In the United States – especially since 2011 – we’ve been hearing about “the 1%”. The US has 300 million people, give or take. Our “1%” is about 3 million people.

How big is 3 million people? It’s enough to populate a city the size of Chicago or L.A.. Or two Manhattans.

1% of the world population is about 70 million people. That’d be a country on par with the UK or Germany.

Here are some comments I saw on Youtube today:

What is it that makes “1%” not scale in our minds?

Ah, the Hyperloop. Holy crap, it even has its own Wikipedia page.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s okay. No one else does either. Which is why I’m writing this post. Something as vague and amorphous as the Hyperloop brings out all of the kooks and the cranks, including Yours Truly. This whole episode reminds me very much of the “Ginger” hysteria from 2001.

I have no better idea than you what the damned thing is. All I know is that listening to Elon describe it, it started to sound like a crackpot idea I had many years ago. Ordinarily I keep my mouth shut about such things (high school taught me that), but every now and then it’s fun to share a goofy idea and this seems like a great time to do it. Ready? Cool!

Uh… so… this is where you flat-Earthers are going to get really pissed. Sorry. Here’s a diagram of the Earth:

Yeah, I know. Art school really paid off.

The Earth has this curve to it, you know? And if you make a straight tunnel long enough, eventually you’re going to come out the other side. If you shoot straight through the planet you’ll hit molten lava or something. Not awesome. But if you limit the distance you’re trying to go, your tunnel can stay safely inside the earth’s crust, as shown.

Elon talked specifically about a connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco, so let’s draw that:

Aside from the startling reality of the drawing, you’ll notice some arrows labeled ‘g’. Those indicate the direction that gravity is pulling from different points along the tunnel.

(For some reason the tunnel I drew extends from the Hollywood hills to somewhere around the Mission District.)

What’s awesome about this tunnel is that it is downhill from both sides. If you are wondering how a tunnel can be downhill both ways, imagine walking through the tunnel in the picture. At first, it’s downhill. As you walk further, the tunnel has a different angle relative to the Earth’s center of gravity. Over more and more distance the angle changes enough that by the middle of the tunnel things are flat, neither downhill or uphill. Gravity is pulling straight down. Then as you continue forward it’s uphill to the other end of the tunnel. While the tunnel seems like a straight line to you, from the perspective of gravity it is shaped more like a half-pipe. In other words, the tunnel is downhill at both ends and is uphill in both directions from the middle. As Einstein once said, “Gravity be crazy, yo!”[1]

Anyway, I had the basic idea for a tunnel that you could hurl things through. There were some things I wanted to know. Namely:

• Would the tunnel stay inside the Earth’s crust?
• How fast could you go, with no additional energy, ignoring friction?
• How long would a trip take, with no additional energy, ignoring friction?

It’s about time we had a diagram.

Of course this is just a conceptual diagram to help think about the problem. The Earth is HUGE and this triangle would be absurdly narrow and deep if we tried to keep things scaled in any way to reality.

The Details

Remember that part about Earth having a curve to it? That turns out to be a bit of a hassle. The curve is important to this problem, but the Earth doesn’t have the same curve everywhere. Seriously, this is the kind of thing people write dissertations about. After many rounds of trying to get super-accurate numbers, I opted to go with “cocktail napkin”-quality calculations. This means I’m using the median radius value of Earth that I found online, not the actual value for the region between LA and SF. Since this is not a project proposal and I am just some random guy on the Internet with a blog, I hope you’ll allow me this indulgence. My calculations are in the notes below, after the end of the post.

The key piece of information I wanted to know was ‘h’, the depth of the tunnel at the mid-point. That is because I wanted to know how fast you’d go if you were to slide down this tunnel through the mid-point. I also wanted to know if this tunnel would stay within the Earth’s crust over its entire length.

The number I came up with was about 6 km. That’s deeper than I expected. The Earth’s crust turns out to be between 5 km to 70 km thick depending on where you are. Since I know absolutely nothing about geology, I’m just going to pretend that the crust is substantially thicker than 6 km in the LA to SF area.

Honestly, given this “median radius” I’m working with, I wouldn’t be surprised if my numbers are way off. Earlier numbers, where I was trying to be more accurate, put the depth at more like 2 km which is borderline practical. It’s also way more boring, because the greater the depth, the faster we can go…

The depth of the tunnel’s mid-point tells us the velocity for any mass allowed to fall into the tunnel. This is in an imaginary scenario where there is no friction or air resistance and no energy is added to the system. The mass is just “dropped” down the tunnel. At first you’d start off slow, heading down a 4% grade, but my numbers say that you’d be going about 767 mph (~ 1234.5 kph, interestingly) by the time you reached the mid-point of the tunnel. That’s around the speed of sound. It’s also in the neighborhood of “twice as fast as a plane”, if you consider typical commercial airspeeds.

I did not end up calculating the trip time. See “Problems” and the calculation notes for more on that.

Interesting Properties of Tunnels

Tunnels are “immune to weather”.

Tunnels work well with maglev. I built a model maglev train for a project in grade school. It didn’t work too well. My cars wouldn’t stay on the track. The permanent magnets I was using would flip my cars over. In a tunnel that doesn’t have to happen – you have more surface to use than just the ground.

If you build your conveyance (space pod, trolley, what have you – I’ll use “car”) to work with the tunnel you can have something that never derails. Further, despite those action movies where people dive out of airplanes to save other people who were thrown out of airplanes, falling bodies tend to fall with uniform motion. That is to say, if you pushed a car down this tunnel and then pushed another one down the tunnel shortly afterward, they “never crash” into each other because they’re following the same path and obey the same laws of motion. The number of cars you could have in the tunnel at any one time is determined by the length of the tunnel. If you had a tunnel going in each direction you could keep a continuous loop going so “there is no waiting for a specific departure time”.

Problems

A few times above I oddly quoted a term or phrase. Those were various descriptions that Elon has used. Just because something matches a description doesn’t mean it’s the same though. Only some of this comparison stands up to close scrutiny. Particularly problematic is the matter of speed. I haven’t calculated the total trip time yet but the only way I could get my trip time under 30 mins is if the average speed for the entire trip was the maximum speed I calculated at the mid-point of the tunnel. (For the curious, the trip at that maximum speed would be about 27 minutes, “under 30 minutes”). Also, friction and air resistance are things that I’ve completely ignored. The final major problem is cost. He has estimated a $6B project cost. Can you tunnel nearly 550km on $6B? Maybe. I really don’t know.

OTOH

This whole scheme I’ve described is based on zero external energy and zero initial velocity when cars enter the tunnel. When you add in the costs of friction (even if you do maglev) you have to have some kind of external energy source to at least make up for the losses. And if you’re going to add extra energy to the system, you might as well add enough to make it interesting. Maybe even get the speed up and bring the travel time down. I’ve heard some people talk about rail guns. That sounds interesting.

Oh, and one other thing I can’t help but point out: Elon used the phrase “average speed”. You either raised your eyebrows at that or you didn’t. I know I did.

What’s the Point of All of This? Is This the Hyperloop?

Wouldn’t that be awesome? But no, I’m sure I’m way off the mark. After all, I thought “Ginger” was going to be a flying car or jetpack. You know, something cool. For the Hyperloop, the similarities to my idea were too good to pass up. I had to make the comparison. There are probably dozens of other unrelated schemes that could fit the description Elon’s given so far.

I guess the point is that we can all dream up interesting ideas, and we should play with those ideas more, even if we’re not Tony Stark. I used to do this all the time when I was 11 or 12 years old. Why don’t I do that anymore? Playing around with this has been fun!

(A nice conversation about this has popped up in a friend’s Google+ stream.)

—-

Cocktail Napkin Calculations

The numbers I started with (all figures approximate):

Find h:

h = r – L

To find L, I needed to know μ, and to know μ I needed to know θ, which is the angle between the two cities from the perspective of the center of the Earth. This is where having super-accurate curve info would have been handy. But oh well, on we go with the median radius.

θ = s/r = 0.0863 radians = 4.945 degrees

μ = 0.5 θ = 2.47 degrees

L = r * cos μ = 6366 km

h = r – L = 6372 – 6366 = 6 km

—

Maximum velocity v:

v = sqrt(2gh) = sqrt( 2 * 9.8 m/s/s * 6000 m) = 342.9 m/s = 1234 km/h = 767 mph

—

Time for trip if at max velocity: t = 550 km / (1234 km/h) = 0.445 h = 26.7 mins

—

Slope of the tunnel at each end would also be 2.47 degrees.

Grade = tan(2.47) * 100 = 4.31%

—-

I’ve ignored the gravity of the portion of earth above the tunnel. The ideal shape would probably have some curve to it. Speaking of which, “hypocycloid” sounds a lot like “hyperloop”. Coincidence? Probably.

—

I didn’t calculate the travel time through the tunnel because the angle of gravity changes as you go which is different than a first-year physics velocity calculation where g is always straight down. This started to look like a path integral so I ran away! The Gravity Train article suggests that on Earth this time is always 42 minutes, but I’m not convinced that this is the same problem, as the gravity train notion involves taking some optimal path deep through the earth. Clearly, I have homework to do. If there’s an easier solution or you’re handy at this kind of thing, get in touch. Thanks.

Update: Alan Eliasen, creator of the lovely Frink programming language, shared a program that calculates point-to-point travel times through a more realistic model of the Earth. He’s seeing a 38 minute travel time rather than 42.

So there I was, riding the crest of the bubble, with dreams of startups dancing in my head, when a private list of angel investors fell into my lap. What did I do?

I didn’t have a lot of ethical options. The biggest quasi-ethical play I could have made would have been to cold-call these people and solicit them for investments. Investments in what, I didn’t know. I had nothing concrete to invest in. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and had no partners. In short, I had nothing to offer and was months if not years away from even thinking about funding of any kind.

There are other people in this world who can just fire up the bullshit machine and start spewing until dollars start flowing. They work out the details later. I get the sense that many dotcoms were started that way, in fact. For better or worse, that just isn’t my style. Even if that was my style, that list wasn’t mine to use. What felt very exhilarating at first just seemed depressing after a few moments of thought. Yes, I had found a valuable hidden gem, but it wasn’t mine to keep.

So what did I do? I did exactly what @AdamD said in his comment on my previous post: I sent the author an email telling him about the problem. I explained how I found it and what he should do to fix it. I almost didn’t send that email though… I was worried that the author might claim that I had hacked his site or trespassed in some way. That isn’t as far fetched as you might think: I hear that eBay will claim a form of trespass if you scrape their website for data instead of using their API. And while legal matters are pretty murky on the Internet today, they were far murkier 9 years ago. So I waited for a response, unsure of what – if anything – would come back.

A few days later I got a reply from the author, who was happy I told him about the problem, but he wasn’t nearly as worried about it as I thought he might be. After all, having an angel list isn’t nearly as valuable as having actual relationships with those angels.

As a thank-you he sent me a t-shirt from his company which I wore often while playing hockey for many years after that.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I spent a month playing roller hockey and shooting hoops in the breezy Northern California fall. When I wasn’t doing that I was plotting my next move, which I thought might be a startup.

During one of my frequent visits to the bookstore I found a book by a well known Silicon Valley marketing guru slash venture capitalist. This was one of those business books that is light on details but somehow manages to inspire and stimulate through anecdote and analogy. I enjoyed it quite a bit and read it quickly.

At the end of each chapter the book had exercises for the reader. One of the exercises was to do research on people by using the internet. The author suggested starting off by researching him. So that’s exactly what I did.

After a few minutes of “googling my yahoo” I discovered an oddball, partially completed area of the author’s website. The full url was kind of strange, as if the page was buried in an app, but the page I was seeing clearly wasn’t part of an app. If you build web apps long enough this kind of goofiness starts to catch your eye. Feeling a little nosy, I altered the url a bit to try to figure out what kind of app was supposed to be there. That’s when I found an ugly little page with only a few links. This was clearly not part of the main site. It looked to be part of an oddball personal organizer app which had been shoehorned into the website. The kind of thing that you don’t expect to see because you’re not supposed to see it without a password. Except there was no password! This was wide open to the world, but only if you knew exactly where to look. I am not a hacker. I just played with the URL a bit. (Also: I’m not a player. I just crush a lot.)

One of the links on this page said “Angels list”.

I believe “HOLY SHIT!” was the precise phrase that came out of my mouth. You know I clicked that link, right? And sure enough, there was a big old list of names and phone numbers. I had stumbled onto the Rolodex of a well-connected VC during the Bubble. That does not happen every day.

So what did I do? Well, I’ll tell you in my next post. In the meantime, let me ask you: What would you have done?

Rewrote it in…

What is completely tripping me out is that these numbers changed while I was composing this post. And something especially odd is going on with the Java numbers, because now Google is only finding 292 hits for “rewrote it in Java” instead of 60k hits like it did 40 minutes ago. I would chalk this up to an error on my part, except the hits for VB are still the same at about 29,500.

What is it all about? It’s about bullshit. Seriously. Have you ever seen someone on the web assert something as fact and not be able to back it up? Well now they can. Because when they link their bullshit “fact” to researchedfacts.com it will automatically be declared a fact. The Internet says it is a fact, so it must be true!

You can make up any facts you’d like. Did you know that President Lincoln shot himself? Must be a fact, it says so right there.  Did you hear about bats? It turns out that all bats are vampire bats. Total fact! Andy Samberg will be directing and starring in a three volume completion of the originally planned Star Wars series. Undeniably true. (If only! sigh…)

Mostly this is for fun, but I think it also makes a statement about the veracity (truthitude) and referential worth (lookitupitude) of the web as a medium. Have you ever seen a page on Wikipedia that was in contention? Facts can change hourly if not faster. And that’s on a respected website with rather strict editorial rules. Speaking of editorial integrity, these days the traditional news media often rely on links as supporting material for articles. It is all kind of crazy, confusing, and a little scary. Might as well have some fun along the way!

More info is available on the Researched Facts main page.

When I was about six years old I had decided that I loved to draw. My mother, seeing a budding artist, encouraged me to no end. I would scribble little drawings and then show her. Invariably she would tell me that she liked my drawing and maybe ask what things were in the picture. But I remember this one time when I was very bored and for reasons I won’t go into in this post, I had no place to go outside and play. So I was six  years old, bored, and had a pencil and paper. And a devious sense of humor.

On this one particular day I was suddenly struck with inspiration. I sketched out my picture quickly, giggling at my creation the whole time. When it was done I ran right off to my mom to show her what I had drawn. Smiling, she picked up the paper to take a look.

I think I knew something was wrong when I saw her jaw drop and the blood rush out of her face. And then I saw the blood rush back until her face was red. See, I had drawn a lovely scene: A smiling stick figure, on a toilet, with a giant tail of poo crawling out of the toilet and around the page. On the wall next to the person could be seen a sign which read: “Toilet, Sweet Toilet”.

Needless to say, I didn’t get my pencil and paper back for a few days. My point?  Well, my sense of humor has grown up since I was six but my tendency toward dark or gross humor has remained the same. So I hope you will appreciate the great restraint I have used in relating the following story to you.

When I think about owning a house, most of the time I kick myself that I didn’t buy a place back in the late 90s when I probably could have swung it and would have caught the early wave of the housing bubble. Reality usually settles in though. I remind myself that I often make dumb money decisions. That means I probably would now be upside down on some piece of sub-par suburbia with a crazy ARM mortgage that I’d have talked myself into and generally hating life. And then there is my whole rant about how most homeowners don’t really own shit, than the bank owns their house and their future, and that modern American home ownership is a socio-economic trap on par with sharecropping or indentured servitude. Even so, I’ve gotta say that most of the time when I think about owning vs. renting, I can say I definitely wish I owned my own home.

Not this week. This week I am flat-out grateful that I don’t own a home.

Why? Because I don’t have the pay the plumbing bill. It turns out that this lovely old house, with its well built, farmhouse-meets-craftsman style, high ceilings, and pseudo-wood floors, has been sitting on a huge pile of shit. For quite a while.

When we toured the house in December I thought I smelled a little something. But I thought maybe there was a horse stable nearby.We’re in the kind of area where a horse corral next door wouldn’t be that unusual. Not being familiar with the neighborhood I didn’t think much of it.

After we moved in we started to smell something in certain rooms. It was a phantom smell which would only appear at certain unpredictable times.  We complained to the landlord, but since we couldn’t pin it down very specifically and we weren’t nagging about it I guess she didn’t take it too seriously. It was annoying but honestly we didn’t know what to make of it.

Many months passed and the smell would come and go, always mild, always smelling like horses or cows or something like that. And we wondered.

Finally, a plumber came out this week. He was supposed to check out a clogged bathtub drain, but as a side note the landlord had asked him to check out that smell we’d been talking about for months.

Our house sits on a block foundation, which means there is a crawlspace underneath. The moment the plumber got a whiff of the smell he wanted to go under and investigate. (And God bless him, because I sure as hell wasn’t doing that.) He came back up practically laughing.

See, the house we’re in had an addition built sometime in the past 20 years or so. It’s a small extension to the house, with a toilet and sink, plus the washer and dryer. Apparently whoever did the plumbing for the addition back then wasn’t what you’d call a “detail oriented” type. See, the drain pipe that he added on (and I’m going to assume it was a He), was never capped at the end.

Get that? The end of the  drain pipe – the pipe that takes everything out to the sewer – was wide open. Apparently it was that way ever since that addition was built 15-20 years ago. So let’s do the math here… open sewer line plus toilet, sink, washing machine, and adjacent kitchen, plus 15-20 years = ? Yup, a big old pile of crap under the house. The plumber said it looked like the bottom of an outhouse down there. Nice!

Bonus: This old house used to have cast iron piping. Most of which had been replaced, but apparently one leg of the main line out to the sewer was still cast iron. And what happens to cast iron when you mix it with water, kids? Yup, rust. Which it had. A big old hole had rusted out of that section of pipe, in mid-air, under a whole other section of the house. So if you’re keeping track we had not one, but TWO places where shit was falling out of pipes and piling up under the house.

Added bonus: The line to the sewer was also clogged. Which meant that everything we thought we were flushing was instead backing up into the crawlspace. The plumber was amazed we didn’t have a 4-inch deep puddle of sewage under the house. I guess the dirt here drains well or something. I’d really rather not think about it.

So, as you might imagine, we spent the week in a hotel. A special cleaning crew came in and removed all of the “debris” from the crawlspace, then they fumigated and cleaned and deodorized and fumigated some more. They ran a giant HEPA-filtered air mover in the house for days. And the plumber did his thing.

And now, finally, at the end of the week we are back home. And things seem fine. But I have learned one hell of a lesson for when we do buy a house: Always get the plumbing checked out. Twice. Maybe three times.

If you made it this far through this nasty story, I have a present for you. I was looking on YouTube for video of the Golgothan from Dogma. Sadly that turns out to be the one clip YouTube doesn’t have. However, they did have this clip of Kevin Smith talking at Cornell. It’s funnier than the Golgothan: