You want pictures?

Quote of the week: "It is recomended by that you don't go through the top hatch while the main rotor is still turning, for you will be immediately assaulted by the rotor blade."


This thing is GIGANTIC... in a hoover dam kind of way...





Some of the many remenants of the previous management.




In the museum of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This is the Soviets being about as subtle as they can...


I'll blame the this for any misspellings.


This is Kremuchug Flight Collage. The school in the back ground should give you a pretty good idea of the more recent architecture around this place.

Greetings from the land of perpetual dehydration!

That would be Europe in general... where a tiny glass of bottled water is about 8 dollars and carbonated, and beer is 80 cents. (Except of course Greece, were they invented clean water... but then poisoned it with turpentine to keep the turks from stealing it.)

This place is so un-American in every way I almost feel bad about being here... like I am spoiling the snow with footprints. I'll get into the cultural weirdness in a minute. First I should answer the most important questions about any new place... "How is the beer, and the women?" The beer... well, this place has confirmed my suspicion that energy and mater are not the only conservative substances in the universe, instead it is a general operating principle of existence. As evidence: I payed over $20 for two crapy beers in New York about a week ago... now I am paying about 80 cents per bucket of absolutely excellent beer! I think it is called ZPRKZCETYHC... I am just kidding, that is not what the name of the beer is, that is the name of everything here! What I am getting at is that the universe knows that a $10+ beer must have it's equal and opposite... and it is here.

Having established the conservation of beer as a law of the universe, I am troubled by the thought that women may also be a conservative substance. Because after this place... I am owe the universe like it was a pissed off loan shark with mafia connections... and that is just for looking. There is absolutely no concept here of the american female idea of not wearing something because it makes her look slutty. There is absolutely no fucking way to describe the women here. Mind scrambling is the closest thing I can think of. 90% of the women start off armed with 8' legs and perfect tits... and they improve from there. I didn't know that it was possible to have a camel toe with jeans on... but it is... it is the way they wear their jeans here. (In fact they may just be spray painted on.) Continue that concept with at least knee high, if not thigh high, stiletto boots and you have an idea of the most conservatively dressed women I have seen here. I swear to god I am not making any of this up. They have an aviation college here... sort of a aviation trade school as far as I can tell. In the heyday of soviet pilot training they where graduating about 400 pilots a year. Now they are down to about 25. This leaves them with a huge surplus of classroom space. How would you fill the rest of the classrooms? Of course... you would expand your program to offer training in "Book Keeping." This is for real... the collage trains pilots and office girls, at about a 1 to 15 ratio. And since they are going to the "Flight College" they must wear the uniform of the institution. (This is where VMI and the Citadel fucked up) The female uniform is a mid-thigh mini skirt, fishnet stockings, knee high stiletto boots, and a very tight light blue blouse (obviously no buttoning regulations...) If I didn't see this place with my own eyes, I would never believe it. The female uniform looks like one of those novelty costumes... but better quality. I swear this is all completely true! It is very hard to concentrate... how can you learn very technical subject matter in a foreign language with that all around you?

We have solved the tactical problem of procuring drinking water. We have saved up enough water bottles and have found a source of fresh water so that we will probably not die of dehydration... though the locals give us very odd looks for drinking water. Now for the next tactical problem how to get a haircut. While finding a barber is the first step, telling him how i would like my hair cut with no common language should be the more difficult one. How do you say "a one on the sides, leave the sideburns, tapered in the back, and long enough to still part on top" in Russian... or Ukrainian...?

Icing

Detroit

This was originally going to be a bunch of pictures of the last few weeks. I have been living out of a suitcase, couch surfing, and living in hotels for the last month and a half. The pictures would have been a fiat covered in ice rime icing and towered over by 12' snowbanks. My mother wearing my helmet. A picture of the pentagon with defense contractor office buildings in the immediate background. Some air and space museum pictures. A cute butt that I was encouraged to take a picture of in hooters, (its owner was the one encouraging it... it seems that shinny cameras make people want to have their picture taken. Now I see why Sophist became a photographer!) But the problem is that I can't get to my pictures here... on the Sophists computer. I am sure as soon as he reads this there will be a follow up post with pictures.

In other news: Believe it or not, I have been called the most unemotional person they knew... by several people. I don't know if that was for sure the case, but I have noticed that i don't get emotionally excited either positively or negatively about almost anything. I actually started to question if I did feel strong emotions at all. I mean, shit! I barely even feel hungry let alone sadness or happiness. I have even had a few moments that I was pretty sure that I was about to die and all I felt at the time was mild disappointment. (Disappointment that I was about to be done with life... not that I was about to die. It was disappointment in the lost opportunities of the future.) The last few weeks have put that question to rest for me for sure. I am happy to report that there is no doubt that my emotion sensors work just fine! I have felt the full scale deflection of unbelievable happiness, hope, heartache, and crushing disappointment... Though, given that I just felt these full scale emotions, I actually think that the emotion sensors may be deadened by the intensity of it all. As crazy as it may sound I feel even more nothing than before.

Another thought: FUCK! Why can't everyone be brave enough to live their life. What the hell else is there to do, bide your time until you die? Fuck that noise!

Ok, I am going to go throw up... or lay face down on the floor. (I guess I am not quite feeling more nothing than before yet, but at least I have that to look forward to.) In the meantime... I am now stuck in Detroit for a week with nothing to do. I need to get my happy little ass to the war...

If you find a "Social Psychology and Psychology of Personalty Convention," crash it!

Sorry it has been a long time since I rapped at you... I have no good excuse.

So last thursday, I was sitting in class that was being taught by some army SF dudes. They mentioned that in there hotel there was hundreds of hot chicks. They figured out that they were all in town for some convention. This was just a casual comment so I didn't think much more than wish I was at that hotel instead of my own.

Thursday night: Several other guys and I weren't flying on friday, so we went out that thursday night. Downtown we kept running into these little groups of people (Mostly mid twenties girls) that where all psychology grad students. I talked to them quite a bit... fairly interesting though a little academic. They told me that there was a convention that they were all attending. I figured out where it was.. and other tactically relevent information and decided that I should go check on this place tomorrow morning. Hell, my car was going to be downtown already and I'd have to go get it, might as well stop in at the convention center.

Friday morning: I take the cab downtown to pick up my car. After I move it out of the away zone it was in all night I park it a few blocks away at the convention center and go in. Drat! It seems you have to be affiliated with a place of higher learning in order to get one of the passes that let you into the exhibition hall. This shouldn't present to much of a problem, I'll just make up some school I am associated with and go in. No dice... the University you attend has to pay about a $300 entrance fee to participate. That's not going to happen... especially since i don't plan to stay for the whole convention and I hate cover charges. And given that I am mostly going to meet girls, it is effectively a cover charge. Actually it offended me a little bit that they were charging to participate in the advancement of human knowledge! This isn't in the spirit of higher learning. The set up is that there is a set of double doors that go to a large room with all the poster presentations and main stuff going on in it. Out in the hall is where the registration desk is. Guarding the door is some fairly militant and thourogh woman who checks everyone who enters for their Convention passes... Everyone has them in little plastic envelopes that they have hanging from their necks. I don't even have a plastic envelope let alone anything that looks remotely like the pass. I circle the building to see if there is an alternate entrance from the outside. There is none. Now, normally I would have just gone home at this point, but seeing as I am in this training mindset I thought about it this way... "If I am spending all week learning to sneak through a hostile city at war, it would be shameful if I am stopped from hitting on/debating science with all these psychologist girls by a door guarded by a middle aged woman." So I decide that I have to get in for my own pride now! Now it is just for the challenge of getting in. I devise a plan. First, I pick up some free psychology literature that is sitting on some tables in the hall way. This is just to make me look a little more legitimate. After that, I walk to the wall next to the door on the opposite side of the doorway from the guard woman, acting like I have no intention of going in. I am looking at my cell phone and pretend to be texting someone. Using my peripheral vision I watch till the woman is distracted and looking the other way. After a quick glance to confirm her distraction I roll around the door frame and nonchalantly walk into the crowd of academics on the other side.

Fuck Yea! I am in!

I walk around getting my orientation. It is roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, there are temporary partitions covered with poster presentations in the center of the room with tables around the perimeter. Holy Shit! There are literally hundreds of good looking girls!... and like 50 nerdy looking guys. What the hell kind of universe have I stumbled into? Apparently all the hotties study Psychology! This is going super easy right! I walk around and start looking at the posters. As far as I can tell, if you want a masters/doctorate in psyche... all you have to do is compare two traits and assume they correlate. One example would be, "How does male aggressiveness correlate to romantic infidelity?" That is a the kind of thing that seems to be researched in this field, though the title of the research would be almost incomprehensible due to the academic psychological double speak. I actually had no problem at all hanging in discussions with these experts in this field and easily passed as a psyche grad student. Though my main mission was meeting girls, I found myself getting into debates quite often. Actually that is what I ended up spending most of my time there doing. Coming from a background of hard science, I found their experiments in general full of holes and their use of statistics quite dodgy, not to mention the presentation of mathematical data in the posters to be poorly done at best and misleading at worst. Overall I was not impressed with the scientific rigorousness of the field. Of the 40 or so posters I looked at in detail, in only one did the experimental results not support the hypothesis. It seems incredible that so many psychologists are always right... I asked one student about that, her response was that there is no interest in negative results... and in general if the data indicates something besides the hypothesis, then usually the hypothesis just gets rewritten. Disappointing. There was some very interesting research going on too though. My favorite was "Does sexual arousal decrease judgment?" Hmmm... I am sure that there is more than anecdotal evidence to support the idea that it does, but that research was unfortunately not yet complete, but I have a good idea of what kind of results they will get.

Oh yea! now back to the girls. Basically I had no useful game at all. It was just as bad as trying to talk to 19 year old Swedish girls! I was particularly surprised because I do my best work when I am sober and get into in depth conversations. This should have been my best scenario possible... Yet still it was a useless place to pick up girls. I did notice that I was the only guy that was trying to run any game at all. Either all these psych dudes didn't notice they are surrounded by hundreds of hotties or they already figured out that it was a useless endeavor.

Regardless of the girls it was a very interesting way to spend a friday morning in Albuquerque.

Saturday afternoon: I spent all day Saturday doing field excersises with the army SF dudes. The ones who are staying in the same hotel with all the psych grad studs. After the training was over I mentioned that I had gone to the convention. I related the story how I got in and they where very proud! As I was telling the story, I could tell that they were very hopeful! Then when I got to the part about how the girls seemed impervious to me they laughed much more than I would have expected. As it turns out they have spent the last three nights in their hotel bar trying to get with them too... with the exact same results. The army guys said you can talk to them all night in a hotel bar, but they don't get drunk and seem to have no physical (read that carnal) interests at all. They said when they start talking to one girl, all the others seem to close ranks in some protective formation. I told them that I figured Army SF guys would have been able to pull something with these girls... they said the same about pilots. We concluded that some girls just have really poor tastes in men. (Not being attracted to us being the poor tastes... for all you out there that might misinterpret that.) It is the only plausible explanation really.

So what did we learn? First of all, that psych grad students go in the same category as swedish girls. That category being "Good Looking but Unfortunately Useless Women." We also learned that Psychology is not a real science... it is a combination of gossip and playing mind games on people. Third and finally, we learned that if you have a room full of women you want to guard it takes more than plastic envelopes and a guard to protect them.

Oh Shit... the time line slides left.

Some of my dates have come through today. I will be effectively out of Montana by the 30th of this month. That is two weeks from now. The three weeks after that, 31 Jan through 22 Feb. I'll be in Albuquerque, NM. Anyone that will be in that area, let me know because my plans are pretty much flying and sitting in my hotel room by myself studying Farsi, and I will be up for trips to Maloney's and Billy's Long Bar... not to mention the white sands ranges. After that... Lots of unknowns. Possibly a month or so in El Paso, TX... or Ukraine, yes the country. I'll be trying to make a trip to michigan some where in there also. I'll let you cats know and if we well be within a state or two from each other, let me know.

Now to shed some cars.

What is the only thing more aphrodisiac than an italian sports car?

An Italian sports car with a functioning hood scoop!

Everyone knows that as a gas gets hotter, its density will decrease. Horsepower is made by more air, so more dense air makes more horsepower... so one wants as cold of air as possible entering the engine for max horsepower. Well, this thought was right at the front of my brain where it ususally is and it ocurred to me that the air going into my engine is coming from right next to the hot engine and behind the radiator. Not the ideal place to get cold air.

So I ran some tests using an out door/in door thermometer. The top number is the temp on top of the hood the number in the middle is the air that is right in front of the engine air intake. These numbers are in Celsius of course. I found that depending on where I put the temperature probe and what speed I was driving I was getting between 20 and 30 deg C hotter intake temp than ambient air temp. The lowest temperature difference I found was on the highway at around 70 mph, but even that was 18 deg C.


An example of one of the places I placed the temperature probe.


So what did I do with all this data?

Apply some math... and a little science...


Realize that my partial differentiation skills are super rusty... so consult some trusty buddies from my scientist days. I know you can't judge a book by its cover, but in these cases you can. Especially the one on the right.


What all that shit said was that I will probably gain about 7% -10% horsepower just by useing the ambient air instead of the hot air from inside the engine compartment.


Step one: Isolate the air intake from the engine compartment. I did this by building a styrofoam and galvanized steel box around the intake air cleaners.


I forgot to take a picture of step two...


Step three: Profits!


I don't have any hard numbers for increased horsepower... but I do know that the butt dynometer says "Holy Fuck!" This actually made a huge difference. I am actually really interested in my 0 - 60 times now. The improvement is very noticeable.



Not to mention the looks you get from the hotties on the corner at the light when they realize that you have a functioning hood scoop and cold air intake!