Fortress Update

I still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that our safe-house is actually being built. After eight months of inactivity, suddenly (and completely inexplicably) my contractor has decided to finish the job. I mentioned earlier that I witnessed my contractor negotiating the job with the masons. Later I got to know the masons just a little bit better. It's a family affair: a father and his two sons. The father's name is Davey (at right, just before going home for the day); the older son Eduardo. I checked in a few times during the day today to see what progress there was, and if anything was needed. Each time, it was a pleasure to watch these men work – they clearly have a lot of experience as masons, and the way they make the job look effortless is a testament to their skills.

The work started with some careful measuring and calculating. From what I could tell, the main objectives of all this was to figure out exactly how many blocks were required on each layer (“run”) of blocks, to figure out where their outer edges should lie on the slab, and to make sure the vertical pieces of rebar were all in the right place to poke through the holes in the block. A complicating factor was the doorway; one piece of rebar had to be bent slightly to make that work. Then the tangible work commenced: they laid a first run of block down all around the building.

It was fascinating to watch carefully how the masons laid those blocks. They make it look so easy! The starting point was a single block, set down into a lot more mortar than was actually needed. Davey tapped this block gently into position, paying the most attention to the height of the block (I suppose to make sure the grout thickness underneath was correct). This block's height then became the reference height for all the rest of the blocks.

For all the subsequent blocks, the masons followed a pattern. First the blocks were set on end near where they'd be used. Then they would put some grout (again, much more than actually needed) on the top end. Next they would lay down heavy lines of grout on the slab (or later, on the underlying row of block) where the blocks would go. Then, one at a time, the upended blocks were turned sideways and set roughly into place. Then Davey would work his magic, carefully maneuvering the block by gentle taps until it was in exactly the right place, as determined by eyeball, straight-edge, and level. The last step was performed by the youngest son: cleaning up and removing the excess grout from the inside of the joints (as you can see in the photo above right).

Thinking like a nerdy engineer for a moment, it was interesting to note that he moved that block with all six classical degrees of freedom: forward/backward, left/right, up/down, and rotation about all three of those axes. That's quite a feat of spatial manipulation, but he made it look effortless and easy. I know darned well that were I to attempt such a thing, the result wouldn't be nearly as pretty…

On every second run of block, something slightly different occurs: a horizontal piece of rebar is run through all the blocks. They accomplished this by manually notching the three lengthwise segments of every block on that run. At right you can see Eduardo making cuts in those segments; later the youngest boy uses a hammer to carefully knock them out. After one of these notched runs is complete, the masons bend rebar as required to run it completely around the wall.

By the third run of block, there was very little of the original vertical rebar pieces left showing. Yet the plans call for vertical rebar running all the way up the wall. On asking, I found out that this requirement will be satisfied by placing vertical pieces of rebar in place when the wall is completely built. This is much easier than trying to thread every block through 8 feet or so of rebar!

At right you can see Davy using the level as he completes a corner. This extra care is need to make sure that the runs of block along each wall meet up on the corners correctly. I watched him do this several times; he's not satisfied until the error is invisibly small.

The end result is a perfect block wall. Well, at least it is perfect within the capacity of my eyeballs to detect error: I cannot see anything out of whack on these walls. In the photo at right, you can see the first three runs on the south wall – everything about it appears to be straight as an arrow and perfectly aligned.

Davey and his sons are due back on the job at 7:30 am tomorrow morning. I don't know them well, but I know them enough to have developed a sense that Davey is a reliable, straight-up kind of guy (unlike someone else I might mention). When he tells me that he'll be here tomorrow morning, I'm inclined to believe him.

What a nice feeling that is, and what a refreshing change in the context of this project.

I'll end with these scenes of three skilled masons at work…

Botany Photo

Today the Botany Photo of the Day site is featuring this Mexican plant (Mentzelia hispida). I wish it grew around here; it's gorgeous!

Cox & Forkum nail it again, this time in response to the Democrat's maneuvers on Capitol Hill to eliminate a proposed “shield law” that would prevent lawsuits against citizen informants who notified authorities of suspicious behavior they'd observed.

Why would the Democrats want to eliminate this shield law? The only plausible answer that I've seen to that question is this: the Democrats are so beholden to the litigation attorney's (they are major contributors to the Democratic Party) that they are willing to trade off national security and American lives .

Cox & Forkum, as usual, perfectly capture the insanity.

Fortress Update

Debbie came into my office a few minutes ago with spectacularly good news: the masons have arrived, and they have begun laying the block for our safe house (aka “The Fortress”).

I have no idea why my contractor suddenly decided to get my job done, but it really does look like that's what's happening. The masons are subcontractors, and I heard him negotiate the job with them – all the way through to completion.

I'm feeling a little faint; I need to lie down for a few minutes…

Electric Father

My father called me yesterday from my parents' home in New Jersey. I could tell that he was very excited, and I soon found out why – just a short while before he called, he had been outside on their covered porch when lightning struck a big oak tree just 10 feet away!

He reports that chunks of smoking oak and a number of fried squirrels fell out of the sky all around him. His hair (he has a few tufts left) stood straight up, because he had acquired a high-voltage static electrical charge. He had no trouble hearing the sound; his normal hearing aids were unnecessary. I think he was still pumped up with adrenaline when he called..

I've been near lightning strokes several times in my life, but never as close as 10 feet – and that's one experience I'd be happy to never have! He was actually quite lucky that none of the current flowed through him or his clothing, as that could have badly injured or even killed him – ten feet is close enough that it could have jumped over to him if he was the path of low resistance. But he was dry, and standing on a dry wooden porch, while surrounded by wet (from the pouring rain) trees and ground, so the lightning naturally took other, lower resistance, paths to ground.

Tagged Again!

Simon tagged me on his blog, looking for eight random facts about me. The rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts.
2) List 8 random facts about yourself.
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them)
4) Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they've been tagged!

Well, I can easily supply eight random facts about me (I'm a very random guy!) – but I don't know any other bloggers (aside from Simon!) well enough to tag them back, so I'll just ignore that part.

Eight random facts about me:

• I've been to quite a few places in the world. In the 1970s, while in the U.S. Navy, I visited dozens of countries around the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean – and a few out-of-the-way places like Iceland and Greenland as the Navy flew me around the world to catch my ship. In the 1990s and later, business travel took me to Europe (especially England, Germany, Estonia and Russia) many times, and to some other places as well.
  
  
• I know next-to-nothing about sports (to the point where I cannot reliably tell baseball, football, socker, and tennis apart – I do recognize golf, though). I care about them even less.
  
  
• I wasn't always a software engineer. My initial professional interest was radio. That morphed into digital electronics when I got interested in microcomputers as a hobby in the 1970s. I didn't really get totally focused on software until the mid 1980s – and I still keep my hand in on electronic design.
  
  
• I don't watch any broadcast television at all, and haven't for quite a few years. I watch only a few movies each year (and only at home; I haven't been to a theater for many years). The most modern modern pop music I've listened to was made in the early '80s (and most of it before the mid-'70s). As a consequence, much to the amusement of my friends, there's a vast swath of modern culture that I am completely ignorant of. Just to give you a sample: I've never watched an episode of Friends, The Simpsons, or 24.
  
  
• I read a lot, both online and books – and my reading is eclectic, to say the least. Right at the moment, I'm reading several books: a Martha Grimes English murder mystery, a Java programming book, a book about the effects of randomness on financial systems, and a book about engineering failures and their causes. When I was young (and extremely introverted, and fearful of basically the whole world), reading was my major form of escape – I thought of the county and high school librarians as close friends. I read hundreds of books in my high school years, and actually won an ad hoc award in high school because they'd never seen anyone read so much. All that practice reading built very strong reading skills and a love of reading that has never waned.
  
  
• I detest beer; always have. I've tried roughly a dozen various beers over the years, usually with a friend telling me “Even if you've hated every other beer you've tried, you'll love this one!” They all suck. This is a bit of a social issue with my German, Estonian, and Russian friends!
  
  
• I used to skydive (in the '70s); I've made over 400 jumps. Every time I see skydivers in the air, I'm tempted to start again. I was jumping just before ram-air parachutes (the rectangular ones that basically every jumper uses today) were common and safe. My parachute was a round, 27' diameter “Russian Para-Commander”, a slightly more maneuverable than usual model. It had lift-over-drag ratio of about 1.1:1, which means for every 10 feet you fell, you could travel 11 feet forward. By contrast, modern parachutes can have lift-over-drag ratios of 5:1 or even higher.
  
  
• I'm obsessed with knowing how things work, whether it is something in nature or something man-made. I suspect this is related to loving engineering. I spend a lot of time (and reading) satisfying my own curiosity on such things, generally with nothing actually useful learned. I'm actually quite uncomfortable using a piece of machinery if I don't know (at least in a general way) how it works.
  

Tippy Ships

Here's last week's poll and its results (at right).

Two people got it right – the correct answer is the longitudinal center of gravity.

Many moons ago, this little fact was vividly demonstrated to me, in a memorable way. I was serving on a U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S. Long Beach. This was a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser, a one-of-a-kind experimental platform for surface nuclear propulsion, electronic systems, and missiles. It was also, oddly enough, the tallest ship in the Navy – about 210' above the waterline if memory serves me right.

On the day of my center-of-gravity demonstration, we were cruising off the southern California coast. A storm moved in, quickly and a bit unexpectedly – and we were subjected to the fiercest winds and largest waves I'd yet experienced. In various maneuvers the ship was subjected to winds and waves that tipped it far over – 48°, according to the “barfometer” (clinometer) in my working space. The really remarkable thing was how long it took to straighten back up – and then swing the other way – it seemed to take forever, but I timed a couple of the recoveries at over 50 seconds (the time between maximum tipping and being back straight up).

Both the large angle of tipping and the slow recovery were caused by the ship having an unusually high longitudinal center of gravity (LCG): just a foot or two below the waterline. The further below waterline a ship's LCG is, the more stable it is.

But what is an LCG? The easiest way for me to visualize it is this: Imagine a ship with a shaft all the way through it, lengthwise. Then imagine this shaft is located so that the ship could be rotated around it while balanced. That shaft would be directly through the LCG.

Now imagine that same ship (with the magic LCD shaft) in the water. If that shaft were exactly at the water line, then it wouldn't matter to the ship whether it was right-side up or up-side down – it would neither right itself or flip up-side down. If the shaft were above the water line, the ship would immediately flip over, up-side down. And if the shaft were below the water line (as it would be on any real ship), the ship is stable in an upright position.

Naval architects (that's what the engineers who design ships are called) pay very close attention to the LCG; it is one of several critical design parameters for any ship. I was told that the U.S.S. Long Beach was initially designed with an LCG considerably lower than it was when I was on board. The LCG was raised when additional superstructure was installed in the 1960s, along with large amounts of additional electronic equipment – some of it located far above the waterline – in the last 1960s and early 1970s (I served on board in the mid-1970s). Whether that raised LCG was accidental or intentional, I couldn't say.

But it sure was uncomfortable!

Fortress Progress!

If you're a regular reader of my blog, then you've suffered through quite a few unhappy posts over my frustrations with getting a fire-proof “safe house” built. I started this product last October – 9 months ago – and it still is not completed. But today, for the first time in 8 months I can report some progress. Substantial progress – what you see at right is a slab, poured (14 yards of concrete) and finished! I just came back into our house from wetting down the slab, something I must do for the next few days as it cures.

The fellow at right is my contractor, Ruben Ponce. He hails from Chula Vista, which is roughly 30 miles from here; he does concrete jobs all over southern San Diego County. Don't even think about using him until you've read my previous posts – and feel free to contact me directly (through comments or by email). My experiences have been a very mixed bag – high quality work with an almost unbelievable inability to get the job done.

I've never had the chance to observe a concrete job from close up before; the process was more interesting than I expected it to be. The “pumper” showed up first, towing a diesel-powered concrete pump behind his pickup. This concrete pump would move the concrete from the nearest point to the project that the concrete truck could reach (about 100' away) to the project itself. Carlos the pumper told me that he owns several of these pumps, plus a “boom truck” – one of those impossible-looking articulated machines that looks a bit like a cherry-picker with a few extra segments. His pump is a piston pump, with two pistons working alternately to keep pressure in the hose relatively steady. One feature of the pump Carlos tried to explain to me, but failed – I had to Google it to figure it out. His pump has a tank of high-pressure nitrogen attached to it, and I had trouble imagining what that could be used for in pumping concrete! It turns out that the nitrogen is used to pressurize a surge chamber that helps keep pressure (and concrete moving down the line) during the brief time while the pump is switching over from one piston to the other.

Shortly after Carlos arrived, the first concrete truck arrived. This first truck was carrying 9 yards of concrete, and so was very heavy. He had to turn around in my yard so that he could back up my driveway and a small hill to where Carlos' rig was set up. The driver and Carlos worked together in a very practiced manner to get the truck's chute lined up with the big funnel that leads into the pump; it was obvious that both of them had done this little dance many times before…

Once the truck and pump were physically lined up, Carlos added some water to the mix (I'm not sure why), and then the driver positioned himself to control the rate at which concrete was fed into the pump. His job seems quite simple – just control the speed at which the giant drum spins so that the funnel on the concrete pump is mostly full. Something I didn't know before: the drum on the concrete trucks spins one way when they're running down the road (keeping the concrete well mixed) and the other way when they're unloading. There are baffles inside the drum that form a sort of Archimede's screw to pump the concrete out through the action of the drum's turning. It's an ingenious solution that eliminates any need to tilt the drum.

Carlos the pumper doubles as the “placer” – the guy who has the job of placing the concrete in the right place and in the right quantity. He started in one corner of the footing trench and worked his way around the entire foundation, filling the trench but leaving the slab itself empty. Ruben's son told me that this was done in order to allow the footing to begin curing before the slab was poured on top of it. It took Carlos something like 45 minutes to fill the entire footing trench.

At that point he started placing the concrete for the slab itself. He has an amazingly good eye – no doubt developed through much practice – for judging the amount of concrete needed to precisely fill the form. The other two workers (the fellow on the left is Ruben's son) attacked the concrete Carlos placed with pieces of scrap lumber, very quickly getting it flat enough to tell if any area needed more concrete, or needed to have some removed. There wasn't a single instance I observed where Carlos' estimate was off by more than a few cubic inches per square yard of surface…

The concrete placement started along one side of the slab, and proceeded toward the opposite side. The other guys worked immediately on the areas Carlos was filling, just moments behind him. They used nothing more than a piece of scrap lumber, worked very cleverly, to get a rough level just inches behind where Carlos had just placed concrete. Just after I took the photo at right, the first concrete truck ran out. Within a few minutes, the second truck was backed up to Carlos' pump, and the work recommenced as though nothing had happened.

After all the concrete was placed, the whole crew of four workers got very busy. After the whole slab was rough-leveled, they started on the detail – making sure the sidewalks sloped gently outwards (so rainwater will run off and not collect) and the inside floor was level. Then they went to work with in an interesting collection of odd (to my eye, anyway) tools to get the surface nearly perfectly flat and very smooth. The photos below are in sequence from left to right, showing the guys working on this phase of the project. The very last step was to use a broom to create a light texture on the part of the slab that will be a sidewalk outside the building.

Public Policy Discussions

Larry E. (one of my 3.5 faithful readers) made this comment in an email conversation:

You know, I don’t think we ever actually have a debate. I can’t remember ever seeing one. Just a series of vague questions with pat talking points. Often the same talking points repeated from “debate” to “debate”. I’d much rather see a discussion. And exchange of ideas. Maybe a political correspondent and a candidate for a couple of hours actually discussing a topic rather than jumping around and never exploring where they really stand.

For example, Hillary Clinton talks in a general way about universal healthcare. Ok. On the face of it, everyone being healthy sounds like a good idea. And certainly costs are out of control. But I’d like to ask in detail, how do we pay for it? Who would it cover? Every American or would it be another thing that other people get for free but I have to pay for myself and now them? What is to stop my employer for reducing benefits or dropping coverage if the government is doing it? How would we reduce the cost to the taxpayer? How would providing health insurance for poor Americans be cheaper than just treating them at emergency rooms since we know that the cost of health insurance exceeds the cost of health care when amortized over large groups. That’s how insurance companies make their money. Without a lengthy discussion by someone that is interested, we won’t find out where this is going until it becomes another failed, expensive, social experiment. And this can lead into discovering that if she wants everyone to have “free” healthcare, what other benefits does she want to give? Free college? If so, does the government only pay for a community college or do we get free Harvard or something?

I doubt it will happen, but I’d really rather see a discussion rather than a debate. I think we may learn something and you never know, there may be some kernel of good ideas there…. Somewhere.

A substantive public policy discussion in the public political arena? I'd love to see that, too, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. Not for diabolical reasons, but because the American electorate is just not interested in any depth on policy – their eyes start to glaze over after about 8 syllables… Too harsh? I think not – because if the majority of Americans were actually interested in a substantive public policy discussion, the politicians and the lamestream media would be falling all over themselves to provide it, for the power and money that would accrue. Capitalism is a wondrous clarifier when it comes to understanding what people actually want.

So I think our substantive public policy discussions will always happen in the backwaters, not on television shows or in high-volume newspapers. The closest thing I've seen to such a discussion in the “mainstream media” has appeared in Reason magazine – and most people, I suspect, wouldn't lump it in with the mainstream media. Least of all the publishers!

But the political blogs are doing a bang-up job of making these discussions publicly available – and even truly public, on those blogs that allow comments. If you want to engage in a substantive discussion on public policy, I know of no better place to pursue it.

If you take a stab at it, you'll quickly notice an interesting and somewhat puzzling pattern: the righty blogs and libertarian blogs are chock-a-block full of such discussions, while they are hard to find on the lefty blogs (empty rhetoric and foaming-at-the-mouth attacks are much more popular there). Certainly the lefties have no monopoly on lunatics and nutballs – but for whatever reason, that fringe is much more visible on the lefty sites. I suspect there's an important message in that fact, but I really don't know what it is…

Steve vs. Mann

Orson Scott Card, writing at The Ornery American, has an excellent essay on the state of the science and politics of anthropogenic global warming. It's perhaps the best summary I've seen yet. He leads with the story of Mann's famous and fraudulent “hockey stick” curve that's been used so widely to illustrate the case for anthropogenic global warming, with this lead:

Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have.

An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann."

The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.

Well, that's not acceptable.

Then he very nicely tells the story of how a Canadian businessman (Steve) did what no “scientist” deigned to do: checked and tested Mann's data and methodology, and in the process thoroughly debunked the hockey stick curve. This story was largely ignored by the lamestream media, so intent were they on the ideologically correct anthropogenic global warming narrative. It's a shame, for they missed a darned good story.

Card continues by discussing the proposed “solutions” for global warming – none of which will actually work (and all the scientists agree on that!). He also asks some interesting questions, such as: what makes us think that global warming is actually bad, no matter what the cause?

It's a very interesting read, and you shouldn't miss the whole thing.

Hummingbird Ponder

Imagine for a moment that you're a hummingbird living near our home. Every day, you feed at the feeders that somehow never run out of nectar. How do you perceive those feeders and the humans that replenish them?

I got to pondering this question as I refilled our feeders this morning (five quarts of hummer juice!). I know the hummingbirds recognize me, as their behavior is much different (unafraid) with me than with other people. I can also see that they know to check out the refilled feeders when I bring them out, after leaving the empty feeders alone. So there is some consciousness there of the situation. But I wonder exactly what it is?

For instance, do the hummers see the feeders as some sort of “magic flower” that somehow never runs out of nectar? Or do they realize that the feeders are contrivances for their benefit? And how do they perceive me? As some sort of “nectar god”? If mother hummers can talk to their babies, what do they tell them about the feeders and me?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Climate Data Problem?

As if the problems with models and mis-placed incentives weren't enough, now there's good reason to be skeptical of the historical climate data that underlies the actual observations of global warming! Some skeptical climate scientists are calling into question the way in which the temperature data is being collected.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: it appears that some number of the weather stations used to collect temperature data are located improperly, in spots where the temperature is artificially high because of asphalt, reflections from buildings, or even hot equipment. The photo above shows the Wickenburg, Arizona measurement site. The temperature measuring instrument is in the white finned coffee-can shaped container sitting atop a pole – on an asphalt parking lot, next to buildings, and right next to hot equipment!

Certainly not all stations are located badly like this. Of particular interest of the stations that started out in perfectly ok locations, but which had cities and big towns grow around them, and perhaps had site “improvements” made which would introduce temperature bias. One skeptical climate scientist decided to enlist citizen help to reach the goal of surveying all of the 1,200+ stations – check out his web site here if you'd like to help. The results so far (160 sites surveyed) show a definite and substantial problem: many sites are located such that you'd expect to see temperature increases from local effects. These are the measurements being used to predict global warming, but what they're really doing is telling us that the asphalt is hot. Doh!

One of my favorite bloggers surveyed two sites, including the one in the photo above. Check out his report.

It's still true: the more I learn about global warming, especially anthropogenic global warming, the more skeptical I become...

A Ponder...

Driving in my truck yesterday, I happened to notice the odometer was getting close to 150,000 miles. My 1996 Toyota T100 has given me nearly flawless service since I bought it more than 10 years ago. Just recently I had the first expensive maintenance in its entire lifetime, and I expect that to be the last for at least another 50,000 or so miles.

But I got to pondering another significance of that 150,000 miles. All but a very few miles of that were driven by me – so that 150,000 miles represents a whole bunch of my personal time. If you figure I averaged 50 MPH over they entire life of the truck (that's optimistic), that means I have spent something like 3,000 hours driving my truck. And that doesn't even count the time I spent driving our other vehicle!

Three thousand hours on the road. I know where most of this came from: until five years ago, I had a job that required me to commute to the office every day. Until two years ago, I traveled to the office once a week. The past two years I've worked from my home, with no commute at all.

Back in the bad old days when I was a manager, we used to figure that a normal employee worked 2,000 hours per year (50 weeks at 40 hours per week). So that 3,000 hours is equivalent to a year and a half of employment. If you figure in the fact that the vast majority of my commute time in this truck happened over just six years of employment (when I was commuting every day), a year and a half of wasted time starts to be significant.

The bottom line is that both I and my employer are gaining from the absence of my commute. I'm a salaried employee and don't formally keep track of my hours – but I guarantee you they exceed 40 hours per week (ask my wife!). I gain personally as well – no more frustrating rush hour commutes, and some more free time to spend with my family, on my hobbies, or on my honey-do list (I'll let you guess where the priorities are <smile>).

I love it that my Toyota shrugs off the 150,000 miles … but I hate it that I had to waste all that time driving to find that out!

Firearms Refresher Course

From Jim M., who starts out with this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not."

And then starts the actual course:

FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE

1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.
   
   
2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.
   
   
3. Colt: The original point and click interface.
   
   
4. Gun control is not about guns; it's about control.
   
   
5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords? (Ed.: See what's happening in England, where there's a serious move afoot to outlaw knives!)
   
   
6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.
   
   
7. "Free" men do not ask permission to bear arms.
   
   
8. If you don't know your rights you don't have any.
   
   
9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.
   
   
10. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights reserved.
    
    
11. What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
    
    
12. The Second Amendment is in place in case the politicians ignore the others.
    
    
13. 64,999,987 firearms owners killed no one yesterday.
    
    
14. Guns only have two enemies; rust and politicians.
    
    
15. Know guns, know peace, know safety. No guns, no peace, no safety.
    
    
16. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.
    
    
17. 911 - government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.
    
    
18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.
    
    
19. Criminals love gun control -- it makes their jobs safer.
    
    
20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
    
    
21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
    
    
22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
    
    
23. Enforce the "gun control laws" we ALREADY have, don't make more.
    
    
24. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves.
    
    
25. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.
    
    
26. "A government of the people, by the people, for the people..."

My guns are handy, ready to punch large holes in varmints (we have lots of those!) and bad guys…

New Poll

There's a new poll up, at the right. This one tests your understanding of the mechanics of a ship… Get it right and you might have a career in naval architecture!

Why is the Sky Blue?

I have smart readers! 60% of you who responded to the poll got the right answer: scattering. And nobody took the dunce's answer (pigment).

The simplified explanation: if the atmosphere above us was perfectly transparent (so that the sun's light shined straight through it), the sky would be pitch black. But a phenomenon called “Rayleigh scattering” causes a little of the sun's light to be scattered in random directions, which is why the sky isn't pitch black. Rayleigh scattering is sensitive to the light's wavelengths – shorter wavelengths (the blue end of the spectrum) are scattered more than longer wavelengths.

And that, my friends, is why the sky is blue and not black. Much more, including the interesting effects of Mies scattering, here, here, here, and here.

Mercury

This morning the planet Mercury was at its greatest elongation (angular distance from the sun) as seen from Earth – which means this morning was a great time to try to observe Mercury. No binoculars or telescopes are required; it's plenty bright enough to see with the naked eye. It's been many years since I tried to locate Mercury in the sky, and I remember it being very difficult to find.

Not this time! I went outside at 4:30 am, about 75 minutes before sunrise, and looked over in the direction where the sun would be coming up – and there it was! A small, bright, orangish “star” right where it should be.

The image above is shamelessly stolen from Bryan Brandenburg's excellent blog. More information on the planet Mercury (and viewing it) can be found here, here, here, and here.

Random Numbers

Here's a fact that surprises many people – even many computer professionals: one of the most difficult challenges for a computer system is coming up with a truly random number. In fact, without special “non-deterministic” hardware, it is provably impossible for a computer to generate a truly random number.

The reason for random numbers being a challenge for computers is that computers are, by their very nature, “deterministic”. Everything they do is completely predictable, if you know the software that's running on them. Over the years, many talented computer scientists have invested large efforts in developing so-called “pseudo-random” algorithms. These algorithms generate numbers that appear to be random (in that a human can't predict what the next pseudo-random number will be), but actually are completely predictable and even repeatable. More recently there has been a determined effort (especially with Linux) to build systems that collect some truly random information available to a computer (such as the interval between keystrokes, or the delay between sending a packet and receiving a response, or the time it takes to read data from a hard disk) – but these efforts suffer from the low rate of truly random information and unexpected (non-random) patterns that show up. Truly random numbers – meaning numbers that are provably unpredictable no matter what information you have – are still only possible with special hardware attached to your computer. Such hardware exploits some known-to-be-truly-random (e.g., non-deterministic) natural phenomenon, such as the timing of radioactive decay.

This fact has some important consequences. Probably the two biggest consequences: it means that many cryptographic systems have an inherent weakness, and it means that many computer models (in particular, a common kind of model called the “Monte Carlo model”) exhibit some very undesirable biases.

The weakened cryptographic systems are those that depend on a randomly-selected key. A good example of such a system is the very widely used SSL system – this is what you use every time you go to a secure web site. There's no need to panic about this – it's still true that the effort required to break SSL is far more costly than any benefit an attacker might get – and it's also true (so far) that breaking SSL on the basis of the random key selection is theoretical.

Bias in Monte Carlo models is a problem with more immediate consequences. Such models are the basis of pricing many financial instruments (options, many bonds, and especially complex derivatives); errors of any kind in these models could have millions or even billions of dollars in jeopardy. Another common use of these models is in weather forecasting, where errors could cost millions in unnecessary watering or other agricultural activities. Monte Carlo models are used to test designs for new buildings, bridges, airplanes, etc. – where human safety is at issue. For all of these uses, and the many more uses of Monte Carlo models, truly random numbers are, well, truly needed.

Lists of random numbers have been available on the Internet for quite a while. These are useful, but for large scale and oft-repeated modeling they are not enough. What's been missing – until now – is an Internet-based service for retrieving truly random numbers. Such a service is now available, at the Quantum Random Bit Generator Service. Anyone involved with Monte Carlo models will find this very interesting indeed – and I would expect to see some cryptographic systems make use of this service once the secure version of it becomes available…

The Real War

Strategy Page has an excellent article about the pervasive corruption in Middle Eastern governments, and the challenges of cleaning it up. A sample:

But the war is still not the major problem. Corruption and incompetent government are.

Corruption is pervasive throughout the Middle East, and so common that it is simply accepted by most locals and foreign visitors. But the inability to create a civil society leads to widespread incompetence in government. This is made worse in Iraq, because the 2003 invasion put the ruling class, largely composed of Sunni Arabs, out of power. The Kurds had been free for over a decade, protected by British and American air power. The Kurds still had corruption and a shortage of skills, but they had been able to develop a peacefulness and prosperity that was in sharp contrast to the rest of Iraq. It's amazing what peace and some honest government will do. Northern Iraq is a striking example of what the rest of Iraq could be like. But you can't do it in a hurry.

The article is fairly long, and full of interesting detail and observation:

More American troops are now embedded with Iraqi police and military units. Partly they are there to advise, but mostly they are there to spy. When incompetent or corrupt officials are spotted, the American troops can either turn them around or turn them in.

Go read the whole thing.

Unintended Consequences...

Last fall, California's voters – by a 70% majority – passed “Jessica's Law”. This law makes it illegal for sex offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a school or park. The basic idea is very simple and hard to argue with: keep the sick creeps away from the kids.

Previously a court ruled that the law could only be applied to offenders released after the ballot measure was passed last November. A review of the records of these recently-released offenders shows that about 2,100 of them are living in areas that violate the law. California's cities and towns tend to have large numbers of parks and schools that are widely distributed, and in many communities Jessica's law effectively bars these sex offenders from living in the community at all, as there is no place more than 2,000 feet from a school or park.

And this leads to the unintended consequence: for lack of any other legal place to live, these sex offenders will be forced to move to rural areas. When you consider the large number of these sex offenders (and that's depressing enough all by itself!), it becomes obvious that having them all moving into the rural areas is a real issue – those areas will quickly have a very high proportion of sex offenders in the population. This is a special concern because sex offenders are particularly likely to repeat their offenses; rehabilitated sex offenders are rare stories.

We live in just such a rural area; there is no park or school within 2,000 feet of us. While we don't have any children, we don't much like the idea of these sex offenders – with their known propensity to re-offend – living in our neighborhood. We also don't much like the idea of them living near kids in the city.

I think the real problem is that we let these people roam amongst the public at all. In my opinion, we are far too willing, as a society, to risk our children's safety in order to allow a sex offender to go free. I would much rather see us treat child molesters as seriously ill mental health patients, and incarcerate them in appropriate facilities until and if we can be certain they are “cured” – even if that means they are incarcerated for life.

Cruelty in Santa Rosa

This morning's news includes a hard-to-believe story of animal cruelty: two 15 year old girls setting a trapped 8 week old kitten on fire, and laughing as it burned.

This actually happened last month, in Santa Rosa, California. The news this morning is that the kitten (named “Adam” by the people caring for it) is clinging to life – and the girls have been charged with animal cruelty.

These two girls are obviously not of the “sugar, spice, and everything nice” variety. I rather miss those old-fashioned sorts of young girls…

Color Perception

The way we perceive color is very different from what you might think (if you've ever thought about this at all!). When someone with normal color vision looks around them, they see a world full of colors – an infinite variety of hues and brightnesses. This perception is created by a relatively simple set of color sensors (in the retina at the back of your eyeball) and a lot of fancy interpretation by your brain.

Consider this simple-sounding color perception example – the color of a tiny patch of clear blue sky. You perceive that as a specific color: a bright, light blue. In actual fact, the “color” of the sky is much more complex than that. It is not a high intensity of a single wavelength of visible light (as a laser is); instead, it is a mix of a broad range of wavelengths from very short ultraviolet light to very long infrared light. The blue end of these wavelengths are slightly higher intensity than the red end, and we perceive the mix as the bright, light blue of the sky.

The physical mechanism by which our eyes sense the various wavelengths of light is well understood. Our retinas have “sensors” (the so-called “cones”) that respond to three different sections of the visible light spectrum. The graph at right shows their response in a typical person – as you can see, it is quite arbitrary. In the case of our hypothetical blue sky, all three sensors would respond: the S cones (blue) most intensely, the M cones (green) slightly less intensely, and the L cones (red) even slightly less. Our brain takes that combination and interprets it as the bright, light blue of the sky.

A digital camera has sensors that mimic those of our eyes; the better cameras do so quite closely. A camera taking a photo of our example's patch of sky would record the color as intensities of red, green, and blue: something like 100% blue, 99.6% green, and 99.4% red. If you were to view that photo on your computer monitor, three different tiny dots – one red, one green, one blue (look at your screen with a magnifying glass and you can see them!) – each lit up brightly, with the blue one slightly brighter. Our eyes see that mix of three wavelengths as being nearly identical to the broad range of wavelengths in the real blue sky, and we're successfully tricked into seeing the same color.

A different kind of camera sensor is under development today – one that can record the actual spectrum at every tiny piece (“pixel”) of a photo. For scientific purposes, this is incredibly valuable information. Often it is possible to identify a particular substance (such as a particular metal, mineral, etc.) from the reflected spectrum of light. Such a camera mounted on a robot space explorer could identify all the minerals it could see on the surface of a planet; on a military vehicle, it could see the difference between natural objects and camouflaged objects. One could imagine all kinds of interesting things to do with images that have so much information in them. For example, software might analyze such images to locate wildlife – so someone might build a pair of binoculars that automatically pointed out the wildlife to you!

Currently there is no system that I'm aware of that can reproduce such an image with a full spectrum of wavelengths – but if we were to imagine such a system, then the spectrum imaging camera's photos could be seen in exactly the same way as they originally appeared. Such an image would be indistinguishable from the real thing, even by sensitive scientific instruments.

The next few years of imaging technology promise to be very interesting indeed. Many companies and scientists are working on this technology, some aimed at consumer cameras and others aimed at more exotic objectives – but anything useful is almost certain to end up in readily purchasable cameras, as this area is intensely competitive…

I want those binoculars!

Before and After

This evening I sat down to start restoring a fine old Dring & Fage slide rule, and I finally remembered to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: show a “before” and “after” photo.

This particular slide rule dates back to the mid-1800s. It's an unusual style, with two slides on each side of the body. The condition of this example is superb, with almost no damage or even signs of wear. The only notable problems are (1) it is filthy, as you might expect from something 150 years old, and (2) the parts fit too tightly to move smoothly.

In the photo above, the top piece is a segment of an uncleaned slide and the bottom piece is a segment of a cleaned slide. This rule has four slides plus a rather large body – it took me 45 minutes to clean the first slide, so the whole rule will probably take about 5 hours to clean.

The cleaning process is simple, but tedious: I soak an old washrag, fold it into quarters on my worktable, sprinkle some Bon Ami onto a corner of the washrag, and then carefully scrub one little piece of my work at a time. The trick is to scrub hard enough to get off all the soiling, but not hard enough to do any damage to the finish – the only way I know how to do this is trial-and-error, starting with very little pressure and working my way up.

Once I've thoroughly scrubbed the entire workpiece, I inspect it carefully for any firmly adhered stuff. These chunks I carefully work off with dental picks. This particular piece had a few specks of something that looked like wax, plus a few paint droplets. Most of the pieces this old that I restore have far more adhered junk.

The last cleaning step is to rinse the workpiece, which is more of a challenge than it sounds. Slide rules like this have very finely engraved lines on them, and if they're made from certain woods (such as mahogany) open pores. These engravings and pores accumulate soap, feldspar powder from the Bon Ami, and fine particles of whatever the slide rule was exposed to in its life. All of this stuff must be rinsed out, and usually the force of the tap water is not enough – I also have to scrub out all the pores with a very fine, stiff-bristled brush. That last bit can be quite tedious!

Once I've cleaned the entire slide rule, and all the parts are thoroughly dried, I'll apply several coats of Johnson's Paste Wax. That will protect any bare wood that's been exposed, and it will fill in small pores and scratches. I let the wax dry for a few hours and then polish it up with a shoe-polishing rag. In the photo above, the bottom slide has been cleaned but not waxed; it will be a little darker and much shinier once it's been waxed.

One interesting thing I've learned about these old wooden slide rules is that they are impervious to water. When I first started restoring these instruments, I was afraid to get them even slightly wet – I figured that would raise the grain and ruin the finish. After a few accidental soakings caused no harm, I started getting bolder about the use of water – and now I don't hesitate to put a 200 year old instrument directly in the tap water. The only slide rule I've ever damaged with water was an unfinished wooden rule made by Lawrence (an American manufacturer of crude, low-end slide rules), and even that one was easily fixed with a little fine sandpaper. The combination of water and Bon Ami cleans the old wooden instruments better than anything else I've ever found…

Fowler's Universal Calculator

This is a fine example of a watch-style circular slide rule, albeit a very large one – it is 87mm (about 3½ inches) in diameter. Click on the photo at right for a large version, or visit my slide rule collection for all the details.

Using one of these slide rules is a bit more work than an ordinary linear slide rule (turning the knobs is slightly tedious), but they pack a lot of accuracy into a very small package. With its three-segment D scale, this one can multiply and divide with the same accuracy as a linear slide rule that is 49 cm (over 19 inches) long – not back for something that fits conveniently into your pocket!

The Fowler watch-style slide rules (they made many models) seem somehow quintessentially English to me: heavy, sturdy, practical, and yet quite sophisticated. I know of no American-made slide rule even remotely like this one, though several American manufacturers made circular slide rules. There were several English manufacturers of fine watch-style circular slide rules, at least one French manufacturer, and even the Soviets made a cheap imitation. But the English models have a unique style that, for whatever reason, was never duplicated outside of England…

Hit And Run Wreck

Via NBC San Diego, this news (more photos here) of a hit-and-run wreck that seriously injured a mother of four, but spared her kids:

Police said that the driver of a pickup truck took off running after he hit a truck with a mother and her four children inside.

The wreck took place on Monday afternoon on Melody Road in Jamul.

According to investigators, the truck with the family inside was following behind the suspect's pickup, which had pulled over to the shoulder. When the family drove by the truck, its driver pulled out to make a U-turn and slammed into her truck. Authorities said the driver fled the scene. A passenger riding inside the vehicle stayed with the pickup, investigators said. The children were apparently unharmed in the wreck, but their mother was seriously injured.

The driver fled the scene on foot. Given that the police have his truck and his passenger, one would think the police would be able to identify, locate and apprehend him quickly. I sure hope so...

I don't know anything further about this incident. If any of my readers know more, please leave comments with the additional information.

Would You Be Useful?

Imagine you could travel back in time … say, a couple thousand years. Would you be able to teach people about technologies that are now common, but were unknown then? That's the question The Universe As asks:

If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness. If you do poorly on the quiz, as most people likely will, then just let that inspire you to study up more on how things work and where raw materials come from.

Take the quiz, and leave your score in the comments. I scored 8 out of 10.

Keuffel & Esser 1744

This slide rule (click to enlarge the photo at right) was made around 1897 and sold by Keuffel & Esser. It may have been actually manufactured by Dennert & Pape (in Germany); they made the earlier versions of this model and I'm not sure when Keuffel & Esser actually took over the manufacturing themselves. I've posted this up on my collection web site, including high resolution scans and lots of details.

This one posed an interesting restoration challenge that I had not run into previously – sometime in its history, someone spilled a liquid onto one side of it, and then let the liquid evaporate without cleaning it up. This left a layer of gunk on the slide rule that looked a lot like rust, and was quite difficult to remove – no solvent I have would dent it; I had to soak and abrade it (using Bon Ami). Some staining still remains; I could see under a microscope that the colorant has migrated into the plastic.

In addition, this slide rule had 110 years worth of the grey “gunk” that seems to accumulate on anything that humans touch. I probably really don't want to know what's in it! Usually this gunk cleans off easily with soap or alcohol, but on this slide rule some of the gunk had hardened into something resembling granite. To clean the slide's tongues and grooves I had to resort to carefully picking off the rocky gunk with a dental pick – hard work for these old eyes...

Photo of the Day

I thought you loved me!

Evaporative Cooling

Each summer we depend on our air conditioner to keep our home's temperature at a livable level – otherwise it would be 100°+ in the house, and darned uncomfortable. We have a completely conventional air conditioner (for the U.S.): a standard electric unit that depends on the evaporation and condensation of a synthetic refrigerant. It works great, and keeps our house at a very comfortable temperature – but it costs a small fortune to run. Surely there must be a better way!

And there is.

In any dry part of the country (and we certainly qualify for that!), evaporative cooling is a technology that costs much less for any given cooling capacity. This technology (which comes in several forms) leverages a simple fact about water: it absorbs a lot of heat (2272 Joules) for each gram of water evaporated. Our air conditioner is a “five ton” unit (60,000 BTU/hour). To provide an equivalent amount of cooling, we'd need to evaporate water at the rate of about 7.4 gallons per hour.

Two forms of evaporative cooling are common in homes in certain areas of the U.S.: misting systems and “swamp coolers”. Misting systems force water at high pressure through tiny holes, creating extremely fine droplets that evaporate almost immediately, cooling down the air around them. Many people in Arizona, New Mexico, and other places use misting systems to cool their patios. There are a few of these in the San Diego area, but they are not common. Swamp coolers work by blowing air through a porous pad that is kept wet, usually by rolling the pad continuously through a tub of water. The air is then routed into the home, directly cooling the house. These systems are common in some areas (again, in Arizona and New Mexico), but they have one big drawback: they raise the humidity in the house to undesirably high levels.

The third form of evaporative cooling technology isn't found (to my knowledge) in homes at all, though it is quite common in industrial buildings. This is the “forced-draft cooling tower”, which works by forcing air over droplets of water to cool the water. A conventional heat exchanger then runs a separate loop (of refrigerant or chilled water) to heat exchangers in the building being cooled. These cooling tower system are slightly less efficient than swamp coolers (as there are some thermal losses in the heat exchanger loop), but they have the great advantage of not humidifying the air in the building being cooled. The only reason I can think of that these are not used for homes is that they are relatively complex pieces of machinery. A small capacity cooling tower is just as complex as a large one, and would probably be much more expensive to build than a small capacity refrigerant-based air conditioner. But much cheaper to run!

To cool our home on a typical summer day, I estimate that we'd have to evaporate about 40 gallons of water. I'm exploring the notion of building my own cooling tower to replace our conventional system. The basic engineering challenge is to create enough droplets, with air blowing over them, to evaporate water at the required rate of 7.4 gallons/hour; I've not yet found any reference that would help me design this. The rest of it is very straightforward, basically just plumbing.

Any “evaporation engineers” out there?

Orbital Mechanics

Maneuvering a spacecraft in orbit requires some tactics that most of us would find counter-intuitive. This morning I got to pondering exactly how a simple maneuver would be accomplished. I set my self a simple problem: suppose I was in a perfectly circular orbit, 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) further from Earth than the space station I wanted to dock with, which was orbiting in a perfectly circular orbit at 500 kilometers (311 miles) above the Earth's surface. What maneuvers would I need to make?

Orbital mechanics doesn't get much simpler than this.

First thing you'd notice is that the space station is moving ahead of you in its orbit. That's because at its slightly lower altitude, it needs to move about a half millimeter per second (1.2 miles per hour) faster than you in order to stay in orbit. That's a leisurely walking pace, so you'd see the space station moving slowly past you – and you'd be forgiven for thinking that you had to speed up to “catch up” to it. But in fact, you need to do exactly the opposite! You need to slow down very slightly so that you will fall down to its altitude. So you aim your maneuvering rocket to slow yourself down, and light it off for a short blast, just enough to put you into an elliptical orbit whose perigee (low point) is 500 kilometers.

Now you're moving more slowly, and falling behind the space station more quickly – but as you fall, you gain a little more speed (just as you would if you jumped off a stool). Not enough to catch up, though, and when you've fallen to 500 kilometers, you're still a little bit behind the space station. But no matter – because you're in an elliptical orbit, you're actually traveling ever-so-slightly faster than the space station, so you slowly approach it. At that point, you need to slow down some more, to match the space station's speed and orbit.

You started out above the space station, moving more slowly than it was. You made two maneuvers to dock with it: both of them slowing you down! It seems weird, and somehow wrong, but that's really how it works. All of the strangeness derives from a simple fact: satellites in higher orbits have more energy than those in lower orbits. We had to slow down (twice!) to dock with the space station because we were in a higher orbit, and had more energy (for our mass) than the space station did – so we had to get rid of some...

The above analysis is based on a simple formula for the velocity of a satellite in a perfectly circular orbit around the Earth. The formula, along with other information, can be found here, here, and here.

Reaper

Today's news includes a new weapons deployment: the MQ-9 “Reaper” (aka “Predator B”) is being deployed to Afghanistan and (a little later) Iraq. This weapon system is one of the best examples of the U.S. employing its technology capabilities in modern warfare. I was expecting this system to be developed and deployed much more quickly than has proved the case, but nonetheless it is now on the way to the battlefield.

From the Air Force web site:

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

A typical Predator system configuration would include four aircraft, one ground control system and one Trojan Spirit II data distribution terminal. The Predator air vehicle is 27ft in length and has a 49ft wingspan. The system operates at an altitude of 25,000ft and at a range of 400nm.

The endurance of the air vehicle is more than 40 hours and the cruise speed is over 70kt. The air vehicle is equipped with UHF and VHF radio relay links, a C-band line-of-sight data link which has a range of 150nm and UHF and Ku-band satellite data links.

PAYLOAD

The surveillance and reconnaissance payload capacity is 450lb and the vehicle carries electro-optical and infrared cameras and a synthetic aperture radar. The two-colour DLTV television is equipped with a variable zoom and 955mm Spotter. The high resolution FLIR has six fields of view, 19mm to 560mm.

The Raytheon Multi-spectral Targeting System (MTS-A) is fitted on the MQ-1/9 Predator. The MTS-A provides real-time imagery selectable between infrared and day TV as well as a laser designation capability. MQ-1 can employ two laser-guided Hellfire anti-armour missiles with the MTS.

The Northrop Grumman TESAR synthetic aperture radar, which provides all-weather surveillance capability, has a resolution of 1ft. Other payload options, which can be selected to meet mission requirements, include a laser designator and rangefinder, electronic support and countermeasures and a Moving Target Indicator (MTI).

This is not your mama's UAV. The multiple imaging systems on board, operating across a broad spectrum from radio frequencies to visible light, give the Reaper an ability to see and designate targets that is almost magical. The long loiter time, high ceiling, and relatively high top speed combine to provide a weapons platform with nearly instantaneous availability over a battlefield. And its ability to carry several different weapons systems on standard pylons means that it is as lethal and flexible as our top-end manned aircraft.

The Reaper is arguably the first generation of real robotic weapons platforms. It is most definitely not a toy or an experiment; it is a real, live weapons platform that made it all the way through a sometimes reluctant procurement process (the Air Force, in particular, has not always been eager to displace pilots). I believe it is a foretaste of the way future wars will be fought, and most especially of the way America can leverage its technological prowess to reduce the blood cost of war. Weapons systems in the air were almost inevitably the first to be robotized – but I don't think the ground-based systems will be far behind…

The Confession

Jim M. sends this along:

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then – just to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was
thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't help myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau, Muir, Confucius and Kafka. I would return to the office dazed and confused,
asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But honey, surely it's not that serious." It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.

"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors. They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra , a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.

This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed...easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I took the final step... I joined the Democratic Party.

That's a joke. I think.

Quote of the Day

Skippy (of Enjoy Every Sandwich) clearly understands New Jersey very well (and that's an escaped New Jerseyite's assessment):

New Jersey is the kind of place where the average obituary ends with the sentence "Authorities do not expect to find the deceased's remains." It is one of the very few places on Earth where the centers of power controlled by the Mafia are more honest and dependable than those that are not. And that, my friends, is pretty much all that makes New Jersey even remotely interesting.

If you're unoffended by outrageously crude, rude, and sexually explicit commentary, then go read the rest of it.

Barking Mad Englishwomen...

Rod Liddle's latest piece (in the London Times) is a great example of British humor at its finest. He skewers the BBC over recent events, and tackles a few other subjects as well – such as the new Mrs. bin Laden:

Another important blow struck in the war against terror. A rather dippy English lady called Jane Felix-Browne has married Osama Bin Laden’s son Omar and intends to live with him in Saudi Arabia. Felix-Browne, 51, who also uses the name Zaina Mohamad al-Sabah and is plainly as mad as a snake, says Omar, 26, loves his dad very much and misses him dreadfully but they “disagree about tactics”.

According to Felix-Browne, Omar hasn’t spoken to Osama since - er, when was it? - 2001. Well, we’ve all had a bit of a problem getting hold of him since then, haven’t we. Maybe he didn’t pay his phone bill in Tora Bora, who knows.

The two lovers met, incidentally, while Felix-Browne, a grandmother who has been married five times before, was having a look around the pyramids: it was love at first sight, for her. The name Bin Laden gave her no qualms at all, she said. Any more than if it had been Crippen or Gadaffi, I suppose.

This is the way forward, though. Never mind the cluster bombs and Challenger tanks, the way to defeat Al-Qaeda is to dispatch legions of barking mad Englishwomen to mate with them, thus seriously compromising the jihadist gene pool and perhaps destroying the terrorists’ resolve and even their will to live.

Ah, yes. Barking mad Englishwomen, that's the ticket. You're doomed, doomed I say, Islamofascists!