Monday, April 6, 2015

Things you must consider before you do the Fast and the Furious jump

Fast and the Furious 7 comes out this week and we are very intrigued by this trailer which has our heroes jump out of a plane in cars.


You have to love how the guys in the Fast and Furious 7 find innovative ways to get their cars to weird locations. Were there other ways? Yes, but this is cool isn’t it?

If you decide to make a similar drop for yourself, may be to crash a party in style or drop straight into a major sporting event here are the top 5 things you must check for.

1)    Get your Parachute pick up point correct

It is critical for you to get the place you latch the parachute onto your car correct. As cars are designed to run on four wheels it important that it lands on its four wheels so that you can saunter off to do what you want once you have landed. This can be easily established by working out where the Center of Gravity (CG) of the car is, and the chute pick up point must be directly above it. A convertible will probably not work.

2)    Get your parachute size correct

It is important you have a soft landing not wrecking your suspension. Road cars can be modified not too much to continue operation post approximately a 1 meter jump. This gives the car a landing speed of 6.26 meter/sec.
The parachute must be at least 550 square meters per ton of the vehicle and driver weight. The diameter of the chute for a 1000kg (1 ton) vehicle must be at least 26.5 meters.

3)    Reinforce your roof pick-up point

The roof of a car is not designed to be connected to a parachute [citation needed]. It would be a good recommendation to add a roll cage to your car and attach the chute pick up on the top of that to avoid this situation –

4)    Make sure you have a system to steer the parachute

A car is useless if it lands on the top of a tree or in the middle of a lake. Parachutes can be steered by steering toggles. Make sure you have them inside the car before you set off from the plane. Even better if you can connect the toggles to the steering rack.

5)    Make sure you check your oil levels, tire pressure, coolant level and fuel

After you have done all of this, you don’t want your car to break down because you did not have brake fluid in your cylinders, right? So please check these basic things before you jump.





Sunday, March 29, 2015

India Vs New Zealand - Second best team at the world cup?

The Cricket World Cup 2015 is finally over and Australia are the champions again. They are certainly the best team in this competition. In fact, knock out tournaments are well designed to find out the best teams in the competition. In fact, it can be shown that a knockout system is the most efficient method to find out which team is the best in a given set assuming the results are transitive.


This format unfortunately is not a good one to find the second best team in a set of teams. For example Australia beat Pakistan, India and New Zealand in that order to win the World Cup. Which means that any one of the 3 teams could have been the second best team after Australia and were just unfortunate to play Australia early in the tournament. However, there is more data from this world cup to play with.

The elaborate round robin group stage before the knock out stages provides more results to play with and apply transitivity. For example, famously India played Pakistan on the second day of the World Cup and India won that encounter. Which means that one of New Zealand or India is the second best team. Unfortunately, since the both India and New Zealand were in different groups and they won all their matches in group stages, data from the group stages does not sort the problem of which is the second best team.

In fact if we try and rank the teams in the knock out stages using world cup data and transitivity this is the only unresolved ranking:

Note: The game where New Zealand beat Australia is ignored because Australia beat them in a game that mattered more.

If New Zealand would have beaten Australia in the final then the transitivity could have accounted for the full ranking. However, now an India Vs New Zealand match is needed to sort this once it for all. This will make the world cup more productive.