWII:
Here is a magnificent detailed dissection of the Big Boy with full explanation of what a peak steam engine looked like and how it all worked:
My Great Granddad did the surveying and supervised the grade construction of a narrow gauge logging railroad that brought white pine tree trunks from the Central Sierra Nevada to the UP line below and west of Donner Pass. I was brought up to worship the Big Boy.
