Wednesday, January the 1st, 2003
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The story “Some Ponds, A Hotel, The Hollyhocks” has been translated from English into Serbo-Croat. This is the first step of the project. The next stage is for the Serbo-Croat text to be translated into, say, French, the French into Urdu, the Urdu into Finnish, the Finnish into Chinese… and so on, until, dozens (or hundreds) of languages later, the text is translated back into English. If you are able to translate from Serbo-Croat into a language other than English, please leave a message with your old friend the Duty Git.
Plans are afoot for the Hooting Yard Ice Archive. The idea is to compile a ludicrously exhaustive library of information about ice. From the ice cubes in a freezer to the wind-blasted wastes of Antarctica—if you have any information about ice, or know of any existing ice archives which can be subsumed into the Hooting Yard archive, let the Ice Archivist know.
This project is code-named Homunculus for reasons so abstruse that not even people skilled in deciphering immensely abstruse things can work it out. The project is meant to work as follows:
Send your ideas to The Homunculus Project.
Some possible starting points: Tristram Shandy, the history of lighthouses, Oulipo, obscure farm implements, things that vanish, Muggletonians… As the project develops, progress updates will appear on the Hooting Yard Site and/or be posted to contributors.
“CCC” stands for “Cryptic Crossword Clue”. You are invited to send in either:
If possible, please give the source: publication, date, setter (if known), etc. Send your clues to the Tetchy Cruciverbist.
Here are some highlights from the responses to the various projects. Let me rewrite that. Here are all of the responses to the various projects:
Cam Baddeley writes:
I firmly believe that the Homunculus Project should exclude any reference to gases. Liquids, yes. Gases, no. I am keenly interested in things which, when left alone for long periods, may or may not turn into something else, eg my grandfather's tools, which have been in a large chest in my father's garage for twenty years, or the correspondence Edward Gorey admits to having left unopened for thirty-five years. I am unconvinced that the contents of either of these are the same contents that were originally lodged, and defy anyone to conclusively prove otherwise. I can see the Melbourne docks, the country rail yards and several fairly substantial chimneys from my office window. If I could see a gasometer I would be the happiest man on earth.
C.J. Baddeley cbaddeley@infoxchange.net.au
I think Cam has hit the nail on the head there. But which nail? And whose head? Meanwhile, Tempel Ov Spoon has (have?) been very forthcoming on ice topics. First, on pykrete:
From Pyke—The Unknown Genius, by David Lampe: “Pyke had conceived of the Plough project to solve a few specific problems of the war, but his Habbakuk idea, he felt, would do much more. It would solve all the war's problems—as well as those problems of the peace which would follow. The three elements of the scheme were to be ice, sawdust and very cold water. Pure ice, Pyke had learned, is molecularly very similarly to pure concrete, although it has an even lower temsile strength. If however, small particles of some other substance are suspended in water, and if that water is frozen, the reinforced ice has remarkable qualities. The reinforcement boosts the ice's tensile strenghth tremendously. Pyke had learned that particles of wood—such as the chips used in paper manufacture—can micro-reinforce ice very much.
“The memo then pointed to a certain little-known characteristic of super-cooled water—water chilled below freezing-point but not allowed to congeal. In a pre-war study made by the United States Bureau of Standards, research indicated that, contrary to popular teaching, such water need not be kept static.
“In the Brooklyn Polytechnic's Cold Research Laboratories scientists working for Pyke had added between four and fourteen per cent of wood pulp to water. The slush thus produced was frozen into a material at first named piccolite and later called pykrete. Initial tests of the material gave fantastic results.
“The crush resistance of clear ice is between 250 and 1,300 pounds per square inch, but pykrete's crush resistance proved to be more than 3,000 pounds per square inch. A one inch column of pykrete was found to be strong enough to support the weight of a medium-sized motorcar quite easily. The wood pulp insulated pykerete quite remarkably after the material's outer surface thawed, making it considerably more stable at high temperatures than ordinary ice. A relatively small expenditure of energy would keep it frozen.
“Pyke's Habbakuk memorandum went on to make some very incredible suggestions. Why not build giant aircraft carriers entirely of pykerete—ships two thousand feet long with thirty-foot-thick hulls? Since pykeretes specific gravity is lower than that of ice, the ships would be unsinkable. The maximum speed need only be seven knots, he estimated, but because of pykerete's invulnerability this would not matter. Initial scientific calculation suggested that if hit broadside by a torpedo, the carrier hulls would suffer a crater only three feet deep and about twenty feet in diameter. Such hulls could resist waves a hundred feet high, and incendiary attack woulkd hardly damage them.
“Pykrete carriers' hollowed hulls would contain freezing plants, workshops, airplane hangars and living quarters—all as snugly warm as igloos. Their runways would launch any military aircraft then in use. Each iceberg aircraft carrier would contain sufficient deisel fuel in its tanks for seven-thousand-mile non-stop cruises. Freezing units would circulate cold air throughout cardboard tubes, frozen vein-like into the pykrete kulls, to allow ships to withstand the most torrid weather, and cork sheathing would preserve the hulls' exterior contours against the effects of possible evaporation.
“Pyke's memo then suggested pykrete freighters, each so large that it would carry as much cargo as eighty Liberty ships! Rather than be unloaded with cranes (obviously inefficient, Pyke remarked), holes would be carved in the sides of the ice freighters and cargo would then be slid off onto ice barges (these to be built for only $200 apiece, according to Pyke's calculations). The freighter's sides could then be frozen shut again quite easily. Their usefulness outlived, the iceberg freighters would be taken to open water and allowed to melt. The memo also suggested a large pykrete carrier, four thousand feet long, as well as smaller berg ships.”
As if that weren't enough, Tempel added the following:
Pyke managed to stretch the boundaries of eccentricity and would brief members of the War Cabinet from his bed whilst surrounded by beer bottles full of piss, because going to the lavatory would waste time that he could otherwise use by working on his inventions.
Another ice story you might like to pick up on is that one of the ice mummies of the Incas, Sarita, has just been discovered in the Andes. For more details go to: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/nova/peru/
spooky@mail.bogo.co.uk (TempelOvSpoon)
Marvellous stuff. This is precisely the sort of thing to keep shovelling in to the Ice Archive until all known hard disk space in the world is frozen solid with it. More ice from Jonathan Edmondston:
Interesting facts about Ice:
- It only exists at negative temperatures, unless you are using the Fahrenheit or Reameur(?) scales, or you are in another dimension
- Most of the planet Pluto is ice
- If all the ice on earth melted at once, the planet would be flooded, and you wouldn't be able to have scotch on the rocks
- Penguins walk on ice, but Mars bars slide
- Rod, Jane and Freddy (of Rainbow fame) once sang a song about ‘Coconut ice tasting very nice’
- The Ice Warriors on Doctor Who were the only alien race who actually looked different to each other, unlike the daleks, cybermen, etc.
- In the anti-matter universe, ice would solidify into water, and water-bergs would float on the ice seas, causing a danger to shipping everywhere (especially Portsmouth harbour)
Edmondston@dial.pipex.com
Thank you for that, Jonathan—especially number 6, which could lead to a project of its own if anyone has further thoughts on such things. Finally, a rather ambitious scheme for the Homunculus Project from Tim Drage:
Idea: Locate the plant/insect which most resembles a human being, and selectively breed it until undistinguisiable from the real thing.
tim@drage.demon.co.uk
Well, yes, Tim, but when are we going to find the time? You can visit Tim at http://www.yi.com/home/DrageTim/ (unless he's too busy carrying out demented experiments in his lab, as his cackling factotum Mungo drags in another sack of insects…)
You'd better go back to the Home Page, unless you want to look at Planet of the Severe Haircuts