- I meant to post this back in May but the item went into a notefile while I was traveling and got misplaced: Larry O’Brien did a very nice detailed comparative review of my Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition and Randy Hyde’s Art of Assembly Language, Second Edition over at SDTimes. Larry understands better than most people that there are multiple ways to approach learning a topic, and that both books have value and don’t completely overlap one another.
- Another tardy item from that same missing notefile: Scientific American must be desperate for subscribers, as it had the courage to challenge the biggest sacred cow in medical science: the Fat Bad, Carbs Good nonsense that has blown us up like carnival ballooms since it was declared health dogma in the early 1970s.
- Part of the problem: Most medical studies are utter crap, and here’s why.
- And here’s an excellent example. Sadness makes me neither creative nor energetic. Furthermore, all the most creative people I know are borderline manic. Insane, maybe. Sad? Not in the least.
- In 1970, I built a vertex-first projection model of the 600-cell regular polytope in four space using D-stix. My senior-year math teacher hung the model from the steam pipes and I never saw it again, but here’s a photo of one made out of ordinary drinking straws. (Scroll down.)
- What is the frequency of a dog shaking water off its fur? The answer: greater than or equal to 4 Hz.
- Slate asked “Is the movie that almost killed Disney animation really that bad?” My answer: Yes. It’s the Seventies car in Disney’s otherwise reasonable animation garage, full of uninteresting things indifferently drawn, with the possible exception of the weird half-dog, half-leprechaun whatchamacallit Gurgi. The Horned King is the least menacing of all Disney cartoon villains, and certainly can’t hold a candle to Maleficent, Hades, or even Gaston. The Chronicales of Prydain is a decent kid-series, and deserves a remake.
Odd Lots
A Big Lake in Autumn
I’ve been a little out of it the past few days, in the wake of an inadvertent encounter with Chinese Five Spice Seasoning, with which I’ve tangled before. Which of the five is the culprit remains a mystery, save that it’s unlikely to be either cinnamon (Chinese or otherwise) or cloves. No matter. I’m a caveman, not a gourmet, and spices regularly cause me various kinds of grief. (This time it was a bad migraine.) All better now. Hey, is that a giant beaver over there? Where’s my club? I’m hungry.
Anyway. We took a quick trip to Lake McConaughy last weekend, to find a lake just a few feet from full. All that beautiful lake bottom is now underwater, as it should be, but for almost ten years the lake was as much as fifty feet down due to drought in the watershed. I didn’t get photos of the crib when the water was at its lowest, but the two photos below (taken last weekend and about thirteen months earlier) will give you a sense for the magnitude of the change. In one year, the water rose over thirty feet, and once the winter rains begin methinks the spillways will see their first use in quite awhile.
We’ve had a slightly cool autumn, but Saturday took a foray back up into the mid-80s. Carol broke out her bikini and we got a little more than knee-deep in the 70-degree water before deciding that the season was indeed a little past its peak for swimming. So we ran the Pack along the beach, pausing now and then to fish burrs out of their paws and get photos of the fall foliage.
While driving a Nebraska county track to the south shore, Carol noticed something odd in the dry cornfields to either side: The corn had been harvested from the top halves of the stalks but not the bottom halves. This seemed consistent (we stopped to look) and had a machine-like precision about it, suggesting that corn is harvested at various times depending on how dry the cobs need to be. We passed an evidently abandoned microwave tower, which provided a natural cover photo for a short novel concept I’ve been saving for a NaNoWriMo November when I don’t have to travel. It certainly won’t be this year.
We’re shopping for a new vehicle to replace Carol’s increasingly cranky 1995 Plymouth Voyager. The Ford Flex fascinates me, as it seems designed to maximize interior space, which is always handy when you’re transporting dogs in bulk. It’s AWD (which we need given where we live) and it can park itself. Precisely how (and how well) it pulls that trick I’m not sure, but given that flying cars will not be an option in my lifetime, I think I’ll take that and be glad of it.
Odd Lots
- Don Lancaster has released a free PDF of his classic RTL Cookbook . No catch. Just go get it.
- One serious problem with legalizing marijuana, for medical use or otherwise, is that there is no one “marijuana.” Like breeds of dogs, weed comes in a multitude of varieties, with various strengths and compositions and effects on human beings. You simply can’t predict what will happen to you when you take it, which isn’t what I like to see in medical therapies–or, for that matter, recreational activities.
- This is good, but not for the reasons you might think: If Macmillan is consigning much of its backlist to a POD agreement with Ingram/Lightning Source, the line between “conventional” publishers and POD publishers begins to get blurry indeed. That’s good, as discrimination against POD titles by reviewers and other gatekeepers in the publishing and retailing businesses has been very discouraging. Mainstreaming POD has got to happen at some point, and the gatekeepers will have to–gasp!–evaluate titles on their own merits. (But that’s…work!)
- Those who think cellular phones were the first mobile phone technology are almost forty years off, as this excellent detailed history of mobile (car) telephony shows. This stuff was huge (as in takes up much of your trunk), hot (as in temperature), and fiendishly expensive, but over a million people were using it in 1964. Love those early-60s control heads!
- I just heard that a lost and never-performed composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams has been discovered in the Cambridge University Library, and will soon be performed for the very first time. He’s my all-time favorite composer, and it’s delightful to think that there’s still something he’s written that I have never heard. (Thanks to Scott Knitter for the link.)
- We got missed (barely) by a 35-foot asteroid yesterday, but I’m guessing that there are plenty more where that came from. And does 35 feet qualify one as an asteroid? I would think they had to be bigger than that. I would call it “modestly scary space debris.”
- Maybe you have to have been an electronics geek for 47 years (like me) to appreciate the humor, but this made me laugh. Hard.
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Conclusion
The Geiger counter is still a lashed-up mess of clip leads and greasy junk on my workbench, but as I mentioned in my last daywander, it does work, and detects the radium paint on a couple of sixty-year-old military aviation panel meters. I may not be able to work on it much for the next few weeks, so in this entry I’m going to summarize what I’ve learned so far.
But first, a couple of notes on the probe I made. I noticed years ago that a species of pill bottle with a two-way cap allows two bottles to be connected at the cap. It occurred to me that one of these bottles was by sheer chance just about the size of an Amperex 75NB3 Geiger tube. So I mounted the JEDEC A3-1 socket in the cap, and cut a foam doughnut with an Exacto knife so that it would fit (with just a little compression) inside one of the bottles. A 5/8″ hole in the doughnut keeps the Geiger tube centered and immobile inside the bottle. I put a PL-259 on the cable because I have a lot of PL-259’s here, and they have a pleasing sort of retro look to them, especially after they tarnish. (This one was new from a sealed bag. It won’t look so shiny next year.)
My first conclusion, after a huge amount of time spent trying things, is that it’s not easy getting to 900V with nothing more than a pushbutton, a spark gap, and 3V worth of batteries. In fact, the best I could do was barely break 700V, which is right on the edge of what allows this particular tube to operate. (Smaller tubes like the CK-1026 may work at lower voltages.) Change out the spark gap for a 1N4007 silicon rectifier and you’re at 900V in twenty pushes of the button–more with a larger cap, less with a smaller cap. The transformer matters crucially. The one I’m using has a 1:14 turns ratio, which is very uncommon.
My second conclusion is that the sort of greasy black bakelite barrier terminal strips that I used for the spark gap and general connections are very leaky at high voltage. The caps are mounted on a steatite bar, which is very low-loss, and when I soldered everything else together in a sort of self-supporting wad in mid-air, the charge stayed on the caps almost twice as long. Obvious in hindsight, but I never thought about it when I was putting the thing together. The final device will be assembled with this in mind. If it doesn’t look especially retro, that’s ok.
My third conclusion is that some sort of amplification is necessary. With 900V on the tube I could clearly hear the clicks indicating activity, but they were not loud and this was in a workshop as quiet as most tombs, at least those lacking zombies and poltergeists. I set up a small homebrew two-tube speaker audio amp on the bench (lineup: 6AV6-6AQ5A) and piped the tube’s output into it. Suddenly the clicks filled the room, and I’m guessing that some of those may not have been heard with the tube running barefoot into headphones. A portable hip-hung retro counter would use battery tubes, of which I have many.
I’m still working on several elements of the design, particularly a better way to charge the caps than pushing a button twenty times. I’m almost ready to test a rotary interrupter that will be operated with a crank. I also have a small hand-cranked telephone magneto that generates 120VAC, and much can be done with that.
But as for whether a truly steampunk (i.e., no active devices) Geiger counter is possible, the answer is a qualified yes. A skilled and patient mad scientist from 1900 could do it. He might have to wind his own step-up transformer, but if I can get to 700V with greasy junk and a spark gap, 900V is not out of reach. I consider myself a citizen scientist but I’m not especially mad, and unlike most mad scientists I have a wife, dogs, and a driveway to shovel in colder weather. That being the case, I’m bringing this research project to a close. I will build a Geiger counter, but it’s going to be more 1950 than 1900. I’ll continue to discuss the project here under a different title. Deco Geiger Counter? Deiselpunk Geiger Counter? Still thinking about that, but you’ll know it when you see it.
Daywander (10/10/10/10:10 10!)
What were you doing today at ten after ten? Over here, Carol and I had just left the garage on our trip down the mountain to go to church, and she was swapping in a new mix CD I had made to the 4Runner’s 6-CD changer. Not very cosmic, except in the sense that it was life proceeding as usual and well. Sure, my back still hurts (and for some reason, more than usual today) but Carol is by my side and my dogs are always happy to see me.
Better still, we went over to Wal-Mart after church and I found a species of dry-roasted peanuts without MSG, thanks to Jen Rosenau’s suggestion. They’re a little odd and not quite the dry roasted peanuts I’m used to, but tasty, albeit a little bit sweet. And lord knows, they’re cheap.
Ubuntu V10.10, Maverick Meerkat, was released today at 10:10 (I think; that’s the legend at least) South African time. I torrented it down earlier today in sixteen minutes flat, and will install it in the day or so. (I may try tonight if I don’t run out of steam.) It’s not a big-deal release, and I’m installing it immediately on its release to test if installing a Ubuntu version on Day 1 is less wise than waiting a month or two, as I’ve generally done in the past. I’m going to try Wubi this time, and will report in detail when it’s in and working.
I guess the best news of all is that I counted some Geigers today for the very first time. My radiation test sample is a 1950s aviation panel meter with radium paint on the scale and the pointer. After trying a number of transformers in the last two weeks I hit the jackpot with an old Merit A-2924 interstage transformer, which has the most extreme impedence ratio of anything in my formidable junkpile: 125 : 100,000 ohms. Alas, the spark gap only took the charge on the caps to about 550V. I swapped in a 1N4007 silicon rectifier diode instead of the spark gap and the charge went up to 900V without any trouble, using the pushbutton interrupter. The Geiger tube I have gives a loud signal into high-impedence headphones at 900V, but the volume goes down steadily and becomes inaudible under about 720V. This bodes ill for the notion of a steampunk Geiger counter (they didn’t have 1N4007s in 1900) but it was way cool to finally hear some clicks coming off the tube.
The interesting thing is that I get no reading at all from the 0A2WA gas rectifier tube, which was “salted” by a smidge of Kypton-85 in 1962. Half-life is 10.7 years; divide something in half four and a half times, and there isn’t really much of anything left.
There’s much more to try, and I’ll continue the series after I do some of that trying. But all in all, today was a very good day. I give it…a 10.
Odd Lots
- My Geiger counter project is still alive, but I ordered an old telephone magneto from eBay and it just got here. Now I have to work up a scheme to transform its hand-cranked 120VAC to 900VDC in the capacitor bank. Will report back once that section of the device is in the can.
- I’ve seen these people in used bookstores and tent sales, and although I knew (vaguely) what they were doing, I hadn’t seen a detailed description of the culture. Here’s why you don’t find lots of bargains at used book sales.
- A correspondent who will remain nameless suggested that, since I’m fighting ongoing shingles pain, I should get a Colorado medical marijuana card and do a series on the Colorado weed scene. After all, an MMD is the third-closest retail establishment to my home (after Blockbuster Video and a nail shop.) Well, no. I’ll go with gabapentin. But if you’re curious about the kind of nuthouse medical marijuana has become (at least in Michigan and probably Colorado as well) read this.
- Taco sauce cleans the oxide layer off of pennies, leaving bright metal in its wake. How? We’re not entirely sure, but here’s an interesting discussion of the question–and some fun citizen science.
- The Soviet Union had a lot of hardware done and mostly tested for a lunar landing circa 1970, but it didn’t have the required launch power of a Saturn V, so the program was mothballed and the landers abandoned. (Thanks to Frank Glover begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting for the link.)
- On the same site, and in the same vein, are some photos of early Soviet snowmobiles, many of which were powered by aviation engines and air propellers rather than treads of some kind.
- This may be TMI about chicken nuggets. You judge. I’ll stick with beef.
- Here’s an interesting take on the Periodic Table, called Helix Chemica, from the 1944 book Hackh’s Chemical Dictionary. “Hackh” is a wonderful name. I think I’ll steal it.
- Our President wants a better America through science, technology, engineering, and math. A little more glue behind the Presidential Seal would be a good start.
- Ok. This is silly. But there is something wonderfully, goofily likeable about it.
- Like I predicted, people are going to be making jokes about this thing forever. I liked this one. Not only epic fail, but epic humilation. Anger is deadly.
The Fox vs. Skunk Conundrum
We got hit with a skunk cloud the other night, and as I cranked windows shut it struck me: We haven’t smelled skunk in several weeks. That’s remarkable, because when we first moved here we’d get intense skunk clouds at least once every night and often twice. (Here, a “skunk cloud” is a passing front of skunk smell, distinct from getting sprayed directly.) The cloud drifts with the breeze and half an hour later it’s gone unless the night is dead calm.
We considered these a fact of life, and they were with us for the first couple of years we lived here. In the fall of 2004 a skunk gave birth to a litter of four kits in the space between our house and our neighbor’s, and we have a video of the kits cavorting and wrestling with one another probably six feet from one of the lower level windows. After that skunk clouds gradually began to get scarcer, and at just about the same time, we spotted the first red fox we’d ever seen in the neighborhood. In fact, it was the first red fox I’d ever seen in the wild in the US, anywhere. (We did see one in Surrey, England, in 2000.) In 2007 a dead skunk appeared in the gully behind our house, stinking to high heaven but also heavily chewed on. I was unaware that anything but great horned owls prey on skunks, but something clearly did this one in, and by the smell of it, the last few minutes had been quite a battle.
Back in 2008, I first saw a fox running past the house with something white in its mouth. I thought it might have been something filched from a trash can overturned by a bear, and thought no more about it. However, after that we began seeing fox running around with small white objects in their mouths on a regular basis. It was not one fox, but at least two. (Their coloring is noticeably different, as you can tell once you see the same individuals two or three times.) I couldn’t get close enough to see what the white objects were until a month or so ago, when I spotted a fox digging furiously in the side of the hill next to our stone stairway. Right beside the hole was something I immediately recognized as an ordinary chicken egg.
We’ve seen fox carrying eggs twenty times or more now, to the point where it’s unusual to see a fox trot by the house without one. Somebody in the near vicinity is obviously feeding them, since there are no chicken coops in our squeakily tony neighborhood. I’ve been finding eggshells in the gully all summer. The fox are sleek and healthy, and not nearly as skittish as they used to be.
Feeding wild animals is never a good idea, and in most places it’s against the law. I want fox to be afraid of me, and if they can’t somehow find a sustainable place in the local ecosystem, feeding them doesn’t fix the problem. I’ve even got an idea who’s doing the feeding, by tracking the fox as we track meteors: I take note of which direction they’re running when they have eggs in their mouths, and the lines all point to somewhere down toward the end of the Langdale cul-del-sac.
I might pursue it…but we don’t need the skunks here. If the fox are driving out the skunks, overall it’s a plus, and pace Woody Allen, the fox need the eggs. (I don’t know how they repel skunks, and online research hasn’t turned up much.) On the other hand, if the neighbors in question stop feeding the fox, we’ll have starving and eventually diseased fox limping around, which is sad on the surface of it, and a possible hazard to people walking small dogs. (Guess who.)
This isn’t a storybook world. Animals compete, fight, and die–far too often in my gully. There are no good answers. But at least we can leave our windows open at night.
Prayers and Squares
St. Raphael’s parish surprised Carol this past Sunday with a prayer quilt. It’s an interesting church ministry called Prayers and Squares that I’d never seen before coming to St. Raphael’s, but it’s evidently quite common and his its own Web site. It works this way: A parish’s quilters (we have several) make small quilts about 30″ by 40″. At each corner of the quilt squares is a knot with two threads about 3″ long left free. Before the quilt is presented to its recipient (often while they’re still in the hospital) it is placed at the rear of the church or in the parish hall, and people tie a knot in one of the pairs of threads while saying a prayer for the recipient. There’s enough thread so multiple knots can be tied at any given corner, and thus the quilt is never “full.”
It’s a sign to people who are in the hospital that the parish is thinking of them and that they are not alone. Carol was not in the hospital all that long, but she was touched by the gesture, and later that afternoon while she rested on our bed, she put the quilt over her. The Pack stood guard, and vowed to shred any squirrel that dared attack her. (Aero is actually in the photo, but he went undercover to Carol’s right, so as to surprise any squirrel who managed to get past the others.)
In the corner of the quilt is an insignia with Carol’s name and the date the quilt was presented.
Religion as a concept is taking a lot of flak these days for various reasons, but few recognize the force for healing and comfort that religion can be when it remains true to its purpose. Small as it is, our parish does all sorts of things that might be listed under “aid and comfort,” including a food pantry that was recognized last year as the best in the Colorado Diocese. Nobody talks it up, nobody brags. They just do it.
Carol puts the quilt over herself every night, and I suspect she will long after her illness is just a memory. Whether or not you believe in God, I think it’s always possible to believe that helping others is the highest good that we can aspire to, and an awful lot of that happens where nobody but those involved ever notice.
Odd Lots
- I’m still pretty sore from lingering shingles pain on my back, and a little grouchy in consequence, though I’m trying manfully not to show it. On the good news end, Carol is much better, and we both had cheese ravioli last night. I think it was the first meal worthy of the name that she’s had in almost two weeks.
- Anger really does make you lose: Sony has condemned “No Pressure” and completely disassociated itself from 10:10.
- From the Terms-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: milk float, a small delivery vehicle (often electric) used to deliver milk in urban England. Some photos here.
- And another from that department: steamdevil, a small vortex of condensed water vapor rising into cold air from a warm body of water like a lake or a river. This is the time of year you tend to see them, and Spaceweather posted a nice example from Wisconsin.
- I’ve always suspected that grains aren’t good for me, but here’s some analysis as to why. Your Body May Vary, but a lot of this sure sounds familiar. Note well the caution on soybeans, which give both Carol and me a lot of trouble.
- Napa’s cool summer has winemakers biting their nails: They may lose much (and perhaps all) of their harvest if a freeze comes before the grapes mature, but if they can walk the tightrope to harvest without falling, this year’s late-harvest wines (my favorite kind) could be spectacular. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The Colorado Springs marijuana industry has made the New York Times , and has injected new life into local newspapers. I like The Independent, our quirky little free paper (its offices are in an old church with interesting architecture) and every issue I flip through down at the Black Bear Coffeehouse has another page of MMD ads. The latest issue had a 48-page pull-out supplement, devoted entirely to You Know What. The world is clearly crazier than we can imagine.
- Mars may have had not only oceans, but (c’mon, this is obvious!) also icebergs. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Australia is about to get its first native-born Roman Catholic saint: Sister Mary Helen MacKillop, who in 1870 got a child-abuser priest removed from his position. In retaliation, friends of the priest orchestrated her excommunication, but she was exonerated in 1872. She will be canonized later this month, and I’d say she now stands fair to become the patron saint of whistleblowers.
Anger Makes You Lose
When the emails started coming in a couple of days ago, I thought it was an urban legend. I really did. (I get a lot of those here.) I went to Snopes automatically, as I always do when someone sends me an email telling me to “forward this to everyone in your address book!” Appallingly, as a single Google search showed, this time the topic was true: Well-known British director Richard Curtis (Love, Actually; Four Weddings and a Funeral) and a global warming group of some significance have created a short film showing True AGW Believers murdering those who disagree with them…including a couple of grade-school children.
The organization is 10:10. The film is “No Pressure.” I won’t post a link to the film itself here because it has been withdrawn from its original location and reposted in lots of other places. I also hesitate because if you have anything like respect for human life you will find it hideously disturbing. Seek it out at risk of nightmares, and don’t say you weren’t warned.
Quick representative summary of a scene from the film: Smug teacher is indoctrinating a group of grade schoolers about the dangers of global warming. A couple of them refuse to buy in. Teacher then pushes a button, and the dissenting kids explode into a realistic cloud of blood and guts, splattering on the walls and on their classmates.
You think I’m kidding? Then grab your barf bag and go find the movie. You won’t have to look far. (It’s on YouTube as I write this.)
No pressure. Right. Disagree with us and we’ll kill you.
This entry is not about global warming, which I’m still researching and will discuss when I’m ready. This entry is about a theme I’ve touched on here again and again over the years: Anger makes you stupid. The level of anger-driven stupidity in this case boggles the mind. To science’s sorrow, anger is now the driving force in the global warming debate. The stupidity comes in when your anger compels you to hand a cudgel to your opponents, which they will then gleefully use to bash your head in again and again and again…forever.
This is galactic-class stupidity. The film will never go away. It will become a legend, and “no pressure” will become a meme for “wanting to kill people who disagree with you.” The Right will broaden the film’s scope and cite it repeatedly as evidence that the environmentalist left is a sort of Stalinist religion that hates humanity and advocates violence against its opponents. The whole thing will inflate far past absurdity. It will tip elections and put more Republicans in power. It will reverse years of gains on environmental issues, and will make it even more difficult to entertain rational debate on any environmental topic at all.
Small price to pay for a piece of delicious tribal poo-flinging, eh?
Bottom line: Anger makes you stupid. And when you get stupid enough, you do things that make you lose.
