Grant Hutchison's Blog, page 12

Scottish Hill Lists: The Classics

If you’ve spent any time at all reading The Oikofuge, you’ll have gathered that I’m quite interested in hills—climbing them, looking at other hills from their summits, understanding their names and their place in history, landscape and land-use. What you won’t have seen me mention very often is the plethora of classifications that have been … Continue reading Scottish Hill Lists: The Classics →

Sydney Scroggie: The Cairngorms Scene & Unseen

The Cairngorms lay beneath what was now a local bonnet of cloud. Everything else was in sunshine and dazzling with colours, cobalts and browns and bright greens, all the peaks around glowing with the pristine pigments of an illuminated manuscript, as far as distant Lochnagar and Beinn a’ Ghlo. Then even the interior gloom began to … Continue reading Sydney Scroggie: The Cairngorms Scene & Unseen →

Epicaricacy: Part 1

��p��k��r����k��s�� / ��p����k��r��k��s�� epicaricacy: malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than … Continue reading Epicaricacy: Part 1 →

Lomond Reservoirs Circuit

East Lomond (NO 243061, 434m)West Lomond (NO 197066, 522m)Bishop Hill (NO 185043,461m) 20 kilometres710 metres of ascent Having previously climbed West Lomond and East Lomond from the Craigmead car park, and having made a more recent traverse of Bishop Hill from the Holl Reservoir car park, I decided it was time to chain all three … Continue reading Lomond Reservoirs Circuit →

How To Model Rotating Propeller Discs

There are some things I hate about "in-flight" models of piston-engine aircraft. One is when the aircraft appear to be flying without a pilot; the other is a stationary propeller.Modellers have a couple of ways of dealing with this second problem. One is to simply remove the propeller blades, leaving only the filled and smoothed spinner visible—it's a well-recognized technique which many feel produces the most realistic appearance. But it always makes me think, Where's the propeller? I find the complete absence of anything in the space where the propeller should be is a little distracting. I'm also not very keen on the photo-etched "prop-blur" option, which aims to produce a blurred sector for each prop blade, reproducing what we see in photos and movies, but not what we see with the naked ey

R.A.J. Matthews: Tumbling Toast, Murphy’s Law And The Fundamental Constants

Robert A.J. Matthews published this seminal bit of applied physics in 1995. The journal reference is European Journal of Physics 16(4): 172-6, and you can access the full paper at ResearchGate, here. For his efforts, he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 1996.Matthews was the first (but by no means the last) to use mathematical physics to explore the popular claim that "dropped toast always lands butter-side down". The usual "explanation" invoked for this perceived rule is Murphy's Law---"If anything can go wrong, it will"---but Matthews sought to show that there were sound physical principles underlying the phenomenon.

Keplerian Orbital Elements

1. All planets move in elliptical orbits, with the sun at one focus.2. A line that connects a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times.3. The square of the period of any planet is proportional to the cube of the semimajor axis of its orbit. Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion (formulated … Continue reading Keplerian Orbital Elements →

The Sound(s) Of wh

You know how to whistle, don���t you Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow. Lauren Bacall, To Have And Have Not (1944) No, your browser hasn’t had a stroke—this post really has wh in its title—that is, the two letters at the start of the word whistle. For most of the English-speaking world, … Continue reading The Sound(s) Of wh →

Supermodel 1/72 Blohm & Voss 138 "Flying Clog”: Part 2

I finished my previous post having painted the finicky yellow stripe on the rear of my aircraft. Having masked that off, I sprayed the RLM65 blue underside, and masked that, followed by a base layer of RLM72 dark green for the upper surfaces. Then there was a lot of tricky masking for the even darker … Continue reading Supermodel 1/72 Blohm & Voss 138 “Flying Clog”: Part 2 →

Supermodel 1/72 Blohm & Voss 138 “Flying Clog”: Part 2

I finished my previous post having painted the finicky yellow stripe on the rear of my aircraft. Having masked that off, I sprayed the RLM65 blue underside, and masked that, followed by a base layer of RLM72 dark green for the upper surfaces. Then there was a lot of tricky masking for the even darker … Continue reading Supermodel 1/72 Blohm & Voss 138 “Flying Clog”: Part 2 →