Finished model 2022-II

Another horrid paper model: The Royal ship Vasa. Box scale, or rather, post card scale. The double-curved surfaces were impossible for me to bend correctly, I wonder if there is some magic trick to make the card stock more pliable. By the stern there were several very thin wedges the were to be cut and glued to make the curved shape. Only afterwards did I realise I should have just cut away the tiny triangles intended as glueing surfaces and instead glued a wider piece of card onto the back. One may note that the bowsprit, which carried a quite sizeable sail, is not represented in the kit. I could perhaps have used a cocktail stick to add it, but couldn’t be bothered.

Finished model 2022-I

As mentioned long ago Pilot 13/1977 contains 3-plan drawings of the Cavalier Turbo Mustang III, and suggestions for how to build one, based on a P-51D Mustang kit. I thought this was a cool-looking aircraft that should be built at some point. Later, I decided I would build it in 1:160 scale for a train modeller friend of mine. When I found a 10 mm scale Minifigs white metal model of a P-51C Mustang, I thought maybe I could use it as the base for a conversion and started collecting references. A fellow modeller, whose name has been unfairly and unfortunately lost in time, mailed me his entire collection of magazine clippings on the Turbo Mustang III. I designed decals in 1:160 scale and had them printed by Al Superczynski. Then I spent several years angsting over how to do surgery on the metal model. I had studied the Heritage Aviation Models conversion kit and had some ideas, but it seemed a daunting prospect anyway, so in the end nothing happened, until I recently noticed that the Shapeways Marketplace contains a number of aircraft models of varying quality and wwitalik has a Turbo Mustang III model which is printable in 1:160. (The model claims to work as a Piper PA-48 Enforcer as well, which isn’t true—there are numerous differences between the two types, not the least being that the Enforcer’s engine exhaust is on the left side of the fuselage.)

I ordered the model printed in “White Natural Versatile Plastic” and it soon arrived. In order to be printable, several features of the model was grossly over-scale and I did my best to adjust these. The propeller blades and tailwheel were cut off, as they were mostly just plastic lumps. The main landing gear is also overly thick, but I felt uncertain about replacing that with anything sensible, but maybe I should have tried. The trailing edges of wings, stabilizer and fin had to be sanded down, which turned out to be difficult—the plastic is rather elastic and tended to just follow the sanding stick and then left grainy fibres along the edge. In the end I had to call it a day and consider the edges as thinned as I was likely to succeed with. In contrast, drilling out the exhaust was actually quite easy. Another things I left off was milling out the landing gear wells, as I wasn’t convinced I would be able to do it well—I would need some kind of way of carefully steering the cutter. Likewise, I briefly considered heatsmashing a transparent cockpit canopy, but apart from the technical difficulties of that, that would also have required milling out the cockpit without accidentally going through the sidewalls. There is a not-particularly expensive milling attachment for my Dremel, maybe I should invest in that.

I fashioned thin propeller blades out of Contrail profiles, cutting and carefully twisting them in warm (not too hot!) water to get blade shapes, landing gear covers were fashioned out of Plastruct sheet, tail wheel covers out of a slice of some aluminium can I had lying around, and a new tail wheel was made from a bit of Plastruct rod and piano wire. I primed the kit with Mr Surfacer 1200 and eventually started painting it. The Turbo Mustang III was intended as a COIN aircraft and at the time it would have meant deployment in Vietnam, so was painted in the then-current South-East Asia camouflage. This meant Humbrol 28, 116, 117, 118. I tried Maskol, again, to mask the colour fields and it seemed to work better now, but the Tamiya masking tape I used to mask off the bottom colour managed to lift a bit of the paint, and even some primer. With the uneven surface that the Mr Surfacer hadn’t managed to improve, airbrushing didn’t make much of a difference, and since I had to touch up scuffed paint at several points, I finally gave up and just brush painted the lot. The control surface hinge lines were accentuated with a pencil. (I need to get me a 0.3 mm pencil again, it has its uses.)

The result will not win any prices (I tried), but it felt good to finally get the old project out of my system, even if in a somewhat different form than originally envisioned.

Trust issues

Reading student reports I often get side-tracked into closer looks at their sources. Not conducive for quick grading, but one can find lots of interesting things. In this case a student pair had looked at drug abuse statistics at the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics and, being source-critical, noted that the claim “The front page of DrugAbuseStatistics.org features the most noteworthy data regarding drug abuse” didn’t have any supporting source itself. I had to agree that this was the case. Furthermore, once I started browsing the website I realised there was absolutely no information about who NCDAS are. No address, no “About Us” box, no nothing. It seems unlikely that this would be some government organ.

Next step was to google their name to see if anyone else commented on their affiliation, but here, too, absolutely nothing. However, lots of hits on other sites that refer to the statistics collected by them. And I wondered: Is the official-sounding name enough for everybody and their grandmother to assume that this is the best data available, citing them, thus making sure they get to the top of the google searches for drug statistics? They do give sources for their statistics, but even I haven’t made the effort to double-check that the statistics are correctly quoted from the given sources, whose quality in turn is unclear.

To be sure, they might be perfectly legit, but how do we know that?

I write like lots of people

I Write Like uses statistical analysis to compare your writing style with that of well-known English-language authors. I tried different entries from this blog and each of them was apparently reminiscent of a completely different author. Maybe a longer text would give more dependable results? I tried feeding in my PhD thesis. It was most similar to Agatha Christie. I hadn’t earlier noticed the extensive note apparatus of Murder on the Links. Actually, I didn’t notice it now either. For comparison, I also fed in my licentiate thesis, by an even younger me, presumably less mature. That was most similar to the writings of Gertrude Stein. A matrix row is a row is a row is a row?

But, Siggy explains why the algorithm is so often wrong.

Related products

As I’ve noted before, the Amazon recommendation engine frequently suggests rather surprising related purchases. Today I got this trio of books suggested:

The book that triggered these? The Buckley-class Destroyer Escorts. Possibly reading naval literature is a sign of decreasing mental faculties which may cause your partner to leave you, in which case you are reduced to public speaking as a source of income. Or something.

Anti-submarine warfare

Completely coincidentally, in these days of submarine anniversaries, I found the site Indicator Loops on Allied harbour protections against submarines. Apparently there was one of these just next to the grounding site at the time, one wonders if they are still around or if they have been dismantled.

Is this the little girl I carried?

The Only-Begotten Daughter and the Love of Her Life didn’t let go of each other’s hands and eyes from the moment the walked up the church aisle to their exit in a cloud of rose petals and soap bubbles. Their loving looks could have lit up the hall all by themselves. The couple had clearly spent the last year planning every smallest detail of the wedding, achieving the effortless smoothness of practice. The solo performance by one of their friends of “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her” was the idea of my daughter, I am convinced.

A bus was waiting outside to take all wedding guests to the manor in the city where the wedding dinner would be served. I realised Långholmen indeed is quite a long island. The wedding cake was eaten and then we were sent out on a quiz-walk in the brisk autumn afternoon while the dinner was laid out. Merrily picking choices we found that details of academic titles can be quite complicated (as if I didn’t know).

The dinner was served in a very church-like room, which however was the billiards and music hall of a previous owner. Each seat had been supplied with a leaflet giving brief but spot-on descriptions of all guests, so that everybody immediately could start conversations with unfamiliar faces. The catering staff had apparently memorised each person’s dietary requirements as they efficiently served the courses through the evening. We parents of the brides made our speeches during the entrée. I believe I managed reasonably well, but the heart-felt and witty speeches of their friends brought what tears had not yet been shed. That they both had retained so many of their childhood friends tells something of their loyalty and indeed at one point the OBD interrupted the proceedings to honour the birthday of one of these friends. The dinner ended with everybody lustily joining in in “Chiquitita”.

Another interlude during which the tables were cleared to open the dancefloor. The bridal waltz turned out to be “Graceland”, which I hadn’t realised was so danceable. My mother jitterbugged as if age didn’t matter, but eventually we took her home and went to sleep, letting the young folks dance on. The baton has now been passed to the next generation.

Ship spotters

Reading up on aircraft carriers, I ran into scores of codes indicating the convoys the carriers were protecting. I could distinguish certain patterns, but the full information is of course available at ConvoyWeb

The waterfall method

I have been to Hepoköngäs, which is one of the more easily accessible waterfalls in Finland.

Advertising

Some advertising burns itself into my brain, while I remain totally ignorant of who is trying to sell what. One example is these two hilariously clueless gentlemen, whom I probably resemble more than I want to recognise.

Heritage

Today the OBS absolved the public defence of his PhD thesis. My grandfather went to school because they served lunch, saving his mother a meal. My parents received secondary education. The OBS has been in education since preschool.

One of the professors in the grading committee I knew from when we were sprightly Young Scientists, with hair, in the 1980s. Already then we had set out on our respective research tracks. We’ll hang along for a little while, but the next generation is waiting to take over. And that is as it should be.

À propos UFOs

While an eminent and hardworking singer, Alice Babs never struck me as particularly bright. I believe it was when she was interviewed in Gäst hos Hagge that she showed a clip of her singing on Masada. She went on about how they had managed to capture the “presence of beings” on the film and how excited the camera man had been about this. This was of course quite interesting, so I watched very intently, but saw absolutely nothing extraordinary. Alice Babs beamed proudly and the interviewer, possibly as nonplussed as I, just moved right along. I hesistantly had to conclude that the honoured royal court singer must have been unfamiliar with lens flares. It seems many other people are too.

Norm critical

It will soon be ten years that Honeybuns and I have lived in this flat but it was only this morning, as the batteries in my electric razor suggested they might run out soon, that I realised that we have two bathrooms, one that contains the washing machine and tumbler, and one that has a plug for an electric razor. (Which arguably in itself might be slightly antiquated, as most razors run on batteries these days, or so I believe.)

Do I make sense?

I’d had a video automatically transcribed. I presume all kinds of AI jiggery-pokery had gone into turning audio frequencies into text—it was clear that the transcription engine was aware that a lot of hemming and hawing could be deleted, on the other hand not-quite-silences could be extrapolated into what probably was being said. A few times this worked amazingly well, but all too often the resulting text was nonsense. I was going to blame this on the lack of deep understanding on the part of the transcription engine, but as I replayed and replayed the same five second clip, trying to hear what was being said, by myself, I came to wonder: Is this actually what my students hear when I lecture—words that may be grammatically correctly connected, but rarely make any sense?

Women and attack helicopters

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle about the short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. I don’t have the skin in the game to judge if the story is hurtful to trans people, but for a number of reasons I was intrigued enough to read the story and found it, at least from a literary perspective, to be quite good. The author is, I understand, suggested to be using a pseudonym. Quite possible; the quality of the writing suggests at least some prior experience with writing (science) fiction. In this case, perhaps twenty years ago this would have been characterised as a story of cyborgs, while today such close coupling between humans and machinery is taken for granted. The way this melding is described I associate with authors such as Charles Stross or Peter Watts (and yes, I realise those are male authors). I struggle to identify precisely what it is in the writing style that ties them together; perhaps something about wars fought remotely, but where the machines at the front have their own ideas about it.

Murray Leinster’s “The Wabbler” can be seen as an early predecessor, but reads, at least now, as more detached. It may have had a stronger impact in the 1940s when semi-autonomous fighting machines were just emerging.

But, to return to the original subject: when the modelling club used to participate at the Hobby Fair in Stockholm, we offered plastic models at cost for families to sit and build together at our table. An observation we made at the time was that the mothers tended to choose attack helicopter models. Perhaps it is indeed true that they have a very feminine combat style.

Finished model 2019-III

I find paper models to be scarily difficult to build – the paper is hard to shape and utterly unforgiving of the slightest mistakes. Still, I got challenged to put together a postcard model of Drottningholm palace. Which I did. The results, as I had feared, were mostly horrible, but as soon as it was done, I got supplied with a postcard model of the Liebfrauenkirche in Munich, so I guess I have to start on it. An idea of mine is that I will use my photo-etch bending tool to bend the paper into sharp corners. We shall see how that goes.

Who cares about categories anyway?

I’ve often wondered about the way books in the Amazon web shop get categorised, and this latest set of recommended reading suggests they have a very liberal attitude to contents.

Language complications

Master’s students are presenting their theses, faculty members comment on their work. My German colleague’s accent becomes even more accentuated in English, and still more by him being quite critical:
“I take ekzeption to your very first vord. Vaht do you mean by ‘vee’?”

Having dissected the permissible uses of authorial pronouns, he continues:
“I zink your use of RE iz inappropriate.”

The student, already rattled, becomes even more confused:
“Did I write RE? It should be ER.”

The opponent relentlessly pursues the RE issue, while the student desperately scans through the paper, vainly trying to find the offending statement. I finally make the connection, and interrupt the proceedings:
“I think what we’re discussing, is AI.”

Veckans ord: härröra

En anledning till den framgångsrika tyska invasionen av Frankrike var att de brittiska och franska arméerna var okoordinerade, det var rent ut sagt en fullkomlig härröra.

Finished models 2019-I and II

Well, compare with my earlier dryads. This did get a honorable mention for skillfully executed atmosphere at Warszawski Festiwal Modelarski 2019, but I’m not convinced it’s all that. However, the wash lent by a friend definitely brought out the surface texture much better this time, but the Vallejo paints insist on flaking as soon as you look at the figure, no matter how carefully it has been primed. I shall try using surgical gloves when handling the figures and see if that makes a difference.

The Orc Druid, well, you can see the difficulty I’ve had with the colour demarcations; that is definitely something that I have to improve. Possibly I need to dilute the paint more, but also feather the areas more.

Both figures old Games Workshop items.

Veckans ord: underökning

För att bli saligförklarad måste man ha åstadkommit ett mirakel efter sin död, men för att bli helgon krävs en underökning till två mirakel.

For all the lost songs

Respect

I’ve been very put off by this old interview of Paul Simon by Dick Cavett where Simon plays a still-unfinished version of “Still Crazy After All These Years” and launches into a discussion of how the tune might continue, and Cavett goes “I don’t understand any of this, so I’ll just make unfunny wisecracks.” So, it was such a joyful experience to find this video where Askold Buk talks with Hank Marvin for over an hour about how the sound of The Shadows actually is created. I had no idea there were so many parameters to playing an electric guitar.

Veckans ord: örnfil

Här en gosse som bereder sig på att dela ut en örnfil, icke att förväxla med en orre.

Up to new tricks

You may remember the publisher BetaScript who generates thousands of “books”, by simply printing out Wikipedia articles. I had quite forgotten about them when I got an invitation phrased like this:

Dear Prof. kai,
I am Koushina Tulloo from Lambert Academic Publishing. Your work « title » from University would be of interest to an international audience [I should jolly well hope so, since I presented it at an international conference], and that is why I am writing to you.
We know it is not conventional for a publisher to pro-actively reach out to authors, but we are not a conventional publisher.
Here is what it means for you:
- free of charge publishing
- simplified and fast publishing process
- worldwide sales of your work
- no commitments - you and only you remain the copyright holder of your work
- access to eco-friendly Print-on-Demand technology
We are looking for authors in the field you have researched and your work has caught our interest. We are interested to publish it as a printed book.
Let me know how this sounds to you and I can get back to you with a detailed brochure.
signature block with a glamour picture of the dashing Koushina Tulloo

Now, this of course sounds fishier than salmon-filled tuna with garum sauce and anchovy sprinkles, so time to google “Lambert Academic Publishing”, and…ahahahah! does Google deliver. A quite long article by Joseph Stromberg in Slate not only confirms that Lambert Academic Publishing is a racket of the Who’s Who variety, trying to get you to buy lots of copies of your own book to give away, but, lo and behold!, it is in fact a sister company of the aforementioned BetaScript, and a dozen other scam companies, all owned by OmniScriptum. (And quite possibly Ms Tulloo has borrowed her pretty face from somebody else.) In passing it also explained the mystery of the weird cover of the Betascript book I had ran into before – the cover template only has so many clip art pictures as options for cover picture and apparently a container ship was the closest thing to a destroyer escort that could be found.

Well, I guess my [and my half-dozen co-authors’] three-page short paper will not end up being published as a proper book with ISBN number and all, though it would have been a bit funny of course. Since this seemed to appeal to Stromberg as well, I wonder how much of OmniScriptum’s catalogue is driven by authors who think they have seen through it all, but participate anyway as an ironic lark?

Reading foreign languages

While competition is coming from new Chinese companies, Japanese model manufacturers are still among the most appreciated ones in terms of model quality. The English translations of the instructions are not necessarily always to the same high standards, but usually are sufficient for getting the model built. Still, there is obviously more written in Japanese than has been translated, so, while gearing up for building Fine Mold’s Savoia S.21F (i e Porco Rosso’s flying boat), I thought it would be interesting to find out what all the text in Japanese actually said. A little exploration found two tools: NewOCR, an online service to convert images to text, handling multiple languages and alphabets. So that let me scan the text from the instruction sheet into Japanese text, which I of course still couldn’t read. The next step was to use Google Translate. There is a cool feature in Google Translate, that I discovered then, which is that you can actually draw, in this case, Japanese characters in an input window. This let me correct characters that had gotten corrupted in the scanning. Of course, the characters most likely to have been misread are also the most complex to draw. 翼 (wing) appeared quite a few times, and had to be redrawn manually.

Well, so now I should have a text in English that I could read? Well, of course not. As shown by earlier examples, machine translation is an inexact science, even for languages within the same Indo-european family, but translating Japanese into English tends to render nonsense, like: “Rui is distinguished simply referred to as "F-type" In that, but the repair work Whatever You're in which was whether to follow the Detection Ichiru Suppose that you try.” “In such Ime temporary, please enjoy the Italian machine of power Rahul ma one King between War.”

Interestingly enough, names, that should have been the same string of characters in every place, got translated differently in different sentences – sometimes as the correct Italian name, sometimes as whatever Japanese expression matches the Katakana transcription of the name. Presumably this has to do with the algorithms of Google, that sometimes recognise the context and insert the correct name, sometimes don’t realise there should be a name. I had hoped for at least useful translations of the colours, but “power over key” is the rendition of what we know as ”khaki”.

So, still not entirely helpful.

Veckans ord: porlkran

Jag insåg precis att vattenflödet över innergården i Genève kom från en porlkran. Därför blev det annat ljud i källan.

I maded a film

Reading Devaney’s An Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems, Second Edition I found the description of a solenoid (§2.5) quite interesting: It starts out as a torus, but then you repeatedly lengthen it, shrinking the radius, and fold it back on itself, much like you fold a hair tie, but with the difference that the volume is not retained, so that each folded form fits inside the previous one. I thought that it would be nice to make a recursive function to draw a solenoid to arbitrary depth, and then to make a raytraced animation of the solenoid developing. As it were, I couldn’t quite work out the proper recursive step, so the idea has been languishing for a while (like a couple of years or so).

A few weeks ago I decided that I would get a grip on myself and work out the proper function, since it was obviously simple, if nothing else so to make sure I’m not entirely senile. After a couple of nights of scratching sketches on paper I finally managed to work out the proper order of things and started to transfer data to POVRay, my preferred raytracer. And of course, since I fully subscribe to the idea that glass balls are an important feature of raytracing, I would make the solenoid out of virtual glass. It would also spin, so as to bring out the shape better (on the assumption that viewers would not have access to a stereo viewer).

I soon realised that it was inconvenient to run a C program to generate the coordinates of the object and transfer to a POVRay input file by cut-and-paste every time I wanted to tinker with anything. Happily it is possible to program directly in the POVRay scene description language, so I reimplemented the function and could then work more or less interactively in POVRay. Delaney proposes shrinking the radius of the tube by a factor 10 for each folding, but in my opinion that makes it disappear from view too fast, so I used a factor 3 instead.

My original idea was that I’d render each level and fade it out while fading in the next level, but it turned out to be rather complicated as the surface+interior computational model of POVRay doesn’t really have a concept of fading, to achieve this a large number of (non-linear) parameters have to be adjusted in synchrony. I pondered this a bit, but decided that while I might eventually work out how to do the transforms it was probably easier to instead do the fading on the resulting images, rather than the 3D models, so generated images with only a single object in each and then composited them using ImageMagick and a couple of awk scripts.

This looked OK, but I still wasn’t quite happy with the results, there should be more movement in the animation. In the end I rewrote the solenoid code a bit, so that there would be an animated transition where the next level double-coil shrinks and separates out of the previous level. On a whim I added a background texture and was happily surprised by how much this made the glassiness of the tube pop out and made its structure more distinctive. The full length video took almost a week to render, the later parts requiring about an hour per frame, as the object becomes more complex. For no particular reason I rendered the animation at PAL resolution, notionally at 25 frames/second, but that made the motion a bit too fast in my opinion, so I pulled the output framerate down to 10 fps when generating the video (with ffmpeg) from the individual frames rendered by POVRay. That could then be uploaded to YouTube:

If anyone wants the code to play around with, just ask in the comments.

C S Lewis popping up

It was when I was working at BT Labs, that I saw a notice in the (surprisingly good for a large working place) staff canteen which explicated C S Lewis’s Trilemma. To wit, this presupposes that Jesus must have been “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic”, whence one presumably is supposed to reach the conclusion that “Lord” is the only possible alternative. This has of course been criticised by better people than me, but at the time it was a new argument to me. As I mulled it over, I first realised that the options of course aren’t mutually exclusive. I can perfectly well imagine a god who is stark raving bonkers, and lying about it to boot. (Here’s one, for example.)

As I thought about it further, I defined my own quadrilemma, also of mutually non-exclusive alternatives: ”Mythical, Misguided, Misquoted, and/or Misunderstood”. Not that I think it will convince any believer, but I was rather proud of the alliteration, one letter up, and one alternative more. Take that, Lewis!

In other news, Ana Mardoll has, with the aid of her faithful commentariat, over the last few years, been doing close readings of the Narnia books and actually working out the consequences and implications of everything that happens in them. Not only do they find serious inconsistencies in how the world of Narnia supposedly works in terms of geography, time passing, political relations, etc, but also that the theology espoused boils down to “whatever Lewis personally enjoys (which is not particularly consistent either) is ordained by God”. Quelle surprise !

One does not have to require perfect consistency of stories, but as they say, once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. As it happened, as a child I read the Narnia books in internal order and completely failed to notice that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until I got to The Last Battle, where it was so heavy-handedly presented even I couldn’t miss it. I felt immensely betrayed – I had enjoyed the books for stories of adventure and meeting magical creatures. Realising it was all a trick in order to indoctrinate in a religion I even then had deemed irrelevant was, I imagine, somewhat like finding yourself in the forest with the weird man and no candy forthcoming.

Ominous Latin Chanting

“O Fortuna” is by now about as overused as „Also sprach Zarathustra“ in all kinds of contexts to the extent that I was somewhat surprised to realise that the lyrics actually mean something.

I learn lots of things

Looking for a given book or article in a library brings up a lot of often very useful by-catch and Google searches are no different. I don’t even remember what I was looking for when I suddenly dredged up several decades worth of scanned issues of Моделист-конструктор, an originally Soviet, then Russian, hobby journal. For some (possibly quite good) reason the scans had been stored in DjVu format which required installing a reader, but once that had been done I started browsing the journal with increasing fascination.

For one thing, the subject width was astounding: a single issue could contain articles on how to fold origami frogs, detail drawings of Tu-22M landing gear for the modeller, and instructions on how to build your own all-terrain vehicle.

Even the Soviet era issues contained quite a few electronics construction projects, including radio transmitters and such. I would have assumed there were restrictions for reasons of state security on such, but apparently not. Another issue is how easy if would have been to procure the necessary components, but presumably that was also possible, at least for some.

The careful measurements on the drawings of the ZIL-130 lorry also spoke against the perception of utmost secrecy being upheld in all matters. (The measurements may of course have been distorted.)

To Infinity and Beyond

“A bird flies back and forth across the universe. Once every thousand years, it comes to sharpen its beak on a mountain which is one hundred miles long and one hundred miles high. When that mountain has been ground to sand, one second of eternity will have gone by.”

I’ve always been rather annoyed by this storicle—it plays out as if eternity is just a slowed-down version of…what really? Eternity is that which has no end, so if we were to say that the grinding-down of the mountain took a googol seconds of eternity it would be as true—there would still be exactly as much of eternity left.

And so, in what way is eternity different from the time we normally experience? Arguably we could imagine that in the far future of our expanding universe, it will become so dilute that there is no way even to count time and say that at this (fuzzy) point time has ended, and that our universe has had a finite existence. In this case we would need to posit some other universe which actually exists eternally. Had we this eternal universe we could subtract the lifetime of our universe from it, and there would still be as much left of eternity.

This may be because people really cannot comprehend something infinite, and assume there should still be an end stop even to eternity, just very far away. However, I am reminded of what Stanley Schmidt wrote on the subject once (“Finite cornucopias”, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Feb 1986):

“The concept of infinity is deeply ingrained in the average layman’s mind at a very real, painfully practical level. Infinity is the amount of electricity in the wall socket, the amount of oil in Texas…”

So, by that count as well, the bird mountain story is pointless. Let us now forget it.

Flotsam and jetsam

Some time ago, my mother and I were out walking on a crisp autumn day. A contrail crossed the sky, and my mother, as she always does, pointed it out and said: “Look, a jet fighter!”

Now, people often say stuff that is incorrectly specific, to try to be funny or whatever. (The OBCM, for example, will refer to all birds as “ducks”, to underscore that she’s a city girl and can’t be bothered with the details of non-asphalt-based organisms.) But this time, just to make conversation, I said: “Heh, yeah, but properly speaking it’s a passenger aircraft, clearly going to land at Arlanda.”

My mother was surprised. “It’s an aeroplane?”

I in turn was surprised. “Uh yes, or well, aeroplane exhaust. If you look carefully, you can see the plane itself at the tip.” I gave a brief explanation of how contrails form in the cold air at altitude, and my mother marvelled at this new information. I for my part realised that she had been a child when newly-purchased Vampire jets probably would have been the only aircraft flying high enough to form contrails in the skies of Finland. Presumably her elders would have pointed out the streamers in the sky, excitedly referring to them as “jet fighters” [suihkuhävittäjiä], but not making it clear that a jet fighter was a type of aircraft rather than a strange name for a strange celestial phenomenon, and somehow the misunderstanding had gone uncorrected all this time.

I wonder what misconceptions I have that people think are just me trying to be funny.

Trains in the Americas

In the early 1990s I did guest research at the University of Washington in Seattle. As it happened, I had friends in Vancouver, BC, not that far away, so a visit was indicated. Therefore I looked up Amtrak in the phone book and called them to ask about tickets. (The first web browser would be made public later that year, and of course it would be much longer before Amtrak had a web presence.) I could hear through the phone how the person at the other end eyed me suspiciously, of course there was no such thing as a train connection between Seattle and Vancouver. I for my part was equally taken aback, how did people then travel? Somehow I found out that if you didn’t have a car (in itself a weird idea) you would go by Greyhound Bus, which of course was an important part of America.

The Greyhound bus station turned out to be indeed populated by people who couldn’t afford a car. Drugs, possibly, but not cars. In the event, there were more travellers than fit on the bus, so we, the OBS, OBCM, and I, had to wait for quite some time for a second bus and a driver to be procured from somewhere before we were on our way. We travelled northwards and eventually stopped at a bus stop in the middle of pretty much nowhere. Apparently our bus had had a mechanical breakdown and we had to wait for yet another bus and driver to be located and ferried up from Seattle. There was a coin phone so I could call our Canadian friends and tell them we would be late. (This was long before mobile phones were common, and in the Americas they didn’t exist at all, as far as I knew.) A new bus did arrive, we boarded and continued our journey. Finally we got to the Canadian border, where we passengers by all means were very rapidly cleared by customs, but our bus turned out not to have a traffic permit in Canada, so now we had to wait for a bus and driver to be ferried down from Vancouver. Eight hours late we finally pulled in at the bus terminal in Vancouver and could call for our friends to come pick us up.

“Oh, good that you are safe, we thought you might have been shot at.”
“What!?”
“Didn’t you know? The Greyhound bus drivers are striking and they’re shooting at the strike breakers.”

Oh. Clearly very many things were different abroad. After our visit we did get safely back to Seattle, but in the future we used one of the competing (Canadian) bus companies.

Now it seems that Amtrak actually has gotten their act together and introduced a train connection between Seattle and Vancouver (and beyond). Interestingly enough the trains are described as ”European style”, whatever that means, say I who have travelled on European trains from Wales to Romania, but admittedly I have not travelled by train in the USA, maybe their trains have some peculiar features that are not present on European trains.

This recollection was triggered by the news that one of these new high-speed trains had derailed outside Tacoma, south of Seattle.

Finished models 2017-VII–VIII

A Warhammer horse. It is made of plastic, instead of the white metal the other figures have been moulded in, but that made no difference to the Vallejo colours, they will come off the surface at the slightest provocation, no matter the primer used. I made a bit of a mess of the masking job as well, but there you go. The “1”s (one on each side of the shabraque) come from a dry transfer sheet I’ve had since time immemorial. The horse was light enough that there was no problem in attaching it to a transparent base with just a bit of super glue. (The original kit had two long runners that were supposed to slot into a base, but I prefer it this way.

The dryad got a nice wash and is getting closer to where I want to go. I added a bit of clear lacquer to give a sheen to the eyes and the oral cavity, but didn’t quite reach the effect I was going for. I shall continue to practice.

Albatross

As you may remember, I tried to convince The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain to cover Albatross, and while it seems they so far haven’t taken me up on it, Pražského ukulele bandu have:

E.T. (spoilers)

It turned out that neither Honeybuns nor I had actually seen E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial^*, so we decided to shell out a few crowns to YouTube and watch it. It was quite interesting.

One thing which I reacted to quite strongly was how obvious it was that several outdoor scenes were shot in an indoors studio. I presume the controlled environment weighed up for the loss of realism to the film-makers.

Another thing was how very 1980s everything was—as if the film makers had gone out of their way to insert period markers, but of course these were just things that happened to be around at the time.

But, and this is quite important, I got a very different impression of the central conflict of the film when compared to reviews and various references I’ve read, and that is that the mysterious Government Authorities in fact are kind and well-meaning. We find that they are quite happy to let Elliott initiate contact and communicate with E.T.—they have Elliott’s house bugged, to be sure, but they stay out of the way and just monitor what happens. Only when E.T. falls ill do they swoop in, and then in a desperate attempt to save E.T.’s life. All through this they are very respectful to E.T., Elliott, and his family.

The chase of the children by police cars is directly caused by two children (Elliott and Michael) stealing a van, driving away and by that endangering the lives of two technicians, who, as far as we can tell, do not at all threaten anyone, but are only interested in getting out of harm’s way, as they are being dragged behind the stolen van. Indeed, as ”Keys”, the leader of the operation, figures out where the children are headed (to reunite E.T. with its kin), it seems the police chase is called off, as there is no further perceived danger.

Further, the aliens are tacitly understood by all to not be a threat. In recent times it’s rather unusual to see a secret(?, we don’t really know, maybe they’re just not very publicly well-known) government agency portrayed so positively.

Then it is rather weird that they apply human-adapted medication to an alien, whose biochemistry they really don’t know anything about at all. It seems that even in a desperate situation it would be likely to cause more damage to do interventions the consequences of which are completely unknown, than just leaving things to their natural course. That E.T. seemingly dies after its bout with…hypothermia(?) and then comes to life again within minutes suggests that its physiology is, indeed, alien.

^* I was reminded of a class-mate in secondary school, who, based on the film title, decided that “terrestrial” meant “alien”. That “extra” bit must have been taken by him to mean simply “yet another”…

Finished models 2017-IV–VI

Some more Warhammer figures: A Wood Elf Wayfarer. I added a bowstring and an arrow, the arrow broke off in transport, though. The geometry isn’t very good for the bowstring either—the original mould maker apparently didn’t care a lot about that.

The two Wood Elves have these big round blobs on their hands. I’m not quite sure that they aren’t just some moulding artefact, but since they seem difficult to remove I’ve decided that they are their Rings of Power.

I once passed Berkeley Square

Alien Stockholm

A few years ago Stockholm City Museum showed the exhibition United Stockholms of America, pictures and stories from the eight Stockholms in USA, all very small towns and hamlets.

It now struck me that surely there must be at least one Stockholm in Canada, and so there is: Stockholm, the seat of government for Fertile Belt No. 183, which gives an immediate idea of the Canadian prairie, about as featureless and sparsely populated as a terraformed area on Tatooine.

Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing

So the bike lane comes up the hill on the left of the pedestrian path, but right here at the zebra crossing, it suddenly switches over to the right side. Presumably the people who did this did not for a second think it would make any difference whatsoever.

Everything is on YouTube

When I made my first visit to the US, this ad came on on the TV and again and again over the following days. The horrific scenario of pre-prepared junk food with soulless activity cards burnt “My Mom’s one busy lady” into my mind, enough for me to look for it on YouTube. What’s possibly worse is that I actually found it – in multiple versions. Other people must also have tried to exorcise the jitters by rewatching the scene.

Rare people

Watching British detective series it has often struck me that no matter in how seemingly remote a place a person has been killed, the body will typically be found within a few hours. An explanation for this might be suggested by Northumberland (where Vera is located) being the most sparsely populated county of England at 63 persons/km², which population density is in Sweden only surpassed by the three “big city” counties of Västra Götaland, Skåne, and Stockholm.

Scientific writing

As found in an article I’m reading: “These observations have indicated that X may provide an option for prophylaxis in certain populations.” Enough hedging for a fence around our house.

Finished model 2017-III

A Warhammer Wood Elf turned into a Moor Elf. Painted in Humbrol enamels for a change.

Finished model 2017-II

Originally a random Space Marine that came with a box set of Vallejo Model Color bottles I won in a raffle. While consisting of all of three pieces they didn’t have terribly good fit and required quite a bit of putty in awkward areas, yet had to be painted before attaching and puttying to be able to reach all surfaces.

In honour of the centenary of Finnish independence I decided on a colour scheme inspired by the Finnish national hockey team, even though they usually don’t carry heavy blasters and rocket packs. (Really, your knife will be sufficient for most eventualities.)

Lua

I got to thinking about the design of programming languages. It may be a recency effect, but it seems to me there’s been a plethora of programming languages designed and supported by a single person in the last decade or so. Usually their existence is very clearly due to some pet peeve of the designer, which is reflected in the grammar and feature set of the language. Some, like Ruby, have syntactical features which, while I find them annoying, presumably save the designer some typing in their typical idioms.

I presume that older languages have gone through processes of standardisation that have worn off the most idiosyncratic bits, if they weren’t designed by a committee to begin with. (Which does not mean that there aren’t disgusting bits in those languages too.)

The latest of these vanity languages I’ve run in to is Lua, which, on the whole, is not too bad. I still haven’t decided if I like the concept of metatables, but I have to admit it allows some nifty and powerful tricks.

So, how does it do the usual Hailstone program?

function hailstone(n)
   while (n > 1) do
      n = (n % 2 == 0) and n // 2 or n * 3 + 1
      print(n)
   end
end

I was a bit disappointed that assignment isn’t an expression and thus couldn’t be fed into the print(). Of note is also that Lua does not adhere to the C syntax patterns used by Java, JavaScript, awk, or even Perl, in particular the conditional assignment is done through short-circuiting logical expressions instead.

Veckans ord: pelargon

Det är klart att en stylit vill vara ensam för en stunds pelargon i solskenet.

Viikon sana: hummustuhnu

Huononlaatuisen falafelannoksen seuraus: hummustuhnu.

Finished model 2017-I

Something a bit unusual. A Relocatable Equipment Building in 1:76 scale from Scale Model Scenery’s kit. The material is cardboard and paper. I have to say the kit was of impressively high quality and the pieces making up a quite easy build. (I still managed in a moment of distraction to confuse the roof and floor, so had to tear them off and swap before the glue had set.)

I expect it will eventually find its place in some diorama context. In particular, it is my entry in the prestigious competition between me and Kipper, both of us known for never finishing our models, in who will get the most models finished during 2017.

Model donated by Big Mike.

Finished model 2016-III

Due to my travels in the UK, the OBS was long since aware of Warhammer when they became popular in his class and he eventually worked up a little collection of figures. When he moved to a student flat and clearly hadn’t touched them for a long time, I asked for them as practice subjects for painting. I’m now slowly working through them. Here’s a Wood Elf Lord I painted at the recent Hobby Fair.

Emotions with Björn Afzelius

I should have posted this five years ago, but I only first heard it a few days ago. Still worthy of listening to.

Beautiful betrayals

When the Iron Curtain fell, there were great hopes and expectations on both sides and one of the buzz phrases of the day was “joint venture”, so at the computer graphics conference I attended in St Petersburg in 1993, there was a hall dedicated to various proposed joint ventures between Russian and Western companies, hopeful Western computer manufacturers showing off their latest hardware to Russian customers who couldn't afford to buy any of it. The hall was, as such things are wont to be, pretty noisy, but suddenly something like a sonic blowtorch cut through the noise and on one of the screens I saw things you people wouldn’t believe, but then it ended and I realised I had just caught the last few seconds of a computer animation with music, but of what, I did not know.

A couple of years later I attended a computer graphics seminar at a conference hotel in Linköping. The speaker was fast-forwarding through a VHS tape and I glimpsed this same animation, but it was not part of the presentation. However, I asked for, and received!, permission to return to the room and go through the tapes on my own after dinner.

So, there I sat, late at night in a dark conference room in Linköping, watching and listening to the L’Opéra imaginaire version of « Dôme épais le jasmin » from Lakmé, tears streaming down my face.

As soon as I could I bought the full opera recording with Sutherland, Vanzo, Bacquier, and Berbié, conducted by Bonynge. I immediately brought it to the lab to share all this beauty with my coworkers. They were mostly amused by my excitement, but one person, composer of electro-acoustic music, rushed out of his room, screaming: “Of all the noise you make here, this was the worst!” and slammed the lab door closed, so as to keep the rest of the institute secure from the noise pollution.

I myself was pleased to find that apart from the Flower Duet there were several other songs that lingered in my ears. I was however a bit put off by the orchestra crescendo at the death of Lakmé, I felt a solemn fadeout would have been more respectful.

I noted that the plot, with a Western officer seducing and then abandoning an Asian woman, was quite similar to that of Madama Butterfly. Only much later did I find out that both operas may have been based on stories by Pierre Loti—the English Wikipedia entry for Madama Butterfly asserts that it is based on his novel Madame Chrysanthème, whereas the French entry denies this. (The Italian does not mention Loti at all.)

The Internet is for porn…

…and that’s why the biggest search engine is called Go ogle.

Finished model 2016-I and II

Porco Rosso is the best aviation film I know and is set in a 1920s whose æsthetics, both in aircraft design and clothing, appeal to me. FineMolds make exquisite models, often based on films or games. It so happened that I by different persons was gifted 1:48 scale FineMolds models of both Porco Rosso and Fio Piccolo from their based-on-the film aircraft models. Originally the plan was to build Porco Rosso’s aircraft for the 1920s theme exhibition at the club's yearly competition, but as usual I didn’t get it finished in time. Instead, inspired by the club’s figure painting course, I painted the pair of figures and eventually entered them at VIII Atvirame Vilniaus stendinių modelių konkursas, placing 3rd in the “Plastic, figurines and busts” category.

Dreams

The couple embraced and threw themselves on the ground.
For the longest time it seemed they would miss.

Veckans ord: höstack

Denna kalla och regniga årstid utbrister man lätt i ett och annat höstack.

Hope and hops

It struck me that my relation to religion is much the same as to beer drinking: While I see that it clearly is important and enjoyed by many, not least as an excuse for meeting friends (but may get you into fights about which brand is best), possibly may have health benefits under certain circumstances, has been historically very influential, and arguably may even have enabled civilisation, I still don’t quite get why anybody would see it as enjoyable, and suspect it is probably not good for you in the long run, especially as your arguments become increasingly more unintelligible the more you have partaken of it.

R

Prompted by a student project, I started looking into R today. Well, this is what the usual Hailstone program looks like in R:

hailstone <- function(n)
  while (print(n) > 1) 
    n <- if (n %% 2 == 0) n / 2 else 3 * n + 1; 

I started writing it in a very C-like way, but the functional nature of the language made itself increasingly more apparent as I played around with the code.

Still going strong

During my first course in calculus, Ambjörn the TA was going through whatever it was and I innocently asked “Isn’t this, like, fractal?” He spun around: “Yes, exactly!”, spun back towards the blackboard and proceeded, chalk blazing, to explain how the current course segment was tied to fractals, their implications for geometry and how that in turn related to other branches of mathematics, ever faster and further into ever more exotic subjects while we students could just hold on to our desks for dear life in the storm blast of imparted knowledge. Forty-five minutes later he suddenly made a double-take, checked the time, and with an embarrassed cough noted: “I think we ran over the time a bit there, let’s take the break now.”

During the break Å accused me of setting Ambjörn into self-oscillation and suggested I shut up in the future, lest we never manage to cover what was actually coming on the exam.

Well, I did pass the calculus exams, eventually even the dreaded Theory exam, though that took me five attempts (in no way an exceptional number). Still, perhaps that was more due to diligently doing all exercises and repeatedly reading the books, rather than thanks to Ambjörn’s TA efforts, which, while always entertaining and mind-opening, tended to veer off from the official subject into Deep Maths.

Eventually I became a colleague of Ambjörn’s, whose wide-ranging interests could no longer be contained within either the Department of Mathematics or that of Physics and thus had moved into Computer Science (which at the limit contains all other sciences). Passing his room would often imply getting drawn into impromptu lectures on maths and their relation to everything else in (and occasionally outside) the universe. He even stored some of his parabolic rock-melting mirrors in our lab, though we irreverently ended up using them as towel racks.

Today, Ambjörn was officially retired, though, as is the custom in academia, that simply means the end of salary, but not necessarily the end of research. So, I returned to the Alma Mater for Ambjörn’s Last Lecture, which, true to form, ranged from how to explain what weekday it will be in a million days, over homotopies of snakes on a torus, to how human culture is an integral over time.

I regretted Honeybuns wasn’t there to get some kind of idea of where I come from, intellectually, but the OBCM was there and afterwards we had a nice chat about teaching and geometric modelling over a cuppa.

If this is the last time I hold you

A song that pops up in my head every now and then, but that I hadn’t been able to place. For some reason I thought it might come from a Fame episode, but googling around I eventually found it was actually from the final episode of Secret Army, which in addition to this has the most haunting opening titles of any TV programme I’ve seen (the images played in reverse for the end titles).

Växeln hallå

I would assume it would be easier to confuse the connections between Ipswich and Norwich, rather than Northwich, but I guess Naarich just doesn’t sound nice to sing. When I saw the title, I first assumed it was about someone travelling on train, but the song is instead about the modern social media of its day. Note also the very careful enunciation of the singer, which makes every word of the lyrics come across clearly in spite of distortion high enough to make grown men cry.

Clean lyrics

As noted earlier , well-known songs often have a far older original, so here is a famous Monty Python piece in its 1930s guise:

List of songs about Stockholm

Liza Minelli, in one of her shows, told of how she’d investigated what city had had the most songs written about it and, of course, found it was New York, giving her cause to sing “New York, New York”. Number two was apparently London, so she did a London-themed song as well. I was a bit patriotically incensed that she didn’t even mention the number of songs written about Stockholm. Fortunately others have addressed that issue.

Forgotten lyrics

All too often, and especially with lyrics in foreign languages, I don’t catch the exact lyrics and so I’ve long been humming on this rhythmic piece that goes something something breakfast in London. But, of course Wikipedia has a List of songs about London and halfway through that I found it: “Last train to London”.

Swashbuckling

Another song that’s stuck in my head: “Song of the Musketeers” from the 1935 version of The Three Musketeers.

The Only-Begotten Children

I’m not the only one to have Only-Begotten Children, but so does Prince Philip, as witnessed by the Reverend Hubert Rumtumtibumbum (starts at 5:00):

Version originale

The Flash animation “Shii’s song” with an up-pitched version of Jennifer Stigile’s recording of “Wind’s Nocturne” was an Internet phenomenon long before the term “viral video” was invented, but here is the original Japanese version.

More 1970s ballads

I’m sure the YouTube comments claim that they just don’t make music like this anymore. Well, why would they? It’s already been made.

Web-adapted

Now is the time for the JavaScript version of the Hailstone program:

<script>
  function hailstone(seed) {
    var output = "";
    for ( ; 
   output += seed, seed > 1 ; 
   seed = seed % 2 ? seed * 3 + 1 : seed / 2) { output += ", "; }
    return(output);
  }

  function submit(seed) {
    document.getElementById("output").textContent =
      hailstone(seed);
  }
</script>

<p>
  Seed: <input type="text" 
            id="seed" 
            onchange="submit(this.value)">
</p>
<p id="output"></p>

Put that into an HTML page and it generates the following box: (Try it, it actually works!)

Seed:

Finished model 2013-II

While I arrange modelling competitions, I don’t compete, mainly because I’m just not good enough, but when we were at Model Expo in Helsinki last year, one of the IPMS Finland guys pressed a Frog Fokker D21 in my hand as a parting gift. I could but take it as a challenge.

I presumed the idea was that I would build a Finnish Fokker (as FR-92 was one of the decal options), but that seemed too easy, and instead I decided I would make a Danish Fokker, inspired by the picture in [Munson 1969]: J-50 of 2. Eskadrille of Hærens Flyvertropper, based at Værløse. A historical note is that while the Fokker D.XXIs in both Dutch and Finnish service acquitted themselves well in the beginning of WWII, the Danish ones were never used in combat, for reasons that are fully covered in [Ancker 1997, 2001a].

The Frog model, while older than I, is not completely horrible. The shape is OK and it has separated control surfaces, which, when offset, would make for a nice effect, as I decided to build it in flying configuration (which otherwise would not affect the exterior, considering the fixed landing gear). But there are deficiencies: The cockpit is completely bare, there are no wing guns (not relevant for the Danish version, but definitely for the Finnish), the engine is such a pathetic effort that all around the building table burst out laughing when I showed it, and the rather prominent exhaust pipe is completely missing. All of this is of course amenable to scratch building, which I did (I didn’t bother with the engine, though) and in addition I made elevator actuators and the large landing light present on the Danish aircraft. The rather shapeless original pilot figure was replaced by a Matchbox pilot, sculpted and painted to look as much as possible as flying suits I found in [Ancker 1997] (photographs of Danish pilots in 1940 are really rare, not to say nonexistent, on the web). A length of thick soldering wire turned out to be perfect for making the exhaust. The hemispherical landing light lens was created by heat-smashing a bit of transparent sheet. (Or rather, heat-smashing several sheets until I got a decent shape.)

By this time it was just a week left before the competition was on (as getting my Tunnan done had had priority up to that point) and I had to start the painting process. Since I persist in using Humbrol colours, which take considerable time to dry, I set up a schedule where I would paint a layer in the evening, get up before dawn to paint the next layer, go to work, come home, paint another layer, sleep a few hours, etc. In the middle of it all I ran out of adhesive tack for masking, so had to run out and buy some, but my favourite Sense 60 g tack just didn’t exist anymore, all shops suddenly carrying Pritt Multi Tac instead. I had to buy this instead. To my horror I found the next morning it would actually lift the underlying paint. I’d never seen Humbrol do that, but apparently I was cutting it a bit too fine with the drying times. In all, the paint job is pretty horrid, you can even see a couple of obvious fingerprints in the photo below. I added the decals the same morning as we were leaving, using some leftover Danish national insignia, unfortunately somewhat undersize.

For the camouflage I went with [Eberspacher 1994] and its suggested colour scheme of Olivengrøn/Brun/Skyblå, which is not inconsistent with the high-contrast camouflage apparent in contemporary photographs, using Humbrol 131 Satin Green, 9 Gloss Tan, and H.G.3 Hellgrau 76 as matches. Acquaintances frowned at this and wondered if I’d purposely chosen the most garish combination.

So, it’s not a great model by any means and will never win anything, but I did get it done in time for the competition.

Literature

De danske militære flyverstyrkers udvikling 1910–1940, Bind I, Paul E. Ancker, 1997, Odense Universitetsforlag.
De danske militære flyverstyrkers udvikling 1940–1945, Bind II, Første halvbind, Paul E. Ancker, 2001, Odense Universitetsforlag.
“A Design of the Times—The Fokker D.XXI in Development and Service”, Srecko Bradic, in Military Aircraft Monthly International 9(7), July 2010, pp 32–41.
Fokker D.XXI—Dutch & Danish Service, Vol. 1, Warren Eberspacher, 1994, Phalanx Publishing.
Fokker D.XXI, Suomen Ilmavoimien Historia 3, 2. uusittu painos, Kalevi Keskinen, Kari Stenman & Klaus Niska, 1977, Tietoteos.
Fighters 1939–45—Attack and Training Aircraft, Kenneth Munson, 1969, Blandford Press.
Fokker D.21, Seria „Pod Lupą” 10, Przemyslaw Skulski, 1999, Ace Publication.

Finished model 2013-I

This year’s modelling competition had the theme “What if…Sweden” and Kipper had one of his brilliant ideas—he bought up every 1:72 kit of Saab Tunnan he could find and pressed them in the hands of all modellers he met against the promise that they would build it, but not in the kit configuration. Mulling things over, I had a brainwave and accepted a bagged Heller Tunnan.

Several things came together in my head: the Prusa Mendel 2 3D printer I had just bought together with some friends (including Kipper), my interest in the Saunders-Roe SR.A/1 flying-boat fighter, the rotund shape that gave the Tun its name, and the wonderful diorama of a wartime S-17BS base in the Stockholm archipelago at a previous 08-Open, so I thought:
What if the Chief of the Air Force had been to the British Gas Turbine Week in 1951, where the SR.A/1 was displayed [Jones 1993], and had decided that it would be possible to convert the all-new Saab 29 Tunnan into a flying-boat reconnaissance version that could deploy from easily-constructed archipelagic bases, the road base system not yet having been built?

I decided that it would have been designated S29H, obviously popularly known as ”Vattentunnan”. Perhaps this would be a proposal interesting enough to extend the production run of fpl 29 beyond serial 29976 in 1956 [Flyghistorisk Revy 27], so I could depict an individual palindromically serialled 29992 (coincidentally $992$₁₀ = 1111100000₂). Like all other seaplanes in the Air Force, the S29H would obviously be operated by F2 at Hägernäs, extending their life as aircraft operators. F2 aircraft did not normally wear squadron-specific colours or numbers, instead using the two final digits of the serial number on the fin [Hellström & Fredin, 2000], and I presume that F2 already being special in their marking schemes, they would never bother transferring to fin letters, so 2-92 it would be. However, they probably would use the high-contrast olive green fields prescribed for A29 and S29 from 1954 onwards (not least because it would add a little splash of colour). The result would be a Tunnan as it would have looked in the late 1950s.

For the actual design of the aircraft I foresaw giving it a boat hull directly based on that of the SR.A/1, retractable wingtip floats that could double as wingtip tanks, and a couple of holes in the wings for the cameras. The cameras mounted in the actual S29C recce aircraft were pretty bulky, necessitating an entire new nose section, but this design was dragooned by Colonel Beckhammar, whereas the original plans called for a rather simpler solution, so the S29H can be taken to be based on these original plans and some clever optics. The model turned out to have a convenient panel line running all the way from air intake to exhaust and I set the razor saw to work on this. Now I could tape together the two fuselage halves and scan their outline for later use.

Then I scanned Barrie Hygate’s SR.A/1 plans [Aircraft Archive, 1988]. Kipper tipped me off to Rhino 3D, which happens to have a free beta version for OS X, and during a modelling day at the Army Museum, showed me how to loft the hull profiles into a 3D structure. Then I stretched and squashed that structure in order to match it to the previously scanned Tunnan outline. I now clearly saw how much smaller Tunnan was than the SR.A/1. I created the wingtip floats, which had fewer constraints, so did them more or less free-hand. (All this took considerably more time and fiddling around than is obvious from this short description.)

The plan had been to print the hull and floats on the 3D printer, but that was a project in itself and I hadn’t even managed to get it to communicate with my MacBook yet. On the other hand, Kipper had gotten access to a Roland 3D router, and used it to produce the desired parts for me. The material used looked like some kind of light wood, but apparently was a resin. The resolution of the router was outstanding and I was very pleased with the bits. Except for the wing-tip floats, whose size I had completely overestimated—they were just little pods. I would have to rescale them by at least a factor of 2. Still, that could wait for later.

I continued putting the model together. Heller models from the 1970s, such as this, are really not bad, with good fit, and the cockpit was reasonably well detailed. I still added a thin copper wire for the ejection handle and a bit of plastic to represent the quite prominent canopy opening mechanism.

The new hull had a big lug left from routing which I had to spend a few hours to sand away with wet paper, as I’m a bit wary about resin dust, but eventually it was in a state to be mated with the (remains of the) Heller fuselage. It fit surprisingly well—I had apparently done a careful job scanning and lofting. The only trouble spot was at the air intake, where I’d sawed through the bottom part of it, this necessitating a bit of scraping and puttying. In retrospect I should have kept the intake as was, but so it goes.

In the wings I took out a section of each lower part, in order to create the attachments for the floats. I added various tubing to represent the retraction mechanism. In the meantime, the router had broken down, so Kipper was unable to supply me with resized copies, but being the man of bright ideas that he is, he came up with an emergency solution: pilfer the wing floats from a Tamiya 1:48 Rufe, and indeed they were perfect in size.

Soon it was time for painting. I went with straight Humbrol 56 overall, and Humbrol 30 for the olive green fields (really too green a shade, I should rather have used 116, I made a thinko). Finally, the day before the exhibition, it was time to add the decals. The kit-supplied national insignia went on without problems, but my Specialtryck Swedish numerals completely disintegrated on contact with water. On this short notice I had no option but to leave the aircraft unnumbered. As I arrived the next morning, looking very glum, older hands laughed at my ignorance of the short shelf-life of Specialtryck decals. Still, there it was, and so were all the other ones! Kipper’s campaign activity had paid handsome dividends, the What if competition category had to be divided in two: one for Tunnan entries, the rest for everything else and then about as many additional entries in the hors concours exhibition. This caused some amount of excitement even abroad, and I was chuffed as nuts to see my flying boat singled out for comment.

A couple of weeks later I brought the Tunnan along to the Helsinki competitions, where it received IIIrd prize in the Jets 1/99–1/51 category, though that was really an artefact of their no-sweeps rules, it was in fact way down the list, but all the entries ahead came from only two builders…

Much later, with the help of Microscale Liquid Decal Film, I managed to get the numerals to stick together, and then scratch-built beaching gear for the aircraft, trying out the hairspray method on it. And here it is:

Literature

“SAAB 29 Tunnan” at Aircraft Walkaround Center, 2003.
Aircraft Archive: Post-war Jets, Volume 3, 1988, Argus Books.
Kronmärkt – Målning och märkning av svenska militärflygplan under 1900-talet, Leif Hellström & Leif Fredin, 2000, Allt om Hobby.
J29-klubben, 2010
“Saro’s flying-boat fighter”, Barry Jones, Aeroplane Monthly, 22(7), July 1993, pp 34–41.
Flygplansritningar 4: Svenska Flygvapnets Spaningsflygplan 1926–86, Björn Karlström, 1988, Allt om Hobby.
”Saab 29 Tunnan · Västerås Flygmuseum”, at 4πsr, Lennart Möllerström, 2011.
Att flyga är att leva: Flygvapnet 1926–1976, Gösta Norrbohm & Bertil Skogsberg, 1975, Bokförlaget Bra Böcker.
Flyghistorisk revy Nr 27: SAAB 29 Tunnan, 1977, Svensk Flyghistorisk Förening.
Gula Divisionen, 1954, Terrafilm.