In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.
For the last several months, more consistently since I retired, I've been making the metal parts to convert my G0704 milling machine to CNC control. So far, every part has been usable. (Perhaps I should say "appears usable"!) Today, I mentioned to Mrs. Graybeard that I hadn't botched any part. Everything seemed usable. So you know what happens next, right? It's like saying, "our pitcher has a no-hitter going" or, "gee, I haven't had a flat tire in years".
Immediately after that, I went out into the shop and made my first piece of scrap. The last piece on the list to make is a spacer for the Y-axis. It's a block of aluminum, 1 3/8 by 2 1/2 on the face and 1 1/2" thick. It has three through holes: two that are 1/4" diameter and one 0.406" (13/32). The big hole is counter bored an odd size: 0.945" diameter by 0.360 deep, on both ends. After examining all of the options I have for cutting a flat bottomed hole like that, I decided to use an end mill and use an interpolated circle cut. This can be done directly in G-Code, a circle is a single line command and to cut out a circle like this is a four line subroutine repeated: go to the center to drop the cutter, step to a new depth, go back to the circle, cut a new layer deeper, and repeat. To make it sound even easier, I just did that a few days ago to complete my Z-axis motor mount. Only problem is that I punched in a wrong number in my calculator, coded it wrong and made the circle off center.
Actually, it's worse than that. I barfed it up twice - as you can see. The first path, which I aborted before it cut the first layer, was way far off. The second was barfed up differently. In both cases, the root cause of the problem was that I did it in my head without checking it in my CAD program.
There's an old saying that there's no such thing as whiteout for metal, so measure twice and cut once. This is why. Let my bad experience be your learning experience!
Actually, over $410k. H/T to the Washington Free Beacon, we find that the National Science Foundation has spent more than $412,000 on a study
that published scientific results on the “relationship between gender
and glaciers.”
The paper “Glaciers, gender, and science,”
published in January 2016, concluded that “ice is not just ice,” urging
scientists to take a “feminist political ecology and feminist
postcolonial” approach when they study melting ice caps and climate
change.
“Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental
change,” the paper by Mark Carey, a professor at the University of
Oregon, explained. “However, the relationships among gender, science,
and glaciers–particularly related to epistemological questions about the
production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied.”
I suspect that, like me, you're looking to see if it's April 1st. I mean, I didn't think the concept of gender even remotely applied to hunks of ice. Nope. It's not March 8th and this is a real paper, although it really sounds like it could have been created by one of those random word salad generators, programmed for the indecipherable prose of grievance studies or social justice warrior diatribe. First noted by Reason Magazine, which quotes the author of the paper saying:
"What I'm trying to do in my research is provide more of a human story
about how shrinking glaciers, warming temperatures, changing
precipitation, how that plays out for different people," said lead
author Mark Carey, an associate dean of Oregon's history department, in a
interview accompanying the press release.
I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a
human face on climate change, he failed. The paper is simply impossible
to read with a straight face. It employs liberal buzzwords—colonialism,
marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc.—with such frequency that
the entire thing comes off like a joke. Just try to follow along with
this paragraph:
Feminist and postcolonial theories enrich and complement each other
by showing how gender and colonialism are co-constituted, as well as how
both women and indigenous peoples have been marginalized historically
(Schnabel, 2014). Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial
science studies, analyzing not only gender dynamics and situated
knowledges, but also alternative knowledges and folk glaciologies that
are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality,
unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western
science (Harding, 2009).
In the WFB article Carey is further quoted as saying he hired a new graduate student, Jaclyn Rushing, an environmental studies and romance languages major, and became interested in "the relationship between women and ice"; thus turning the "lens of feminist studies" to the study of, well, massive hunks of ice.
Let me pause for a moment to swear I am still not making this up.
One purpose of “feminist glaciology” is to “analyze how power,
domination, colonialism, and control—undergirded by and coincident with
masculinist ideologies—have shaped glacier-related sciences and
knowledges over time.”
“Most existing glaciological research–and hence discourse and
discussions about cryospheric change–stems from information produced by
men, about men, with manly characteristics, and within masculinist
discourses,” the paper said.
When studying the gender aspects of ice, one cannot leave out the patriarchy, the paper adds.
I'm not often too confused by a paper to comment, but the main question I have is whether it's permissible to sacrifice trans-gendered pseudo-virgins to the glacier gods to keep the glaciers at bay?
But that's not exactly how they said it. H/T and story at Steven Goddard's Real Science blog.
In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included this graph,
which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature
record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.
Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.
The common term for this is cherry picking. By carefully choosing the start and end dates of a data series, you can usually make it show pretty much anything. In this case, although NOAA had data going back 58 years, they only chose the data that made it look like continuous warming. Anyone should have asked why they did this. After all, if the data showed continuous warming since 1958 that would be an even more impressive plot, so clearly something that happened between 1958 and 1979 made it look less dramatic. With a little judicious research and combining of what they said and what they hid, Goddard reconstructed this plot, attempting to match the scales in both axes as closely as he could.
It's pretty obvious that the data in the left hand side of this blend looks rather similar to the most recent data. There was a period of temperature anomalies that tended toward the bottom of their plots from about 1974 through the 2000/2001 time frame. The stark peak in 1998 was the really strong El Nino phase that year, and this year's peak is rivaling that one. This year's El Nino phase is easily among the strongest few ever observed.
The omission of this data from the NOAA report, is just their latest
attempt to defraud the public. NOAA’s best data shows no warming for 60
years. But it gets worse. The graph in the NOAA report shows about 0.5C
warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original published data shows
little warming during that period.
Goddard continues to extract more of this data and show the NOAA lies - excuse me, data manipulation - and shows once again that when the data adjustments are removed and the cleanest, best data that can be found is used, any trace of a warming crisis disappears. Just the normal wandering of weather. There is man-caused climate change; to be specific, it's caused by the men adjusting the data sets, not CO2.
Beautiful day today! Mid 50s at daybreak turning to mid-70s for the high. If I had thought to get prepared last night, I'd have smoked a pork butt or something involved like that. Instead, I figured I'd make a fatty in the afternoon (those only take 2 or 2 1/2 hours in the smoker). And then I got waylaid by doing taxes and forgot to get started in time.
Atomic Buffalo Turds to the rescue!
Atomic what? Another of the recipes that are mainstays for the barbecue crowd, ABTs, like fatties, are a template, not a recipe. A quick search with your favorite search engine will get you a bazillion recipes. Here's what I did.
I started out with a pound package of pork sausage and eight fresh jalapeno peppers. Cut the peppers in half lengthwise, and clean out the web and seeds so they can be stuffed. Most recipes put a layer of cream cheese, or a cream cheese mix in each half, and then use a prefab sausage like a Lit'l Smokie or another small sausage. I left out the cream cheese and used the raw Jimmy Dean Pork Sausage. Rolled it up into a small cigar shape (some would say turd shape...) that fit in the pepper and just laid it there. Covered it with grated sharp cheddar, then wrapped it in a slice of bacon. Had a little sausage left over, so I rolled it the same way, rolled it
in cheddar, wrapped in bacon and threw it on this rack, too. Sort of a
one-ounce mini-fatty.
Into the smoker at 230 for an hour and a half, followed by the oven at 375 for no more than another half hour, and out they came:
Meat, veggie, dairy, and bacon in one place. They're an appetizer or a dinner. An ideal diet food, if you're doing LCHF, or "paleo". It doesn't get much better than this.
A scrap wood/spare time project: a cutting board made from scraps sold as pen blanks. I bought these a while ago - so far back I don't recall. When I got my first lathe, I went through a bit of a pen turning phase, so it would have been then; maybe '04. I made a few pens, gave away a few, and kind of lost interest, because how many pens can you fill a house with, especially when decent pens are really cheap? Sometime around then, I bought a box of pen blanks off eBay. With the exception of some exotically priced exotic woods, what "box of pen blanks" usually means is some scraps about 5/8 to 3/4" on a side and five or six inches long. This box had maple, cherry, oak, and a handful of some exotic woods. Those are fine for a pen if they're highly figured, but these weren't.
A few weeks ago, while bouncing around on Pinterest, I came across some fantastically beautiful cutting boards. Real works of art that artists put a lot of effort and time into (like in this 15 minute video). Here's an example that's not extremely involved.
It gave me the idea to play around with my cherry and maple pieces and see if I could come up with an attractive pattern; it grew until I used all of my maple and had to put some oak in there. It still wasn't a dozens of hours project, and you can see my share of mistakes, but it was a fun way to spend some time. I probably spent more time sharpening my plane and getting some tools running that I haven't used in years than actually woodworking. The mottled appearance is from taking the pic as the first coat of mineral oil sinks in.
Or a corrupt, dirtbag, politician infestation. Your choice. Second one works for me.
This year there were several bills in the Florida legislature that expanded or preserved gun owner's rights. They have been killed by influential so-called Republicans.
The so-called "Campus Carry" bill would allow people who already have a concealed carry permit to carry on a college campus. Florida's concealed carry permit, called a CWFL (Concealed Weapon or Firearm License) requires holders to be over 21, pass a background check, be fingerprinted, and take a class. We're not talking about letting 18 year olds carry; these are legal adults in the state. Despite other votes in its favor, De La Portilla killed it.
Another bill De La Portilla killed would allow carry of handguns in the non-sterile areas of airports. Again, only by those who already hold a state CWFL.
Finally, De La Portilla killed an Open Carry bill. Florida is just one of five states in the nation that don't allow some sort of open carry: the other four are New York, California, South Carolina and Texas. He said he was afraid the proposed law would create a bad impression on
tourists who would see Floridians walking around with handguns. If they visit any of the other 90% of the country, they should be used to it.
In 2005 the Legislature passed the Stand Your Ground law. As part of
this law they promised you "immunity" if you acted within the law.
Traditionally, "immunity" means the prosecution has the burden of
proof in any immunity hearing. Without this guarantee -- "immunity" is
just a meaningless word, and a normal defense. However, instead of
recognizing long standing definitions of immunity, the Florida court
system interpreted it as just another defense, with the burden on the
defendant. This emasculated the entire concept. Moreover, in all
other "immunity" cases -- the burden of proof is always on the party
trying to show that there is no immunity. Likewise, in all criminal
cases if you have a motion to suppress evidence or to suppress a
confession -- the burden of proof is again -- on the government. So
why (or really "how") did we all get screwed out of the "immunity" this
critical statute promised???? That's what this is all about. Forcing
the courts to interpret Stand Your Ground immunity just like any other
immunity case -- and placing the burden on the government -- where it
should be.
Rumor has it McBurney is term limited and wants to be elected to be a judge. Since the law would make prosecutor's jobs harder and take away some of their power, prosecutors oppose it. By killing the bill, McBurney hopes to be able to fund raise from them.
(Charles McBurney)
So here we are. Three big, important bills that would expand rights, in the case of De La Portilla's bills, and another that would reduce onerous requirements on those who are involved in self defense, in the case of McBurney's bill, have been crushed for political expedience. Clearly, they are not acting as representatives of the people. Just as clearly, there is nothing that we as individual citizens can do. I've contacted these clowns every time, so that doesn't work. I don't know how many people respond to those calls to contact them but they seem to do what they want anyway. What can we do?
It has been around a while, but I always laugh at it. The signature says Silvertoons.com.
I have filed away in my mind that I need to do a piece on Bernie's idiocy, but you know what? Bernie is self-parodying. Socialist systems always, always, lead to the kind of mess we're seeing in Venezuela now, where the people suffer horribly but the power brokers always have the seaside villa, or the resort somewhere. Until they take leave of the country - or are relieved of their head.
Only a teenager or college student needs to read about how Bernie is going to enslavescrew them in the name of giving them Free Stuff - if they'd even believe the math. Anybody who looks around at the world objectively knows better.
True story: back when I worked at Major Southeast Defense Contractor, Mattel came to talk with us. Yes, that Mattel. This was around 1992, so pardon me if I don't remember too many details, but they came to look into putting radio systems into a new line of their toys and wanted to know if we could do it. "Of course we can", we answered, but when all was said and done, our approach was too expensive for them. Our design was probably a little too "gold-plated" for them; figuratively speaking. Being a group that had designed systems for all sorts or military and space platforms, and proud of our very low system failure rate, our design was going to be essentially guaranteed to work properly 100% of the time and they were willing to go with something a bit less robust. They had a price point and we were well beyond what they thought a good starting point would be.
Do I have to tell you that the toy industry is very sensitive to price?
Keep the story about our tech being too expensive in mind when you look at this story on the just-completed annual Toy Industry Association Toy Fair, held February 13-16 in New York City. Yes, the industry has this show every year, right after their big season, with the prototypes of next Christmas' "Big Thing" on display. This is a slide show of 20 feature toys from the show. The influence of hi-tech is simply impossible to miss. For example:
In fact, U.S. Toy Industry Association (TIA) in its top toy trends of
2016 pointed to drones, robots and toys-to-life as the leading trend.
"The hottest robots of the year will be customizable and teach kids
important concepts, including coding, engineering, problem-solving and
building," the group said in a written statement. "Younger children will
also find them as, or with, their action figures, puzzles and bath
toys." (source)
To see everything, just keep clicking the "Next" arrow at the top or bottom of the picture. There's a 23 minute video from a talk at the fair on the 2016 trends in toys in the Electronic Business News article.
Today I broke away from all the other playing I've been doing around here and we went down to our gun club to play with rifles. We took our ARs and my 30+ year old Remington 700 in the Stocky's stock (pictured here) down for a few hours.
Unfortunately, I boneheaded it. We have a chair that we always bring for the diminutive Mrs. Graybeard. The small, wood benches that the club provides are far too short for her to reach her AR on the bench, so we use what's actually an astronomy observing chair. I forgot it. In fact, I double-boneheaded it and didn't bring my spotting scope either.
Not to be kept from using her AR (and she absolutely loves the term "my AR"), she found one of the trash cans they provide for wolf steel cases, .22 cases and other things folks are throwing out. Poured the trash into a second can and made a booster seat out of it. Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome.
As I used to say when I was a project leader or hardware task leader: if anything is wrong it's all my fault. Today it was.
Aside from that, it was a fine day. We haven't gotten out to the rifle range for a while, so we re-familiarized ourselves, and then put some lead down 100 and 200 yards. In the pic, BTW, Mrs. Graybeard is using her High Standard AR with BSA scope on a Caldwell lead sled. The closest row of targets is 25 yards; what appears to be a continuous line above that is 100 yards, and a few light colored rectangles above those are the 200 yard targets. The geometry was awkward and it was difficult for her to run the Remmy 700, but she still successfully shot the 700 to 200 yards. I watched the rounds hit the target with the scope on my AR.
Just a little blog-bragging. It's always a good day when you get to go put some rounds downrange. As we always say, that's why carnivals have shooting galleries and not sitting around galleries. Shooting is fun!
The media has been full of hype and hysteria about lead in the Flint water supply. It has become a proxy for all the usual social engineering hype we read about.
To begin with it wasn't everywhere. Some houses and some readings were much worse than others. For example:
When Virginia Tech researchers tested the water in LeeAnne
Walters’s home in Flint, Mich., this past summer, one sample had lead
levels that reached a staggering 13,200 parts per billion.
That’s almost 900 times as high as the 15-ppb regulatory limit set by
the Environmental Protection Agency. When lead levels exceed that
threshold, water utilities must act to reduce concentrations of the
toxic element.
“We took 30 samples over 20 minutes, and the average was over 2,000 ppb. And even after 20 minutes of flushing, it never got below 300 ppb.”
Sounds (and is) quite terrible.
By early September, Edwards and his Virginia Tech team had sampled water from 252 homes and reported on their website, flintwaterstudy.org, that the city’s 90th percentile lead level was 25 ppb.
EPA’s action limit is based on a 90th percentile calculation, meaning
that if 10% of homes exceed the agency’s 15-ppb threshold, then action
is required.
That says only 10% of the homes had a lead level at 25 ppb or higher; LeeAnne Walter's house not only was terrible, it seems the problem had to be related to either something in her house or something else very close to her house. For perspective, even if the lower 90% of the city was all 25 ppb, it still wasn't above twice the EPA limit, so it was bad but not terrible. For reference, EPA limits on various things are often quite questionable, and I don't necessarily think that the other 90% of homes are at inordinate risk due to lead exposure. For sure, the folks in the worst 10% of homes are likely at risk, especially if the levels got close to LeAnne Walter's levels.
The problems started when Flint switched from the Detroit water system to using water from the Flint River.
When the city began using the Flint River as its water source in April
2014, it didn’t adequately control the water’s ability to corrode those
pipes. This led to high lead levels, rust-colored tap water, and
possibly the growth of pathogenic microbes.
The thing to remember is that the media and the people screaming for attention will show you a picture like this...
but that's rust in the water. Water with nothing but twice the allowable amount of lead is perfectly clear. They're trying to obfuscate things with a compelling image.
It's an interesting story, especially if you find things like corrosion protection in pipes interesting. Flint changed water sources and the chemical makeup of the water changed a lot - all the stuff in the water besides just plain water changed. It even has to do with how the city uses far less of its infrastructure than it used to, which means a lot of water sits around for long periods. But mostly it's mismanagement and other idiocies. Final words to the C&EN article;
“What we learned here is when we collect data, we need to use those
data,” Masten says. She points out that the water utility officials were
already collecting all the data they needed—pH, alkalinity, chloride
levels—to determine if the water was too corrosive.
They had the data. They just didn't bother to use it.
Like many (most? all?) of you, I have a bunch of knives. The first really good knife I picked up was a Cold Steel tactical folder (which I call my light saber because of how it cuts through pretty much everything), followed by a Spyderco Tenacious, followed by, well, a few more than most sane people would have.
Naturally, they get used for everyday tasks like opening boxes, shredding boxes, occasionally sawing off small branches, and lots of other things, which means they naturally get dull and need to be sharpened. Like many people recommend, I picked up a Lansky system and got good results with it, but the problem is that it's pretty slow. For those not familiar with it, these use a clamp and guide rod setup to fix the angle of the edge to the stone, which is absolutely essential for precise sharpening. The problem is that with a range of knives with different blade sizes it can get tough to set up exactly right, so it becomes a bit cumbersome to do a lot of knives. You wouldn't want to sit down with set of kitchen knives to sharpen on one of these.
Since I really do have a set of kitchen knives to get sharpened, I started looking for something with a motor. I imagine everyone has seen the little motorized "kitchen table" type sharpeners, which are more "one size fits all" in the angle they cut. I looked at those as a way to upgrade my sharpening, but decided I didn't like that aspect.
After looking at a lot of options, I settled on the Work Sharp Knife and Tool Sharpener - Ken Onion Edition. The woodworking supply store Rockler (that link) has been running this special promotion for a few weeks, and I finally ordered one a couple of weekends ago. It came last week, and now that I've put a dozen or so blades through it, I can say I like and would recommend it.
The feature of this sharpener is that it adjusts for a handful of knife angles, from the fine edge 15 degree angle of a filet knife to the 30 degree angle of a really tough blade like a meat cleaver at the turn of a knob (in the back at the top of that triangle shaped part. Unlike the kitchen table sharpeners or the Lansky system, both of which use hard-backed abrasives (wheels or the mounted hones Lansky uses), this sharpener uses abrasive belts as you can see here. I've seen several videos of knife makers sharpening their work, and I've seen that many of them use sanding belts. The argument for the belt is that the rounded convex edge the knife takes on is stronger than the angled grind. The Work Sharp manual explains it this way:
Our blade use and sharpness testing have taught us that a convex edge is a superior edge. The smooth radius edge type does not have ‘shoulders’ like a flat grind and creates less friction or resistance when cutting. A convex edge provides more steel behind the edge to support it, so the edge stays sharper longer. Lastly, our convex method thins the bevel when you sharpen the blade, while flat ground blades get thicker and thicker as you re-sharpen.
Before deciding to go with this sharpener, I read several reviews on knife makers' forums and found it well accepted. There were a few minor comments against it, but the vast majority was positive.
I started out with a CRKT knife I probably abuse the most and put a wicked edge on it pretty quickly. After another couple of pocket knives, I went to a Rapala filet knife I've had since (guessing) 1972 and quickly put a great edge on it. Today I sat down with a half dozen knives: one kitchen paring knife and the rest tactical/outdoors folders. I put a good edge on all of them in a few minutes. I queued up all of them, and did all of them on one belt before moving to the next belt. One knife took a while because it had dings in the blade that had to be ground away, but if the edge was in decent shape, it probably took a minute to sharpen one.
If you've got knives, you've got to sharpen them. The Lansky system has the advantage of working with no external power, so if you have a cabin in the woods, or you're out camping or if the S has HTF, it's a good backup plan. As long as the power is on to help, the Work Sharp system is a good way to approach sharpening every knife you've got. As the name implies, it's also a tool sharpener and will sharpen axes, hatchets, lawnmower blades, not to mention kitchen scissors (I did a few of those, too, and brought them back from the dead).
Note to the FTC or whomever: I paid for it with my own money. Not a gift. I get nothing for recommending it.
Obama would have desecrated the day. They would have had to gone to a whole new level of security and endless press sycophants just to accommodate a guy who didn't want to be there. Let him play golf.
While I'm waiting from my 6 day old concrete to cure, I'm pushing ahead with other projects. The last (I hope) hardware I need for the antenna project is on order, and I've gone back to machining the parts for my G0704 Project. Two of the three motor mounts, my X and Y axis mounts, are now complete.
You can't tell the scale, but these are each 2.5" on a side, and the holes in the corners are in the same place on both of them (they match the NEMA23 profile of the motor), drilled for a 10-32 socket head cap screw and counterbored to hold the cap head. The other features are rather different between them, as you can see.
Back in November, I posted a short example of getting one of these into CNC, but I didn't use the method outlined there of using a CAM program to automagically create my G-Code files. I coded these by hand back in January. It's pretty straightforward (although tedious) to do. Basically, I got the motor mount drawings into my 3D design program (Rhino3D), the DVD I bought includes them in a standard format that Rhino can read, then got the dimensions for all the features. This was basically the centers of all the holes to drill.
The first step was to create a G-Code file to drill the holes with a center drill to mark their locations. G-Code files are plain ASCII, and the syntax is dirt simple. Here's a sample piece of code. It goes to two different holes and lowers the center drill, in a drill chuck, down low enough to mark the hole clearly:
G01 X 0.323 Y 0.323 Z 0.0250 F10 G01 X 0.323 Y 0.323 Z -0.1250 F1 G01 X 0.323 Y 0.323 Z 0.0250 F10 G01 X 2.177 Y 0.323 G01 X 2.177 Y 0.323 Z -0.1250 F10 G01 X 2.177 Y 0.323 Z 0.0250 F10
This is far more than really needed to be written, but it's a text export from a spreadsheet (I use Apache Open Office because it's free and it does everything I've ever asked of Excel). G01 X xxxx Yxxxx Zxxxx Fxxx means Go to coordinates X Y and Z of the work at a feed rate of F (in inches per minute). The first line will drive the cutter to the point (0.323, 0.323, 0.025) at 10 IPM. All of these assume that the cutter was starting from a safe place, and it's my responsibility to make sure my machine won't cut itself or anything undesired. Once the cutter is at that point, I lower it to 0.125 below the surface at 1 IPM, then I retract it at 10 IPM and go to the next point. There's another GoTo command in G-code: G00. G00 is a rapid GoTo, set as fast as the machine can move. I could have easily made that third line read
G0 Z0.025
moved the F10 to the next line, and had the same effect while saving some space. On my machine there isn't much practical difference between "as fast as you can go" and 10 IPM.
Once these holes are marked, I could have used the file to drill the holes to full depth, with breaks to change drill bits, or any degree of fancy I want. I did those manually, in what's usually called immediate mode. The machine controller has a command line, where I can enter strings of commands and repeat them with using a loaded file. I wasn't sure how fast I could drill, so I experimented by hand and drilled the holes slowly, peck drilling "manually", then feeding faster, and finally in one continuous move with no pecking.
The next step was to create a tool path to cut out the square hole in the middle. The drawing called out a 1/8" radius, so if I moved a 1/4" cutter in a square with the end points 1/8" in from the edges of the square, it will cut it out with that radius with one tool. I wrote a program assuming a hole big enough in the center to lower the cutter, the move to the edge, cut the four sides, lower the mill, cut the four sides, and then repeat until the cutter is below the bottom of the piece, cutting a little chunk of aluminum off.
G01 X 1.250 Y 1.250 G01 Z -0.0250 F1 G01 X 1.777 Y 1.250 F10 G01 X 1.777 Y 1.777 G01 X 0.717 Y 1.777 G01 X 0.717 Y 0.717 G01 X 1.777 Y 0.717 G01 X 1.777 Y 1.250 G01 X 1.777 Y 1.250 Z -0.0500 F1 G01 X 1.777 Y 1.777 F10
In reality, you don't want to keep cutting until you make the last path around the square. That piece in the middle is going to be held on by a progressively smaller and smaller piece of metal. Generally speaking, it's going to get yanked out of place and jam up the machine rather than politely fall to the bottom, not affecting anything. It could do Bad Things. I stopped the cut on the last side and then took the piece out by hand. Once it was out of the way, I resumed the cut and cleaned out the last of the metal in the hole. Here's a look at the last cut. You can see where the bit cuts through the light web of aluminum and leaves air behind it. This video stops before I stopped the machine to pop out that little cube with the big hole in it.
I should probably powder coat these. I'm not sure what color, but the only powders I have now are for fishing lures: white, chartreuse and an orange-red. None of those seem quite right.
A little engineering humor to start. Since I'm retired, I don't know if I'm technically an engineer (and thinking about minute technicalities like that probably says I am), and I sure don't want to get into one of those "engineering is what we do not who we are" vs. "engineers are born not made" discussions, so I'll pretend someone even cares and post the humor. Design News posted this picture:
I suppose that the way it's composed is to say the guy is the engineer and he doesn't like being hugged at all. On the other hand, it could be that she's the engineer, he's not, and that's his reaction for having to be that close to one of us.
While cleaning up the hard drive a bit, I found a picture of the last PWB I designed for a product at work. This is an opamp circuit to add a little gain into a 190 MHz IF signal in a radar receiver.
For the unfamiliar the green thing is the printed wiring board. The concentrated patch of shiny traces in the middle is the place where the opamp was mounted. The Altoids Smalls tin is about 2 1/4 x 1 1/2". The board is about half the width of a "Forever" postage stamp, and maybe 3/4 as long. Yeah, this is the size of parts we work on these days. Probably large parts by someone's standards. For those of you who understand: the smallest parts are 0402 not 0201.
Among those things that are going on in the world of economics and politics are things that have never happened before. Wide scale use of negative interest rates is one of those things. Negative interest rates have been spreading around the world and are being considered for the US. Note I mean rates that are called negative, fees or taxes, as opposed to negative real rates. Negative real rates mean the interest paid on a bond or other vehicle is less than inflation; we've had those for years. I've written about this several times; a reasonably good post is here.
Sovereign debt; government bonds from several countries, have now gone negative interest. About $7 trillion worth of sovereign bonds now yield less than nothing.
Lenders give their money to governments… who swear up and down, no
fingers crossed, that they’ll give them back less money sometime in the
future. Public banks, I believe led by Alternative Bank Schweiz, have gone to negative interest and this presents an easy case to look at.
When you deposit money in a bank, that's an asset on your balance sheet but it's a liability on their sheet, because if you ask for that money, they have to pay you. They don't stack your money up in some vault somewhere, they use that money as the basis for loans - but they can loan far more than you deposit under the concept of fractional reserve banking. So whether you think of it this way or not, when you deposit money in the bank you're taking the risk that the bank will run out of money and not be able to pay you on demand. It has been the normal case that the bank charges more money on interest to borrowers than they pay depositors, making a profit on the difference between what they loaned out and what they paid you. But with negative interest, you pay them to make the loan that they make the interest on.
Same with a government bond, in which you're taking the risk that something happens to the country and they can't pay you back. War, depression or inflation, revolution, natural disasters; all of these factor into how much risk buyers will stomach and the chance they won't get their money back.
That’s why countries with much uncertainty – such as Venezuela – have
higher interest rates than countries, such as Switzerland, where the
future is probably going to be a lot like the past.
Venezuelan 10-year government bonds yield 11%. The Swiss 10-year government bond yields negative 0.3%.
All of this relates to pricing the uncertainty of the future. If you were absolutely sure you were going to get your money back in the future, you might settle for a low interest rate compared to loaning to Venezuela or Greece. In a way, negative interest rates imply the future is known perfectly, perhaps even better than the present is known. You're certain there's no risk at all in those Swiss bonds.
This is yet another example of how horribly the central reserve banks; not just the Fed, but the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and all the others, have distorted the world's economies. Interest rates being charged by the central banks are now so low that the next step in trying to create growth is to penalize you for putting your money in the banks and not spending it. Bill Bonner writes:
The logic of lowering rates below zero is so boneheaded that only a PhD could believe it.
Economic growth rates are falling toward zero. And at zero, it
normally doesn’t make sense for the business community – as a whole –
to borrow. The growth it expects will be less than the interest it will
have to pay.
That’s a big problem…
Because the Fed only has direct control over the roughly 20% of the
overall money supply. This takes the form of cash in circulation and
bank reserves. The other roughly 80% of the money supply comes from
bank lending.
If people don’t borrow, money doesn’t appear. And if money doesn’t
appear – or worse, if it disappears – people have less of it. They stop
spending… the slowdown gets worse… prices fall… and pretty soon, you
have a depression on your hands.
How to prevent it?
If you believe the myth that the feds can create real demand for
bank lending by dropping interest below rates, then you, too, might
believe in NIRP.
There's no real evidence that if rates go negative people will spend more to keep their savings from evaporating. In fact, there's evidence some savers, faced with seeing their savings not
growing, double down on the saving, denying themselves even more and
trying ever harder to save. As Jim Rickards put it: "As a result,
many citizens are saving even more from retirement checks and paychecks
to make up for the lack of a market interest rate. So a Fed
manipulation designed to discourage savings actually increases savings,
on a precautionary basis, to make up for lost interest. This is a
behavioral response not taught in textbooks or included in models used
by the Fed."
Negative interest rates are going to fail to create growth just as every step up to now has failed. Look, if Quantitative Easing hasn't helped Japan in the last 20 years,
with all the QE the Bank of Japan has done, why would anyone think it's
going to help anywhere? Draghi, Yellen, Kuroda, and all the rest are
either idiots or criminals and it's harder to believe they're idiots. All they're doing is taking money from
lower incomes and transferring it to their cronies.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about
by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should
come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit
expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency
system involved. - Ludwig von Mises, "Human Action - A Treatise on Economics", 1949
The first time I heard of a group of so-called Bionic Ants from a German company called Festo, my reaction was that sometimes even though you can do something, you shouldn't. Maybe it was too close to our battles this fall with the big head ants. Since there doesn't seem to be any actual biological materials in these, I don't think these are really bionic, and "Robotic Ants" is a more accurate name. (Besides, I saw Robotic Ants open for The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band back in 1972).
The program is really a technology demonstrator for the idea of solving real world problems with autonomous networking of smart bots. I think they were playing with the name Autonomous Networking Technologies, saw the acronym ANT, and they liked it enough to try to implement the bots as ants. Festo is a company that's good at a couple of the key technologies involved, 3D Molded Interconnect Devices and piezoelectric actuators, and they created a small "swarm" of these robotic ants. Interesting video at the link of the ants cooperating to move a load around a small work area. They are rather complex, with circuitry built onto the body of a 3D printed ant, piezoelectric motors so they can move around, grasping jaws as built in tools, built in radio networking, rechargeable batteries, a recharging mechanism, and more.
This circuitry resides under a more friendly but slightly anthropomorphic, ant-like visage, made of 3D printed polyamide resin (see what I did there?). Where the compound eyes of real ants would go, these little things have a stereo video camera that looks more human - or at least more vertebrate.
Festo employs a laser-direct-structuring (LDS) machine to laser-etch the
tracts and apply conductive metal coatings of gold, nickel, copper, or a
mix. The external circuitry adheres to the curves of the ant’s body
segments, eliminating the need for bulky wiring, since components can be
directly soldered to the devices at the intended terminals. Minimal
internal circuitry is needed, contributing to the compactness of the
design. Read more about Festo’s 3D MID process here.
Each BionicANT works as a component of a multi-agent system
(MAS) to perform heavy lifting-and-carrying tasks. They are programmed
according to a distributed catalogue of rules created from mathematical
model-building and simulations. These regulation algorithms govern their
motions and enable the ants to alter their behavior as a response to
environmental cues and RF signals generated by the other ants. For
example, a simple regulation algorithm prevents collision by ensuring
that the ants do not try to occupy the same space.
Communication generates from the RF chip in the ant’s posterior body segment. Also
located on the posterior segment is a Cortex-M4 microprocessor (MPU),
which processes RF signals and environmental cues. In addition, the MPU
sends voltage signals to the piezo-actuators in the pincers and legs.
To be serious for a few seconds, these are hot topics of research in industry. Swarming, cooperative, intelligent robots are seen as useful in applications ranging from warfare to factories. Ants are often thought of as having a collective intelligence; witness the term "hive mind". They can cooperate and a mass of ants can exhibit behaviors that make them look like liquids or solids, depending on the need. Instead of these ants, picture swarms of small robots "flowing" around products, moving the products and working on them: products of any size. These robotic ants, by the way, are actually pretty huge, even by Florida ant standards. A pdf on the Festo website says they're 135mm long, stand 43 mm high and their leg span is 150mm. In rough numbers 5.3" x 1.7" x 5.9".
John Robb at Global Guerrillas takes a break from his fascinating fare of bot net wars and analyzes why Donald J. Trump keeps winning. It's an interesting piece, if politics from the 30,000 foot level interests you. (To my new readers, I've said many times that day to day politics disgusts me, but when viewed from a distance it has some interest. Day to day politics is more like cleaning out the cats' litter box: it's a nasty, disgusting job, but if you don't do it, it only gets more nasty and disgusting.)
"The fault line in
American politics is no longer Republican vs. Democrat nor conservative
vs. liberal but establishment vs. anti-establishment. This is an
inevitable result of serial failure in establishment policies."
He goes on to present case after case that establishment politicians don't care about failure. If they promote the F-35, for example, it doesn't matter that it's a bad fighter. All that matters is that it brings favors to them and jobs for their district. The F-35 is a horrible fighter, but they'll never have to fly it. So long as the money keeps flowing, all is well. His trenchant observation is:
[The establishment] is composed overwhelmingly of people who want to be something, not
people who want to do something. They have devoted their lives to
becoming members of the establishment and enjoying the many privileges
thereof. They are not likely to endanger club membership by breaking its
rules. - [emphasis added - SiG]
Returning to John Robb, he then flows this observation into a good overview of this year's election:
"From the start, Trump targeted the (mostly) white working class, which
happens to be 40 percent of the country. And he’s done it not just with
issues, but with how he talks — the ball-busting, the “bragging,” the
over-the-top promises...
But it speaks volumes — whole encyclopedias — about the ignorance of
our political and media elites that they’re only now realizing that much
of what Trump’s been doing is just busting balls. It’s a
blue-collar ritual, with clear rules — overtly insulting, sure, but with
infinite subtleties. It can be a test of manliness, a sign of respect, a
way of bonding and much more.
America hasn’t been great for the working class for decades — which is
why “Make America Great Again” is a great slogan for a guy who’s
talking tough on the problems that blue-collar Americans (and more than a
few middle-class folks) see as killing them."... from Donald Trump has Invented a New Way to Win Mark Cunningham
I believe this is why Ted Cruz as adopted the slogan TrusTed - printed in two colors to emphasize his name. He's loudly declaring, "you can trust me not to betray you". And that's the reason why Trump's campaign has attacked Ted as being dishonest. They know that trust is extremely important to Ted Cruz' supporters and if they can break that image of trustworthiness, they can ruin Cruz' chances. And that's why I think it was mandatory for Ted to fire his campaign communications manager after a bad tweet. When you're being hammered over honesty, you have to look aggressive when a wrong statement is made.
More than others, and perhaps because of his role as media "star", Trump seems to understand the whole social media world and the impact of the internet and it's "TL:DR", nanosecond attention spans. Anything that happened a few days ago scrolled off the top of the screen and winked out of existence. His bombast, the bragging, the conspiracies--it's quintessential Internet.
So he pops off and then lets it go--which his supporters fundamentally
understand. When opponents and media pull up a tweet from 2012,
literally no one gives two shits and it only ends up reflecting (poorly)
on the person pulling up the tweet.
What Robb doesn't talk about is the dark side of Trump's supporters. I can't and won't blame their behavior on Trump, but there were reports out of South Carolina of Trump supporters physically harassing door to door workers for other candidates. It was reported that women were afraid to go do their campaign work without guys around for security and one guy alleges being run off the road by a Trump worker's truck. Trump's support has the air of a cult of personality to it, and that's bad. After all, it's how we ended up where we are. A "right wing" cult of personality taking the place of our current "left wing" cult of personality is no trade I want to make.
Today is my sixth blogiversary. I do these posts every year (as does virtually everyone) but today works out to be the exact date and day of the week.
On Sunday, February 21, 2010, I posted a simple little test message ... before going off on a rant about economics, which is actually still pretty good.
I've put off having a blog for a long time. I suppose I figure you have
to be pretty self-centered to think people around the world will be
hanging around waiting for your pearls of wisdom.
...
What will you find here? Like everyone, I will tend to write on the things
that interest me. They might be current events, current conditions,
technical looks at various electronics topics, ham radio, and making
things of various kinds.
I have no idea how long I'll be here, but here's to the ride!
I'm a bit amazed that around a thousand to sometimes 1500 times a day someone reads a page here, and that number has been steady since late 2013. I'm really rather honored that so many think it's worth stopping by. So to echo what I said in that first post, here's to the ride!
After a lot of self-debating, tossing and turning things over and over in my mind, I continued ahead with my plans to rebuild my ham radio tower setup, as described here two weeks ago. Today, a helper and I dug a 2'x2'x3' deep hole, built a rebar cage, coated the aluminum pipe with a heavy sealant and put it up. The rest of my parts for the job are here, but no more work will be done for a while. Concrete used in critical places (self-suspending balconies, for example) has to cure for 28 days before the forms are taken off, so I'll leave this sit with no stresses on it for those 4 weeks. Or thereabouts.
There was a long discussion in the comments back then about just using a 4" PVC pipe filled with concrete instead of aluminum pipe. In the end, I went with this pipe for a few reasons. Most importantly, I'm not experienced enough with the PVC approach to feel sure that it would hold up, and I wasn't able to get enough information to convince me. Since I'd already bought this aluminum pipe, and was familiar with everything I'd done to get to this point, I decided to go with what I had. As a bonus, if I wanted to go to a bigger tower or heavier load, I feel confident this is capable of handling it, while with the PVC pipe approach, I'd be less sure I could do that.
Before you ask, there's a plastic plug in both ends of this pipe so that it can't fill with water.
My plan for now is that once the pad is cured sufficiently, I'll mount all the hardware I bought to replace the winch and cable, and then crank the tower over. Once that's down, I can do a bit of routine antenna maintenance, like check the cables and connectors. I'll get a good look at the house bracket and see if it needs anything beyond the bit of scraping and repainting I can see now. I should be done by the end of March.
For the next few weeks, though, this job will mostly just sit. There's indoor work to be done getting the hardware ready to mount, and I'll be spending more time on my CNC conversion project.
In the last couple of days, a bill in the California legislature has been reported on (H/T to Black Rifle Builders, a new link of mine, and Gun Free Zone). Bill AB1673 essentially outlaws 80% receivers, and makes everything "readily convertible" to a firearm regulated the same as any other firearm.
This bill would expand the definition of “firearm”
for those purposes and other purposes to include an unfinished frame or
receiver that can be readily converted to the functional condition of a
finished frame or
receiver.
The problem is the definition of "readily converted" and exactly what they include in that vague sentence. If you have the STL files to run an AR lower on your 3D printer, exactly what is the gun? Today, once you print a complete lower, that's a firearm. But could they make the file itself a gun? After all, with the proper 3D printer the file is readily converted into a finished lower. Various groups, like the US State Department, have already tried to stop the distribution of 3D Printer gun files; is this another push?
Let's say you have a typical 80% lower but don't have a drill press or milling machine or any other tools. Can it be "readily converted"? Not by you, at least not right then, but buy a drill press and now it is! On the other extreme, if you're a machinist with a good shop, a pile of any appropriate metal stock can be readily converted into a firearm. Many different firearms, in fact. If we refer to machinists, than any metal stock must be considered a firearm.
Consider the poured resin AR lowers that McThag has been experimenting with. (I think these guys are the makers). Like the 3D printer, what comes out of the mold is already a firearm - it's a 100% lower. But what about the mold? You use the mold to make a firearm, but the mold itself isn't converted. The resin becomes the firearm but it isn't readily converted to anything. Pour it on the floor and it converts to a puddle. It won't take the AR shape any more than any other shape without the mold. How do they regulate this?
As always, who gets to define these terms? Who gets to decide?
We all saw that video of the guy who made an AK from a shovel; does that mean shovels "can be readily converted"? What about the sheet steel stock selection at any metal dealer? As commenter Loess at GFZ pointed out,
Certainly brings to mind Tam’s comment about plumbing shops being full of 90% sten receivers…
The road that the California state legislature is going down ends in a couple of ugly places. It could end with every single part that goes into a gun being serialized and tracked. IMO, the whole reason for the "80%" gun coming into being is that gun owners have the right to fix or modify our guns. If we wear out a barrel, we can replace it. If we want a better trigger, we can modify (or replace) it. The Feds don't require people who make recoil springs, for example, to serialize and track them. At some point, though, to use their system the BATFE needed to define something as being the gun. That's the part that gets serialized, tracked and managed. They decided that at the 80% point, the receiver was like any other piece of metal that isn't a gun. It's no different than any paperweight. By California saying a component that's not usable as a firearm has to be considered one, doesn't that imply any other thing that isn't a firearm has to be considered as one?
Alternatively, it ends with a hodgepodge of overzealous prosecutors and stupid judges deciding these questions. A nation not of laws, because the laws are so vague they could mean anything, but of men who choose what they mean on some sort of whim. There's already far, far too much of that.
