Commercial Items Identified on my Commute

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I see a lot of interesting commercialitems on truck on I-75. When you make the commute many times you start to see the same items over and over again. Sometimes it is huge equipment tires, sometimes heavy equipment of different types. I see these huge blocks of aluminum going North. I think about what the mill must look like and where it is going. And how much aluminum foil a block like this will make. Using the Tesla Full Self-Driving (supervised) allows me to look for these things on the highway. The FSD also helps me through the crazy stop and goes. Easily over 70MPH and then sudden traffic at dead stops, frequently. I see accidents every trip. It is amazing there aren't more. A side note- aluminum foil has a shiny side and a dull side. The reason why is that the foil is folded as it goes through massive rollers. The shiny side is the side that faces the steel roller. The dull side faces itself - aluminum.
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Tomorrow I am supposed to got up on top of Mt. Bird. The helo schedule comes out in the early evening. We are headed out to Mt. Bird because there are large penguin rookeries around this area. We are setting up a repeater system on Mt Terror, Mt. Erebus and Mt. Bird for scientists studying the birds. My co-workers are going up on the other two mountains that tie this system together. Just about everybody in my shop will be on a mountain tomorrow. I spent most of today trying to get some NASA equipment working, scrounging parts from other broken gear and looking and digging through specs to see if components will work. You have to work with what you have. Getting parts is too far off. Our deadline for getting material to Port Huneme CA is Dec. 1. Those materials will then come down by vessel (ship) in January. It is going to be so weird seeing ships at the ice pier. It is all ice now. Generally 3 meters thick. We land C-17s and LC-130s on the ice as well as have D8 dozers out there and all that. The big hope is that the sound may break up totally of ice this year. It hasn't happened in something like 5 or 6 years. There was a huge iceburg called B-15 preventing the sea ice breakup and a combination of weather prevented a open sea with floe ice. The Coast Guard cutter has had to work to keep the channel free. We can only hope. Folks are looking forward to the possibility of seeing a liquid McMurdo Sound. It doesn't happen that often.

These pictures are a repeater system on what we call a "Lunar Lander" and a nice shot of one of the glaciers in the dry valleys.

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Anonymous said…
Hey you can see the scratch marks from the glaciers, neat!
GM
9:12 PM
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