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Anybody like me and think a lot before they go to sleep? No? Well, what basically happens is in the hour or so before I drift off I tend to think a lot, or perhaps it takes an hour for me to drift off because I'm thinking about things a lot.

So last night I went out, had a few drinks with the guys, played a few rounds of pool, and came up mostly inebriated. Long story short, I found out it was too much of a hassle to try working while out of it so I went to bed. Then the alcohol really started to kick in and I spent three hours lying in bed staring at nothing and thinking about this really crappy shop project I made in grade 7.

This project was to basically design a device of sorts that included two sorts of motions off of a single hand powered system. In my case I made a very simple hand crank system that created lateral motion (naturally generated by the circular motion of the hand crank) and dorsal-ventral motion (a crude system of attaching elliptical wood pieces to the circular crank rod and having it bounce poles up and down). I hated it, I had such a great plan for how to create an elaborate circuit for the metal ball to perpetually continue through a somewhat complex course involving ups and downs powered by just the hand crank and containable within a relatively small box. Granted, my design was far too impractical to be completed with a basic elementary school shop set up and only two weeks of time, but it was still amazingly complex, if I ever figured out how to resolve the problem of creating anterior-posterior motion from a lateral crank system.

There's an interesting thing to note about myself and being drunk. While inebriated I have a hard time applying logic and remembering things. It took me two hours to realize that the hodge-podge manner in which I was attempting to convert my lateral motion into anterior motion was ridiculously inefficient and size wasting. This led to a ten minute interlude where I took a half remembered thought of two wheels moving against one another would in fact move in opposite directions to recreate the cog, and then apply in a conical design to efficiently, reliable, and realistically convert lateral to anterior. Once I managed to apply that to my design I realized I could save immense amounts of space, enough that even with the water wheel devices I was going to incorporate to ferry the ball from the bottom of the circuit back to the initial starting point at the top of the device, I would still end up with a device that was if not the same size as my initially completed machine then one that could be smaller.

I have to say, all things considered, that was a very entertaining three hours of my life. I drifted off when I finally reached the issue of friction and how energy wasting wood was once friction was applied to the device, which led to a barely finished conclusion that I would have to incorporate metal for the joints, or fashion a system of rollers in order to over come this problem.

Sometimes I wonder if I'd have been better off in an applied science/engineering program instead of humanities.