- Those who marveled at the quirky motion of the Big Dog quadripedal robot should not miss the (inevitable) video parody.
- And while we're watching videos, make sure you watch this one, starring a Pope Benedict XVI bobblehead identical to the one on my bookshelf. While this is what I call “gentle humor” and I suspect that Good Pope Bennie (with whom I disagree but whom I do not despise) would have laughed had he seen it, the usual grump-ass moroons who object to things like this prevailed to have the ad pulled. Fu on 'em.
- Which of course reminded me of this famous Far Side cartoon, which incensed Jane Goodall's staffers but made the great lady herself laugh. My father told me early on: Life demands a sense of humor. Only cowards cannot laugh at themselves, and only hopeless slave-collar tribalists cannot abide humor about their own leaders.
- George Hodous sent me a link to an artist who uses intersecting lasers to etch a crystal cube containing a 3-D starmap of our stellar neighborhood out to five parsecs. Nice work, and if you ever forget, he's marked the direction to the galactic core.
- Maybe this is why I started to get muscular in middle age. Thanks to Frank Glover for the pointer.
- Takahiro Kato of Japan sent me a link to his page on 12V tube work, including a 30mw transmitter he designed. It's in Japanese, and (alas) the machine translation link does about as well as machine translation links generally do. But look at his construction techniques—I haven't seen anything that clean and rational for a long time.
- Those who love The Rocketeer (whether the graphic novel or the film) will want to take a look at this, documenting a Swedish inventor who has come damned close to making it real. (Yes, he does look more like Buzz Lightyear than Cliff Secord.) No explanation here of why his pants don't catch fire, but hey, wow.
- While hunting for a new standard model thumbdrive to replace the no-longer-made Cruzer Mini I ran across this prototype. Not what I need but very cool nonetheless. Let's just hope they don't pollute it with U3.
- In thinking about non-obvious disruptive technologies, it occurred to me that using nanotech filters to separate gold from seawater could be hugely disruptive to nationalk economies if it became effective. However, with gold at about thirteen ppt (parts per trillion) in seawater, it would take a lot of nanofilm to get any useful quantity. I vaguely recall an old SF story about a guy who pulled gold out of seawater somehow. Anybody remember what that was?
Odd Lots
Slide Charts Are Still With Us
Reader Kevin Anetsberger is a fan of nomography (basically, the use of printed charts as calculating aids) and he wrote to say that the sorts of “slide charts” I mentioned in my April 5, 2008 entry are far from extinct—and interestingly enough, the world center of manufacturing for slide charts is back in my home town, Chicago. Kevin mentions three companies, and their Web sites are worth a quick look: Perrygraf, Datalizer, IWA, and American Slide Chart.
And although this was posted in the comments on my LiveJournal mirror, it's worth reposting for everyone else: A monograph on nomographs, courtesy Bill Leininger.
I spent a little time looking for instructions on my father's circular slide rule, and by now I'm pretty sure that the device is a Dietzgen/Gilson Midget Circular Slide Rule. I found what may be a manual for it, but it consists of bad TIF scans of the pages, and it is not easy to read—and the rule itself is so worn that making out the scales in some cases is impossible. It was evidently made by Gilson but private labeled and sold by Dietzgen to fill out their product line. The operation is something I would not have guessed: You position the two sliders separately to appropriate scales, and then slide the two as a unit to a third point to read out the answer. The friction clutch is made such that sliding the short pointer moves only the short pointer, but sliding the long pointer moves them both. (I had not noticed this while fooling around with it.) So you set the long pointer first, then the short pointer (which does not disturb the position of the long pointer) and then move the short pointer by moving the long pointer, at which time the long pointer reads out the answer. Whew.
Interestingly, about 120° of the front face is much more worn than the rest of it, suggesting that my father did a lot of calculating within a relatively narrow range of values. What he used it for is only one of a multitude of things I would ask him, if only I had the chance. What he probably would have said (over a grin) is, “I made things not blow up,” which when your stock in trade is bulk methane would be a very good thing.
If circular slide rules interest you, this page presents a number of different models, none of which precisely match the specimen that I have. And if you want to make your own circular slide rule, here's a page with a full how-to. And here's another site that explains how to make both circular and linear slide rules.
LiveJournal Sentence Sunday
This is a writer thing, which I'm doing at the behest of
1. You go to one of your current novels-in-progress, and find the page number declared for this event.
2. You choose an excerpt beginning at the first complete sentence on that page.
3. You post it where others can read it.
4. You tell everyone what you like about it.
5. People discuss it in the comments.
My only problem is that Melissa has chosen page 123 this time, and although I have a number of novels-in-progress (including a few that have been in progress since the early 1980s) none have gotten to that page yet. Old Catholics has gotten to page 81, and it's the project on which I have the most momentum right now, though with all the jackhammering my mouth has undergone in the last two months, the momentum has been thin. Alana has given me permission to knock out the hundreds column and start with the first complete sentence on page 23. Remarkably, that one page stands together very well:
—–
“They have a church building. And a woman priest! Just like your Episcopal church. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
Suzy didn’t nod.
“So let’s make a deal. I’ll call Peter and ask him if he can help me with my laicization paperwork-if you’ll come to their church with me tomorrow. It’s right out Devon Avenue, near Western.”
Suzy puffed out her cheeks and considered. The steam rose from her cup in slow rosettes. “Ok. Deal. But I get to be the judge. If these people are crackpots, I grab your arm, and you leave with me. No questions. No objections. You get up, we leave, and we don’t go back.”
Rob sat silently, his fingers clenching in his lap, thinking of Mrs. Przybysz reading his aura, and imagining a deacon fishing in the cold-air vents for fugitive rosary beads. Suzy’s definition of “crackpot” might not quite match his own. Cutting deals with a brilliant woman like Susan Helms was a lot like gambling, and he knew how good he was at gambling. Making ordinary, rational decisions was hard enough. Taking bets–it was an invitation to humiliation. If this were not the woman he loved, and had loved in absentia virtually his entire adult life…
“Oh–and if you don’t call Peter, I will.”
Rob opened his mouth, afraid what his face would reveal, thinking of Suzy on the phone with his old friend. People had called them a “threesome” back at Loyola, and there had been enough resentment in that to yield more than a little relief in not getting a response from Peter Luchetti. Rob remembered once–was it 1972?–walking along the lakefront with his arm around 5’2” Suzy Helms, and 6’2” Peter on the other side, his arm on her back above Rob’s.
The feeling that rose in him that evening when he was back in his room–anger, jealousy, covetousness, whateverthehell it was–had scared him half-silly and sent him screaming for his confessor. His friendship with Peter was conflicted (and stale) but Suzy’s threat was not idle: Her father, bakery magnate David Warren Helms III, had left a cool three million dollars to the Archdiocese of Chicago upon his death in 2004. Cardinal Peter Luchetti did not answer just anyone’s phone call. But he would answer hers.
—–
Those who have followed my fiction at all know that this is a peculiar thing for me to write: No starships, no aliens, no AIs, no gunfights. It's about a Roman Catholic priest who resigns his parish position in Indianapolis to return to Chicago to the woman he abandoned for the priesthood thirty years earlier. He runs across a (very) eccentric Old Catholic community that includes an ex-con, a psychic little old Polish lady, a former call girl who became a priest, a young computer geek who has a side business converting churches into condos, and a bishop who spent the bulk of his life writing advertising copy. The priest's seminary buddy has since become Chicago's cardinal, and the new Pope–a reactionary conservative from Brazil–is hell-bent on bringing the American Church's liberal wing to heel.
I like it because it's been a necessary exercise in the things that I am not naturally good at: Characterization, nuance, and a story told without chase scenes. I've had to create characters who are eccentric but not ridiculous, and treat with a light heart a set of topics that, often as not, incites people to fury: Should priests be married? Should women be priests? Do we really need a Pope? And what really defines the Catholic idea? That's what I'm reaching for. I'm not sure how successful it will be, but I intend to finish it, and will get back to work as soon as I can chew without wincing, which should be any day now.
Application-Specific Slide Rules
I went in for my upper set work yesterday, and spent eight and a half hours in the chair, from 7 AM to 3:30 PM. It took two solid hours for the surgeon to cut my upper horseshoe out of my mouth, consuming (I asked) twelve burrs in the process, three diamond and eight carbide. The cottage cheese I had for supper last night tasted distinctly of machine shop.
But let all that pass; the less you know the better you'll sleep. What I want to talk about this morning is the fact that slide rules are not dead. By no means; I use them regularly, if not every single day. The catch is that they're not general-purpose mathematical slide rules. They're application-specific slide rules that do one thing only—or perhaps two or three related things.
A good example is something I got from Carol's late father: The Triangulator, shown above. It doesn't do trig calculations, but it sets them up for you, depending on which values for a given triangle are known, and which are unknown. Slip the slide back and forth until the holes show you the unknown (a question mark) and the knowns (printed in black) and it will display the formula you need to run to get the unknown.
I've used the Triangulator a time or two, but the one that I've used the most is shown below: Allied Radio's coil winding calculator. The copyright notice says 1960, and I bought it at a hamfest for a dollar years'n'years ago. You can use it to quickly figure a coil for a radio project, assuming you know the inductance required, and if you don't, the flipside of the calculator calculates resonance and both inductive and capacitive reactance. (Slide rules, like records of old, generally had two sides.)
I have a similar reactance calculator from Shure Brothers, but it doesn't have the coil winding feature. Elsewhere in the collection are a couple of English/Metric conversion items, including one I've discussed here before. My favorite actually looks like a slide rule, and isn't made of cardboard:
I scanned all of what came easily to hand this morning, and if you're interested you can bring down the biggish image files. Image 1. Image 2. Image 3. The most mysterious one in my collection belonged to my father. It's circular, and he clearly used it a lot, because the scales on one side are largely worn away.
I've figured out how to do a few things with it, including fraction/decimal conversions and reciprocals, but whether it's got the ability to do general multiplication/division or even square roots is obscure. (The other side is a straightforward circular trig table.) I discern no equivalent of an A nor a D scale, nor how the two hairlines interact. I think it's this item, but lacking a manual I have no way to be sure, and there's no manufacturer's name on it.
So let it not be said that slide rules are extinct. I'm guessing that somewhere is a manufacturer still producing cardboard species as promo items, as I got a world time calculator at a trade show booth as recently as 1996. I like them, as each one doesn't need its own damned wall wart, and they can show relationships as well as values. Toss 'em in a drawer, and when you need one, well, it still works. “Analog” is a real word!
The Other Kind of Fifties Moment
The massive urban renewal project that is the inside of my mouth got into high gear again this morning, with what I call a three-p procedure: It took six hours, with three pee breaks, and (I am not exaggerating !) fifteen separate injections of local anaesthetic. Uggh. The surgeon removed my lower horseshoe, which has been in my mouth since September 2001, and cleaned up what damage had occurred during seven years in place. Two fillings had to be drilled out and replaced, and all the teeth had to be re-margined. One tooth, while not infected, had broken into three pieces underneath the horeshoe (probably due to my perpetual clenching and grinding during the night) and no longer has enough structure above the gum line to be retained. It will have to be pulled, and later this year (once the bone heals) an implant post will be put in place to carry the eventual crown.
So here I am at home, groggy on painkillers, watching out my window as a blizzard rages on the slopes of my mountain. What month is this again? We already have four inches out there and it's still coming down hard. A friend at church told us that this has been the wettest, coldest, longest winter he's seen the whole sixteen years he's lived here.
And tomorrow morning at 7, I go back for six more hours to accomplish a similar treatment on the uppers. Alas, the upper horeshoe is in pretty tight (a good thing, actually, for my teeth's sake these past seven years) and the surgeon will have to cut it out in chunks using diamond burrs. (I'll be tasting stainless steel for weeks.)
But to the story at hand: I asked the young dental surgical assistant if I could have the lower horseshoe back so I could put it on my curio shelf. She said sure, and asked what else I had on the shelf. I ran down the short-form list:
- A horse vertebra.
- A cow skull that wears my Lane Tech high school mortarboard.
- A radio-controlled rat.
- A Pope Benedict XVI bobble-head.
- A stuffed squirrel that giggles when you press his tummy.
- A meteorite fragment given me by Pete Albrecht.
- A Giant Squid action figure.
- A Tim-Bird ornithopter
- My father's slide rule.
She smiled, nodded, and then asked, “What's a slide rule?”
I explained as best I could. I realized that this was the other kind of Fifties Moment; that is, when you realize that you're in your fifties and almost everybody else isn't. I ache for the day—though I will probably not live to see it—when graying Gen-Y fiftysomethings talk about their vintage gear collection, and some young punk asks, in all sincerity: “What's an iPod?”
Tabletop Fluoroscopy for Boys, Circa 1913
It took a few minutes of flipping through some books in my workshop, but I eventually found what I remembered: That one of my “boys” books contained a description of a tabletop X-ray setup. The book in question is The Boy Electrician, the first volume of many from Alfred Morgan, who later wrote The Boys' First Book of Radio and Electronics and its three sequels, all of which loomed large in my tinkersome youth. The Boy Electrician was originally published in 1913 and is now in the public domain. The 1913 edition has been reprinted by Lindsay Books and I consider it worth having. There was a significant revision in 1943 that added chapters on radio and a few other things, and as best I can tell, the copyright on that edition was not renewed and it too is now in the public domain. A 40 MB PDF of the 1943 edition is here.
The Boy Electrician explains that “it is possible to obtain small X-ray tubes that will operate satisfactorily on an inch and one half spark coil.” This does not refer to the coil's dimensions; it means a coil capable of generating a spark an inch and a half long. He goes on to say that X-ray tubes cost about four and a half dollars each (albeit 1913 dollars) and may be obtained from laboratory supply houses. Hookup is fairly simple, with the spark coil driven by four of those wonderfully gutsy #6 dry cells with the huge carbon rod running down the middle. The drawing of the setup is shown below:
Morgan explains that you can either view images directly with a fluoroscope or expose ordinary photographic plates by placing an object to be X-rayed between the tube and the plate and leaving it there for fifteen minutes. This includes things like purses, mice, or…your hand. If you have the money, he also explains that a hand-held fluoroscope may be constructed by simply coating a sheet of white paper with crystals of platinum barium cyanide. It looks like the fluoroscope screen is used by basically staring at the X-ray tube with the object to be X-rayed between the tube and the paper screen.
It would be interesting to know just how many boys bought the tube and tried to make it work; though given that $4.50 in 1913 would be about $100 today, I doubt it was many. Nor do I know how toxic platinum barium cyanide is, but I'm guessing a little more than iron filings. (On the other hand, my 1962 chemistry set contained a little bottle of sodium ferrocyanide, which sounds much worse than it actually is.)
I remember taking The Boy Electrician out of the Chicago Public Library when I was 12 or so and pondering the X-ray project. What stopped me wasn't any fear of X-rays themselves, but concern that the whomping big spark coil would wipe out TV reception for a quarter mile in every direction and get me in trouble with the FCC. My friend Art had an old Model T ignition coil, and we could hear it sizzling on Art's transistor radio for half a block. The project had to be safe; I mean, the book was in the juvenile section of the library…
We knew less about a lot of things in 1913; X-rays were in some respects the least of it. But the hazard is significant, if not as bloodcurdling as luddites specializing in radiation insist. People used to self-treat insomnia by inhaling chloroform; well-known Victorian British scientist Edmund Gurney died by falling asleep with a chloroform-soaked cloth next to his nose. We know more now, and understand the precautions a great deal better, which has led to an escalation of conern that (untempered by any grasp of statistics or risk evaluation) quickly descends to rank superstition. One has to wonder how much knowledge isn't obtained these days simply because people are afraid of small but nonzero hazards. Panic over traces of phthalates—then heedlessly drive fifty miles to a football game with a car full of kids. It's the modern way of life.
Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscopes
Just got back from Chicago and there's way too much to do (and I have a six-hour dental appointment scheduled for Thursday!) but I did want to report on something I saw on our trip that I haven't seen for a very long time: A shoe-fitter X-ray machine. People my age or older may remember going to a shoe store in the 1950s or earlier, and having your parents and the shoe store man look at your feet inside a new pair of shoes to make sure they fit correctly. I know I did this, and I vaguely remember the humming machine, but I suspect I was just too short to get to look into the machine myself. (I doubt I would forget a real-time X-ray image of my own bones. Urrrrp…)
Carol and I stopped at Square Deal Shoes in downtown Des Plaines last Saturday. We both bought shoes to leave at our condo so we don't have to pack them on future trips. While browsing the stock I also looked at their Simplex X-Ray Shoe Fitter. The machine was disabled (they've been illegal since 1970) but it was otherwise in very good shape, housed in a marvelous Raymond Loewy-ish Art Deco wood cabinet.
An excellent short history of this peculiar phenomenon is here. The machine shown in the article is, I believe, a more deluxe version of the one I saw at Square Deal Shoes; both were made by X-Ray Shoe Fitter, Inc., of Milwaukee. The name 
plate (below) indicates that the power supply drew 7 amps and put out 50,000 volts at 5 milliamps. That kind of power will generate considerable radiation out of an X-ray tube, and the associated hazards eventually put an end to continuous-beam fluoroscopy by untrained operators, in shoe stores and elsewhere. The hazards appeared not so much to the occasional shoe store customer as to the sales reps who ran the machines and sometimes to professional shoe models who tested shoes for manufacturers using machines like this; one woman's foot was damaged so badly in testing shoes that it had to be amputated.
Square Deal Shoes has been in business since the 1920s, and in earlier times they also made custom shoes. One the current owner showed me was the shoe of Robert Wadlow, who at 8 feet 11 inches was the world's tallest man in the 1930s, and possibly the tallest man in recorded history. The shoe was technically size 37, and although I placed the shoe in front of the X-Ray machine in the photo above, it just makes the machine look small; the damned thing was as long as my forearm.
As I mentioned in my entry for March 25, 2008, the world is full of odd things like this. Get out, look around, pay attention, and you'll see them.
Rail Trails and the Narrowest Storefront
The weather today in Chicago promised to be as good as it gets this trip, so I decided to do a little exploring. I wanted to get some exercise and a little sun on my face, and run down to a neighborhood I hadn't set foot in for almost thirty years: Sauganash, an upscale part of the Northwest Side where my father's parents lived in the 1950s and 1960s. I went past the old house (at the corner of Kedvale and Glenlake), which had not changed at all, though the tree that my grandfather had planted in 1955 was now huge and breaking up the sidewalk. I had lunch at a hot dog place at Devon and Pulaski and parked the car on Pulaski near St. Odisho's Assyrian Catholic Church. I then did something interesting: I walked the old rail line that intersects Pulaski near Granville, southward as far as the Chicago River, roughly at Balmoral. The rails are still there, but by the depth of their rust I'd guess they hadn't seen wheels for a number of years. It was a little weird walking over Peterson on the rail bridge, but I wanted to see if there was any evidence of there having been a commuter rail platform at Peterson. I'm not sure why, but I always thought my grandfather boarded a train for downtown (he worked at First National Bank) on Peterson somewhere. This was clearly not the place. (Gretchen says he boarded at Edgebrook, and she's probably right.) Whatever that line was, it had clearly been freight-only.
Since I was on the right of way, I just kept going. The tracks continued, rusty and weed-choked, as far as I went. Just a block south of Bryn Mawr, a second line merged with it, and I found that the city was in the process of making a walking trail out of the old bed. So I cut north again on the walking trail, passing people and their dogs and a father flying a kite with his preschool son in a schoolyard. The trail is quite new, and in fact the walking bridge over Peterson was not complete yet and was fenced off. (The trail goes north as far as Devon.) So I skidded down the embankment and walked east back to Pulaski along Peterson to my car. It was a nice two-and-a-half mile stride, and when the sun was out it was quite warm.
That accomplished, I drove back west toward Des Plaines, and stopped in Park Ridge to do a little more walking. I wanted to visit Hill's Hobby Shop, and walked there only to find that they have moved to Buffalo Grove. I did, however, snap a shot or two of what is certainly the narrowest storefront in Park Ridge (and perhaps the whole Chicago metro area) at 147 1/2 Vine Avenue (60068) directly across the street from Park Ridge City Hall. I didn't have a tape measure in my pocket, but I'm guessing the whole thing was between four and five feet wide.
I'd seen it before, and remembered that it had been a knicknack shop a few years ago. Sure enough, googling the address showed it to have been (aptly) The Miniature Gallery, and there was a 2007 business registration sticker on the window. However, the counter and window displays had been ripped out, and it looks like it's being converted to something else, probably a hall to the rear. The art gallery in the rest of the building was also vacant, and the building as a whole was not in terrific shape.
No serious point to be made here, other than you miss some odd and occasionally wonderful things by driving everywhere. Spring's coming—so get out on shank's mare and see some of the weird stuff in your own neighborhood!
Odd Lots
- I've had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen, culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard. (The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering winter across the Midwest.) Tooth troubles continue, so if my posts have been (and continue to be) a little sparse, that's most of the reason.
- Our early Easter this year caused some people to ask how the date of Easter is calculated. Well, it's not pretty. At least next year it happens in April, whew.
- Here's a nice article describing a problem that is by no means recent: The split between people in the Catholic Church who can worship with a light heart, and people who invariably equate reverence with grimness . This has been an issue at least since Pope Pius IX lost the Papal States in the mid-1800s, after which the Papacy became obsessed with its authority and lost any ability to laugh at itself or anything else. (Pope John XXIII bucked the trend, but we didn't have him anywhere near long enough to make a permanent difference.) Roman Catholicism needs a sense of humor far more than it needs a Pope, but this may be one of those things that won't be solved within my own lifetime.
- In keeping with its long history of contempt for the consumer (which, in all fairness, is rife in Japan) Sony attempted to charge purchasers of its laptops $49 not to install a crippling load of crapware on the machines. Apparently they've taken so much flak for it that they recently dropped the fee. What I find boggling is that they willingly cripple their own machines by selling huge numbers of crapware slots, which makes you wonder how much money they make in the crapware business. We may be heading down the same path here for laptops that printers have followed, in which the printer is a thin, shabby thing sold for very little that makes money for its parent company by consuming artificially expensive ink/toner cartridges.
- It seems that I've been hearing a great deal within my own circle of contacts about people who try to help nontechnical folks (often parents) make Vista work with existing peripherals and software. The script goes like this: Nontechnical person brings home a new Vista PC or laptop from Best Buy and tries to install older software or connect it to various external hardware devices. Install fails; system aborts in various weird ways; technical person tries to fix (or simply understand) the failure, to no avail. Moral here: Do not use Vista. Everything that isn't needless window dressing is there for Microsoft's or Big Media's benefit, not yours. (Reread the venerable Vista Failure Log if you haven't read it for awhile.) You can still order PCs from vendors like Dell with XP preinstalled. Do it while you still can. And failing that, start researching Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
- Speaking of failure, WiMax (which we have seemingly been waiting for since the last ice sheets retreated) may be a failure because it's lousy technology. The wireless DOCSIS technology mentioned in the linked article as a solution has been around for some years and doesn't have a much better reputation. We may in fact be asking too much of low-power microwave broadband systems—fixed point-to-point broadband is totally at the mercy of topography and even vegetation—and I keep coming back to the conviction that some sort of “roof-hopper” mesh network may be the best path to follow. People are doing this in some areas; why it isn't seen as a more general solution puzzles me.
The Big Dog Walking Qudripedal Robot
Don't have much time today, but I did want to call your attention to an item aggregated on Slashdot: The Boston Dynamics “Big Dog” robot prototype, developed as a cargo mule for DARPA. Here's a must-see video of Big Dog in action, climbing up a wooded hillside, tramping through snow, and walking on ice. At one point a technician kicks the device hard on one side, and it recovers its balance beautifully without falling over, all the while carrying a load that weighs 30% more than itself. It uses a gait that looks more like a show dog's than a draft horse's, and while they do not demonstrate it in full gallop, they're clearly trying to teach it to run.
Scary item, considering that this would have been impossible just a few years ago. I flashed on Cordwainer Smith's Manshonyoggers (from the German Menschenjaeger, man-hunter) which are human-scale Berserkers that run around a ruined world and kill any human being they see. Though hardly stealth creatures now, that's mostly engine noise and is a minor engineering problem. It'll be interesting to see what we do with them in a few years—or what the Bad Guys do with them in another fifteen or twenty.
