"Drawings are the way to go. Beats the heck out of CAD drawings." - at PLASA Focus Nashville seminar entitled, "From Concept to Design."

Unless you live in the Northeast United States, you may not know that Amtrak is a great way to travel in the area. On the train, you can use the internet and your cell phone while you travel, which makes the time fly by. It's like traveling in your own office. 

Internet is only available on certain trains, and though it's not the fastest connection, you can always tether to your cell phone for internet service (if you have that ability). There are also AC plugs on the train so you will never run out of battery life.

 

But don't make the mistake of relying on Amtrak in other parts of the country. In Texas, it can take about 12 hours to travel by Amtrak the same distance that it will take you about two hours by car. You're better off hitchhiking.

"One of the things that is abundantly clear to us is that learning is incredibly fragmented, and there's nobody that's helping the learning that's happening across those connections," says Constance M. Yowell, the director of education for U.S. programs at the MacArthur Foundation. 

As an entertainment technology professional, you might not get noticed for taking a CPR course, a lighting console programming class, or a Photoshop class. But that could all change with the implementation of digital badges. 

According to HASTAC (in collaboration with Mozilla and supported by the MacArthur Foundation), a digital badge is a validated indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality, or interest classrooms, professional development programs, online tutorials, mentoring, workshops, camps, training, and other means. 

"In addition to representing a wide range of skills, competencies, and achievements, badges can play a critical role in...enabling identity and reputation building. A sequence of badges can be a path to gaining expertise and new competencies. Badges can capture and display that path, providing information about, and visualizations of, needed skills and competencies. They can acknowledge achievement...and provide access to ever-higher levels of challenge and reward."

For more information about digital badges and how you can achieve them, click here.

Lighting operators, watch your back! Lighting designer Chris Cockrill (Gretchen Wilson) recently set up his console for an unidentified opening act and let his seven year-old son trigger cues. As you can see, his looks were better than some experienced professional's.

 

Richard Nix of Entertainment Structures Group was project manager for the record-breaking Hot Wheels double vertical loop where Formula Drift champion Tanner Foust and Hollywood stunt driver Greg Tracy zipped through the 66-foot looped track, modeled after the Hot Wheels Double Dare Snare toy racetrack.

"Both drivers said the first time they went into it, it looked like they were driving into a wall," Nix said. "The speed ranged between 48 and 52 MPH, but that was determined by the minimum speed necessary to essentially coast through the loop in a theoretical frictionless environment, but maintaining a maximum theoretical g-force exposure of no greater than 7g (the maximum g a driver could withstand under these condition). The drivers actually trained in stunt planes that exposed them to almost 10g.

"We knew real-life meant considering things like tire-roadway friction and air friction, but as it turns out, motor inertia and other factors pretty much balanced out the difference between theoretical and reality. And, the vehicles both had RPM limiters on them so the motor was always trying to maintain a certain RPM once the limiter was locked in. This meant the cars were actually overcoming some of the vertical g component as they rose up into the loop.

"Ground clearance - rather, the balance between suspension rate of shock compression, stiffness of suspension overall and absolute minimum ground clearance - ended up being a trickier challenge to overcome. You can see the result of some of this when Tanner (in the yellow, second car) lands, then bounces on his deceleration.

See video.  

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