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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, March 12, 2005
Big Bertha Behaves Okay, maybe the additional edge supports for the mirror solved (or mostly solved) the turned edge problem. I find that masking the mirror, even down to 13", did not do any noticeable good. Collimating the mirror on stars worked rather well, at least for low power observation. At higher powers, I still need to put an off axis mask on the front of the telescope--but when I do so, the performance becomes at least acceptable, although not spectacular. Saturn now delivers a very crisp image at 285x, and a reasonably crisp image at 333x. Cassini's Division isn't inky black at 333x, but when the atmosphere goes into brief periods of calm (for a second or two), Cassini's Division is clearly visible all the way around the planet, and quite dark. I think I can see a bit more detail in the rings--perhaps something like additional divisions? I don't know. Another measure of performance is to ask what the lowest power that you can see detail. At 57x, Cassini's Division was not visible. At 80x, it was clearly visible, and at 111x, it was obvious that it went around the whole planet. Jupiter has been too low in the sky to see much, but by the time I finished last night, Jupiter was up about 30 degrees above the horizon, and starting to be pretty astonishing. At 333x, the image was not as crisp as I would have liked, although at 285x it was acceptable. At either magnification, there was more detail visible in the cloud bands than I could even begin to describe or sketch--lots and lots of whorls and dark dots against the pale background. Unlike Saturn, I believe that I am seeing a good bit more detail on Jupiter than I can see with my other two scopes--or, for that matter, with any other scope that I have used on Jupiter. I am not quite sure why the off-axis aperture mask makes so much difference. Without it, by 160x, the image degrades substantially. A mask on the mirror itself made no substantial difference, but the off-axis aperture mask made an enormous difference. I am wondering how much of this might be caused by the diagonal mirror (which is pretty large) or the spider that holds the diagonal mirror. One way to test this is to build an aperture mask that can be centered in the tube, and operate off-axis. If the problem reappears when centered, then I need to figure out if the diagnoal is too large, or if the somewhat clumsy and homemade spider might be the source of the problem. It does seem as though the focuser is a bit coarse. Perhaps going to a lower profile focuser and a smaller diagonal would help--but that would require changing the telescope tube. It might make more sense to buy one of the helical focusing adapters that go into the 2" tube, and let you make fine adjustments to 1.25" eyepieces. Labels: telescopes Why Ward Churchill Thinks So Highly of Terrorists... I haven't blogged a lot about Professor Ward Churchill's problems, partly because it there has been so much evidence of this--in multiple areas: academic fraud; plagiarism; lying about his ethnicity to get a job; fraud in selling "Native American art" (only stopped when federal law was changed to clarify what was and wasn't "Native American art"--and partly because I thought his goose was cooked, and it was time to stick a fork in it, and say he was cooked. But it gets worse. In the midst of this article about even more evidence of academic misconduct by Professor Ward Churchill--plagiarism, in this case--we find out how he has gotten away with some of this: University of Colorado officials investigating embattled professor Ward Churchill received documents this week purporting to show that he plagiarized another professor's work. Officials at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia sent CU an internal 1997 report detailing allegations about an article Churchill wrote. Friday, March 11, 2005
The Irrelevance of the Left to American Politics Ann Coulter's column is, as usual, not completely fair, but very funny. She seems to be confusing leftists and liberals (and there are some differences there), but still, it's good for a chuckle: Liberals have been completely intellectually vanquished. Actually, they lost the war of ideas long ago. It's just that now their defeat is so obvious, even they've noticed. As new DNC Chairman Howard Dean might say, it's all over but the screaming. Terry Schiavo The outrageousness of the judge's rulings just gets worse. It isn't just that the judge has ordered her feeding tube removed. According to this admittedly rather passionate source: Sixth Circuit Court Judge George W. Greer doggedly continued his resolve to execute neurologically disabled Terri Schindler-Schiavo Tuesday, denying a motion by her parents to orally feed the disabled woman after the removal of her gastric feeding tube March 18 as he has ordered.As Different River points out: If a convicted murder like Ted Bundy had been ordered to be executed this way, it would be an unconstitutional violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” But if a completely innocent, but disabled person is ordered to be starved and dehydrated, well that’s just fine and dandy with the law as it stands now.I used to think the people that called the ACLU the "Anti-Christian Litigation Unit" were over the top--that they failed to understand that the ACLU was simply a bit too zealous in protecting the Constitution. I don't think that now. If Terri Schiavo were awaiting execution for murdering children, the ACLU would be fighting just as tenaciously to keep her alive, insisting that execution was cruel and unusual punishment. The only consistency in the ACLU's efforts is that they oppose any law that represents a traditional Christian notion of morality. The ACLU doesn't object to killing; they only object to killing murderers. One Of Those Chilling Discussions I try to remain composed and calm when I read articles like this. Yes, there are babies born with such severe defects that I can see how it would seem like the most humane thing to end their suffering. There are clearly cases where individuals are in such severe pain, and the prospects of successful treatment are zero, that killing them is the humane action. I am thinking of an Argentinian POW who was helping to clear landmines in the Falklands, and stepped on a mine. The lower half of his body was blown away; there was simply no prospect of survival; but he was conscious and in pain. A British soldier immediately shot him in the head to end the suffering. But this article over at Different River points out the criteria being used in the Netherlands are quite a bit beyond "ending suffering" as a reason to kill infants. Slippery slopes are real, and articles such as the one that Different River cites are gruesome examples of how doctors, having crossed the line from passive to active measures to end life, are in danger of picking up speed on that downward slope. Notes From Iraq Instapundit occasionally publishes emails from acquaintances serving in Iraq, and I envy him for that. But because so much of the U.S. military serving in Iraq are National Guard, there's an awful lot of Americans who know someone--or know someone who knows someone--over there. At least three people that I go to church with have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and in at least one case, "I am not allowed to tell you where." These personal correspondents have provided a powerful antidote to the mainstream media's efforts to misportray the nature of operations in Iraq. A physician's assistant who works at the same company as me (although I have never actually met him) was mobilized to Iraq last year. The following email from Captain Castellano gives a small picture of what is going on in Iraq. His request for items for the Iraqi children really gives you an idea what a desperately poor country Iraq is: The Digital Desert Commo v.2 newsletter was written days before the historic Iraqi election in January. That turnout and atmosphere following the elections have brought an air of progress in our area. Our commendable infantry unit, G Troop 1/82 Cavalry Scouts, determined the local villages are secure enough to allow increased medical missions. Now it is time to resume fostering good relations and do some Humvee tailgate medicine.When I get home tonight, I'm going to see what shoes my son has that meet this requirement of "old outgrown children’s shoes" and ship them off. There are some picture as well of Iraqi children with Captain Castellano, and Dr. Ali; for technical reasons, I will have to wait until this evening to add them. Thursday, March 10, 2005
Big Bertha Is So Ugly She Needs a Mask Or at least the mirror does. I put on a mask that covers the outer 1" of the mirror--reducing it to a 15.5" reflector--and it made a noticeable improvement. At 222x, Saturn was now sharp--although Cassini's Division was still not the inky blank it should be. I can't claim that I could see any more detail on Saturn and in the rings than I can with my 8" f/7 reflector or my 5" f/9 refractor--and even the image scale isn't dramatically larger. Adding the aperture mask to the front of the scope gave me a bit more detail at higher power--but 285x was about as high as it would go, before fuzzing away. The problem is no longer a classic turned edge, unless you use "edge" in a rather warped sense of the word. Using Procyon for the star test now reveals what would appear to be an undercorrected mirror. The combination a turned edge (essentially, a form of extreme localized overcorrection) and an undercorrected rest of the mirror, unsurprisingly, produces a less than impressive image. I suppose that I can make a mirror mask that takes it down to 12", and see if it makes much of a difference. It might make sense to have the mirror refigured, but I must confess that I am losing my enthusiasm for big Dobsonians for planetary work. Even with a really excellent mirror (and there are some big Dobsonians that truly have excellent mirrors), the lack of tracking capability (without adding one of the platform trackers) means that at high power, you are constantly repositioning the scope to track an object. A big Dobsonian is well suited to deep sky objects, where high magnification is neither necessary nor desirable, and where a less than perfect mirror is usually not a problem. I suspect that I will use it for that purpose primarily--and I will say, M42 at 160x through Big Bertha is quite breathtaking. I will be curious to see what M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy) looks like. Labels: telescopes Entrepreneurship Isn't All Strawberries and Cream The caster sets for the Losmandy GM-8 get nothing but positive feedback from customers; those for the G-11, however, have had a more mixed reaction. I am a little unsure how much of the problem is caster rotation, and how much is rotation of the leg insert in the tripod leg (intrinsically more likely, since the G-11 legs are circular, not rectangular section, like the GM-8). In any case, I think I am going to hold off on anymore shipments of the G-11 sets until I have figured out for sure which it is, and come up with a fix. I am having G-11 customers with problems try a fix that should identify if the problem is caster rotation, or leg rotation. Caster rotation I can fix with a field replaceable upgrade (and fortunately, there aren't enough of the G-11 customers yet for this to be expensive to send out the replacement parts). Leg rotation, however, can only be fixed with either masking tape on the leg or rubber cement--neither terribly elegant. In any case, I won't be going into mass production on these leg inserts until I figure out the answer. Cats: Be Glad That They Don't Have An Opposable Thumb Our cat Tater is especially ferocious--that Whiskas cat food commercial with the house cat running across the African savannah really captures our cat's species identity confusion. We have some doorknobs that are the lever type--and he has learned to jump onto them, long enough for air pressure differences to push the door open, once the latch is no longer holding the door shut. I caught the little beast on his hind legs the other day, attempting to turn a conventional round doorknob. Without an opposable thumb, of course, he was not successful. But then again, I don't have a cat quite this dangerous: BATES TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - A man cooking in his kitchen was shot after one of his cats knocked his 9mm handgun onto the floor, discharging the weapon, Michigan State Police said.Still, it is a good reason to keep your guns properly secured. Our dog would have something to worry about from Tater. Wednesday, March 09, 2005
I Applied For a Construction Loan Today Probably best to get this underway, before interest rates get too normal. Both GM and Ford long-term bonds are beginning to show yields above 8%--although partly because GM is beginning to work its way down the quality ratings. I think this is probably temporary. Still, interest rates are picking up; it would be best to lock in a good rate for my wife's dream house, and then lock in more typical corporate bond rates of 8-9% when the economy starts to overheat next year. Scaring Seniors My mother forwarded me an email from one of the conservative groups that is lobbying on behalf of President Bush's Social Security reform. She seemed quite concerned about it, and wanted to know if it was true. I should mention that my mother pays a lot more attention to political goings on and the news than most of her generation (or, for that matter, most of the 20somethings). The worrisome letter: President Bush has made it clear that a key second-term goal is reforming and strengthening Social Security. Well, here at Grassfire it is fast becoming ours as well. In fact, we are angry about the state of Social Security—but not for reasons you might think.My response to her was this. It is true that the Social Security Trust Fund has been financing the national debt for some years. Because the Social Security Trust Fund has been running a surplus for a number of years (in preparation for the Baby Boomers retiring, starting very, very shortly), the federal government has financed all of the rest of its deficits by borrowing from the Trust Fund. This would be a fine solution to get through short term budget problems, and those budget deficits will start to drop shortly--they have already started to decline from last year--but the problem is that once the Baby Boomers start to retire, there will be a dramatic reduction in Social Security revenues going into the Trust Fund--and a dramatic increase in benefits checks going to the Baby Boomers. For the same reason, federal income tax revenues will also decline, because the Baby Boomers won't be making $80,000 a year salaries anymore. The federal government's non-Social Security budget could get a lot worse at the exact moment when Social Security Trust Fund calls in the IOUs. This is why Bush says that this is a crisis, and that we need to fix it NOW. Actually, about 20 years ago would have been the time to fix it, but Republicans have been afraid to say anything, because Democrats use it as a way to scare your generation into voting Democrat. Bush is the first nationally prominent Republican with enough political courage to risk touching what is commonly called the Third Rail of American Politics. I don't know if Bush's plan is really the best solution, but the alternatives are this: 1. Raise the retirement age. 2. Reduce benefits (either for existing retirees, or more likely, for future retirees). 3. Raise Social Security tax rates, which will cause enormous suffering at the bottom of the society. For very poor people, the Social Security taxes are often the largest single deduction from their paycheck. 4. Raise the ceiling on Social Security taxes, so that people who make $200,000 a year pay the same percentage as people who make $10,000. Of course, the $200,000 a year person also pays a much higher percentage of their income in federal and state income taxes, and they aren't going to be happy about this. This might encourage those who are close to retirement age to retire--reducing revenues even more to the federal government. 5. Raise federal income taxes to cover not only the federal budget deficit, but also the IOUs to the Social Security Trust Fund. This would be a disaster for the national economy, I think, and might well aggravate other budgetary problems, because a shrinking economy produces even less revenue, and this can build on itself. It would also encourage those of us who are within a few years of retirement to do so sooner. If my income taxes went up $300 a month to cover these problems, it would definitely encourage me to settle for a somewhat less comfortable retirement, rather than pay the higher taxes. (It might also cause me to go back to school and work on my Ph.D.) As I understand Bush's plan, he wants to encourage younger workers to exchange lower retirement benefits, 20 to 40 years from now, in exchange for being allowed to put at least part of the money that they are paying into Social Security into private retirement accounts somewhat akin to 401(k) or IRA plans. I haven't followed the debate carefully enough to have a terribly informed opinion on this, but I think that it could work, depending on what percentage goes into private retirement accounts. There's no question in my mind that we are going to pay a price for the actuarily unsound way that Social Security was established, and then for the irresponsible actions of Congress in funding all sorts of wonderful programs with money that they didn't have. UPDATE: An observant reader asks: I'm confused why folks think that raising the ceiling on social security taxes helps. If I'm paying on more income, I'm going to expect a greater benefit. Since SS loses money on every customer basically in proportion to the payment, that's the wrong way to move.He goes on to ask if raising the ceiling isn't just income redistribution by a sneakier method. Yes, almost certainly the higher ceiling will combine with some other rule to mean that the $200,000 worker won't get much of any larger benefits. There's an additional complication here. I remembered that above a certain income level, your Social Security benefits are taxable. This website gives the complicated details. The $200,000 a year worker who retires will get a bigger benefit check--but he is almost certainly going to be paying larger income taxes on his larger benefit check. Long-Term Treasury Yields Up I mentioned a few weeks back that long-term Treasury bond yields were astonishingly low--and why this couldn't last. It does indeed appear to be the case that things have turned around: U.S. benchmark Treasury yields climbed to their highest levels since July on Wednesday on speculation solid economic growth could lead to accelerating inflation and more aggressive hikes in interest rates.It may be time to do any refinancing you need to do now, or at least in the next few months. I suppose it is time for me to get started on the construction-to-perm loan for the new house. First, the Independent: Now the New York Times Both saying that Bush's Middle East "stratergy" seems to be working: He has gone out of his way not to crow, or even to take direct credit. But not quite two years after he began the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and not quite two months after a second Inaugural Address in which he spoke of "ending tyranny," President Bush seems entitled to claim as he did on Tuesday that a "thaw has begun" in the broader Middle East.What next? Will MoveOn.org and Michael Moore have something good to say? Big Bertha I am a little confused. Leaving Big Bertha out meant that the mirror didn't need any time to cool. After the adrenalin rush of manufacturing in Delrin, I couldn't sleep, so I went back to trying to debug Big Bertha's optics. Using an aperture mask at the front of the tube definitely helps. Without it, Saturn was definitely blurry at 160x; with it, Saturn was still showing an okay (not great) image at 222x. Cassini's Division was visible around the planet, but not dark; the brown cloud band was visible. Jupiter was still low in the sky, but with the front tube aperture mask, I could see quite a bit of detail (fleetingly) in the clouds. Tonight I will put the mirror masks in place, and see what happens. Part of why I am now a little skeptical that the problem is turned edge is that star testing no longer shows the single bright outer ring outside of focus. This seems to have gone away after I added three more supports to the mirror on the edge--but the image still leaves much to be desired in crispness. Labels: telescopes Adventures in Small Scale Manufacturing I started cutting rectangular Delrin last night for the product now known as ScopeRoller 8 (the caster assembly for the Losmandy GM-8 mount). Much easier to cut because of the material, and the shape. I was able to cut ten feet of black Delrin into the appropriate 3" parallelogram solids--and very exactly the same dimensions--with a miter saw in about fifteen minutes. No melting surfaces, and almost no need for sanding. Then I dropped the pieces into a jig that I constructed, and in about one minute each, I was able to drill and tap them to accept casters. Because of the self-lubricating qualities of Delrin, I didn't have to start with a pilot hole--I started immediately with the drill bit that came with the 3/8" tap. I sent out new product announcements to just about every authorized Losmandy dealer in the English-speaking world last night--I'll be curious to see how much of a bite I get. Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Healthy Economy My son has only been working at his first part-time job for a couple of months, slinging ice cream for minimum wage, and he is already moving onto his second part-time job, at $6.25 per hour. Not bad for a 16 year old. I was 16 when I started working as a keypunch operator--and it was $1.65 per hour--minimum wage. Terror Suspects Pass Gun Background Checks The GAO says: More than 40 terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms in the United States last year because background checks found no reason to stop them, says a government report released Tuesday.Not surprisingly, many of the same liberals whining about the hazards to our civil liberties because of the PATRIOT Act are upset that the federal government doesn't "do something" about these people who have not yet committed a crime. I actually agree that this is a serious problem--but don't whine about losses of civil liberties, then demand that the government punish people who have not yet broken any laws. It is very, very hard to imagine that there are any large number of people who are suspected members of terrorist organizations who could withstand a really careful inspection of their affairs. Are they lawfully present in the United States? Have they made false statements on visa applications? Even having local police keep an eye on these suspects might well uncover a criminal offense--and if this type of careful examination did not find a violation of some sort by at least some of these suspects, it would make me wonder a little about the quality of the evidence that they are part of a terrorist organization. UPDATE: A reader tells me that the list includes a lot of people who only associate with people known to be members. I don't know if this is true or not, but it might explain why Justice isn't going out of its way to solve this problem. Another Terrorist Smuggled Across The Border I've pointed out that news accounts, some in very mainstream sources, indicate that terrorists are being smuggled across the Mexican border. Here's a recent conviction of a terrorist who entered the U.S. in exactly that way: The U.S. Attorney's Office said Kourani bribed a Mexican consular official in Beirut to get a visa to travel to Mexico. Kourani and a traveling companion then paid another man in Mexico to be smuggled across the southern U.S. border Feb. 4, 2001, the government said.I understand that for political reasons, Bush is reluctant to crack down on illegal aliens, and there may also be some international relations reasons as well--it is important to keep Mexico on very friendly terms, which they might not be if we shut off the pressure release valve of illegal immigration. But eventually, someone is going to have to quit saying, "What elephant in the bathtub?" Yes, that elephant in the bathtub. This Is Repellent If you are a world renowned scientist, you get special treatment when you drug a woman and try to rape her (free registration required): WHAT'S THE difference between Penn professor Tracy McIntosh and any other disgusting, lowlife sexual predator?The columnist goes on to point out: I don't doubt for a moment that poor people and minorities commit more crimes than most of us. But their over-representation in prisons is only partially explained by that.Giving someone a reduced sentence for a crime like this makes a mockery of equal protection before the law. Thanks to Michelle Malkin's blog for the link. The Spread of the Democracy Virus Well, well, well, the Independent (among the most virulently anti-Bush papers in Britain) discusses the rise of democracy in the Middle East, under the headline: Was Bush right after all? Monday, March 07, 2005
Big Bertha's Gravitational Field & Optics Well, I'm still not thrilled with the optics. Part of the problem is cooling. I have become frustrated with attempts to put on wheels, and there's a bit of a story to that--one that may save others some irritation and wasted time. "Dobsonian" is the term used to describe a particular type of altazimuth mounting for a Newtonian reflector, so named for John Dobson, who played the major part in popularizing this style of cheap telescope. Keep in mind that the more traditional equatorial mount (for tracking objects across the sky, as the Earth turns) is almost always more expensive than the telescope that sits on it. (You generally don't want a telescope where the equatorial mount is less expensive--it will show.) One part of a Dobsonian mount is called a "ground board," and as the name implies, it sits on the ground. Coming up through the ground board is a pivot pin; the upper part of the mount rotates around the pivot pin to give azimuth motion. When I picked up Big Bertha, it was late at night, in an unlighted shed. We left the ground board, and the owner of the shed went on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I built my own ground board. It had too much friction but it didn't matter, because I put four casters on my ground board, so that I could roll Big Bertha out. Too much friction between ground board and the part of the mount that moves in azimuth meant that any sort of motion really meant the casters moved--and even when locked, they still moved, scraping plastic across the concrete. (Big Bertha must weigh at least 150 pounds--perhaps as much as 200 pounds--I'm not sure.) So, when the owner of the shed returned this last weekend, I retrieved the ground board, and thought to put casters in it. Unfortunately, the same problem appeared, and even worse, because of the shape of the proper ground board, I had to use three casters--and the results were not as stable. Even worse, all the struggling with my ground board (made of too soft a wood) meant that the casters had pretty well enlarged the threaded holes in the wood to a point where the casters would not stay in--and there was real danger that over time the casters might fall over. I went to Home Depot today to buy a hand truck. An appliance hand truck would have been good--except that for reasons too stupid to explain, they don't have a long enough shelf to catch the bottom of the ground board, and the kind of hand truck that I did buy made me realize that Big Bertha is never going to be portable--unless that portability involves its own motors. So, I have accepted that Big Bertha is going to live in the backyard until I can get around to giving it a more permanent home on our country property. Fortunately, both the wood and the paint on the tube are not particularly beautiful, so covering it with a tarp is probably sufficient, especially now that winter is pretty well over here in Boise. The optics remain a frustration. I've mentioned the cooling problem--and even a fan doesn't speed this up dramatically. However, living in the back yard helps a whole bunch. There is still something wrong with the optics, and it may be a turned edge--at least, that's what it looks like. What is a turned edge? This means that the outer edge of the mirror was polished a bit too flat, and effectively, the mirror has two focal points--one for the inner 16" or 17", and another, a wavelength or two out, for the outer 1/2" of the mirror. Not surprisingly, a turned edge (which is apparently pretty common on large commercial mirrors like this) ruins the image, because it superimposes one image (which might be reasonably good) on another image (which might also be reasonably good). But both combined makes everything a bit blurry. One trick that I used was to put an off-axis aperture mask on the telescope, so that I have effectively an 8" hole through which all light passes. Indeed, it made a noticeable difference, sharpening up Saturn to the point where the brown cloud band was clearly visible on the planet, and Cassini's Division was visible all the way around the planet--and this was at about 160x, which had been just hopelessly fuzzy with full aperture. The more certain way of assessing turned edge is to put a mask on the edge of the mirror. I wrote a little PostScript to produce a series of progressively larger black rings on white paper, which I have now cut out. (Yes, I have a very nice plotter at work, that lets me print out single pages with black rings 17.5" in diameter.) The clouds started to come in by the time I finished cutting out my paper dolls, so that will have to wait for tomorrow. Labels: telescopes Where Do These Names Come From? I saw this sad little story about Boeing firing its CEO for poor judgment in having an extramarital affair with another executive, and I was struck by his name: Harry Stonecipher. Stonecipher? Last names (at least, from European languages) fall into several broad categories. Some were job titles, long ago: Taylor (or Schneider, if you were German); Smith; Schmidt; Cooper (a maker of barrels, or Kubler if you made German barrels); Marshall. Others were associated with a place: Oxford, or Manchester. Often they were patronymics: Johnson; Neilson. Some, I suspect, were associated with a person's attributes: Long, and the aptly named drafting teacher I had in junior high: Pound. But Stonecipher? It almost sounds like a Native American name, like the last name of Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma P. Mankiller. Sunday, March 06, 2005
Gun Banner Arrested On Gun Violation I am shocked, shocked, to read that a prominent gun control advocate was arrested for possession of a gun with its serial number removed: A Springfield woman who began lobbying against gun violence after her son was shot to death in 2002 was arrested last week when police allegedly found an illegal gun and drugs in her home. Rebuilding Civilization From A Garbage Dump Or maybe you just want to build reasonably precise stuff on the cheap. A recurring theme of science fiction stories is the effort to rebuild civilization after either nuclear war, such as Alas, Babylon, or Panic in the Year Zero (1962), or natural catastrophe (Lucifer's Hammer). So much of our modern technological civilization is built around the ability to machine parts accurate to thousandths of an inch--or better. This is a pretty recent development; making parts consistently accurate to hundredths of inch would have distinguished you as a pretty amazing craftsman in the eighteenth century. Yes, we have all these wonderful machine tools (vertical mills, lathes) today, but what if you did not have access to those gadgets? Could you start from common items you would find in a garbage dump, and start to make thousandths of an inch accurate stuff? Here's how. It turns out that most precision machine tools rely on the turn of a screw. The photograph here is of a 1/4-20 machine screw (of which there must be several hundred million sitting around above ground).  What is that, exactly? It is a screw that fits in a 1/4" threaded hole, and that has 20 threads per inch (20 tpi). Twenty revolutions will move the screw one inch--and using a micrometer shows that this is really and truly the case--or pretty darn close. That means that moving the screw one revolution (and thus pushing a part against that screw) should move it 1/20th of an inch--and when I measure it, it seems to be .0532", which is about 6% from 1/20th of an inch--and most likely the discrepancy is because the last revolution was a bit more than one turn. Okay, one revolution this gets us to five hundredths of an inch--good, but not good enough to rebuild our machine tool civilization. Notice that nut with the numbers at the base? Hexagonal nuts have six sides--and I have used Liquid Paper and a pen to mark each side with the numbers 0 through 5. If I turn the screw, depending on which number is upright, I can get down one-sixth of five hundredths of an inch--or .0083" of precision. With a little more care--perhaps marking the left and right side of each of those six faces of the nut--we can get down to .00415" precision--or four thousandths of an inch. There are a lot of other common screws out there as well. The 1/4-28 screw (not quite so common) gives us 28 tpi--allowing us, using the technique above, to give very repeatable measurements of .003 inch. The very common 8-32 screws gives us 32 tpi, allowing .0026" measurements. A little more rare are 40 tpi screws (used in some handguns), which would let us go down to .0020" measurements. As long as you have a master source of precision--and we live in a sea of precisely made parts--you can make precision tools on the cheap. Machine Tool Owners My next product planning cycle is under way. If you can turn stainless steel, here's the part that I need.  Yes, it is effectively a mushroom with a 1/4" hole in the head, and the stalk of the mushroom is 3/8"-16 threaded. Sexual Abuse of Children in Foster Care I'm not completely comfortable with the details of this study reported in World Net Daily: A six-year study of sexual abuse committed by foster parents in Illinois found a highly disproportionate percentage of the cases were homosexual in nature.I will tell you that I am a little suspicious of how typical foster parents are. I've read quite a bit over the years that would suggest that foster parents may be atypical--perhaps more likely to have been abused as children themselves, and inclined to want to help, but with a lot of unresolved issues of their own. I have known one couple that was trying to become foster parents, partly because of the money that the county paid (this was in California), and they were good examples of people that should not have done it. He had been sexually abused as a child; she was pretty damaged as well, although I couldn't quite understand if this was her upbringing, or being married to this guy. Labels: child sexual abuse A Troubling Decision From the Connecticut Supreme Court: NEW HAVEN (AP) -- A former cab driver has pleaded guilty to a weapons charge for fatally shooting a passenger who had slashed his throat with scissors during a robbery.Now, I can understand why the Connecticut Attorney-General pursued the case. The job of the Attorney-General is to defend the laws of the state, regardless of how he feels about a particular statute. I can even understand the argument for a concealed weapon permit system of some sort, simply because it provides a quick way for a peace officer to verify that someone isn't a bad guy. I can also understand why Superior Court Judge Gold had taken the position that a cab driver is in his "place of business," and shouldn't need a permit to be armed in that location--especially an occupation as hazardous as being a cabbie. What I find a little incomprehensible is why a cabbie in Connecticut wouldn't have a concealed weapon permit. If there an occupation that justifies it more than cabbie, I can't imagine what it is. Connecticut is not, strictly speaking, a "shall issue" state, but the law is definitely biased in favor of issuance; I don't even live there, and I have a Connecticut concealed carry permit. Transgendered It just amazes me how rapidly what used to be recognized as a serious psychological problem has become its own minority group. About twenty years ago, my wife and I attended a class about child sexual abuse. My wife and I had run into an astonishing and depressing number of adult survivors (this was California, remember), and we decided that we wanted to know more about abusers and the problems of the victims. Most of the other students were in the health professions, and I was almost the only guy in the class. Anyway, over lunch we got to talking to a woman in the class whose husband today would doubtless be considered "transgendered." He wanted a sex change, because he didn't feel like he really belonged in a male body. His wife was distraught about this; she explained that her husband had grown up in a home with a macho Marine father, and a mother who had desperately wanted a little girl, not a little boy. As a result, Mom had made him wear dresses (at least at home), had painted his nails, etc. until he was old enough to refuse. Gee, why do you think he was conflicted about his sexual identity? Now I see absurd news stories like these about efforts to treat the confused as a legitimate minority group: Political epiphanies can occur in unexpected places. For Riki Dennis, a 35-year-old humanities student who is transsexual, it was the women's room at a rest stop on Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara.And this really sad story: METHUEN, Mass. (AP) A fourth-grader who was attending a city school as a girl before February vacation has returned to school as a boy.There are real differences (on average) between the brains of boys and girls. But the notion that being a tomboy means that she is a boy trapped in a girl's body is silly--and probably destructive to this girl's identity as she grows up. The whole "transgendered" idea makes some forms of homosexuality look almost normal. Labels: transgender What's The World Coming To? When an online publication called CampusJ.com, subtitled "Jewish Collegiate News" would be considered right of center by the left? Anyway, the most recent news items seem to be focused (unsurprisingly) on the rising tide of anti-Semitism, especially among faculty. Consensus (Ignoring Almost Half The Court) I mentioned a few days ago the absurdity of the Supreme Court's recent decision ruling that capital punishment for 16 and 17 year olds violated the Eighth Amendment since it was based on an emerging consensus. Another blogger points out that: Consensus is defined as “an opinion or position reached by a group as a whole". |
