The Scottosphere

I have started run­ning para­met­ric analy­ses of hull designs as a sort of san­ity check. The good news is that, assum­ing my guess about the fin­ished weight holds true, it will float with­out adding a lot of extra material.

The donor car for the boat will, in all prob­a­bil­ity, be this 1967 Chevy Bel Air:

Return­ing from an early-morning tug­boat mis­sion in Boston Har­bor, we motored slowly out of the locks, through the Museum of Sci­ence canal, and into the Charles River basin. Just before leav­ing the no-wake zone, we spot­ted, across the river, a small motor­boat labelled “Marine Tech­nol­ogy Laboratory.”

Since our skiff bore the name of MIT, some­thing had to be done. I searched for my best Mag­nus Pyke voice, cupped my hands and shouted, “SCIENCE!” It echoed pleas­antly across the water.

The three occu­pants of the research ves­sel spun around, grinned broadly, and saluted us.

I am build­ing a new boat for July 4. I’m presently scour­ing New Eng­land for a good deal on a 1960s-era con­vert­ible with front and rear bench seats. Actu­ally, it need not be a con­vert­ible because I can eas­ily make it so (chop chop!), but a clos­able top would be a nice feature.

There is no offi­cial plan yet and work has not yet begun, so please con­tact me if you would like to help.

Cold Stone Cream­ery, the innocuous-looking ice cream store (based in Tempe, Ari­zona) that appeared overnight in about 20 neigh­bor­hoods here.

Apple Com­puter has announced that they will aban­don the ele­gant 64-bit IBM Pow­erPC RISC archi­tec­ture for the 32-bit Intel 8086 fam­ily. They said this will be done by 2008, when the Intel proces­sor design offi­cially turns 30 years old.

The new Mac will be func­tion­ally iden­ti­cal to any other per­sonal com­puter, even to the point of being able to run Microsoft Win­dows. His­tory has shown that, bar­ring any other dif­fer­ences, peo­ple will not pay extra for the kind of [expen­sive] hard­ware design that Apple cher­ishes. If ele­gant soft­ware alone were capa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing a PC, as Steve Jobs seems to believe, peo­ple would have aban­doned Microsoft crap long ago. Mark my pre­dic­tion. By the end of the decade, Apple will reas­sume its early-1990s sta­tus: a com­pany on life sup­port, aban­doned by the pub­lic spot­light, devoid of rel­e­vance, and nour­ished only by a tiny group of devoted fans.

In the lobby of my dad’s hotel: a Yamaha Disklavier grand. They’re not exactly new, but they’re still amaz­ing. Yamaha engi­neers devised a mech­a­nism for pre­cisely repli­cat­ing a pianist’s tim­ing, attack veloc­ity, sus­tain, and release. In record­ing mode, it senses these para­me­ters opti­cally, thus impart­ing no change to the stan­dard piano action. In play­back, a key is struck by a sole­noid dri­ven by a power ampli­fier con­trolled by a cus­tom closed-loop ASIC. Some­how, they shoe­horned 88 of these mech­a­nisms into a normal-looking piano enclo­sure. It’s a per­fectly ele­gant, har­mo­nious mar­riage of high tech and old-world crafts­man­ship. It sounds great, and it’s even more fun to watch than a real pianist.

The only bum­mer is that the vir­tual pianist does noth­ing to protest the hotel management’s deci­sion to play the same song all day on infi­nite loop.