Sunday, August 24, 2014

Going Offline

For the first time in the 4 1/2 year history of this blog, I'm going on vacation.  I've had some biz trips that have kept me offline and one trip that kept me away, but those were never more than a week or so.  I'm taking off for 12 days tomorrow morning.  If all goes according to plan, I'll be back the first weekend of September, 9/6-7. 

We're going off to places we've never been, do some day hiking, and see some things we've never seen.  Away from the same old places and same old sights.  Pretty much every place has WiFi these days, and we won't be tent camping, but I really doubt I'll have the time to do much of anything here.

Y'all enjoy the next two weeks and we'll see you on the Far Side!

Friday, August 22, 2014

Why So Many?



Personally, I think Chris Muir nails it here in DBD:
Get rid of those guys and things will definitely get better.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Opie? Opie??

Put down the stick, Opie.  (Eric Allie at Townhall). 

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Techy Tuesday - Plastic Screws and Bolts As Strong as Steel

I'm always keep an eye out for the really cool or "how about that?" things in the stream which crosses my desk everyday.  I have gone through some periods where not much came across, but usually there's a few every week.  Tonight, thanks to Technical Editor in Materials Ann Thryft at Design News, we learn of new fasteners from Piper Plastics.  Plastics which approach - and can exceed - the strength of metal fasteners.
Kyron MAX is a new line of injection-moldable composites, with both glass and carbon fiber versions, from Piper Plastics. The material comes in three performance levels. Depending on the combination of polymer type and fillers, tensile strength can reach from up to 50,000 psi (345 MPa) to as high as 120,000 psi (827 MPa). That last figure puts it above steel, Dave Wilkinson, materials engineering manager for Piper Plastics, told Design News. Tensile modulus ranges from up to 5 million psi (35 GPa) to as high as 12 million psi (83 GPa).

The composites are almost 75% lighter than steel and about 60% lighter than titanium. Polymers include PEEK, PPS, PEI, PPA, and PA. "The strength of any fiber-filled polymer is the strength of that fiber combined with the strength of the fiber's adhesion to the polymer," Wilkinson told us. "So we've developed a stronger fiber and a new sizing technology to adhere the fiber to the polymer. Depending on the application's mechanical strength needs, we use either short or long fibers."
Pictured here, Piper Plastics used one of the highest-performing XS series Kyron MAX polymer grades to mold a standard #10-32 bolt for replacing titanium aerospace bolts. The part exceeds target minimum tensile load at 741 lb and double shear strength at 1,890 lb while reducing the weight of the titanium bolt by about 60%.   They also say it beat the cost targets but don't say if it's supposed to be cheaper than the titanium bolt; with that kind of weight reduction, it might well cost more.  (Source: Piper Plastics)

Piper presents this table of the capabilities of this plastic:
As Ann points out, Piper Plastics is a machining/injection molding company.  I think that means that these threads can't be cut by conventional means like taps or dies or single point threading on a lathe.  It would be interesting to try.  It's not uncommon to booger up the threads on a bolt while assembling things (who? me?) and the ability to clean the threads up with a tap or die would be nice.  On the other hand, if it's cheaper than metal, too, why not just pitch it and use a fresh piece of hardware?

There are still obvious questions here.  For example plastics are known for cold flow and creep, and a bolt stretching out under its intended load and getting looser isn't much of a bolt.  Still, that should have shown up by now in early development, and there's nothing else that won't be resolved by some standard tests.  An interesting, cool development.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Gosh, This Surprised Me

I went looking at my Stats page on Blogger and hadn't noticed that sometime in the last two weeks, I went over 1,000,000 page views in the life of this blog.
Thanks, folks.  I know I've made some friends who have commented, maybe made contact via email and have been reading here almost since the start - certainly since the first year.

I always find funny things in the search terms that lead people here.  This week included "JJ Cale" (three times), "cardio when can't run" (twice) and "civil air patrol dating memes" (twice).  I have no idea why that last one led a couple of disappointed people here.  My most viewed page ever, as it has been for some time, is my page on building my AR-15 from an 80% lower.  Blogger allows me to list my 10 most popular posts ever, which is down at the bottom of the right column.  

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Behold... The Salmon Cannon

If you're not in the Pacific Northwest salmon country, and I'm about as far from there as you can get and still be on the North American Continent, you might not realize that transporting salmon around hydroelectric dams is a big problem - and a small industry.  According to one source I read, the spent over $500 million transporting about 2 million salmon around dams on the Columbia river - or $250 per fish.  I would imagine you could buy them airfare and fly them inland for not much less.  (Imagine if you will an airport waiting area populated by ticket-holding salmon who are reading newspapers, fiddling with their smartphones and semi-patiently waiting for their plane to leave).  From The Verge, a story about a possible way to do it cheaper, better for the fish, and, well, funnier: 
Salmon are amazing fish. They’ll swim hundreds of miles against the current, hurl themselves up waterfalls, and risk being eaten by bears as they return to their birthplace to spawn. But some obstacles are too much, and that’s where Whooshh Innovations comes in. Behold, the salmon cannon. Seriously, watch this video of fish getting launched out of pneumatic tubes:

Whooshh Innovations ("Whoosh" was already taken) first designed its tubes to transport fruit, but as Washington state debated what do about hydroelectric dams and the salmon whose migrations they blocked, the company saw its technology might have another purpose. If Whooshh tubes could send apples flying over long distances without damaging them, maybe, an employee thought, they could suck fish up and over the dams blocking the Columbia river.
So they put a tilapia into the fruit tube and let it fly, proving both fish and fruit are subject to Bernoulli's laws.  Whooshh is aware of the giggle factor here.  To quote Todd Deligan, Whooshh's vice president:
"At a talk at the National Hydropower Association, I hit play on the video and the first fish goes flying out, and the audience is dying. I had to say, 'It's okay to laugh, this is utterly ridiculous.' Then people start talking and they say, 'Holy cow, why hadn't we thought of something like this before?'"
The salmon cannon isn't fully operational, but they have tested it by destroying Alderan, a small planet on the edges of the empire ... no, sorry ... they've tested it a couple of times in the Columbia River system.
The test in June showed that fish will voluntarily enter the tube. When they swim into the entrance, the vacuum sucks them in and gives them initial boost; after that, elevated pressure behind the fish keeps them moving at about 15 to 22 miles per hour till they go flying out the other end. The speed, Deligan says, can be adjusted. Mist is applied to keep the fish wet as they zoom along. Currently the tubes are being hand-loaded, but Deligan says the test at the Roza site showed that "the fish just swim right in."
More tests are planned, but unless something bad shows up, it looks like someday you might see salmon flying to get around dams.  Without chartering airplanes.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Economatrix Chart Updates

Almost as long as I've been running this blog, I've posted the Calculated Risk Blog's chart of Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions.  It occurred to me today that I haven't posted it in a while so I went looking for it today:
According to this chart, which is again only the news sound bite number that gets released every month, the 2008 recession is over.  The last time I posted this I wrote "... recovery will be complete in late 2014 to early 2015.  But I don't think I believe that".  I based not believing it on a couple of reasons, the biggest being it has no reflection of labor participation rate, which I continue to hear is at levels last seen in the late 1970s. Assuming those people try to start working again, that's going to affect the measured unemployment numbers.
For example, in the May unemployment report, the unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 to 6.3%, but the size of the workforce dropped by 800,000, yet I keep hearing about people having to postpone retirement and working longer.  It would seem to imply that people staying working who would rather be retired are occupying jobs that some of those people out of the work force would like to have. 

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Privacy, Ambient Intelligence and ... Printers?

A few things I've come across worth sharing. 

We've spoken a lot in this space about 3D printing.  It has been speculated that the future is in printing agencies that take your design file and ship you the printed object.  I hadn't heard that Amazon opened a 3D printing service.  I'm a Prime member and while they contact me regularly to remind me I can look stream videos or listen to music, they have never said a word about this.  I thought their marketing was better than that.  The chances I'd be interested in a 3D print are many times more than the chance I'd be interested in a video. 

Back in my series on Privacy in Radio Communications, I did a unit that introduced the concepts of spread spectrum, information theory, and a lot of other important ideas.  If you're really interested in learning more hands on spread spectrum stuff, the complete text of an amateur radio introduction has been posted in pdf format.  Link courtesy of Sparks31 and an emailer whom I will leave anonymous.  (BTW, I re-read that series recently and still thought it was pretty decent).

I did a post on the Internet of Things recently.  In a recent email from a computer geek group called MakeUseOf, they posted a good article on "Ambient Intelligence".  AmI, as it's called, is either the end state of the IoT or just past that.  Picture the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise's character is walking into a store and sees ads personalized for, and aimed at, only him, and multiply the privacy violation. 
This new paradigm is obviously powerful, but it also comes with its own risks and challenges.  As the devices in your world come to know your life in more detail, they also  come to know your life in more detail.  You might appreciate it if your technology automatically responds to an intimate moment by lowering the lights and changing the music, but you may be uncomfortable with the idea of a large corporation like Google knowing the when and where of your love life.
Do people really want privacy?  Or are they willing to sell it for "cool" and convenience.  As the author of that article commented:
If people really want privacy, market pressures will force someone to offer it, but my suspicion is that people won’t actually care as much about privacy as much as they say they do.

Guess we'll find out.  It's a brave, new world out there.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Techy Tuesday - Steam from Sunlight

Power Electronics reports on a development at MIT of a way to capture sunlight and create steam at high levels of efficiency.

Steam, of course, is useful for sterilization, desalinization, and cleaning.  Most current systems for solar steam generation are huge, with lots of mirrors or lenses collecting the energy concentrating the solar input up to 1000 times.  This system requires much less of that. 
This is preliminary and hasn't been scaled up to full production, but it's something to keep an eye out for.  The obvious advantages for sterilizing water in places with too much wildlife in their water supply are just one use.  Don't neglect sterilizing surgical instruments for field or bush hospitals.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Oh, No

Oh, dear Lord, no.  Robin Williams dead of an apparent suicide.

One of the funniest men who ever lived; his frantic, "full-tilt Bozo" antics of the 70s and early 80s made me laugh until I hurt.  His acting had less impact, but I saw most of his movies.  I still regularly remember bits from his HBO live comedy show in about 1980 and they always make me smile. 

His last post on Instagram, a Happy Birthday message of love to his daughter:
I can't adequately describe the feeling of loss. 

I hope you found your peace, Robin.  In a world in desperate need of humor, the rest of us will miss you.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

What's All That Noise? Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

I think that if I can say one positive thing about this blog is that I've been all over the story that the administration has apparently changed sides in the "War on Terror", supporting Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda rebels in Syria,  and covering the story that Russians couldn't believe we were being so stupid in the Mideast, so it must be we're destroying the world on purpose.  And more;  I've been covering what I can find about the Muslim Brotherhood influence at the highest levels of government.

The attacks of ISIS (as they're commonly called) are turning into full out genocide of Christians and anyone else they think isn't the right strain of Islamic.  According to this story on


 The article concludes with:

It's melodramatic to blame this on Obama: no one is responsible for these crimes against humanity except for the Islamists, but this outcome is completely predictable given the things Obama has done already.  Completely predictable in light of all the stories I've covered before.  You might recall that the leader of ISIS said he's coming to America, and the media was full of stories this weekend reporting how they are threatening to do so immediately, and "raise the flag of Allah in the white house".
“I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established,” spokesman Abu Mosa told VICE Media in a video interview. “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq.”

Mosa, however, wasn't finished: "We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House,” he added.
The soldiers they humiliated in Iraq?  What definition of humiliation would that be?  Regardless, these horrific savages (and there are no other descriptors for people who would behead children in front of their parents) are on the march.  The flag of ISIS was flying in London and elsewhere in Europe this weekend, and only a 77 year old nun had the guts to tear it down.
There is a phrase used of, and by, jihadists: ‘First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.’ Well there’s a fine example of this on display at the moment in East London. Even the Guardian has picked up on it.

At the entrance to a council estate near Canary Wharf, amid the banners of the hilariously misnamed ‘Stop the War coalition’ (‘End the Siege on Gaza’) the Black flag of Jihad is flying. Yes, that’s right, at a major council estate in the East End of London the black flag of ISIS is flying.
I don't know what the right thing to do about ISIS is, but I suspect the answer comes awfully close to what they'd say: "kill them all and let God sort them out".  I do know that if you don't think you have a dog in this fight, you'd better get your head out of your butt.  They may come for the Jews first (the Saturday people) and then come for the Christians, but they're coming for everyone, unless someone stops them.  If the neighborhood lunatic came up to you and vowed he was going to kill you would you take it seriously?  I personally always say that when someone swears they are going to kill you, you'd best take them at their word.  It doesn't matter if you don't want to get into a "religious war" if they do.  If you're completely atheistic and think it doesn't matter when they tell you convert or die, good luck with that.  You might want to look up the terms "dhimmitude", "jizya", and how the Muslims think if you're not one of them, you're essentially not human, and they can kill you any time they feel like it.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Amazing Photo Spread

A friend emailed me this link last night.  It's a slide show of comparisons of a group of shots from both D-Day and recent photographs.  The thing is, the photos were carefully lined up to be the same perspective and scale for the two scenes some 70 years apart. 

Click on the link and at the top you'll get a picture of a port used to stage landing craft for the invasion.
Click your mouse on the picture and slide it side to side and it turns into the modern view.
If you look at the buildings on the far shore, you'll see many appear to be the same.  Throughout the photo set, that's the pattern; some are repaired, some are painted and some are upgraded, but they're all recognizable.  Remarkably consistent over the 70 years. 

There's ten of them, full of amazing similarities and differences.  Go check it out.

Friday, August 8, 2014

A Little More About .308 vs 7.62x51









Lets break it down:


7.62 chamber = higher dimensional tolerance (loose)
.308 chamber = lower dimensional tolerance (tight)





Wednesday, August 6, 2014

This is Handy

Don't know about you guys, but I've personally asked "is it OK to shoot 7.61 NATO in my .308 Win rifle".  I've read on it before, but this graphic from is a handy reference.  And while this is supposed to be a gun blog (I've even got the Tee-shirt), I sure haven't been very good at keeping up the gunny content lately. 

.308 vs. 7.62x51
380 vs. 7.62x51

I printed this out for the reloading area.

So the rule is you can shoot 7.61 NATO in a .308Win gun, but not the other way around.  If you have an AR-15 like everyone else, it's the opposite of 5.56 NATO and .223 Rem where you can shoot both in the 5.56x45 NATO gun and not the .223 gun.  

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Techy Tuesday - The Intersection of Art and Engineering

Before the invention of the camera, artists were concerned with capturing images out of reality.  They could make a living doing portraits of the well-off, and could sell well done pictures of other things, but "art" as it's commonly spoken about today: impressionistic, abstract, cubist, and things like elephant dung on paintings of The Madonna, just weren't done.  Artists were too busy capturing reality to paint how they felt about reality; too busy capturing the sublime to submerge crucifixes in urine.  There was, of course, the constant development of technique from perspective in the 14th Century to Rembrandt's famous developments in shading and shadows, and more; but by the 17th century, capturing reality in a painting was pretty well developed.  Consider, for example, this well known painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, "Girl With a Pearl Earring":
This is a painting of an almost striking reality, very much like a photograph.  In fact, that might not be a coincidence. 

In a recent short blog entry, Design Engineering blogger Elisabeth Eitel goes over the evidence that Vermeer obtained his hauntingly lifelike results through technology, in particular by use of a camera obscura.  The story is contained in a movie called Tim's Vermeer that can occasionally be found in small theaters and probably through the streaming services (that link will open the movie trailer). 
The movie is by inventor Tim Jenison and his friend Penn Jillette (the Vegas magician) who directs. It shows how Jenison works more than eight years to accurately recreate the art of 17th-Century Dutch Johannes Vermeer, the painter of such highly realistic Masters as Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Concert.

Not only that, but Jenison uses all the tech-based techniques Vermeer used — with heavy reliance on a camera obscura.
Cameras obscura are totally enclosed thin-walled boxes with holes on opposing walls. Light travels in straight lines from the scene being painted through a small hole, cross, and project through the opposing hole as an upside-down image on any surface put in front of it.

 With this device, Vermeer captured scenes with the shimmer and accuracy of a snapshot ... 150 years before photography.

What I find fascinating about this is that Vermeer presaged the use of photography for capturing reality by substituting his meticulous work for film.  He essentially became the film.  In an age when artists meticulously painted individuals, Vermeer was (to be crass) tracing pictures in the camera obscura.  It's not as easy as that; people do move and an optical system based on a pinhole doesn't present a great image.  Still, it wasn't painting everything freehand.

I've often thought that if the majority of the great painters had a modern camera to speed their work, they'd use it.  This lends to support to that idea. 

Monday, August 4, 2014

The Golden Age of Narcissism

Our selfie president may not do anything else well, but he absolutely embodies the narcissism that permeates our society. 

From the notion of taking selfies everywhere comes the ubiquitous GoPro video cameras that have allowed thousands of people to take HD videos of how cool they are.  Not enough of you in your videos, because you have the camera mounted facing forward?  Fear not; a whole line of products like this allow you to hold the camera remotely so it can capture your glorious self. 

The notion of taking videos of yourself may have just hit its ultimate point:  AirDog (auto-start of video warning).  AirDog is quadcopter drone with a twist: it has a wrist worn radio transmitter called AirLeash that the drone follows - from a respectful distance.  Mounted to the front of AirDog is your video camera, gyro stabilized and always pointed at you. 

Afraid you'd do something really awesome without producing a video to send to friends or put on the Tube?  Afraid your awesomeness will lost to posterity?  Fear no more!  For a mere $1300 you can purchase a drone dedicated to recording your awesomeness.  Check out their video describing the project. 
I have to admit, from a pure technical standpoint, it's really cool and my initial reaction was to be filled with want.  On a few minutes thought, though, I dropped that desire.  I'm just not that awesome.  This blog is all the selfie-ness that I need.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Zombies Must Starve to Death At the UN - There Are No Brains

Is being legally brain dead a requirement to work for the UN?  Are all employees required to not provide a single gram of Zombie Chow?  For sure it's a requirement to work in the administration, from everything I can see. 

I ask because the UN Human Rights Council is publicly saying that Israel's use of their Iron Dome missile defense system may be a war crime because they're not giving it to the very group that they're defending themselves against!  Only in a brain dead moron's mind (or a socialist's - but I repeat myself) would spending billions to develop a system to protect yourself and your citizens require you to give that advantage to a group sworn to destroy you and every other person of your kind (Hamas Charter). 

But, Madam Brain Dead, isn't it the fault of the attackers when the people they're attacking eventually strike back? 
Tell me that there are higher mental functions going on in that so-called "brain".  I think anyone with half a functioning brain - I've even heard it from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon - knows that Hamas is surrounding all of their military hardware with civilians.  With their own babies.  It's the ultimate hostage situation; they're holding their own people hostage, hoping the Israelis kill them.  It's like strapping each Hamas soldier with a dozen babies.  Hamas is doing their absolute level best to guarantee civilian casualties.  They want them.  They count on them.  They know that civilian casualties are the only way they can "win" this war.  In the press.  With the "low information voters", the useful idiots, and the rest of the media. 
Regrettably, she's not alone in not supplying a gram of Zombie Chow.  The Blaze reports today that a reporter for the Finnish "Helsingin Sanomat" filed a report on a missile being fired at Israel from a hospital, the same hospital hit by a Hamas missile earlier this week, a missile that Israel's IDF recorded the launch and impact of.  But instead of thanking Israeli news reports for using her story and byline, the brain dead reporter was offended that her report was being used by Israel.  Gosh, we sure wouldn't want any truth getting out now, would we?

(Back story: I had written all of this piece except for a conclusion, and then saw Mrs. Graybeard's computer with this cartoon on Sense of Events)

In the classic mindset of the left all of human interaction comes down to one principle: there are oppressors and there are victims.  Israel is a civilized, advanced culture, which places a social premium on knowledge and accomplishment.  The Palestinians are not - it's no small coincidence that the Nigerian Muslim terrorist group with similar beliefs as Hamas calls themselves Boko Haram: Western Education is a sin.  Therefore, in leftist view, Israel must be the oppressor and the Palestinians the oppressed victims.  It's the only way the doctrinaire leftists and most media (again, I repeat myself) are going to structure this story.    

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Anybody Else Ripped Off By Iain Sinclair Design?

Back in February, somebody sent me an offer for a new Iain Sinclair design of a credit card knife (this one, I think).  I was taken by it as a nifty toy and eventually ordered two - one for each of us.  At $16 each, not a terrible expense.  Allow 4 to 8 weeks for delivery.  As we've now hit almost five months, 24 weeks, and nothing but repeated "so sorry, but we're delayed" responses, I think it's time to admit it's probably a ripoff and I'm out my $32.

In June I inquired again and was told they were on track to complete all the back orders by the end of July.  I asked about cancelling the order, and was then introduced to the grim reality of this particular situation.  See, my card was charged back in February.  The Sinclair Design rep says they've changed credit card systems and can't do a refund.  The card company says the deadline for that was a couple of months after purchase.  But the knives are available, they're just apparently not shipping to individuals.  You can buy packs of them on eBay.

In the intervening months, I've seen credit card knives at gun shows for $10 and they're not exactly hard to come by.  I didn't get one at the shows because of the long standing order. 

So I thought I'd ask you, dear readers.  Anyone else been ripped off by these guys?  Anyone else know anything else about the company?  It's hard to fathom why an honest seller with products to sell would take over five months to ship.  Could they have expected a few hundred sales and got a million?  Way more than they could handle?