Throwback Thursday

Happy 3.14159265358979323846 day! Sorry, that’s all of the digits of Pi/π I have memorized. I’m 99% sure they’re right and I know that I can check, but I’d rather not.

Pi/π is part of the formula for calculating the displacement of an engine as it is part of the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder. Displacement equals the square of the bore times the stroke times .7854—π divided by 4—times the number of cylinders.

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My favorite company suffered a massive outage yesterday. Yes, Fack Fucebook and its affiliated sites like Instagram (“social media” for those who don’t want to read or to think) were “down” for much of the day. The company denied it was the victim of a DDOS attack, but would they admit it if it were true?

Speaking of hacks, does anyone else think that what happened with the Boeing 737-Max planes could be the result of someone hacking the software? If so, does anyone think that will give pause to the development of autonomous vehicles?

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In one of my go-to books, History of the American Auto by the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide®, this sentence is written: “Never had American automobiles changed more in a single year than in 1949.” One development that led them to that conclusion was the development of this style:

 

 

From luxify.com a picture of a 1949 Buick Roadmaster “hardtop convertible.” Of course, this wasn’t a hardtop convertible as we know it today with a retractable hardtop, but a car with a hard roof and no visible B pillar. Buick, Cadillac and Oldsmobile pioneered this style in 1949.

Buick built 4,343 of these in 1949 and they cost $3,203, which was actually $53 more than the soft top. Of course, Cadillac and Oldsmobile also introduced the modern, short-stroke overhead-valve V-8 engine for the 1949 model year. This development is also mentioned in the introduction to 1949 in History of the American Auto.

Any automobile historians out there want to comment on the book’s assertion about 1949? The scary thing to me is that the vast majority of people alive today were not alive in 1949. For example, the median age in the US is about 38. That means half the population is younger than 38 so far more than half the population is younger than 70. Many people assume that events that occurred before they were born are not important; I call that temporal arrogance.

 

#somanycarsjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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