April Favorites
Rémi 𝘅 Share the Cool
Hey everyone! Today we shall share cool and interesting ways to get from A to B (or from A to A, but fast 😃).
🏎 HDPE
HPDE, High Performance Driving Education, is a sport where you can bring your car (or rent one) to the racetrack and learn to drive it at the limit! I’ve been doing that quite a bit with mine mostly with Hooked On Driving, and it is fun, really engaging, and a learning experience which teachings you can use in other conditions as well :)
One of the core principles of HPDE is that HPDE is NOT racing. For everybody’s safety, which is paramount in those events, in HPDE you compete with yourself, not with others. There is no starting grid, no finish line, and no winner nor loser at the end. Nobody but yourself, if you want to, will time your laps around the track, as the goal isn’t necessarily to go the fastest, but rather to get better at driving at the limit.
When your group is on the track, which in total amounts to around 2 hours per day for an event, split into 20 minute sessions, the goal is to learn the limits of your car and how to drive it effectively to maximize its performance given its limits. It’s been really enlightening to see how far a car can be pushed before it reaches its maximum, or how to recover a car whose tires have passed the traction point and who is now drifting away from your control — video of me failing at this here:
The learnings can be applied in any low traction situation, whether your car is low on traction because you’re going very fast around corners (like HPDE), or because you’re driving in snowy or rainy areas (hydroplaning). Cars at the limit react and need to be driven in very counterintuitive ways : for example if you’re going too fast around a corner and your tires are screeching and losing traction, the last thing you want to do is brake! That would only ask more of your already overloaded tires : you would ask them both for lateral traction to turn, but also longitudinal traction to brake, which would go over the traction limit and send you flying around that corner. It is really interesting to learn to overcome that natural reflex to reach for the brake pedal as you start losing control due to too overspeed, and force yourself to steer out of trouble instead of braking out of it. Very useful in snow, where braking an already drifting car is making a bad situation even worse.
⛵️Sailing
In the “wouldn’t it be cool to get more than 5 miles per gallon” category of transportation, Josephine and myself have started sailing classes, which is super fun. It’s a very team-oriented sport: given the size of the boat there are many things to do that are physically outside of the reach of a single person and need to be done simultaneously, which I think is really interesting and a sharp contrast with racing cars and flying airplanes.
We’re learning to sail at OCSC on their J-24 boats, located in the Berkeley marina. Sailing from berkeley can be a challenge as it’s located directly east of the golden gate without any obstructions between the two, which puts it right in the path of the westerly (coming from the west, heading towards the east) winds coming straight from the golden gate entrance. This creates fairly big waves coming straight at you, which is great for training, but pretty hard. Regardless of the weather we’ve had (which to be fair is benign to more experienced sailors), I have found sailing really thrilling and am looking forward to the moment where after motoring out of the harbor, we raise the sails, cut the engine, and only hear the wind and the waves (and the laments of our instructor 😃 😃)
🚀 BFR
I probably won’t put it (at least not yet :D ) in the “personal transport” or even from a certification standpoint right now “human transport” category, but SpaceX has started work on the BFR spacecraft, which I think is by far the coolest thing happening right now on our little blue planet 🌏.
Since their inception, SpaceX has been at work on multiple versions of their current flying rocket, the Falcon 9. They initially developed Falcon 1 which uses the same Merlin engines, simply 1 instead of 9 for the first stage, and recently launched Falcon Heavy, which is “just” 3 Falcon 9 first stages together. Falcon 9’s diameter is 12 feet, which is quite tiny for a rocket : SpaceX chose that diameter specifically as it’s the biggest object size you’re allowed to ship on US highways, which is super useful for them to ship rockets from California (manufacturing) to Texas (testing) to Florida (launch) while keeping costs low.
The issue is that Falcon 9/Heavy is too tiny to send 100+ ton payloads to mars, so they’ve been hard at work designing a significantly bigger rocket, BFR. Since it won’t fit on US roads, they have just been granted a lease in the port of LA, where they will do the spaceship’s manufacturing which will be then shipped by boat to Florida for launch operations (it is actually likely that the first test flights will be taking off from barges in the ocean to avoid collateral damage if the thing explodes, given its enormous fuel capacity). The building’s manufacturing will take months if not years to complete, which isn’t to the liking of SpaceX’s fast iteration time, so they’ve started to build their spacecraft in… a giant inflatable tent in the port of LA, close to the final building’s location, in between all the shipping containers.
So next time you think “I couldn’t possibly have done this sooner or faster”, just remember that SpaceX is currently building humanity’s first manned interplanetary spacecraft in a tent, cause they couldn’t have their permits in a timeframe that aligned with their insane schedule.
💥💥 First suborbital testflights in 2019 in Elon Time™
👾👾 BonusCool to finish 👾👾
This week a VR game called Beat Saber launched. It’s amazing, I play it at work way too much, and it has perfect scores on every VR store it released in. It’s a music/rhythm game, like Guitar Hero or AudioSurf, but where the notes are cubes coming towards you, timed to the music of course. You hold 2 red and blue lightsabers in your hands and you need to slash the colored cubes with the lightsaber of the same color, in the direction (⬆️ ⬇️ ⬅️ ➡️) shown on the front of the cube (as shown on this mixed reality video).
The cube positions, timings, and arrows direction are manually curated (unlike AudioSurf for example, that automatically generates the environment and the track according to the song’s audio), which makes it even more engaging. Check it out!
