Thumbs

Miki (our rambuctious little field spaniel puppy) and I were just playing in our living room. He decided that my right thumb was a chew toy, and those little puppy teeth are sharp! Before I could extract my thumb from his mouth (actually it was partway down his throat!), those little razors he calls teeth had raked a couple of nasty gashes down the length of my thumb.

I washed them out and discovered that if I carefully held my thumb perfectly straight, the blood didn’t gush out quite so badly. In fact, with just a bit of pressure for a couple of minutes, the bleeding stopped altogether. This meant that I could safely leave the kitchen sink and head for the bathroom, where I knew we kept a package of bandages. Debbie was out grocery shopping, so I was on my own.

Here’s where the challenge was: I had to get three bandages (to cover the length of the two cuts) out of the box, out of their paper wrapper, and remove the little papers that cover the sticky part — all without bending my thumb and starting the gusher all over again. Does that sound easy to you? Or at least feasible? Trust me: it is not easy…and in fact I could not do it at all. I eventually gave up trying, and just bent my thumb to get the job done and let the blood run into the bathroom sink. Once I had three bandages lying sticky-side-up on the counter, I straightened my thumb, reapplied pressure, and stopped the gusher again. Then I was able to put the bandages on with just my left hand; that wasn’t too hard.

It’s amazing how dependent we are on such a simple little thing like a thumb bending…

I remember another similar revelation about thirty years ago. This was a much more impactful situation: I had broken my right wrist rather badly, and I had a cast (the old-fashioned plaster kind) from my shoulder to my hand, with only about half my fingers protruding. The cast was strapped such that my forearm was held against my chest. I’m right-handed, so the only hand I could use for the eight weeks I was in a cast was my left hand. Everything was more difficult, even simple little things you’d never imagine, like opening a door (or a hatch on the ship I was stationed on; I was in the U.S. Navy at the time). Driving my stick-shift car was only possible when I rigged up a shift lever extension (a buddy welded it up for me) that let me use my left hand to shift — and I had to let go of the steering wheel to do that. Taking a shower was really challenging. For me the worst of all was trying to do my job (as an electronic technician): trying to use tools like soldering irons or pliers with my left hand was unbearably awkward and totally frustrating.

Not being able to bend my right thumb is much less of a problem, not least because within a day or so it will have healed enough to use again. But it sure is a reminder of all the human characteristics that we just take for granted, day in and day out…

Imminent Employment

I don’t think I’ve blogged about this before, but I’ve actually been unemployed for the past eight months — I was laid off from my role as CTO of FutureTrade this past October. Unemployed, in my case, does not mean without income: I’ve been consulting for several companies, and I’ve had a generous severance package from FutureTrade. So this period has not been one of hardship for us, thank goodness — and in many ways it has been quite enjoyable. For one thing, all of the consulting work has been done from my home office…and I just love the work environment here. But most importantly, all of the consulting work has been honest-to-goodness hands-on engineering. I haven’t had this much fun earning a living for a good many years!

But now one of my consulting clients has decided to offer me a job, and I’ve accepted their offer. As of this Monday (June 5), I’m officially employed. I can hear the snarky comments already — what on earth was this company thinking? They worked with me for a while as a consultant, and they still wanted to hire me? What is wrong with this place?

The company is Conifer Securities. And all snarking aside, I am just tickled pink to join a company with (a) a real need for someone with my skills and experience, (b) that is willing to have me work from home, (c) needs the skills and experience that I most enjoy employing, and (d) has a great bunch of folks (whom I already know!) to work with. Conifer is located in San Francisco, some 650 miles from me, but I don’t anticipate this making any difference at all…

Curta Calculator

When I was in high school (in the mid '60s), there were no electronic calculators. We did our math either by longhand (which I’m still fairly competent at) or with slide rules. As I was very interested in electronics, practical mathematics (algebra, trigonometry, and simple calculus) was an essential skill. I got fairly good at using a slide rule (more on that another day), but Dr. Brown (my high school physics teacher) had something even better for many purposes: a Curta mechanical calculator. He let me use it a few times, and I just loved it — but its cost was way over anything I could imagine my parents buying for me (a couple hundred dollars, as I recall), so I never even mentioned it to them.

The Curta was almost magical — it could add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers with up to 8 digits of precision (and answers to 14 digits). It used no batteries, and had no motors or electronics. The Curta worked through dozens and dozens of mechanical parts interacting in a complex way. You could hold it in one hand easily, working it with the other — and with a little practice, you could calculate far more accurately than is possible on a slide rule, and darned near as fast.

Oh, how I wanted a Curta.

Now I have one, thanks to a winning bid on eBay. Of course it doesn’t hold a candle to today’s miraculous calculators (not to mention personal computers). But it is still a marvelous little gadget, a testament to Curt Herzstark’s mechanical engineer genius. And it’s fun to use it! Just for fun, I will divide 48772.33 by 4.5538848 … and the answer (which took me 53 seconds to compute) is: 10710.049. Of course I confirmed that answer in about 5 seconds on Windows Calculator (and got a more precise answer), but that’s not the point!

Summer Is Here

It’s certainly no surprise to us that the temperature is 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) by 9 AM — this happens every summer. But it shocks us every year when the lovely spring weather (last weekend it was in the low 70s) gives way to our blast-furnace summer norms. This is the season when the house air conditioner is a prerequisite for life, not merely a luxury.

The graph at right (click for a larger version) shows the past week’s temperatures (in red, left scale) and relative humidity (in green, right scale). Last Saturday the high was 64, Sunday it was 73. Each day this week got progressively hotter; yesterday peaked at 90 and today is predicted to be in the high 90s or low 100s. Last night the humidity never went over a few percent; this tells you that it is very dry indeed, and all the surface water has evaporated — this is what happens just before our hottest days.

I went out to work this morning quite early, to take advantage of the relative cool. But even at night it was 74, and the temperature spiked as soon as the sun rose. By 8:30, working with my Husqvarna weed-whacker, I was panting from the heat, sweating profusely, and feeling light-headed. I quit work outside for the day at 8:30 am! Tomorrow I plan to be out at daybreak (about 5:30 am) whacking away — it’s a good thing my neighbors are some distance away!