I’m on the map! No matter what else my mother and I achieve this week, my name will forever be recorded as the unlocker of the Loughrea graticule in Ireland: https://geohashing.site/geohashing/Ireland
Tag: travel
Note #25113
Off to Ireland to hunt for geohashpoints. Wish us luck!
Geohashing Ireland
When my mother proposed that we take a holiday together somewhere, and that I could choose the destination, I started by looking at the Geohashing Expeditions Map.
Where, I wondered, could I find a cluster of mostly-land graticules (“square” degree of latitude and longitude) in which nobody had ever logged a successful expedition?
I’ve been geohashing for ten years now and I’ve never yet scored a “Graticule Unlocked” achievement for being the first to reach any hashpoint in a given graticule.
Over the next week, if the fluctuations of the Dow Jones and the variable Irish weather allow, I’ll be changing that.
Horse-Powered Locomotives
You’re probably familiar with the story of George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, a pioneering steam locomotive built in 1829.
If you know anything, it’s that Rocket won a competition and set the stage for a revolution in railways lasting for a century and a half that followed. It’s a cool story, but there’s so much more to it that I only learned this week, including the bonkers story of 19th-century horse-powered locomotives.
The Rainhill Trials
Over the course of the 1820s, the world’s first inter-city railway line – the Liverpool & Manchester Railway – was constructed. It wasn’t initially anticipated that the new railway would use steam locomotives at all: the technology was in its infancy, and the experience of the Stockton & Darlington railway, over on the other side of the Pennines, shows why.
The Stockton & Darlington railway was opened five years before the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and pulled its trains using a mixture of steam locomotives and horses1. The early steam locomotives they used turned out to be pretty disastrous. Early ones frequently broke their cast-iron wheels so frequently; some were too heavy for the lines and needed reconstruction to spread their weight; others had their boilers explode (probably after safety valves failed to relieve the steam pressure that builds up after bringing the vehicle to a halt); all got tied-up in arguments about their cost-efficiency relative to horses.
Nearby, at Hetton colliery – the first railway ever to be designed to never require animal power – the Hetton Coal Company had become so-dissatisfied with the reliability and performance of their steam locomotives – especially on the inclines – that they’d had the entire motive system. They’d installed a cable railway – a static steam engine pulled the mine carts up the hill, rather than locomotives.
This kind of thing was happening all over the place, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company were understandably cautious about hitching their wagon to the promise of steam locomotives on their new railway. Furthermore, they were concerned about the negative publicity associated with introducing to populated areas these unpopular smoke-belching engines.
But they were willing to be proven wrong, especially after George Stephenson pointed out that this new, long, railway could find itself completely crippled by a single breakdown were it to adopt a cable system. So: they organised a competition, the Rainhill Trials, to allow locomotive engineers the chance to prove their engines were up to the challenge.
The challenge was this: from a cold start, each locomotive had to haul three times its own weight (including their supply of fuel and water), a mile and three-quarters (the first and last eighth of a mile of which were for acceleration and deceleration, but the rest of which must maintain a speed of at least 10mph), ten times, then stop for a break before doing it all again.
Four steam locomotives took part in the competition that week. Perseverance was damaged in-transit on the way to the competition and was only able to take part on the last day (and then only achieving a top speed of 6mph), but apparently its use of roller bearing axles was pioneering. The very traditionally-designed Sans Pareil was over the competition’s weight limit, burned-inefficiently (thanks perhaps to an overenthusiastic blastpipe that vented unburned coke right out of the funnel!), and broke down when one of its cylinders cracked2. Lightweight Novelty – built in a hurry probably out of a fire engine’s parts – was a crowd favourite with its integrated tender and high top speed, but kept breaking down in ways that could not be repaired on-site. And finally, of course, there was Rocket, which showcased a combination of clever innovations already used in steam engines and locomotives elsewhere to wow the judges and take home the prize.
But there was a fifth competitor in the Rainhill Trials, and it was very different from the other four.
Cycloped
When you hear the words horse-powered locomotive, you probably think of a horse-drawn train. But that’s not a locomotive: a locomotive is a vehicle that, by definition, propels itself3. Which means that a horse-powered locomotive needs to carry the horse that provides its power…
…which is exactly what Cycloped did. A horse runs on a treadmill, which turns the wheels of a vehicle. The vehicle (with the horse on it) move. Tada!4
You might look at that design and, not-unreasonably, decide that it must be less-efficient than just having the horse pull the damn vehicle in the first place. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Consider the bicycle which can transport itself and a human both faster and using less-energy than the human would achieve by walking. Or look at wind turbine powered vehicles like Blackbird, which was capable of driving under wind power alone at three times the speed of a tailwind and twice the speed of a headwind. It is mechanically-possible to improve the speed and efficiency of a machine despite adding mass, so long as your force multipliers (e.g. gearing) is done right.
Cycloped didn’t work very well. It was slower than the steam locomotives and at some point the horse fell through the floor of the treadmill. But as I’ve argued above, the principle was sound, and – in this early era of the steam locomotive, with all their faults – a handful of other horse-powered locomotives would be built over the coming decades.
Over in the USA, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company successfully operated a passenger service using the Flying Dutchman, a horse-powered locomotive with twelve seats for passengers. Capable of travelling at 12mph, this demonstrated efficiency multiplication over having the same horse pull the vehicle (which would either require fewer passengers or a dramatically reduced speed).
As late as the early 1850s, people were still considering this strange approach. The 1851 Great Exhibition at the then brand-new Crystal Palace featured Impulsoria, which represents probably the pinnacle of this particular technological dead-end.
Capable of speeds up to 20mph, it could go toe-to-toe with many contemporary steam locomotives, and it featured a gearbox to allow the speed and even direction of travel to be controlled by the driver without having to adjust the walking speed of the two to four horses that provided the motive force.
Personally, I’d love to have a go on something like the Flying Dutchman: riding a horse-powered vehicle with the horse is just such a crazy idea, and a road-capable variant could make for a much better city tour vehicle than those 10-person bike things, especially if you’re touring a city with a particularly equestrian history.
Footnotes
1 From 1828 the Stockton & Darlington railway used horse power only to pull their empty coal trucks back uphill to the mines, letting gravity do the work of bringing the full carts back down again. But how to get the horses back down again? The solution was the dandy wagon, a special carriage that a horse rides in at the back of a train of coal trucks. It’s worth looking at a picture of one, they’re brilliant!
2 Sans Pareil’s cylinder breakdown was a bit of a spicy issue at the time because its cylinders had been manufactured at the workshop of their rival George Stephenson, and turned out to have defects.
3 You can argue in the comments whether a horse itself is a kind of locomotive. Also – and this is the really important question – whether or not Fred Flintstone’s car, which is propelled by his feed, is a kind locomotive or not.
4 Entering Cycloped into a locomotive competition that expected, but didn’t explicitly state, that entrants had to be a steam-powered locomotive, sounds like exactly the kind of creative circumventing of the rules that we all loved Babe (1995) for. Somebody should make a film about Cycloped.
Geohash Luck
Maybe it’s just that my sabbatical is making me pay more attention then usual, but it feels like I’m getting very lucky with nearby geohashpoints lately. Tomorrow’s hashpoint in my graticule might be achievable!
This is a good omen, perhaps, for next week. Next week my mother and I are going to hop over to the West coast of Ireland where there are several contiguous mostly-land graticules that have never seen a successful expedition. We could be the first! 🤞
Sabbatical Magic
A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off my first sabbatical since starting at Automattic a little over five years ago1.
The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:
- Three Rings CIC’s AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better place to volunteer, and better value for our charity users,
- building a first draft of Three Rings’ new server architecture, which turns out to mostly work but still needs some energy thrown at it,
- a geohashing expedition with the dog, and
- a family holiday to Catalonia, Spain.
The trip to Spain followed a model for European family breaks that we first tried in Paris last year2, but was extended to give us a feel for more of the region than a simple city break would. Ultimately, we ended up in three separate locations:
- Barcelona, where we stayed in a wonderful skyscraper hotel with fantastic breakfasts and, after I was able to get enough sleep, explored the obvious touristy bits of the city (e.g. la Sagrada Família3 and other Gaudían architecture, the chocolate museum, the fort at Montjuic, and because it’s me, of course, a widely varied handful of geocaches).
- The PortAventura World theme park, whose accommodation was certainly a gear shift after the 5-star hotel we’d come from4 but whose rides kept us and the kids delighted for a couple of days (Shambhala was a particular hit with the eldest kid and me).
- A villa in el Vilosell – a village of only 190 people – at which the kids mostly played in the outdoor pool (despite the sometimes pouring rain) but we did get the chance to explore the local area a little. Also, of course, some geocaching: some local caches are 1-2 years old and yet had so few finds that I was able to be only the tenth or even just the third person to sign the logbooks!
I’d known – planned – that my sabbatical would involve a little travel. But it wasn’t until we began to approach the end of this holiday that I noticed a difference that a holiday on sabbatical introduces, compared to any other holiday I’ve taken during my adult life…
Perhaps because of the roles I’ve been appointed to – or maybe as a result of my personality – I’ve typically found that my enjoyment of the last day or two of a week-long trip are marred somewhat by intrusive thoughts of the work week to follow.
If I’m back to my normal day job on Monday, then by Saturday I’m already thinking about what I’ll need to be working on (in my case, it’s usually whatever I left unfinished right before I left), contemplating logging-in to work to check my email or Slack, and so on5.
But this weekend, that wasn’t even an option. I’ve consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my usual channels of work communication, and I’ve been very disciplined about not turning any of them back on. And even if I did… my team aren’t expecting me to sign into work for about another 11 weeks anyway!
Monday and Tuesday are going to mostly be split between looking after the children, and voluntary work for Three Rings (gotta fix that new server architecture!). Probably. Wednesday? Who knows.
That’s my first taste of the magic of a sabbatical, I think. The observation that it’s possible to unplug from my work life and, y’know, not start thinking about it right away again.
Maybe I can use this as a vehicle to a more healthy work/life balance next year.
Footnotes
1 A sabbatical is a perk offered to Automatticians giving them three months off (with full pay and benefits) after each five years of work. Mine coincidentally came hot on the tail of my last meetup and soon after a whole lot of drama and a major shake-up, so it was a very welcome time to take a break… although of course it’s been impossible to completely detach from bits of the drama that have spilled out onto the open Web!
2 I didn’t get around to writing about Paris, but I did write about how the hotel we stayed at introduced our eldest, and by proxy re-introduced me, to Wonder Boy, ultimately leading to me building an arcade cabinet on which I finally, beat the game, 35 years after first playing it.
3 Whose construction has come on a lot since the last time I toured inside it.
4 Although alcohol helped with that.
5 I’m fully aware that this is a symptom of poor work/life balance, but I’ve got two decades of ingrained bad habits working against me now; don’t expect me to change overnight!
PortAventura
Made it through a day and a half of theme park fun with the kids. Time for a much-needed beer, then as long a sleep as circumstance will allow.
Dos Huevos
For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN’T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂
Hackaday
Me, hacking challenging Javascript at work: “Damn, I need a holiday.”
Me, hacking challenging Javascript on sabbatical: “Ah, so relaxing.”
Hour of Ambiguity
Here in my hotel room, high above Barcelona, I woke up. It was still dark outside, so I looked to my phone – sitting in its charging cradle – as a bedside clock. It told me that the time was 02:30 (01:30 back home), and that the sun would rise at 07:17.
But how long would it be, until then?
Daylight savings time is harmonised across Europe by EU Directive 2000/84/EC1, but for all the good this harmonisation achieves it does not perfectly remove every ambiguity from questions like this. That it’s 02:30 doesn’t by itself tell me whether or not tonight’s daylight savings change has been applied!
It could be 00:30 UTC, and still half an hour until the clocks go back, or it could be 01:30 UTC, and the clocks went back half an hour ago. I exist in the “hour of uncertainty”, a brief period that happens once every year2. Right now, I don’t know what time it is.
I remember when it first started to become commonplace to expect digital devices to change their clocks twice a year on your behalf. You’d boot your PC on a morning and it’d pop up a dialog box to let you know what it had done: a helpful affordance that existed primarily, I assume, to discourage you from making the exact same change yourself, duplicating the effort and multiplying the problem. Once, I stayed up late on last Saturday in March to see what happened if the computer was running at the time, and sure enough, the helpful popup appeared as the clocks leapt forward, skipping over sixty minutes in an instant, keeping them like leftovers to be gorged upon later.
Computers don’t do that for us anymore. They still change their clocks, but they do it silently, thanklessly, while we sleep, and we generally don’t give it a second thought.
That helpful dialog that computers used to have had a secondary purpose. Maybe we should bring it back. Not as a popup – heaven knows we’ve got enough of those – but just a subtle subtext at the bottom of the clock screens on our phones. “Daylight savings: clock will change in 30 minutes” or “Daylight savings: clock changed 30 minutes ago”. Such a message could appear for, say, six hours or so before and after our strange biannual ritual, and we might find ourselves more-aware as a result.
Of course, I suppose I could have added UTC to my world clock. Collapsed the waveform. Dispelled the ambiguity. Or just allowed myself to doze off and let the unsleeping computers do their thing while I rested. But instead I typed this, watching as the clock reached 02:59 and then to 02:00. I’d started writing during summertime; I’d finished after it ended, a few minutes… earlier?
Daylight savings time remains a crazy concept.
Footnotes
1 Why yes, I am the kind of nerd who didn’t have to look that up. Why do you ask?
2 In places that observe a one-hour shift for summertime.
Melià Barcelona Sky
Enjoying a glass of cava while the kids peer down out of the window of a Barcelona skyscraper.
Day 8 of my sabbatical. Think I’m doing this right?
Note #24818
This boy is excited and ready for Spain!
Note #24813
Off to Spain! BRB.
Calm after the storm
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Regarding the alignment offer at Automattic that resulted in around 1 of every 12/13-or-so Automatticians being paid to leave, my colleague Rosie writes of her experience of the week of the offer and our subsequent week in Mexico:
…
I never thought about taking the offer, but last week took a toll on all of us. It was a weird and sad week. So the Woo DM worked not only as it usually does, a week to bond with colleagues, have fun and collaborate in person. It was also one hundred times more energizing than it usually is. It had that little taste of “we are here because we believe in this. LFG!!!”. A togetherness that feels special. We could talk, discuss, and share our concerns, opinions, memories and new ideas for the future of Woo and WordPress.
…
That’s a good summary of the week, I feel. It was weird and sad, especially to begin with, but it grew into something that was energising and hopeful. There was, in particular, a certain solidarity, of us being the ones who stayed. It’s great to be reminded that my experience is shared.
Whether or not somebody chose to stay for the same reason as me, or as Rosie, it felt like a bonding experience to be among those who made that same decision. I’m glad we got to have this meetup (even though I’m feeling a bit run-down by a combination of exhaustion, jetlag, and – principally – some kind of stomach bug I’ve contracted somewhere along the way, ugh).
Note #24696
I’m back home from Mexico (and feeling a little worse for wear), where this young lady wanted to let me know that I was sorely missed.
