Like A Broken Record

The same thing over and over and over again.  Obama "won't accept" a budget that doesn't increase spending and doesn't penalize the people who pay taxes.

(Gary Varvel)

He proposes a $4 trillion budget for one year, proposes taxes that raise $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years and thinks this is not only a good thing, but will "not accept" anything that doesn't do what he wants.  If you're a new reader, let me say I'm always extremely skeptical of numbers stated like that.  There's simply no way to know what "$1.5 Trillion over 10 years" really means.  How much per year?  How much economic growth is expected?  It's virtually guaranteed to be a static estimate, meaning it will be wrong as soon as the people being taxed change their behavior even slightly to avoid the taxes.  Probably as soon as the bill passes.  As for expecting to know precisely how much money goes to the treasury in 10 years, just go look up the 2004 budgets and tell me how accurately they predicted last year. 

If he can't see how his own policies are hurting the groups he says he's trying to help, he's hopelessly deluded.   What else can you expect from Alinsky-ite community dis-organizer?

Solar Cycle News Update - It's Downhill From Here

I try to do these every 6 months and my last was in mid-June, so January is the update to post.  Just missed getting this in during January (I forgot!). 

It looks like the second peak of the cycle has ended, with the smoothed number (blue) heading down and the monthly values reducing the range they run over.  It appears the absolute peak of this cycle was just about a year ago and we'll be in the declining side of the cycle for the next few years.  From my experience, the downside of the solar cycle has tended to have more disruptions from solar flares and to decline in activity slower than the cycle peaked.  We haven't had an x-class flare (the strongest class) since October, though, from what I can find.   

As I've posted before, this is the weakest solar cycle in 100 years, which means no living solar scientist has seen a cycle this weak, and our records of what the sun was doing back then are more sparse than what's available now.  Since no living scientist has seen a cycle this week, expect all predictions, including my little one above, to be even less accurate than usual. 

My interest in solar activity grew out of the shortwave radio listening hobby I started at about 13 years old.  That was in the cycle right after the strongest one on record, the peak from the late 50s.  Solar activity acts to increase the density of the ionosphere, which raises the frequency at which radio waves are bent back to Earth.  Following the highest frequency that will propagate between two points, the Maximum Usable Frequency or MUF, is generally the way to hear (or talk with) the farthest points with the lowest loss of signal.  If you're a radio listener or ham it gives you the best shot at those far points.

More recently, I became interested in the sunspot cycle and how it affects the non-radio aspects of life.  The link between solar minima, like the Maunder Minimum, and the little Ice Ages is pretty well known.  Despite what the alarmists say about Global Warmening (or whatever they call it this week), mankind has done better in warm periods than in the cold periods in our history (huge pdf alert - but fascinating reading). 

The NRA Makes the Same Mistake The Rest of Us Are Making

This months' American Rifleman features this cover:

I agree with assessment that we're entering an extremely dangerous period in the world;  some of it I've written about quite recently, and some of it is the result of Obama and his daemons.  I don't, however, agree with the NRA's approach.  Their emphasis is gun control; primarily fundraising to oppose gun control.  (Full disclosure: I'm a life member.  It was deeply on sale or I wouldn't have done it).

The NRA is the 800 pound gorilla in the gun rights fight, but I've seen them described as "pilloried by both their friends and enemies".  The knock on them (not that I need to tell you) is that they play the DC insider game and don't really care about a knockout punch to win the fight for our rights; they just want to keep the gravy train going - like every other lobby going.

While they're the largest of the gun owner groups, they're still only a few million members out of a country of around 300 million.  The exact number seems harder to find than it should, but is on the order of 5 to 10 million people.  Anti-gun groups routinely try to say it's less than that, but it's still not 5% of the population.  In a nation where people routinely say there's 300 million guns, that strikes me as a small percentage of gun owners.  My guess is there's at least 30 million gun owners.  While it's conceivable that if they had 30 million members they would have more political impact, I don't think political lobbying is the way to go.

I think the fight is the broader cultural war; independence and self-reliance vs. reliance on the omnipotent state.  The answer is to make gun ownership more mainstream and accepted.  We need to help show everyone that gun ownership is not the thug culture depicted on TV and in the movies.  One of the strongest signs that progress is being made is that Gallup poll released in November showing that 63% of respondents said that having a gun in the house makes it a safer place.  By a 2/3 to 1/3 margin, they rejected the gun control default position that there should be no guns anywhere.

The percentage of Americans who believe having a gun in the house makes it a safer place to be (63%) has nearly doubled since 2000, when about one in three agreed with this. Three in 10 Americans say having a gun in the house makes it a more dangerous place.

Self-adoring elitists and Ivy League types (yeah, I repeat myself) are always attacking the intelligence of the average American, but average Americans seem to have good common sense.  Maybe they can't build a bridge or design an interstate, but they seem to have a good handle on the fact that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun", a pretty common sense idea. As concealed carry and "gun culture 2.0" continues to grow, more and more people are going to find that they know someone who carries.  The more people who think, "I know Susie has a gun, and she's not a violent nut job", the more likely they are to at least not consider gun control as the standard way to be or to not consider gun control as the immediate response to some insane, mass shooter. 

If they're good at anything, the Alinsky-ites are good at controlling the messages.  In the 1990s, the average 20-something didn't think about gay marriage, today it's difficult to find a 20-something who isn't in favor of it.  Two can play that game.  90 Miles links to a post on Gun Watch about mass shootings stopped by an armed citizen.  There are positive stories about defensive gun use every day; information that reinforces the positive aspects of gun ownership.  Raising that number from 63% to 80% seems daunting, and will mean fighting a propaganda war against propagandists, but it's such a common sense position, it has to sink in.

Helping people see gun control as counterproductive will buy you more in the long run than just sending more money to the DC hog trough. 

Yet Another Project

Remember my broken fishing rod?  MHX agreed to replace the broken blank and the new one arrived today.  I just ordered all the stuff that it takes to build the replacement rod.  I'm still out the cost of all those parts, but the worst loss is the time it's going to take to redo it.   Hey, it should go quicker, right?  Learning curve and all.  Plus, a chunk of the time last go 'round was building the fixtures to do the work. I still have those.

The last one, just before epoxy coating.

Work on the guitar body resumes this weekend, too.  Interspersed with lots of other things.

NASA's Worst Week

It's a peculiar coincidence that all NASA missions that ended in the crew being killed and vehicle destroyed occurred in the same week.  

Apollo 1 burned on the pad during a test, killing Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White on January 27, 1967 .  It was the result of a pure oxygen atmosphere and a spark from a wiring defect. A local legend here in the shadow of the KSC is that from then until at least the beginning of the space shuttle program, as lower level managers were promoted into positions with more Go/No-Go responsibility they were taken into a private room and required to listen to the tape of the men being burned to death. 

Shuttle Challenger was destroyed on January 28, 1986 a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L, as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and the O-rings used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before this.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water and noting that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.  Kevin at the Smallest Minority links to Dr. Sanity who blogs about her experience as flight surgeon for that flight.  Her column is haunting.  Go Read. 

Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry on February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most along the Texas/Louisiana line.  As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it.  A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite, punching a hole in it.  There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it.  They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air.   During reentry, hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart.  Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere or stand up to abuse as well. 

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion.  The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after design, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight.  The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped.  It's doubtful they survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that. 

There's film from inside Columbia until the moment the vehicle is ripped apart by the aerodynamic forces.  I suspect the forces ripped apart their bodies just as fast.  

January 27 to February 1 is 6 days.  Not quite a full week.  Every year, there's a memorial ceremony on the Cape.  On a personal note, I remember them all.  I was a kid living in Miami when Apollo 1 burned.  I was living here and watched Challenger live on TV.  Instead of going outside to watch it as I always did, I watched it on NASA Select satellite TV.  Mrs. Graybeard was working on the cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the SRB's between flights, and was outside watching it.  It took quite a while for the shock to ease up.  I saw those spreading contrails everywhere for a long time.  Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again.  Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms. 

Final words to Dr. Sanity:

I remember the Challenger and her crew frequently and with love. They are a part of me now. All of them represent the best within the American spirit, and always will. Since that day in 1986, I have come to see NASA as one of the greatest impediments to the Dream of space exploration; but I have never given up the Dream itself. Nor have I forgotten any of the pioneers who have died in the service of that Dream. Some day we humans will leave this small planet and joyfully play in all the corners of the cosmos.

"I have come to see NASA as one of the greatest impediments to the Dream of space exploration; but I have never given up the Dream itself."  We're in complete agreement.   

Techy Tuesday - Microsoft Changing Their Business Model?

If I asked you to do word association with the word Microsoft, chances are you'll say Windows.  Microsoft got its big boost as a business and into the upper echelons of the business world by providing the operating system for the IBM PC (PC-DOS) in 1981 and has dominated the world of computer OS sales almost since then.  Windows has been with us since 1985 (frankly, that surprised me, my first version of windows was 3.1 in the early 90s).

And all through that time, Microsoft has hounded the users to pay up for their OS as well as any application they sell.  Bill Gates, in fact, is famous for having written an "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976 complaining about rampant copying of his BASIC programming language for the first home computers.

With that in mind, I was surprised to learn the distribution model for the next version of Windows, which will skip 9 and go directly to 10, will be distributed free, if you upgrade from Windows 7, 8.1, or Windows Phone 8.1 within one year of the final release.  (It's currently available for anyone who wants to Beta test it).

The exact mechanics of how this will work aren't clear to me.  It appears to be real (not rumor), but the plan is still in development.  Windows 10 will remain free for the lifetime of the device on which you upgraded during that first year.  The reporter said they don't really know how they plan to get paid for the products, much less how they'll handle updates or upgrades to Service Pack 1 when that inevitably comes out.  Their goal appears to get all Windows users: desktop, Surface tablet, Windows phone, or whatever, using a common OS; with the goal of a common experience across all platforms.  Microsoft uses terms like:

mobility of experience across an increasing number of devices

trust, putting people in control of their privacy because they are the customer, not the product

natural interactions via voice, pen, gestures, and gaze in an intuitive way

But I couldn't help but think:

One OS to rule them all 

One OS to find them 

One OS to bring them all 

and in the darkness bind them.

The list of features gets a giant "Meh" out of me with a possible exception or two.  But the change from the old way of buying Windows is the unusual thing here.  

Details on the features, etc., here. 

Preserving the Dignity of the Office - Part II

If you don't understand this, you're probably mentally healthy by today's standards.  (WARNING: An actual description of the actual acts that inspire this cartoon follow.  Those with delicate stomachs may lose their meals.  You have been warned.)  See, this YouTube star who interviewed the president, GloZell, did a video where she put on bathing suit, filled a tub with milk and Froot Loops, immersed herself in the tub and ate the cereal.  Its depicted at the upper right on the wall. 

"It's Snowing and We're Out of Kale" - Chaos Erupts in NYC Whole Foods

Funniest thing I've read on the Twitter in quite a while.  I don't have a twitter account, but I read the agglomerator, Twitchy from time to time.

‘Free range cannibalism’? Hearty mockery as blizzard-fearing NYC hipsters storm Whole Foods

Some favorites:

"911, what's your emergency?"

"IT'S SNOWING AND WE'RE OUT OF KALE!"
...
BREAKING: NYC Whole Foods runs out of ironic beverages; hipsters attempt to flee city; thousands of electric cars frozen on area highways.
...
I just watched a woman cry in the empty kale aisle of the Tribeca Whole Foods. Life is a prison.
...

And from our buddy Iowahawk, Dave Burge wins the Internets with: 

Next big NYC foodie craze: free range cannibalism

"#Shopocalypse at Whole Foods in Chelsea with bigger crowds and more on edge than before Hurricane Sandy"  Paul B. Raushenbush        ✔ @raushenbush 

New York City Mayor Bill "Che" Deblasio,  rapidly increasing his competition with Michael Bloomberg for the title of Most Dependable Asshole in politics declared a “winter weather state of emergency” and essentially shut the city down.  Just a bit of an overreaction, but probably has something to do with his pattern of not sending snow plows to wealthier neighborhoods.   Or not.  

Speaking of which, do you remember reading a while back that "the end of snow" was coming, and the stories that children born soon will never know snow in their lives?  Like all climate alarmism, this has proven laughably wrong.  Instead, Joseph D'Aleo, the chief forecaster for Weatherbell Analytics, points out this decade, just hitting the halfway point, is the snowiest decade in the NOAA records on the east coast. 

“Assuming this storm gets ranked by NOAA as one of the high impact (population affected by snowstorm) snowstorms (likely since the November storm was), we will have had 14 major impact storms this decade (only half over) beating out the 10 in the 1960s and 2000s,” Joseph D’Aleo, CCM (Certified Consulting Meteorologist), told Climate Depot on Monday.

Go 20-teens!  That's pretty impressive.

Well How About That?

No Lawyers - Only Guns and Money has an infographic from the NSSF about the rapid growth of women in shooting.  For attempt at convenience, I'll copy it here:

While we regularly hear about making sure we welcome new shooters and help them acclimate into the gun culture, both good things,  it looks to me like these new women shooters are full-fledged gunnies Right Now.  Why?  Look at the features they're shopping for:  (1) Fit,  (2) Quality,  (3)  Practicality.  Note to gun manufacturers:  did you notice that "Pink" doesn't appear in that list?  Why do they buy guns?  (1) Self defense  (2)  Hunting  (3) just to go shooting with Friends.  Just like any guys I know.  Notice the 3 most popular types?  (1)  Semi-auto pistol  (2)  Revolver and (3)  Shotgun.  I'd bet that it's either the same for men, although one of the three might turn into a semi-auto rifle (AR-15s are Barbies for Men, after all).  What else are women buying?  Gun cleaning products, eye and ear protection, targets, cases.... how much more "mainstream gunnie" can you get? 

While I'm impressed by the increases in the numbers of women getting into shooting, and I certainly hope I'm as welcoming to all new shooters as can be, women are becoming shooters to become shooters.  They're as much gunnies as any grizzled old guy.  More so, if the guy has guns but never goes shooting. 

Preserving The Dignity Of the Office

(Chip Bok)

I think it was Rush who was asking (to use my words), "in what universe does this make sense"?  I've often wanted to ask Obama what color the sky is on his planet; this just makes the question more pressing.  Apparently he's reaching out to ... someone.  The youth vote?  The YouTube fanboi vote?  And why would he even be reaching out for votes in the first place, since as he so pointedly reminded us, he has no more elections to run?  Trying to be the King Maker?    

How About A Bit More Chaos?

Good Lawd, what a week!!  Could we get more chaos?   Could we put any more pressure on global systems that are creaking worse than the most awful wooden floors or stairs ever seen?

To begin with, just over a week ago, the Swiss unpegged their Franc from Euro.  Long the most stable currency in Europe, they finally dropped their peg (a fixed exchange rate) and the move immediately shook the financial world.  It triggered a rush to Swiss assets for safety.   EU and German banks got hammered.  The Euro's exchange rate immediately dropped 30% .  Gold went back up to $1300 and silver jumped to $18.  (BTW, both metals are off to pretty big starts this year.)

In light of this (IMO) the European Central Bank announced a new round of bond buying - quantitative easing or monetary creation.  The ECB said it would combine purchases of government bonds with an existing smaller program of private bond purchases, to create 60 billion euros a month through September 2016.  All told, the program will amount to 1.1 trillion euros ($1.16 trillion).  The aim, of course, is to revive the EU economy.  As many have pointed out, they're going to fix the problem of over extended credit by extending more credit - exactly the same as fixing a hole by digging it deeper.   

The Euro is down against the dollar, it's almost 1:1 and I don't recall it ever being there, there's virtually a full tilt currency war going on, and the dollar is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.  Strange that it seems to have started with Obama essentially declaring he was going to crash the dollar.  Weaken it to the point where our exports increased greatly.  The problem with currency wars is that no one wins and everyone loses. Currency wars don’t create growth; they just steal it.  Growth  is stolen from trading partners until those trading partners steal it back with their own devaluations.

Yemen has collapsed as a nation - to the extent that it really was one to begin with.  Worse yet, it appears that Iran is involved. 

Saudi Arabia has lost one King and gotten another.  The combination of Yemen and Saudi Arabia pushes the region further into some deeply disturbing directions. Last week, John Robb posted a plausible scenario of how ISIS leverages a successful assassination of Saudi general into collapse of the Kingdom and how that could prompt global economic collapse - today's sub-$50 oil bounds up to $150 within a few months.  The death of King Abdullah probably makes that even more likely, as Robb reports today.   Even worse, he sees the possibility that ISIS captures and flips the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!

PS:  If this doesn't occur, ISIS missed the opportunity, and we're all better off for their mistake.

PPS:  ISIS is a theocratic network of networks that is both entrepreneurial and dynamic. The KSA is a theocratic hierarchy that's risk averse and inflexible.  Which one wins?

One of the more plausible explanations for the Saudis driving oil prices down is that it pressures their old enemies: Iran and Syria (Sunni vs. Shia, round 9 million).  It punishes Russia for helping Iran, both of whom are economically hurting from it, and it also hurts ISIS who gets funding from selling their stolen oil.  If the Saudi hand is ripped off that figurative valve by the ISIS jihad, do you think $50 oil stays? 

Iran!  Like many others have said, Iran and other countries see us as a weak country now and are likely to be thinking they need to take their action against Israel or us soon, before a stronger leader takes the reigns again.  I think the Iranian general that the Israelis took out this week could have been in the vanguard of putting plans into action.

Iran’s brazenness, or audacity, goes further. While a desperate-looking US administration tries to advance talks over the Iranian nuclear program, the regime in Tehran continues to run a wild foreign policy throughout the Middle East. Though the regime’s income has fallen dramatically in the wake of the drop in oil prices, Tehran is still investing huge sums of money taking control of new assets in the region, from Afghanistan to Libya — almost the territory of the ancient Persian empire of Ahaseurus.

Hezbollah, for its part responded to the Israeli strike by saying they're preparing for war in the Galilee region of Israel.  Galilee is in the northern part of Israel, near the Golan Heights and Syria.  I spent a few days there last August. 

“If the highest level of Hezbollah commanders were in the Golan Heights and the high level of Iranians, it means that their idea, [what] they’re planning could be a kind of operation, an act against Israel on a high level,” Reuven said during a conference call Monday organized by the Israel Project (TIP). “It’s significant, the high level of this meeting, of this reconnaissance of the Iranians and Hezbollah.”

In the meantime, Obama has transferred almost $12 billion of your tax money to Iran; no doubt helping fund their development of atomic weapons.   This past Wednesday they paid $490 million in cash assets to Iran and will have released a total of $11.9 billion to the Islamic Republic by the time nuclear talks are scheduled to end in June.  Good thing we keep paying them even when oil is down, or they might not be able to arm Hezbollah to keep killing Israelis and whatever US troops they can get to.  

With all that chaos going on in just the last week to 10 days, what more could we pile on?  Mandatory $15/hr minimum wage increases?  That ought to throw a good sized quake through the economy.  Increasing spending?  Taking away programs that encourage saving for college?  Increasing taxes on the people who already pay the most?  The image of the Fabian Socialists was that the world needed to be heated up so that it could be re-forged and remolded to their desires. 

Hot enough for ya?

Quote of the Day

To Stilton Jarlsberg at Hope n' Change Cartoons:

No, we didn't watch the State of the Union Address last night.  We didn't watch it for the same reason we didn't shove meth-crazed porcupines up our poop chute: because it would be an unbelievably stupid and painful thing to do.

And that says it all better than I was saying it.  It was on in the other room while I was working last night but I had to turn off the TV.  I can't stand the voice, let alone the content of what he was saying.  Fact-check articles are out and about if you care, written not just by people who are bound by actual verifiable reality, but by anyone who thinks their opinion makes sense.  The prez himself makes as much sense as this Octopi Wall Street dood, who has the same message as Obama but is only a little more direct. 

Techy Tuesday - Tech You Can Use

How about boots that can recharge batteries? 

As technical advances have increased the amount of electronics that's useful to soldiers, the amount of batteries they need to carry has steadily increased, with some reports saying the typical soldier carries 20 pounds of batteries.  Now, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and STC Footwear has produced boots that can replace some of those batteries carried.  In its current design, the Kinetic Boot is capable of generating up to 1.5 watts of power per foot to charge reusable batteries or connect directly to systems.

Previous solutions, such as solar-power chest panels and helmets, still added significant weight to soldiers’ uniforms, but the Kinetic Boot only adds 2 to 3 ounces of weight per boot—all while generating more energy. In a demonstration at the Marine Corps’ Experimental Forward Operating Base (ExFOB), a pair of Kinetic Boots was able to generate between 2 to 3 average watts of power...

I don't know the voltage available at those boots, but let's assume we can use it to charge a phone with no losses due to inefficiency.  A standard iPhone 5 original equipment battery, for example, is 1440 mA at 3.8V or 5.47 Watts.  It would take almost two hours of walking to completely replenish that battery.  Still, that's otherwise wasted energy, and it will add up in a day with a lot of walking.  I couldn't tell you how useful those 20 or so Watt*Hours produced by walking around would be.  

While the concept of harvesting energy from motion is not entirely new, efficiency has remained an ever-present problem. Further optimization of the boots will help achieve maximum power generation while ruggedizing the design for harsh military conditions. Enhanced ruggedized packaging will not only protect the boots’ components from environmental factors including dust and mud, but will also standardize the components’ positioning to increase reliability. 

I suppose these are a little while out, and even longer until they show up as surplus.  No idea of cost so they might be too much for the commercial market.  

U.S. Marines try out a Kinetic Boot prototype at ExFOB 2014.  (Photo courtesy of the US Marines.)

No references to Bennie and Jets. 

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

Administrivia:  in the past few weeks, I've added two blogs to my reading list.  I've neglected to point these out, but I should have.  One is fellow Florida blogger 90 Miles From Tyranny.  Hosted by Mike Miles, he's a common sense, small government, firearms friendly guy - who needs a link from me about as much as Instapundit does.  He has about 5x as many views as I do in way less time than I've been blogging.  But blogs that are short, pithy, and visual are fun to watch and I do.  He's in the Florida blog section.

The other is a blog that Western Rifle Shooters Linked to a few days ago, Come and Make It - reminiscent of the Molon Labe cry.  He's a maker dedicated to helping the home gun and knife maker.  Almost everything I've seen is tool related.  His article on the state of the art in 3D Printed guns was WRSA's link that got me there.  In turn, he links to MaDuece.imgur.com where you'll find a lot of very interesting work in progress.  A 3D printed AR fire control group?  Still need metal for the springs, and it doesn't quite work yet, but experimentation is the mother, right?  Keep an eye on this one, if you're interested in making stuff. 

Meanwhile, my shop is in place and hardly being used.  I sanded the project guitar kit to 220 grit yesterday, and will follow up with the next size finer that I have.  Then it's time to start messing with stains (where "mess" is the key word).  I'm still leaning toward a cherry sunburst, as I said when I posted originally, but don't really know how to get there.  Need to do some more reading.  Over at the show Saturday, I saw a few flame maple guitars finished in "natural".  It doesn't look bad.  Nah... I'll stick with trying for cherry sunburst because otherwise I don't learn anything for the next project.  The back and sides are mahogany, so they'll be given a more reddish-brown stain. 

Yeah.  In my dreams it comes out looking pretty much like that.  Except for the sides, because the cheapo kit doesn't have flame maple on the sides. 

How Did I Get Here?

How did it get to be Sunday night?

Yesterday was the Orlando International Guitar and Music Expo.  We had never been to one; in fact, I first learned about it last year the Monday after the show.  After looking in a few calendars for another guitar show in a reasonable driving distance, I put a memo in my Calendar to look for it in December.  We took the 90 minute or so drive over to see what these shows are like. 

To begin, it's held at Orlando's Orange County Fairgrounds, the same venue that houses the Orlando Hamcation I've written about before, but in only one of the buildings while the Hamcation uses three.  Still, it was a big room that was completely full and while the dominant impression is a room full of guitars on tables, there was quite a bit more.  This picture from last year is only part of the room, and it's less densely packed than this year looked.  (Photo from the show organizers)

I was astounded at the sheer number of instruments commanding four digit prices - and there was at least one I saw that was priced at $100,000 (I think it was this one).  There were other instruments as well: mandolins, ukeleles, banjos and others - including a harp guitar.  I saw instruments that I can't name.  70s rocker Rick Derringer was there as a spokesperson for a manufacturer, taking pictures with folks and doing a demo.  The room had the usual din of hundreds of people talking along with a few dozen people at any moment playing different riffs and songs as they tried out new purchases. 

But that only took up six or seven hours, including 3 to 4 driving the round trip.  Didn't buy a thing, except a small wooden pick tray from a CNC router shop primarily selling raw Telecaster and Stratocaster bodies for home builders.  We were home before 5 and had a normal Saturday evening. 

Today...I almost can't tell you what we did.  Other than a short Wally World trip to get sandpaper for my project, and an hour or so doing some sanding, I would swear it should be noon.

Regular content will resume and all that.

This Made Me Cringe

It is so incredibly ... amazingly, embarrassingly juvenile. 

I just don't know where to start.  It's the Amateur Hour writ large. 

Greg Gutfeld of Fox News and Red Eye commented, "This is like if the French sent a troupe of mimes over after 9/11".

A Stopped Clock Is Right More Often Than Eric Holder

The stopped clock is right twice a day; Holder may be right for the first time in his tenure as AG.  H/T to Market Ticker.  Holder has issued a ruling to limit civil forfeiture, where police departments have been incentivized to seize property and cash from anyone they find convenient. 

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.

 Denninger continues

This will not stop all civil forfeiture, but it will stop nearly all of it.

States can certainly continue to try to proceed with their programs under state laws, but the "Equitable Sharing" program made it very easy and thus cheap to administer -- and also gave the states a wide degree of immunity from being hammered in the courts with civil suits, since the underlying action was federal.

I've written about civil forfeiture incidents here before, and it's not a new problem.  It goes back to drug laws first passed in 1970, when Congress allowed police to seize aircraft, boats and other property used to transport narcotics or bought by drug lords with ill-gotten gains.  Like all laws useful to the police state, it has expanded over the years.  As I wrote a couple of years ago:

Around Daytona, Florida, in the 1990s, sheriff Bob Vogel was notorious for stopping cars on I-95.  If you had cash, you must be a drug dealer, so the cash was seized.  Drivers were virtually never charged with a crime, guilt was therefore never proven and the police made over $8 Million dollars for a department fund.

This pattern has expanded and been used repeatedly all over the country.  My previous article featured a story of the laws being used to sue an inanimate object. 

This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955.

But the stories can go on endlessly.  The WaPo article reports that since 2008, more than 55,000 civil forfeitures have been used to seize cash and property worth $3 billion from people whom are rarely if ever charged with crime.  The usual approach would be to seize cash if it appeared it was from a small business or individual, because they would be least likely to afford a legal staff that would be a threat to the states, then drag the cases out and run up legal bills until the victim went bankrupt trying to get their money back.  Case in point:

That includes people such as Mandrel Stuart, who was stopped in 2012 by Fairfax County police, detained without charges, handcuffed and stripped of $17,550 in cash that was to be used for equipment and supplies for his barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Va. He eventually hired a lawyer, and a jury gave him his money back in 2013. But he lost his restaurant while fighting the government, because he had no working capital.

Of course, the police departments see a threat to their undocumented funding efforts and are upset:

“It seems like a continual barrage against police,” said John W. Thompson, interim executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “I’m not saying there’s no wrongdoing, but there is wrongdoing in everything.”  

Read that last sentence again.  Sounds like Otter in Animal House.  "The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests - we did.  But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals"  This whole thing sounds like organized crime to me.  If you have something valuable and don't seem to have the legal force to protect it, the state is taking it.

So why would that despicable little troll Holder do this now?  Has he become sensitive to his legacy, and wants to be known for doing something right?   If so, this is a good candidate because it seems that there is no political base that likes civil forfeiture.  Left or right, I've never heard anyone say it's a wonderful thing.  Maybe statists think so, but I've never come across them saying it.

Although it burns my mouth to say this, I have to acknowledge that Holder did something right.  I always heard that while it's not strictly true, if something happens less than 5% of the time, it's probably a random event.  They used to say "even a blind pig finds a few acorns". 

(from)  By the way... did you know there's an entire "Eric Holder looks like sloth" meme out there? 

Microwave Cloaking Technology Demonstrated

When this month's Microwave Journal trade magazine arrived, I was rather surprised to see a feature article called "Wideband Omnidirectional Microwave Cloaking" with a rather good explanation and demonstration videos.  The article is full of details, references and all needed information, but is written for working specialists with good foundation in electromagnetics.  I know some of my readers will understand it, but you may have seen it already.  If you have the resources, you might be able to duplicate it, but the company, Fractal Antenna Systems of Bedford, MA, has patented several aspects of the system. 

In a nutshell, what happens is they cover an object with an antenna array which keeps an object from reflecting or absorbing radio waves.  Instead the array of antennas (printed antennas on flexible, hi quality insulators) cancels reflections or backscatter from the body, and directs the waves around and away from it in the direction it was originally traveling.  Fractal Antenna Systems' technique uses printed Minkowski Fractal patterns, with antennas spaced closely to each other.  The antennas are passive; they absorb the field from source and re-radiate it in directions that add up in the desired way direction, forming what they call a metamaterial.   Metamaterial cloaking is an area that has been discussed theoretically for several years.   This is it.  The term for the forward radiation, seen in this diagram, is evanescent surface wave, or ESW:

Imagine coating an aircraft with this, so that radar pulses are directed around the aircraft and aren't reflected to the radar operator. Similarly, radio returns or noise from beyond you would pass through you as though you weren't there. 

If you've got a really good memory and have been coming here for years, you'll remember that we've spoken about cloaking technologies before (read the comments, too).  In the conclusion of that little piece, I said,

The technology to do this in visible light is very likely many years away, but imagine light-piping (fiber optics) an image from one side of a cloak to another, so that the objects on one side of you can be seen as if you weren't there.  I expect the first uses will be to disguise soldiers from being seen from great distances; it will be a long time before you could stand near someone and not see them.

That is essentially what this is doing, only at low radio frequencies instead of light frequencies.  I think the day of operational cloaking devices for most sensors just got a bit closer. 

Although I couldn't embed them here, if you want to see a couple of short (~ 5 minute) videos of the system at work, the journal has another interesting page.   No, it doesn't look like a Klingon War Bird decloaking (although I can imagine how it could someday), but you can watch an engineer become invisible to microwaves. 

Who Carried Out the Charlie Hebdo Attacks?

Depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers.  It's too easy to accept that radical Islamic murderers acting to avenge their insults carried out the attacks.  That's not fun.  You need to think outside the box!

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan blamed it on the French.

'French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price,' Erdogan said yesterday.
...
'That's very meaningful ... Doesn't their intelligence organisation track those who leave prison?
...
'Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.
...
'The West's hypocrisy is obvious. As Muslims, we've never taken part in terrorist massacres. Behind these lie racism, hatespeech and Islamophobia,' Erdogan added.

Vladimir Putin and the Russian powers blamed it on the US; or the just the general wickedness of the west. 

"As for the events in Paris, I am sure that one way or another American curators stood behind the Islamists that carried out the attack," said Aleksei Martynov, the head of the International Institute of the New States, an organization created shortly before the 2008 Russia-Georgia War that appears to focus on promoting breakaway regions in Russia's periphery.

As you'd probably expect, it's rather common to blame the west in General if not the US in particular, whether it comes from college professors, Syria, Hamas or other dependable idiots.  

But my favorite is blaming it on the Jooos.  Who else is do devious and powerful?  But not just regular Jooos.  Magical, shape-shifting Jews.  Srsly.

Dana Kennedy of the Daily Beast spoke to a "cross section" of French Algerian Muslims in suburban Paris and learned "they felt the attacks were actually a conspiracy by the Jews to make Muslims look bad. One person told me that in fact they weren't just regular Jews that were doing this, in fact they were a race of magical Jews, shape shifting Jews"
....
Diaz-Balart: You talked, Dana, to some of these French Muslims who say this was all a conspiracy. What do they mean?

Kennedy: Well, I went out to what they call the suburbs of France which are not what Americans think of as the suburbs, really the housing projects they’re outside Paris and there are a couple of areas inside Paris where a lot of poor Muslims live. I talked to cross section of mainly French Algerian young men who said to me it was pretty much they felt the attacks were actually a conspiracy by the Jews to make Muslims look bad. One person told me that in fact they weren't just regular Jews that were doing this, in fact they were a race of magical Jews, shape shifting Jews, master manipulators that could be everywhere at the same time.

(Odo, famous shapeshifter from Star Trek Deep Space 9 as portrayed by actor René Auberjonois)

Ordinarily, I like to come up with something pithy to finish a posting.  Something that really sums it up well, or maybe something that's memorable, or funny.  I can't think of a single thing to say that even gets close to "...a race of magical Jews, shape shifting Jews, master manipulators that could be everywhere at the same time. " 

Techy Tuesday - A Little CES Wrapup

I've never been to the Consumer Electronics Show.  The simplest explanation works here: I've never worked in a business that valued it and sent anyone.  I've spent my career in industrial and military electronics, which is more concerned with absolute dependability than with low prices or "Wow factor".   It's still fun to read what's coming in gadgets and other home electronics, though, and I try to keep an eye on the show every year.

If there was a theme to CES, I think it would have to be personal electronics.  One of the big marketing buzz words was "wearable".  Not just smart watches and Google Glasses, but LED-enhanced clothing and fitness trackers/monitors.  You'll be pleased (?) to note the Golden Age of Narcissism I wrote about in August remains in full swing, with swarming, intelligent, autonomous drones to take selfies of you on the floor at CES.   Parrot showed of its Bebop Drone, the lightest drone of its kind, with a 14-megapixel fisheye camera that does image stabilization. Though image stabilization generally requires more weight, Parrot's drone weighs in at 400-grams, and can stream live video across a Broadcom 2x2 WiFi chip (capable of 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies) while a gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and pressure sensor stabilize the camera's 180-degree view.  Preview video here.

Personal medical devices were big.  A Mountain View, CA, company called Scanadu showed a new medical sensor called the Scout.  The device can track heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen levels in the blood.  After the device scans a user's forehead, the data is sent to your smartphone via Bluetooth.  (Sound like a rough cut at a Star Trek Tricorder?  It's not a coincidence.  Qualcomm, the electronics component and wireless infrastructure company is offering an X-Prize for the first Tricorder and the Scanadu Scout is in the running)  Meanwhile, Scanadu is developing a Scanaflo, a urinalysis test kit capable of testing for levels of glucose, protein, leukocytes, nitrites, blood, bilirubin, urobilinogen, microalbumin, creatinine, ketone, specific gravity, and pH in urine. It will send you the results via your smartphone, or directly to your doctor if you prefer. 

Something I thought was cool was the jamstick.  Most people are aware of MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standard that's used for transmitting music between composers, instruments, and users.  Where do you start?  Often with a MIDI Controller, where you'll compose different pieces, give them different voices, and write all the tracks.  If you go to a music retailer and look for MIDI Controllers, you mostly find a lot of keyboards.  What if you don't play keyboards, but you do play guitar?  That's where the jamstick comes in.  It looks like the last five frets on a guitar's neck but rather than actually simulating the notes you hit and synthesizing a sound, it's the equivalent of the keyboard.  It uses proprietary IR sensing to determine finger position and detect the pick on the fretboard.  JamStick connects to your device or home network by WiFi. 

Of course there was more; acres more.  Not all egotistic features like the drones to follow you and document your life, a lot of things to make life a bit more enjoyable.  I'd like to go someday.  Maybe after I retire...

TRW used this cutaway car to show all the active and passive safety equipment they make for modern cars.