Countless times (well, ok, maybe five or six times) I've been trying, with pictures in the sand or shouted advice from boat to boat, to instruct people how to surf the waves of a cargoship. It's not that easy to explain on land how to choose the right wave, when to make your sprint and in what direction, how to stay on the wave as long as possible... I decided to make a nice presentation about that on my computer. I think animations work better then a static slide show, and when I got that far, I put in the complete dynamics of ships, kayaks, paddles and waves. I ended up with an interactive simulation (Computergame, for the grownup readers) in which you control a seakayak, bouncing on the waves of ships that just keep coming. On an actual river it can take hours for the next boat to pass! I seriously think it explains a lot about the dynamics of surfing the wake of big ships. I had fun building the program, if anybody can actually learn something from it, the fun will be even greater. The program is essentially a normal web-page: It should run in any not-too-old browser (Netscape from version 4, Explorer from version 4, Opera 5) without trouble. Since it is a webpage running in a browser, it can not damage your computer in any way, nor can it contain virusses. It might take a while to load though: It contains 800K of data, mostly images. On a telephone modem it will take about one minute to load. Happy surfing, and let me know if you think it useful. http://home.wanadoo.nl/niels.blaauw/WaveRider Niels. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Oct 31 2002 - 11:51:16 PST
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