Congratulations, MOM!

Congratulations, MOM!  India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) returns its first photos of the entire disc of Mars.  Very impressive for the first try of the Indian Space Resource Organization (ISRO), and on a shoestring budget to boot!

Weather, and road trip...

Weather, and road trip...  Our forecast for today had a “chance of rain” – and we won the lottery.  So far today my rain gauge is showing two tenths of an inch, and there's a line of intense squalls bearing down on us – maybe ten minutes away – as I write this.  The rain was enough to put the kibosh on both the driveway paving work and the barn building work.  Dang!

On the other hand, another craftsman showed up today.  This was in response to my reporting a problem with our shower grout on Friday.  The fellow who did the tile work showed up, took one look at the problem I reported, and immediately went to work to repair it – no push back, no guff, no debate: just “Yup, that sure does need to be fixed!” 

I've had enough experience with this sort of thing up here in Paradise now that I've come to expect that workers of all types will unhesitatingly take responsibility for any problem that arises.  I've recently seen this with the two guys (Terry and Jerry) who did the grading work on our driveway here.  The care that they took to get the slopes correctly is way beyond what I'd expect.  One of them even drove out here after he saw a rain squall pass over Paradise, so he could see how the rain water drained off the road base – that's better even than their instrumentation.  A few decades of experience in California led me not to expect this kind of care in contracted work, and it's taking a while to undo that.

This morning I took a trip up to Blackfoot, Idaho, to see the vendor of reclaimed wood there.  These are the same folks (Trestlewood) that supplied our mantel, and we're so happy with it that we decided to get another piece of reclaimed wood from them.  This piece will fit up against our kitchen's ceiling, and the lights for the island will hang from it.  I went up there this morning to walk around their (enormous) yard full of wood to choose a piece.  I found an oddly-shaped hand-hewn piece of wood that I just loved.  The folks at Trestlewood aren't sure what the species is, but they suspect it's a species of birch, or possibly even a lighter-than-usual cherry.  Whatever it is, it's a (very) hard wood, and the chunk we're getting is about 6' long, 2' wide, and 8" thick.  I'm guessing it weighs about 140 pounds, but it's wet at the moment; it will lighten up a bit after it's dried and finished.  The ax and adze marks left on it are quite pronounced; this piece was used as a timber and was never finished in any way.  As with our mantle, the folks at Trestlewood are going to do the finishing for us.  I can hardly wait to see the result!

Corn mazes are very popular up here in Utah...

Corn mazes are very popular up here in Utah...  But I haven't seen one like this :)  Via my brother Mark...

Bitcoin mining by hand ...

Bitcoin mining by hand ... isn't very practical :)  But it's interesting, in a geeky way...

Lasers and jello ...

Lasers and jello ... and a good geekly puzzle!

We are slowly winning the war against cancer...

We are slowly winning the war against cancer...  Oh, faster, please!

Strange rocks on Mars...

Strange rocks on Mars...  Including the very round rock in the colored photo at right.  Photos were taken by Curiosity, via APOD, of course...

Self-assembly with micro-fluidics...

Self-assembly with micro-fluidics...  I have a longstanding interest in fluidics, but this article is about something new to me: chemical reactions in a moving fluid...

McIntyre vs. Mann...

McIntyre vs. Mann...  It's not a fair match...

I happily pay the $99...

I happily pay the $99...  Because it works, and it's usable! But I also use a lot of free open source software, too. There isn't a single piece of software left on my computers made by Microsoft, though...

Heating up in Hong Kong...

Heating up in Hong Kong...  Pro-capitalist protesters are edging into open confrontation and closer to violent confrontation against mainland Chinese manipulation of the political process.  This is a real challenge for the Chinese government – they're walking a tightrope here.  On the one hand, they've got the goose that lays the golden eggs (almost literally!) in Hong Kong, but on the other hand, the democratic and pro-business government is a direct threat (by example) to their top-down, socialist-leaning thugocracy on the mainland. 

Will the mainland government cave, and allow Hong Kong to keep its free elections?  Will they come down hard against a drift toward democracy, like they did at Tienanmen Square?  Or will they find some middle road?  I haven't a clue...

Twenty years ago today ...

Twenty years ago today ... the RORO (roll on, roll off) ferry MS Estonia sank in the Baltic sea, claiming 852 lives.  Most of the victims were Estonian or Scandinavian, many were children.  This occurred as I was just starting to get to know the country of Estonia, its people, and its culture.  I visited the country just a couple of weeks after the sinking, and the shock and grief were evident everywhere I went.  Estonia is a very small country, and it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been on that ferry...

This morning I ran across a transcript of the inter-ship communications starting with the first report of trouble on the MS Estonia and continuing through the rescue efforts.  Reading it (there's an English translation) brought lots of memories flooding back...

The closest piece of Estonian land to the site of the sinking is the northernmost point of land on Hiiumaa (an island off Estonia's west coast), a little spit called Tahkuna (see map at left).  Just northwest of the lighthouse there (the Tahkuna Tuletorn), the grieving Estonians built a simple, but hauntingly beautiful monument to the children who died.  It's a bell in a simple tower, and the bell is adorned with the faces of children (my photo of it at upper right).

I first visited the monument entirely by accident, while exploring the beautiful island of Hiiumaa.  I first visited the lighthouse – a popular tourist attraction – and then wandered toward the beach where I spotted the monument.  Until that moment, I had no idea that I was on the piece of Estonia closest to the site of the sinking.

I've visited that monument five times over the years, most recently in 2003.  Even though it is in quite a remote place, fairly difficult to reach, there are usually people there.  On my second visit, an older couple in traditional Estonian knit sweaters sat on a log, looking to the northwest, (toward where the ferry sank), weeping.  Later they rang the bell on the monument and left.  The memory of that couple still affects me deeply, many years later.  Other pieces of art have been installed there in more recent years, and there's a traditional Estonian maze there now, too (rocks arranged on sand).

I'd like to return to that place some day, and show it to Debbie...

The bottle of wine...

The bottle of wine...  My CCPOAAGGM (card-carrying, pissed-off, angry-American great-grandmother) mom sends me things.  In an email this morning, she said “For all of us who are married, were married, wish you were married, or wish you weren't married, this is something to smile about the next time you see a bottle of wine”

Sally was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road.

As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride.

With a silent nod of thanks, the woman got into the car.

Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make a bit of small talk with the Navajo woman. The old woman just sat silently, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every little detail, until she noticed a brown bag on the seat next to Sally.

'What in bag?' asked the old woman.

Sally looked down at the brown bag and said, 'It's a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband.'

The Navajo woman was silent for another moment or two. Then speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder, she said: 'Good trade...'

Speaking as a husband who might be traded for, doesn't a single bottle of wine seem a little cheap?  Surely it should have been at least a six pack!

The saluting boy on Omaha Beach...

The saluting boy on Omaha Beach...  Reader Simi L. passes along this mini-documentary about a young boy honoring the soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

I visited this beach myself some 20 years ago.  I was struck by the friendliness toward Americans of the locals (a marked contrast to the rest of France).  Of all the things I saw there, the cemeteries had the most impact on me...

The Middle East is a hard-to-understand muddle...

The Middle East is a hard-to-understand muddle...  Reader Jim M. passes along this attempt at clarification:

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don't like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don't like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in the fight against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren't actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?

That certainly ought to set you straight!

Dogly joy...

Dogly joy...  Our border collie (Race) would go absolutely bonkers if we got him in a fountain like this :)

Ramirez on Eric Holder's resignation...

Ramirez on Eric Holder's resignation...

The Shirky Principle...

The Shirky Principle...  I had never heard this before:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

That's a wonderful distillation of a characteristic of institutions.  In this post, the author uses unions as an example of this principle in action.  The first one that came to my mind, though, was political parties, and individual politicians.  The Shirky Principle is basically their organizing principle...

Z80 mystery solved!

Z80 mystery solved!  Many moons ago, long before my beard turned gray and my hair fell out, I made extensive use of Z80 microcomputers in systems I designed.  I probably built 25 or 30 different systems using that part, so I got to be very familiar with it.  The pinout of the Z80 DIP had one striking oddity: the eight data pins were out-of-order, as if the chip makers had scrambled them.  This was in marked contrast to the sixteen address pins, where were in a nice, neat, orderly sequence that wrapped around the top of the package.  Why would this be?  Why not have all the data pins in order?

Well, now we know!  It took almost 40 years to figure it out...

This sounds very hopeful...

This sounds very hopeful...  The so-called “super bugs” scare me.  I had a brush with one of their predecessors about 20 years ago – a drug-resistant staph infection that was only cured by me wearing an IV pump that kept my system flooded with a three-component cocktail of antibiotics.  Some of today's super bugs would shrug that therapy off.  So the promise of a flexible approach that will work not only on existing super bugs, but also new ones that might crop up, sounds pretty darned good.  As the Instapundit would say: “Faster, please!”

The stupid, it burns!

The stupid, it burns!  National Review's Katherine Timpf interviews protestors at the Flood Wall Street climate march...

Abandoned cats in Aleppo...

Abandoned cats in Aleppo...  That's in Syria, if you've not been following events in the Middle East.

With all the horrors over there affecting people, we rarely think of the pets those people had – but in some ways, their situation is even more dire than their former owner's.  The “cat man of Aleppo” is trying to help some of the cats abandoned in the beleaguered city...

Actual weather!

Actual weather!  Rain, lightning, and thunder echoing off the local mountains.  As I write this, it's pouring outside – a big cell is passing overhead.  All around me I see lightning flashes, and several times a minute a rolling thunderous crash shakes the house.  Weather!

Barn: three walls up, one to go...

Barn: three walls up, one to go...  The builders are zipping right along...

Flagpole: concrete poured!

Flagpole: concrete poured!  Now in two or three days, I'll see if I can get the form off :)

Barn: another wall, rising...

Barn: another wall, rising...  By the end of today, all four walls on the second floor should be erected...

Cichorium intybus...

Cichorium intybus...  Via BPOD, of course...

Rosetta moves in closer...

Rosetta moves in closer...  Click on the thumbnail to embiggen...

Mystery of butterfly-shaped radar image solved!

Mystery of butterfly-shaped radar image solved!  It was caused by ... butterflies!

Clever extension of “magic number” division...

Clever extension of “magic number” division...  I've known about the use of multiplication by a “magic number” as a substitute for division by an integer constant, to improve performance.  I've always thought of the technique as being limited in range, for reasons that are obvious if you understand how it works.  Here's a simple technique to remove those limitations...

The earth's water is older than the sun...

The earth's water is older than the sun...  That's a rather amazing fact, but follows directly from Sagan's famous statement about us being made from “star stuff”...

If this is true...

If this is true ... it is an action that approaches treason, in my view...

Marbling paper...

Marbling paper...  You've seen the fancy marbled end-papers and inside covers in fancy books, I'm sure.  This is how they are made.  I had no idea...

Oh, noz!

Oh, noz!  These thoughts completely erased all my joy at Eric Holder's resignation...

Flagpole: the form is ready for concrete...

Flagpole: the form is ready for concrete...  And the concrete is ordered for tomorrow at noon.  My backhoe made short work of digging the big hole for the form – took me less than two hours, including finishing the details with a shovel.  Not bad for moving more than five cubic yards of heavy, wet soil!

The last step, which I finished just before dark this evening, was to position the steel sleeve in the center of the form.  You can see (in the last two photos) my system for holding it in place – using four steel wires tightened down with eye bolts to the point where they twang when plucked.  That sleeve shouldn't be moving at all when the place the concrete tomorrow.  I built a little plywood cover for the sleeve so that the concrete truck can't accidentally fill it with concrete – that would be a disaster!

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go out there and spray the inside of the form with Pam (spray canola oil) so that the concrete won't stick to the form.  I'm hopeful that I can tie ropes to the hooks on the top of the form and just yank it out with the tractor.  If that doesn't work, I'll have to tear it apart with a wrecking bar, which would be a lot more work :)

Barn: we has second story walls!

Barn: we has second story walls!  Well, two of them, anyway :)  If you're wondering why there are two holes in the floor ... one of them is for the stairwell, and the other is for a “hatch”, 10' x 5', through which I can hoist large things up into the second floor storage area...

Holes in Mars rocks...

Holes in Mars rocks...  Curiosity is drilling holes again, this time in some interesting looking rocks at the base of Mt. Sharp.  To my (very much inexpert) eye, those rocks look like petrified lake bottom, or dried mud.  I'm guessing the Curiosity science team is drilling there to figure out just what kind of rock that is...

Dust from Chad fertilizes the Amazon...

Dust from Chad fertilizes the Amazon...  It blows across the Atlantic, settles over the Amazon basin, and acts as a rich fertilizer.  But why should dust act as a fertilizer?  Turns out it's because the dust is composed largely of fish bones!

Solar sintering...

Solar sintering...  Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is going to be very interesting to watch develop...

Shellshock...

Shellshock...  If you run any Linux systems (especially) or other UNIX variants, you need to know about this vulnerability.  It's in bash, of all things, and it's an arbitrary code execution bug.  Nasty.  It's patch time, folks...

Google science prize awarded...

Google science prize awarded ... to three Irish teenagers who have apparently made a rather consequential discovery: a simple, inexpensive way to significantly boost the productivity of grain crops.

I keep getting surprised at how biologists, botanists, and agriculture experts (and now teenagers!) keep finding ways to boost farming yields.  Those yields have been climbing steadily and rapidly ever since the late 1800s.  Any number of times, experts have predicted that the end of these steady gains is imminent – and every time, they've been wrong.  We don't seem to have reached “peak agriculture” yet, just as we haven't reached “peak oil” or “peak silicon” yet, either...

Not so settled after all, that climate science...

Not so settled after all, that climate science...  A new paper from two prominent climatologists (Nic Lewis and Judith Curry) uses the same data the IPCC models are based on, but derives a (much) lower figure for global temperature sensitivity to carbon dioxide.  The new figure corresponds much more closely than the models to those pesky actual observations.

If you're at all interested in whether anthropogenic global warming is real, this is a must read...

Flagpole: it begins...

Flagpole: it begins...  In a week or so, I should be taking delivery of a beautiful tapered aluminum flagpole, 35' tall.  Said flagpole needs a sturdy base to sit in, so that winds don't blow the thing over.  The manufacturer recommends a cylinder of concrete 3' in diameter and 4' high.  Concrete is cheap, so I decided to go a tad bigger, just to add some extra stability: I'm going to place that flagpole into a 4' cube of concrete.

So how does one go about getting a 4' cube of concrete?  Well, you start by building a “form” – essentially a mold.  That's what's in the photo at right, shown in the same orientation that it will be used in.  I built that behemoth today, starting with a run to Lowe's to get the materials.  The top and bottom of this form are open.  The bottom will sit on the base of a big hole I'm going to dig tomorrow; the top is open so that the concrete truck can easily fill the form.  It all went together rather easily.  The design is about as simple as can be, and the tolerances aren't tight :)

That form isn't quite finished yet – I still have to add some wires and eye bolts to hold the steel sleeve (that actually holds the flagpole) in place while the concrete is poured.  The top of the sleeve will be in the exact center of the form, and will extend about 3/4" higher than the edges of the form.  When the concrete is poured, I'll be finishing it with a slight slope from the center to the outside, so that water will run off it easily.  The top of the form (and the edge of the concrete) will be at the same level as my yard, so I can mow around it easily.

The form will hold about 62 cubic feet (or 2.3 cubic yards) of concrete, after accounting for the space occupied by the hollow sleeve.  I'll be digging a hole that is substantially larger than that: about 6' x 6' x 4' - which means I'll be excavating about 5.3 cubic yards.  If you're familiar with bulk materials, you'll know that that's a rather large pile of dirt!  I'm very glad I'll have the backhoe to do this with.  If I had to do it by hand, I'm not entirely sure I'd survive the project :)

Communists in Oakland, California...

Communists in Oakland, California...  No big surprise there, and Zombie has the complete rundown on them.  Here's the rub, though: the socialism and communism that Zombie carefully documents here is on display at an event concerning global warming.  That's right: the global warming movement has been almost completely co-opted by the socialists/communists/progressives.

I can't help but marvel at the number of seriously deluded people on display.  Are they really so completely ignorant of recent history as to think there are answers in communism?  Then I remember: these people elected Nancy Pelosi.  Then I have to worry about it...

At over 23k, the current email regexp is getting pretty big...

At over 23k, the current email regexp is getting pretty big... Even experienced programmers skilled in the lore of regular expressions are intimidated by this monstrosity (the first few lines are reproduced below).  If I had ever seen this thing in the first few months I was using regular expressions, I'd probably have run away from them, screaming, never to return.  Just because you can validate email addresses with a regular expression doesn't mean you should...

(((?:(?:(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:\x28(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f]|[\x21-\x27\x2A-\x5b\x5d-\x7e])|(?:\x5c(?:\x0a*\x0d*[\x00-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f]\x0a*\x0d*)|(?:\x5c[\x00-\x7f]))))*(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?\x29))*(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:\x28(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f]|[\x21-\x27\x2A-\x5b\x5d-\x7e])|(?:\x5c(?:\x0a*\x0d*[\x00-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f]\x0a*\x0d*)|(?:\x5c[\x00-\x7f]))))*(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?\x29)|(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))))?(?:(?:[\x41-\x5a\x61-\x7a]|[\x30-\x39]|[\x21\x23-\x27\x2a\x2b\x2d\x2f\x3d\x3f\x5e\x5f\x60\x7b-\x7e])+(?:\x2e(?:[\x41-\x5a\x61-\x7a]|[\x30-\x39]|[\x21\x23-\x27\x2a\x2b\x2d\x2f\x3d\x3f\x5e\x5f\x60\x7b-\x7e])+)*)(?:(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:\x28(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f]|[\x21-\x27\x2A-\x5b\x5d-\x7e])|(?:\x5c(?:\x0a*\x0d*[\x00-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f]\x0a*\x0d*)|(?:\x5c[\x00-\x7f]))))*(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?\x29))*(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:\x28(?:(?:(?:(?:[\x20\x09]*(?:\x0d\x0a))?[\x20\x09]+)|(?:[\x20\x09]+(?:(?:\x0d\x0a)[\x20\x09]+)*))?(?:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f]|[\x2...

You want a computer that acts like a person?

You want a computer that acts like a person?  So do marketers!  From the linked article:

Half the time, I’m cynical/alarmed/wearied that so many people are working so hard to make machines fool humans.

But the other half the time I’m kind of cracked up by the fact that the most avid prosecutors of Alan Turing’s sly and audacious 1950 thought-experiment have been not philosophers or computer scientists or advanced A.I. labs but … marketers. The former folks have foundered for years on the difficulties of understanding the fractal contours of human consciousness. The latter just want you to open up their damn mail. Comprehending the mysteries of human thought and behavior is hard. Emulating it? Not so much! It’s partly why Turing’s test is so unsettling: Man, are we really that easy to copy?

MOM is in orbit around Mars!

MOM is in orbit around Mars!  No, not my CCPOAA mom, but the Mars Orbiter Mission – India's first interplanetary satellite.  They succeeded on their very first try, even though they were on a hurried schedule and a shoestring budget.  If they keep this up, SpaceX and Blue Ocean are going to have some offshore competition!  Here's the official announcement, and a more detailed story...

The death of free speech...

The death of free speech...  Having lived through the university protests of the '60s and '70s, I've long tended to think of the student populations as a key source of fight against censorship and other free speech restrictions.  Before these protests, universities had strict rules about what could and could not be said on campus.  The protests ended that, much to the regret of then-traditional Americans on both the left (war mongers!) and the right (flag burners!).  More liberty-minded folks (including myself) celebrate the accomplishment.

These days, though, the universities have become hotbeds of a new movement toward the suppression of free speech.  Some have dubbed this the “unfree speech movement”, and the moniker is apt.  It's a natural outgrowth of the intersection between multiculturalism and progressivism – the invention of the right not to be offended.  It's leading us down the same crazy path that Europe went down, starting 20 years or so ago.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern – whom I remember as a radical in the '60s – has a piece that echoes my own thoughts.  It's interesting hearing what this looks like from one of those students who helped win the fight for free speech nearly 50 years ago...

The doorbell rings...

The doorbell rings...  Who could it be?  It's 6:30 pm, and almost time for me to get ready for bed.  Who would call on me at this hour?

I walked to the door (which is mostly glass) and outside I see a smiling Gracie, holding a plate with homemade cookies.  I didn't spot it until she'd left, but under the cookies was an envelope with a card in it.  The cookies and the card are in the photo at right (click to embiggen).  Well, to be precise, the cookies were in the photo.  Now they're in my stomach, along with a giant glass of milk.

Gracie hopes that I like sugar cookies with lots of orange cream cheese frosting.  Why, yes, Gracie.  Yes I do :)

Barn: second story shaping up...

Barn: second story shaping up...  The builders have been busy today!  Nearly all the joists are in place, the framing for the stairway and the hatch are finished except for two joists (they ran out of metal hangers), and all but a few square feet of the floor are in place (they ran out of wafer board!).  Tomorrow morning they'll finish those last details up, when the new load of lumber arrives, and then the second story walls start going up.

In the last photo below, you can see one of the builders wielding a nail gun.  After watching these guys working for the past few weeks, I think this may be the single most useful tool they have.  It's an air powered gun that holds a magazine of 250 nails.  But the best part is how it's triggered.  One mode uses a conventional trigger, just like on an actual gun.  The other mode uses pressure on the very tip – you put the nose of the gun where you want the nail and then just press gently.  A skilled user can put a nail ever 8" down the 4' length of a joist running under the floor boards in less than two seconds.  That works out to 3.5 nails per second, each one perfect straight and perfectly driven.  A skilled framer wielding a hammer might be able to do one nail every two seconds, but won't be able to sustain that for very long.  They used the same nail gun to tack all the studs in place, making very short work of that more challenging nailing job (challenging because you're nailing at close to a 45° angle)...

Rope swing optimization...

Rope swing optimization...  Let's say you had a rope swing, and you wanted to use it to go as far as possible horizontally.  How would you do it?  Here's more than you ever wanted to know about the subject...

Mann's “Hide the Decline” ruthlessly exposed...

Mann's “Hide the Decline” ruthlessly exposed...  Jean S., posting at Climate Audit, has posted a carefully researched chronology of events that exposes “Mike’s trick” as the deliberate fraud we all knew it was.  The only credible conclusion you can come to after reading Jean's awesome piece is that Mann was most definitely involved in the deliberate misleading of the IPCC, his fellow scientists, and the public at large.  His “trick” created the memorable “hockey stick” graph from the thinnest of air.  Below are two versions of the famous graph (click to embiggen): on the left without “Mike’s trick”; on the right with it...

Mike Mann, schlub scientist...

Paving: it's time for “road base”...

Paving: it's time for “road base”...  The paving guys are now doing the last step before the actual asphalt goes on: they're laying down a 3" thick layer of “road base” – a mixture of fine gravel and very fine (almost powdery) dirt.  This will be wet down and carefully smoothed to form a layer upon which the asphalt will be put down.  They'll be done with this today, but the asphalt won't go on until the paving machine is available – and I'm not sure when that is.

The first two photos below show where the ends of a 3" diameter “sleeve” are; this is partly as documentation for myself.  The idea of the sleeve is to provide a way to run pipes or wires under the pavement, without having to resort to expensive horizontal drilling.  This sleeve is 30' long, and runs diagonally under the pavement just 10' or so from our house.  Next year I hope to put a greenhouse up just west of the pavement, and when I do, I'll use this sleeve to run water and gas (and maybe electricity) out to it from the house...

Barn: the second floor progresses...

Barn: the second floor progresses...  Yesterday the builders put up the last of the glulam beams (that's one being sawed in the middle photo below), and started laying the second floor joists on top of them.  Today they've finished with the joists, including framing out a place for the stairs to go, and a place for a giant hatch (10' by 4') through which I can lift big objects with a block and tackle.  They've also started putting down the flooring. 

Things are moving along quickly on the barn!

The great water adventure...

The great water adventure...  Last night as I was just getting ready to head for bed, my phone rang.  It was my neighbor, Tim D., calling to let me know that we had a “water problem” – our neighbor's teen daughter (Gracie L.) was mowing their yard, and accidentally struck and broke one of the irrigation water “risers”.  That's precisely the same thing I had done earlier this year, so I knew exactly what it was like for Gracie :)

Tim and I talked for a couple minutes, and figured out that between the two of us we had almost everything needed to repair that broken riser, both parts and tools.  We'd need one more part, but Tim figured we could find a neighbor who had that one.  So Tim and I gathered up what we'd need, and met over where the broken riser was gushing water 20' or so high. 

As I walked up, another neighbor got the water shut off.  The geyser was gone, but a small pond remained around the broken riser.  People were gathering – adults and kids from the immediately adjacent neighbors.  Shovels and buckets appeared, and an organized effort to drain the water around the riser got started (this was necessary because the solvent used to weld PVC pipes together only works on dry pipes).  The drainage effort was made more difficult by the fact that the broken riser was near the low point of a few hundred yards of pipe, and all of that was now draining backwards through the broken riser.

Now this probably doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, but ... we were actually all having rather a grand time.  There was much joshing and laughter.  Two dogs (Annie and Dallas) were splashing around in the water, spewing mud in every direction, splattering us all from head to foot – and we all were laughing about it. 

Eventually the draining was finished, and we got the water level down.  We used a towel to dry the pipe, then cut and glued the new parts in place.  A neighbor did have the missing part.  It was after dark by the time we finished, but I had brought a nice LED flashlight that was providing plenty of light. 

When I got home, I discovered a sad email from Gracie, the girl who had accidentally broken the riser.  She wanted to tell me just how very sorry she was for breaking my riser.  My riser?!?  Until the moment I read that email, it had never occurred to me that the broken riser was mine – but Gracie was right about that: it was on our property.  She was mowing a little piece of what I think of as their lawn when she broke the riser, but that 6' or so wide piece of lawn is actually on our property.  The whole time we were all working on that thing, I was thinking that we were all helping Gracie and her family out – but in reality that whole crew was helping me out.  What an odd feeling that was as I changed mental gears there!

I love living up here...

Mantle: it's finished!

Mantle: it's finished!  Yesterday I got the mantle, with its two corbels, mounted to the living room wall over where the fireplace will be.  I'm very pleased with the result of my mounting plate design – the finished mantle is very strong, doesn't jiggle at all, and the reclaimed wood will all be exposed once the rock is in.  The plywood mounting plates that are visible now will be completely covered by mortar and rock.  Behold (and use your imagination for the rock)!

Antarctic ice level is at an all-time record high right now...

Antarctic ice level is at an all-time record high right now...  Global warming, don't you know?

Mantle mounting...

Mantle mounting...  I spent most of this weekend (when I wasn't goofing off) working on mounting our new mantle to the living room wall.  This is a job that would have been (much) easier in a properly-equipped wood shop – but which can still be done in a garage with just hand tools.  I used saw horses and clamps to keep everything in the right place, and then a circular saw, a jig saw, and a drill.  Today I hope to actually start attaching this to the wall...

First of two plywood "plates"

Second "plate"

Installing hanger bolts

Creative clamping

Getting the hangers right

Trial fitting the finished plates

All the hangers are in