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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, February 26, 2005
The Business Is Taking Off There may be a bit less blogging, and slower response to emails for the next few days. Three orders arrived as PayPal payments this morning, and checks are also being mailed. (I guess that I am going to have start advertising somewhere besides astromart.com, to get the volume up.) I built a jig to hold the GM-8 leg inserts for drilling and tapping so that I could do assembly line production and get more precisely repeatable results--it made it much faster. I need to build a jig to hold the G-11 leg inserts for the same purpose. A friend who is a mechanical engineer just loves to do machine work, so I persuaded him to use a Bridgeport vertical mill to make some rather sturdy rings (of 1/2" thick aluminum) to hold the round stock that I use to make the G-11 leg inserts. These rings are, within 1/1000th of inch, identical to each other, and clamp down on the round stock to prevent motion. I believe that this will enable me to speed up production of the inserts, as well as make them far more exactly alike. Far too much of this week's production failed to meet my not terribly demanding standards for parallelism, because I couldn't keep the round stock properly clamped. I haven't been thrilled with the results of what I have been sending out, but one of my customers emailed me how pleased he was with the workmanship of the set that he just received. (Another customer complained that I had missed one burr, and he cut his finger on it. Time to buy a belt sander--using a hand electric sander just isn't that efficient.) I ought to get an award for "most green packaging," I suppose. So far, I have not used a single new box--almost all of them have been boxes that were being thrown away. It turns out that HP laptop batteries come in a box that perfectly fits the GM-8 set, and another box that typically carries large disk drives makes a good fit for the G-11 set. The wrapping material? That's all recycled grocery bags--of which there is a nearly unlimited supply. At some point I may have to actually buy boxes and shipping material, but even then, I am going to try and find a company that has large quantities of shipping boxes that it has to recycle, and see if I can make a deal on them. Big Bertha Behaves It turned out the decline in performance was a collimation problem--and a reminder that you shouldn't ever trust appearances. The focuser is an older University Optics 2" inside diameter focuser. Instead of a 1.25" adapter that slides inside, instead, you unscrew the 2" collar, and screw the 1.25" adapter in its place. It is a little clumsy, and the 1.25" adapter collar looks cheap. So I pulled out a more common 1.25" adapter from a 2" diagonal that I had lying around. (It came with my 5" refractor.) This adapter looked and felt like a finely machine piece of work--so I put that into the 2" focuser a couple of nights ago. It did not even occur to me that the decline in image quality might be connected to this finely machined adapter. When you turn the focuser in with the laser collimator in the focuser, if everything is in the proper position, the laser beam will hit the same spot on the primary mirror. With the cheap 1.25" screw on collar, that pretty much happens. With the finely machined (or so it seemed) adapter, the beam moved a half inch across the mirror as I turned the focuser knobs. It turns out that the finely machine focuser from somewhere in China is actually pretty sloppy in its tolerances. Anyway, last night, I went to the crummy looking but well-made Japanese adapter, and once the mirror had cooled down--with a little help from a muffin fan--I can honestly say that the telescope is now behaving at about the level that I would expect from a Coulter mirror. It is a little disappointing, compared to my 8" f/7 reflector, which uses a Coulter mirror from the 1960s, when they advertised mirrors accurate +-1/25th wave (and I think managed to do it), but for a telescope that cost me this little, it does okay. At 500x on the Moon, the image isn't tack sharp, but it isn't all that bad. At 222x on Saturn, Cassini's Division is visible all the way around the planet, although it isn't terribly dark. The brown cloud band on the planet is clearly visible. There is a little bit of either coma or undercorrection--not sure which--that keeps me from going much higher on Saturn--although I think there is more detail visible at 222x with this beast than I can see on my smaller telescopes, even at higher magnification. (Remember that even at the same magnification, a larger aperture telescope will reveal more detail. Dawes' Limit says that resolution is directly proportional to aperture diameter.) I will have to roll the 5" refractor out tonight to do a direct comparison. Where this telescope does well--and the primary reason that I bought it--is for deep sky objects. I don't have a dark enough sky here to make much use of it yet, but on the Orion Nebula (M42) using 80x--oh wow! The detail that it brings out, and the subtle colors as well--just amazing. I look forward to moving this beast to my Horseshoe Bend property in a few months, once we get construction under way. Labels: telescopes Thursday, February 24, 2005
Terry Schiavo, Silver Rice Rat I blogged yesterday about the sure way to save Terry Schiavo's life was to have her convicted of a capital crime--and then the ACLU would devote its energy to saving her, not starving her to death. Now I see that Scrappleface has come up with an even more elegant solution, and one that doesn't require a trial: 2005-02-19) -- The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has, at least temporarily, saved the life of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, the Florida woman whose former husband, Michael, had planned to disconnect her feeding tube on Tuesday.And Scrappleface is really on a roll on this one: (2005-02-24) -- In another move designed to show his love and compassion for his wife, Michael Schiavo today announced he would auction off his guardianship of Terri Schiavo on eBay.You know, I have never been a big fan of extralegal violence, but it almost sounds like it is time for an antilynching--where the mob rescues Terry Schiavo from legal authority to keep her alive! Always Pleasant To See People Putting Faith Above Money In this case, a member of Korn: BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) - A founding member of Korn is leaving the band to focus on his religious beliefs. "Korn has parted ways with guitarist Brian 'Head' Welch, who has chosen Jesus Christ as his savior, and will be dedicating his musical pursuits to that end," said a statement posted Tuesday on Korn's Web site. Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Big Bertha Again Oddly enough, putting in longer screws in the hopes of having a bit more opportunity for adjustment doesn't seem to have helped--it seems to have hurt. I can't get images as good as I had last night. Groan. Time to pull out the books on reflector tuning, and try to figure out what is going on here. Labels: telescopes Idaho Residents: Save Yourselves Some Money There's a bill before the state legislature, SB 1136, which would establish a statewide uniform policy on what police departments do with seized, confiscated, lost, impounded, etc. guns, requiring legal guns to be sold to licensed dealers--instead of just being destroyed. Imagine if police departments regularly destroyed confiscated cars, rather than sold them to a dealer. You might want to contact your state senators about this, and let them know how you feel. Professor Churchill Admits He's Not An Indian In a speech in Hawaii: Churchill did address the issue of his ethnicity, admitting that he is not Native American.It isn't important to what Churchill said; it does provide a legitimate reason for Colorado University to fire him, since his claim to being of Indian ancestry was why they hired a guy without a Ph.D. to be a full professor in their ethnic studies department. UPDATE: The Honolulu paper above now says that they misquoted Churchill about not being an Indian. How To Save Terry Schiavo's Life Have the State of Florida convict her of a capital felony ("aggravated vegetativeness"); then the ACLU will file suit to keep her alive. The Illegal Immigration Problem What elephant in the bathtub? Even USA Today and Democrats like Senator Feinstein are admitting that there is some real danger involved with our lax border security: Despite an influx of new technology, such as underground sensors and cameras that pan the desert, agents catch only about one-third of the estimated 3 million people who cross the border illegally every year.Part of the problem is technical, but part is a matter of manpower: Ironically, the war on terrorism abroad has slowed the government's ability to secure the border in some areas.As I have pointed out in the past, we have enough manpower to stop 98% of all illegal immigration--it would just take some political willpower to do so. The President has authority to call up the unorganized militia for home defense, and my guess is that large numbers of Americans, especially in the border states, would be quite willing to serve one day a month on active duty. While there are some pretty dangerous and nasty smugglers along that border, the vast majority of the illegal aliens aren't particularly dangerous. Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Clear Sky & Big Bertha Okay, a couple evenings of clouds and rain. But tonight it was clear! I rolled Big Bertha out, and waited for the mirror to cool. And waited. And waited. Definitely need to put a fan in there. But it was still amazing. There is still a collimation problem--I think I need to put in four inch screws instead of three inch for the mirror cell to move on, but at least I was starting to get close. But before collimation reached that point, oh my, does this gather a lot of light! Ways To Know You Have Enough Aperture 1. You decide to increase magnification from 111x to 160x not because you need a larger image to see detail, but because Saturn is so bright that it is washing out the detail--enlarging the image makes it less overpoweringly bright. 2. You point at the Moon at 400x--and it is still too bright to make out details without a Moon filter on the eyepiece. 3. You put a cardboard off-axis aperture mask (a piece of cardboard with a hole in it) on the front of your telescope--and the aperture mask still has more aperture than your next size smaller of telescope does. 4. The Orion Nebula (M42) has an oppressively green cast to it. 5. You scroll across the sky and you are astounded at how many stars have very, very noticeable color to them--because there is now enough light to excite your cones, not just your rods. 6. Instead of looking hard and seeing one satellite of Saturn--Titan--you can't help but see four obvious satellites of Saturn. And this is from my suburban front yard! Okay, there's still some work to do on this. Saturn was not what it should have been. I could see the Cassini Division all the way around the planet, but it wasn't black. I could see the brown cloud band on Saturn's atmosphere, but no more detail than in my 5" refractor (admittedly, at a larger scale). I went to 500x on the Moon--and while it wasn't as crisp as I would have liked, it wasn't real bad, either--and the problem was partly atmospheric turbulence. Coma is a problem (and perhaps even fixing the collimation won't solve it--this is an f/4.5 mirror, and they tend to have a bit of a coma problem). Still, it was awesome, even within these limitations. Labels: telescopes Life Tenure For Supreme Court Justices There has been quite a bit of discussion of late, generally on the left end of the spectrum, but not exclusively so, of why Supreme Court justices should serve not for life, but for 18 year terms. You can read one of the proposals, and Professor James Lindgren's ideas about it, here. There's no question that life terms for federal judges (and not just Supreme Court justices) irritates more than a few people. Conservatives used to be the upset ones, back when the Supreme Court was striking down state laws against abortion, obscenity, finding all sorts of hitherto unrecognized Constitutional rights for criminal suspects (sometimes with good reason, and sometimes not). Liberals seem to be upset about life tenure now (although in light of the Lawrence decision, I can't imagine why). I confess that there are times that life tenure for judges frustrates me--but let's examine this question a little more thoughtfully, instead of just venting our frustration. The original objective of life tenure for federal judges was to grant them the independence to make the right decision, regardless of political pressures, and without fear of being fired or not reappointed. Since the federal judiciary was considered the weakest branch of the new federal government, this made a lot of sense, especially in light of the English tradition of the crown making life difficult for judges that showed too much independence. Since then, the doctrine of judicial review, combined with, it seems at times, almost unlimited power through the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws, has made federal judges actually on a par with the legislature branch. Congress can pass laws; so can state legislatures; and the Supreme Court strikes them down, knowing that nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can overturn their decisions. Still, what has been the effect of life tenure? Consider what happened when President Lyndon Johnson appointed a number of federal judges (at all levels). Those judges don't stay on the bench forever. Most are already at least in their 40s, and at best, cannot expect to stay on the bench more than 30-40 years. Ditto for Nixon's appointees, and Carter's, and so on. Each president, when he appoints federal judges, is leaving a legacy behind him, generally sharing his point of view. There are some really glaring exceptions, and certainly, a number of the Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court have turned out to be far to the left not only of the Republicans who appointed them, but even to the left of most Democrats in this country. Because these appointees persist for decades after the administration that appointed them--and the Senate that confirmed them--life tenure operates as a form of buffering agent on political change. In the 1930s, the political mood of America changed quite dramatically in favor of government regulation of the economy. The Supreme Court justices appointed in earlier decades reined in Roosevelt's many ambitious and usually unsuccessful efforts--but only to a point. Eventually, the threat of the court packing scheme and old age moved the Court to the left--but it took a little while to do so. The same thing has been going on for the last couple of decades. Popular sentiment has moved noticeably to the right since the late 1970s, and it shows in who we send to Congress and the White House. (Even Bill Clinton, while too far to the left for my taste, was pretty conservative in a number of areas for a Democrat. Look at John Kerry.) But judges reflecting leftist views remain on the bench, styming the nation's move to the right. I am not happy about the left's continued control over the federal judiciary. But a little moderation on political swings is a good thing--it keeps whatever enthusiasm of the moment is going around from getting out of control. Shortening the terms of Supreme Court justices will tend to reduce this moderating influence. I think we should think long and hard about whether this is a good idea. Two Of My Favorite Topics... Academic fraud and evolutionary fraud, in one neat package! It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.Obviously, one scientist's fraud isn't going to significantly damage the claims of evolution, which is dependent on a lot more evidence than this, but this is an extraordinarily gross form of dishonesty. Like Piltdown Man, this wasn't an honest mistake. If it takes this long for blatant dishonesty to get caught, it makes you wonder how long it takes for honest mistakes to get sorted out. Oh yes, make sure you read Scrappleface's amusing satire of this story: (2005-02-19) -- A disgraced German anthropology professor, who pretended to use carbon dating to establish a link between Neanderthals and modern man, told reporters today that he regularly drinks 40,000-year-old milk and drives a Porsche Carrera made in 736 BC. |
