In Defense of the Mustache

Many unkind words have been said recently about our friend the mustache. Some go so far as to say it was spanned from the utmost depths of Dante’s Inferno and sent to plague man for all eternity. Still others claim that was indeed Pandora’s Box that unleashed this “Horror of Horrors”. Mustaches have been associated with Communist, Fascism, and perhaps worst of all, the music of “Kings of Leon”. "Scourge of the Earth", "A Crime Against Humanity", "Plague that Threatens Society Itself."

However we must ask ourselves this question: Is the concept of a mustache actually natural, and even above natural, is it desirable? The answer my friends could not be more clear in my mind, for my answer is yes, yes, one thousand times yes. Let the rallying cry of the mustache be heard in every street and avenue across this great country, nay, across the globe. Let it echo on the heights of the tallest mountain and in the deepest crevice of the Earth. Let the entire world hear the refrain, from the youngest newborn male to the man on his deathbed.

The mustache lives! From the Fu Manchu to the pencil stache, I cast my lot with Jimi Hendrix, with Johnny Depp, Salvador Dali and Friedrich Nietzsche, with every man willing to take a stand for what he knows in his heart to be true: Mustaches are God’s personal gift to mankind, designed to worn with pride!

Helicopter ejection seat?

Helicopter ejection seat. Sounds like a terrible idea right? Always mentioned in the same sentence as screen doors in submarines, named as a rhetorical remark to say that something just said is in fact not the worst idea ever. The very thought of the seat brings to mind a pilot being chopped to bits as they head through the whirling helicopter blades, but is that actually what would happen? Or is there a chance that with computerized timing, a person could be pushed through between blade rotations? I will attempt to answer the question with maths.

The first numbers we need are the height of the person as they are pushed through the blades, and the rotational speed of the copter blades at the place the person is ejecting. The first of these is easy to estimate, as a sitting person is approximately 2/3rds of their standing height, that means for a 6 foot person, they would be 4 feet tall when sitting. This will be the number used, except it will be converted to 1.22 meters.

The second number is more difficult to attain. From what I read on the intrablogs, the rotational speed of helicopter blades is around 500 rpm, double because there are two blades spinning at this speed, and you come up with 1000 rpm, which equals 1000/60 rotations per seconds, which is equal to 16.66 rps.

This is where a lot of haphazard guesswork comes into play. Let us use the Bell 206 for our example copter for these equations. This helicopter has a rotor diameter of 10.16 meters with the pilot’s seat roughly 3 feet from the center of the rotor. For arguments sake, let us assume that the width of the pilot requires 50 percent the length of the chord made by the line crossing the circle at three feet from the center of the circle. It takes 06 seconds for each rotation, so the time the pilot has to make it through the blade area is (.06)*(2) seconds=.12 seconds. And because he must travel 1.22 meters in this time (his own height while seated) he must travel at 1.22/.12 m/s=10.1 m/s when he is traveling through the blades. Another estimation puts the blade at 6 feet above the pilots head, assuming the pilot must be traveling at an average of 10.1 m/s while going through the blades, this means he has 6+2=8 ft, or 2.43 meters to accelerate to this speed, by this, and seeing he would only have 5.05/2.43 seconds=2.07 seconds to travel all the way to top speed. This makes acceleration would have to be only 10.1*2.07 m/s^2 so 20.9 m/s^2, plus the 9.8 m/s^2 or normal earth acceleration makes for 3.13g’s.

I can only assume that my calculations are fraught with errors and inaccuracies, but I don’t care all that much. For I have reached a final number through steps that appear logical to my own self.

Well lookey here

Because Facebook is not an ideal medium for passing on lengthly thoughts, I figured I'd start up a blog with a name and a URL and all that jazzz. I don't know how often I will have anything to write here, or how often it will be about sports (hopefully not all the time). This may be the only post I ever write, you just never know. But the opportunity to write more than 460 characters in a post is certainty appealing.

That is all.