More Ship Pictures

The thing's beginning to look like a sailing vessel.

It's been a while since the last update (lotsa reasons). Anyway, here they are.



As you can see, I've stepped the masts and connected the shrouds and stays. The masts actually are in three sections, so this is just the bottom bit. The final, completed, masts will stand a little over twice the current height.

I've included some detail pictures of how the blocks are used to connect the standing rigging to the boat. Handily, they also allow you to adjust the tension on the rigging - which is what they're for in the real thing too. The rigging wraps around the block and then is lashed tight. I decided to paint the lashing black (pics 2 & 4 - this wasn't in the plans) because they would be covered in tar on the real thing to prevent any slippage.

I've also assembled and lashed on the dory (the little boat). It's not glued so I can take it off if I need to. The plans suggest making coils of rope to drop in the dory, which I'll do when this is all done, but what's curiously missing are oars for the thing. I believe I'll have quite a bit of extra wood left over, so I'm going to take a shot at making a pair and putting them in the boat.

The tops are the platforms at the top of the masts - there's a detail of one in picture five. These were a die cast metal that I painted to try and make them look like wood. I went back and forth as to whether to put the railing on. I was leaning towards no because I've spent some time as crew aboard a 70' Brigantine in Lake Ontario where there were no railings on the tops. Then I was watching Master and Commander (again) a couple of weeks ago and noticed in one shot that they had a similar railing to this one (only on one side), so that made my decision and a glued it on.

Next I will be starting to weave in the ratlines. These are lines that run horizontally, connecting the shrouds to form a ladder for the crew to climb up to the tops. I have no idea whether this is going to be easy or a pain in the ass.

By the way, it has now been almost exactly one year since I began working on this thing.

Mike

Pi Crop Circle

telegraph.co.uk

I found this one on Digg the other day. The article calls this the "most complex crop circle ever", which clearly isn't true, but it is pretty clever none the less. What I found really entertaining is the discussion it spawned at Digg when someone made the, kind of obvious, observation that since this representation of pi was in base ten, it was obviously made by humans.

The decimal representation of pi, of course, completely changes under different bases. For example, in base eight it would by about 3.11038. Our base ten number system is inherited from the Arabic world and is completely a result of use having ten fingers and toes, nothing more. It would seem unlikely that an alien civilization would have the same number system as us. In fact, different cultures here on Earth had different number systems. The Babylonians had a base 60 system that we still carry in our clocks, among other places. The familiar Roman system wasn't a place value system at all.

It cracks me up that there still is a, so called, crop circle mystery. There is no mystery. The circles are made by humans. In fact, here's their website: circlemakers.org. These people are hardly shy of their creations. In fact, they rightfully consider themselves artists. Yet, UFO enthusiast still like to believe that there is no way us mere humans could have created such things.

Our perceptions of the world are what we make them.

Mike