Podcast is Up

The Gun Blog Variety Podcast episode 86 is up.  My topic this time is an intro to rechargeable batteries.

Edit at 1224 EDT to add:  Both Sean and I are unsure of whether or not the real Tech Tips host is coming back.  This will probably work itself out in the next few weeks, but I'd appreciate it if anyone who has listened to these podcasts has an opinion about if I should continue to do these. Leave a comment or send a personal email to SiGraybeard at gmail dot com, with the usual substitutions.

Writer's Block

Working on a post that just isn't, well, working. 

So cute cat pic!

Found somewhere or other.  Imgur?  It's not mine, but I'll gladly credit you (or take it down) if it's yours.

Wait... I'm Not the Only One Questioning Wellness Programs?

I think I wrote my first anti-wellness program piece back in 2010, "What's Wong With Wellness? Weawy?"  (do an Elmer Fudd or Baba Wahwah speech impediment; it makes sense - weawy).  Perhaps the most important paragraph was fairly early in the piece, and I stand by it today, almost six years later to the day:

Obviously, "wellness" - however imprecise that word might be - is a Good Thing.  The real question is if these plans actually improve health and cut costs.  The answer appears to be no.  There are just way too many conventional wisdoms that are wrong.  In a nutshell, all of the so-called indicators don't show so much that you are "well", they show that you're "young and healthy".  There is simply not enough hard evidence that taking a random group of adults, all of them products of an almost infinite set of life choices and genetics, and forcing behavioral changes on them will result in different health outcomes.  It's important to add that prevention, in general, drives up costs, it doesn't cut them.  This is pretty well known among those who study statistics 

If you read Karl Denninger at Market Ticker, you know he regularly talks (well, alright, almost preaches) that low carb diets are the answer to most of our current health problems and that the conventional wisdom is flat out wrong.  Example 1. Example 2.  Example 3 (all within 2 days).  Newsflash: Karl's right.  The fact that lots of doctors are coming around to this is more evidence.  I could fill a post with links, but that's not the point. Furthermore, there's simply not good quality science to match our obsession with making everyone in the country look like concentration camp survivors.  How many times do they need to find that higher BMI patients have better outlook and survival than thinner counterparts before they stop calling it paradoxical?  (also)  I recently lost a close friend to complications of liver cancer.  He had lost 80 pounds due to the complications - he wasn't large to start with - and I think he would have had a better chance if he hadn't lost that 80 pounds and was more robust.  It wasn't the cancer that got him. 

According to Jonathon Adler writing in the Volokh Conspiracy, the premises of these corporate wellness programs are being questioned at all levels.  A conference is coming (on tax day) to get some collaboration going on between more folks.

On April 15, the Law-Medicine Center at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law is hosting a full-day conference “Corporate Wellness Programs: Are They Hazardous to Well-Being?”  Speakers include Dr. Soeren Mattke of the Rand Corporation, Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Prof. Dennis Scanlon of Penn State, Prof. Sam Bagenstos of Michigan, Christopher Kucynski of the EEOC, Prof. Jessica Roberts of the University of Houston, Prof. Harald Schmidt of Penn and Elizabeth Click of CWRU.

Adler, in turn, quotes from NY Times piece by Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll in September 2014.

Wellness programs are popular among employers. An analysis by the RAND Corporation found that half of all organizations with 50 or more employees have them. The new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 36 percent of firms with more than 200 workers, and 18 percent of firms over all, use financial incentives tied to health objectives like weight loss and smoking cessation. Even more large firms — 51 percent of those with 200 workers or more — offer incentives for employees to complete health risk assessments, intended to identify health issues. . . .

The Kaiser survey found that 71 percent of all firms think such programs are “very” or “somewhat” effective, compared with only 47 percent for greater employee cost sharing or 33 percent for tighter networks. . . .

What research exists on wellness programs does not support this optimism. This is, in part, because most studies of wellness programs are of poor quality, using weak methods that suggest that wellness programs are associated with lower savings, but don’t prove causation. Or they consider only short-term effects that aren’t likely to be sustained. Many such studies are written by the wellness industry itself. More rigorous studies tend to find that wellness programs don’t save money and, with few exceptions, do not appreciably improve health. This is often because additional health screenings built into the programs encourage overuse of unnecessary care, pushing spending higher without improving health.

Again, the company I just retired from had a wellness program for years.  It started out gradually: they want you to see a doctor and get tested for various risk factors.  Two years later, goals were set for those risk factors.  The year after that, you got penalized for not meeting their goals.  In the early days, you got a price cut in your insurance costs if you got tested and by the time I left you paid extra if you didn't meet the goals.  Around the annual screenings was a virtually continuous three-ring circus of activities to get employees to participate in group diets, or running clubs (never acknowledging that your cardio may be killing you) or other nonsense.   Treating employees differently by charging them more or less for insurance because of blood test scores or other physical aspects is breaking the Americans with Disabilities Act.  I have no doubt that if companies get actual data that shows they're not getting their sufficient return on their wellness investments, those programs will go away.  Companies are always efficient about maximizing profits, right?  I'm less optimistic that any wellness nonsense encoded into Obamacare will ever go away.   

Negative Interest Rates and the Law of Unintended Consequences

The topic of negative interest rates has appeared many times in this column.  The theory the central banks use is that by charging savers to save, effectively putting a tax on savings, that the tax will discourage savings the way all taxes disincentivize whatever is being taxed.  So savers will start to spend, figuring it's better than watching their savings slowly evaporate. 

What they didn't expect or intend was that it would cause a run on safes.  In a WSJ piece, excerpted here, we read:

Signs are emerging of higher demand for safes—a place where the interest rate on cash is always zero, no matter what the central bank does. Cash languishing in safes could thwart the Bank of Japan’s move to get money circulating more vigorously in the economy. 

Shimachu Co., which operates a chain of stores selling hardware and home products, said Monday that sales of safes in the week that ended Sunday were 2½ times higher than in the same period a year earlier.

One safe that costs about $700 is now out of stock and won’t be available for a month, the chain said.

“I am a bit worried about what will happen next,” said Kazuo Matsumoto, a customer at one of the Shimachu stores in Tokyo. While he didn’t buy a safe, the 64-year-old said he might turn some of his cash into gold and keep it inside a safe-deposit box he rents.

The banks of Sealy or Liberty, may not pay any interest but once the cost of the safe is justified, the money doesn't evaporate.

As an aside, Japan is a genuine economic mess.  We learn that Japanese pensions are so low that retirees are turning to crime to stay alive.  If they steal a sandwich and get away, they get a sandwich; if they get caught, they get two years in prison, "three hots and a cot" (at a cost of Y8.4 Million to the state) - no mention if they get to save their pension while they're in jail.  As always, it's blamed on everyone and everything, but the fact is that despite efforts of the Bank of Japan for more than 25 years to stimulate the economy, it doesn't work.  Despite efforts to encourage spending, people are saving more.  This doesn't surprise me a bit, although I'm sure it's an unintended consequence to the Bank of Japan, because as I wrote here last June:

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."

I'm not saying that as a bunch of gun owners we probably already have a perfectly usable safe, and are therefore one step ahead of everyone else when interest rates here go negative, but I'm not NOT saying it either. 

(photo courtesy of Liberty Safes)

Changing CNC Tool Paths

Not the path the machine makes to cut the part, the path to get to the machine! 

I started out my G0704 CNC project with the intent of using the lead screws already on the mill. As I said at that time, lead screws are serviceable, but aren't considered ideal in the CNC world.  The problem with lead screws while running CNC is backlash, that moment when you change directions and the wheel moves before the table does.  Backlash can be compensated for in CNC, and after my last post about the irregular circles I had cut, I adjusted my backlash compensation on the small (Sherline/A2ZCNC) machine.  Doing some more reading on the subject, one viewpoint I read said that backlash compensation was less effective for circles and arcs than when running the machines manually. 

I also mentioned in the original post that the DVD of plans I bought had three approaches, two with different versions of ball screws, and I had chosen to go with the lead screws for two main reasons: first is the simplicity and speed with which I'd be up and running; second is that with lead screws, I could put cranks on the motors and run the mill manually, without using the CNC.  That might be convenient if the SHTF and power was extremely scarce.  The big advantage of ball screws is that they don't have backlash, but the disadvantage is that you can't operate the mill manually.  Ballscrews don't offer holding torque to keep things from moving when you don't want them to. 

There's a tremendous amount of information on lead screws and ballscrews of all kinds at Lead-Screws.com on their "Application Engineering" page and at the tabs for each type in the left column.  

So I've decided to switch my approach over to using ballscrews.  There's a community of folks that have done these conversions and most use ballscrews from either Roton (Lead-Screws.com) or from an eBay store, linearmotionbearings.  I ordered from linearmotionbearings because it looks like less work to use his products and the reports are his ballscrews that include two ballnuts provide better performance.  The Roton screws are built differently and one trick that's done is to remove all of the balls and replace them with slightly larger ones. 

The ballscrews arrived today.  Shown are X, Y, & Z, left to right. 

I know what you're thinking now: does this toss out everything I've made so far?  I'm almost 100% sure that I won't need to toss out everything.  While I'm not sure I don't toss anything, I might need to modify or toss something.  What I've built are motor mounts and standoffs, with one spacer for the Y axis.  The spacer is the same, the motors are the same, and these ballscrews are the same size at the point that the motors will mount.  I have the instructions, of course, but the folders on the DVD are full of options and it's not completely clear what parts I need.   What I'm sure I need to make are some mounts for the ballnuts in that picture, and I'm pretty clear on what they need to be.

There will be adventures ahead, but I think this has the potential to turn out really cool.

Techy Tuesday - NIST Develops a New Atomic Standard for Temperature

From time to time (if you'll pardon the pun), I've featured something cool coming from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, the NIST (which is the older National Bureau of Standards renamed) on this page.  Not quite two years ago, I posted a piece on their "newest, best" atomic clock, which offers a total uncertainty and instability of one part in 10^18.  (Google's HTML doesn't allow superscripts but that's one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 - a number which is even huge compared to the Federal Deficit).

This past month NIST presented an atomic standard for temperature.

Today, at an American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, Md., the organization presented a system that precisely measures the vibrations of silicon-nitride molecules in response to changes in temperature, ranging from cryogenic to room temperature. The effort may lead to high-accuracy temperature readings in extremely sensitive lab applications and industry procedures.

The method employs a beam of silicon nitride with small reflective cavities. The scientists directed a laser through a thin crystal beam, and measure the changes in reflected wavelength, which they could directly relate to the picometer-scale thermal vibrations.

But what makes the method so dependable is the scientists' ability to calibrate the thermal vibrations to fluctuations in electron spin, which remain constant independent of temperature. Since both vibrations are measured using the same laser, any measurements that indicate changes in quantum vibrations would also indicate an error in the readings for thermal vibration.

“At top is an electron micrograph of the silicon nitride beam. The bottom shows how the beam deforms as it vibrates (length scale greatly exaggerated) with the red regions showing the most deformation, and the blue regions not moving at all. Over one vibrational period the center of beam goes from being stretched out as shown, to being compressed inward, and then back.” (from the NIST article)

This is fundamental science, and that usually means some years before commercialization can happen.  The summary abstract on the NIST website goes into more details on how it all works.

The NIST team’s approach arose from their efforts to observe the vibrations of a small transparent beam of silicon nitride using laser light. Thermal energy—often expressed as temperature—makes all objects vibrate; the warmer the object, the more pronounced the vibrations, though they are still on the order of just a picometer (trillionths of a meter) in size for the beam at room temperature. To observe these tiny perturbations, the team carved a small reflective cavity into the beam. When they shone a laser through the crystal, the light reflecting from the cavity experienced slight shifts in color or frequency due to the beam’s temperature-induced vibrations, making the light’s color change noticeably in time with the movement.

But these were not the only vibrations the team members could see. The team also spotted the much more subtle vibrations that all objects possess due to a quantum-mechanical property called zero-point motion: Even at its lowest possible energy, the beam vibrates ever so slightly due to the inherent uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics. This motion is independent of temperature, and has a well-known amplitude fundamentally dictated by quantum mechanics. By comparing the relative size of the thermal vibration to the quantum motion, the absolute temperature can be determined.
...
“Our technique allowed us to tease the quantum signals out from under the much larger thermal noise,” says the team’s Tom Purdy, a physicist at NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory and at the Joint Quantum Institute. “Now we can directly connect temperature to the quantum mechanical fluctuations of a particle. It sets the stage for a new approach to primary thermometry.”

Unlike the articles on the atomic clocks, this piece doesn't show any accuracy or precision numbers for this new way of measuring temperature.  NIST hints that their goal is to use this as an integrated atomic calibration system for temperature measurement.  They would pair this sensor with on-chip photonic thermometers that are also under development at NIST which are more sensitive but require frequent calibration.  The photonic thermometers would offer the high temperature sensitivity demanded by some applications, such as pharmaceutical manufacturing and other high performance industrial applications, while this new quantum thermometer would act as an integrated temperature standard, able to keep the photonic thermometer calibrated over long periods of time.

Headline of the Day So Far

From the inimitable Tamara, who needs a link from me about as much as West Texas needs another grain of sand (but it's the polite thing to do).

Salmon Caught Near Seattle Are Full Of Cocaine And Antidepressants

which, I've gotta tell you, is just the thing to read about a 15 minutes after having a baked salmon dinner.  No, I don't think it was from Washington.  It was supposed to be from Alaska.  Small comfort when talking about species that swim thousands of miles.

The story says,

Apparently, samples taken from the [Puget Sound] water showed high levels of Prozac, bug spray, cocaine, Zantac, ibuprofen and 77 other drugs. These drugs littered not only the water but also the tissue of juvenile chinook salmon.

The samples, taken from the water near sewage treatment plants in the estuaries of the Seattle area, were collected over two days in September 2014.[Note added: SiG]

It's primarily the job of the municipal sewer treatment plants to remove things like that.  I'm sure some amount of drugs could be present in water runoff from spills on the land.  I'm equally sure that bug spray would be more common than drugs like ibuprofen or cocaine in stormwater runoff.  The vast majority is probably coming from human waste.  That has to either be removed by the action of the bacteria at the heart of a sewage treatment facility, or it would have to be removed by some sort of chemicals added to the water during treatment (which, in turn, have to be removed later during treatment).  As Betsey Cooper, administrator from the Wastewater Treatment Division in Washington's King County, told the Seattle Times, "not everything goes away". 

I did a quick lookup of the lifecycle of the Chinook salmon in order to make sure I'm not way off base here.  They're born in freshwater streams in the area and live in those streams for as much as 18 months before moving down into the Puget Sound, where they can spend another few months before moving out to sea.  If they're getting that drug cocktail while in the Puget Sound, they could be absorbing it for as much as six months.  An average of three to four years later, they return to the same streams to spawn passing through the Sound again.  An interesting question to me would be whether or not fish retain those chemicals in their body tissues when they're in the open ocean.

Maybe you can get your Prozac and Zantac at the same time you have your lox? 

The Future of the Web

The not too distant future:

Inspired by this post at Bayou Renaissance Man (and courtesy of ).

Otherwise, I got nothing.  Busy day around the house today. 

Administrivia

Another way of saying, "things I care about that you probably don't".

First, I have a list (in the lower right side bar) of the 10 most widely read posts ever on this blog.  For over a year now, an old post has crawled up, place by place, until it took the #1 place a couple of weeks ago.  The most popular post ever is now "A Little More About .308 vs. 7.62x51".  The previous #1 post, now #2, was a real oddity.  It never gathered many views or comments, and really wasn't much, but I found a funny picture of a skittles-pooping  unicorn to put in it, and one night somebody on Reddit found that picture.  (Don't you go looking at that!)  The thing is, I'd used that picture in other posts, so it's really odd that one post showed up and got flagged on Reddit.  Next thing I know, instead of the usual "few hundred" people who might read a post in a week or so, it suddenly banged up to over 7000 views.  I honestly have no idea if that post was ever looked at after that first few days of the spike, but right now #1 has exactly 400 views more than #2, and I looked at the stats page often enough to know that #2's number of views hasn't really gone up in the last month, while #1 has gone up over 600 views and continues to go up every day.  It looks like it will be #1 for a long time.  

I don't know if you use my reciprocal blog list, but I use it all day every day.  Because of that, I will occasionally notice that the title post for a certain blog will stop changing.  I always thought I had no influence over that, but recently tried to clean up a few of them.  It has worked.  The ones I cleaned up were New Zeal Blog - when Trevor changed the name of the blog from that to "Trevor Loudon presents New Zeal", it stopped updating.  You could go to it, but the name of the latest post didn't change.  Likewise, Miguel's Gun Free Zone stopped updating a few weeks ago when he went through his loss of service at the hosting company.  Note again, all I did was remove these blogs from my list and then put them back. 

And I stumbled across a new blog that I've added to my list, The Arts Mechanical, compiled by a mechanical engineer with multiple Master's degrees and lots of years in the industry.  You'll find a lot of cool tech stuff there, a lot on "how it's made" (for example), and some similar economics and "big picture" ideas that you'll find here.  Because he's actively in a job-search, you'll find lots on job hunting and the steaming pile of fail that modern Human Resources departments have become.  Lots of good stuff.  I've spent hours there already.

A screen cap of my stats page.  See that big spike, just left of center?  That's the Reddit spike.

And Another Big Project Is Done...

For about the last two weeks, we've been working on another project here: painting and refreshing the kitchen. 

It's something Mrs. Graybeard has been wanting to do for a while, but she was having trouble picking colors and, well, deciding what it was going to look like.  We started in earnest after the antenna project was done. 

The novelty here is that for the first time in our house, we did a two-tone wall, with the bottom darker and the top lighter.   Also for the first time, we added a chair rail.  I've never done that sort of finish carpentry before, but I have the tools to do it.  We found a rail we liked on the Big Orange Borg's web site and put it on order.  It took a week to get here.  We measured and cut the rails yesterday, then put a couple of coats of poly something or other on them.  Horrible Freight had a pneumatic nail gun on sale for $22, so I grabbed one of those rather than do everything all stooped over.  The lifetime supply of 2", 18 ga. nails I had to get offset that saving.  All in all, the chair rail went up like it was supposed to; or as I like to say, "almost as if I knew what I was doing".  

It's not completely done.  The walls in any house are rarely as straight as chair rails so there are some annoying gaps between the walls and the rails, but a little bit of caulk will solve that.

Only now Mrs. Graybeard is looking at the miter saw and thinking "crown molding around the entire house".  

It Depends on How You Look at It

Or sniff at it.

Glenn McCoy, from Facebook.

The way I see it is that if the Big Government wasn't so big, it wouldn't matter what the big business was chasing.  The way Bernie Sanders sees it is that if the big business wasn't so big, big government would be a wonderful, kind servant.  Instead of a fearful master.

My justification is that no company has ever sent a SWAT team to raid anyone's house because they didn't buy something.  As much as Microsoft or Apple or any big business wants my money, they have to get it by persuasion and if I'm not persuaded, they're SOL.  In contrast, Uncle Sugar, or my state, my county, my city, or even some new taxing authority I didn't even know I was assigned to, could present me with a new tax bill, and as the story at the link describes, if I say 'no' there's a good chance someone in this house dies.

But the moment the government got so big that it was more profitable to go lobby congress than it was to spend that money to make their product better, this cartoon became inevitable.   When senators are cheaper than R&D and provide better ROI, senators will be what's being bought.

At least that's how I look at it.

Back When the Federal Reserve Did Some Things Right

In my regular reading, I came across a story of three Federal Reserve Chairmen: William McChesney Martin, chair under Harry Truman; Paul Volker, chair under Ronald Reagan; and our current Dear Leader, Janet Yellen.

The chairmen before Mr. Martin, Marriner S. Eccles and then Thomas B. McCabe,  had to deal with the nation coming out of the Great Depression, entering and then coming out of World War II.  Under the circumstances, the Fed was very accomodative and kept interest rates low, but it was nothing like our last few Fed Chairmen (Allan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen).  Martin believed it was the role of the Fed to stay out of things and let a market driven system work.  He believed the role for the Fed should be to counter whatever the economy was doing; to moderate market forces by exerting a little countercyclical pressure.  If the economy was contracting, he thought the Fed should ease conditions to try to get it rolling again.  If it was growing too fast, he thought the Fed should be a resistance.  Perhaps his most famous metaphor was:

The job of the Fed, he said, was to “take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” In other words, raise interest rates just when the economy starts to enter an unsustainable boom.

In February of 1951, with the inflation rate running at 8%, President Truman called Martin and the entire Federal Open Market Committee into the oval office to pressure them to keep rates low (turns out "give 'em hell Harry" liked inflating economies as much as later politicians).  Martin refused Truman's "requests" and raised rates from just under 1% to almost 4% at the start of the 1960s.

Twenty years after that, the economy had suffered through the abandonment of the gold standard, transitioning to a fiat currency based on debt, the '70s OPEC oil embargoes, and inflation hitting over 20% at times.  Enter Paul Volker, who saw the need to bring that under control.  But inflation always has friends and cutting it is painful.  In 1980, Paul Volker spoke to the nation:

After decades of inflation, many of us, more or less comfortably, have adapted our business and personal lives to the prospect of more inflation.

We count on capital gains from inflating house and land values as a substitute for real savings. We assume our competitors will match our aggressive pricing policies, and will also accede to high wage demands. We take comfort in our purchases of precious metals, art, and more exotic "collectibles" – or envy those who did buy – and are tempted to project essentially speculative price movements into the great beyond.

But none of this sense of accommodation to inflation can be a valid excuse for not acting to deal with the disease.

To stretch Martin's original metaphor, getting inflation under control would mean taking away not only the punch bowl, but also taking the entire buffet and open bar of money and credit on which the markets feasted.  But Volcker did not back down.  In June 1981, he dosed the economy with a 19.1% federal funds rate; in a few months, the fever was broken. 

Of course, today's situation is unlike that faced by either William McChesney Martin or Paul Volker.  Instead of raging inflation, we have an economy that's in a slow-motion deflation.  Despite creating trillions of dollars in an effort to get growth, all the Fed has been able to do is create an overvalued stock market with inflated prices due to the vast quantities of money available to bid up prices.  The much vaunted Federal Reserve Bank has had about as much effect on the US and world economies as the Bank of Japan and their policies have had on reversing their problems since their stock market collapsed in 1989. 

Janet Yellen is more like Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan than either of those previous Fed heads.  In truth, Yellen seems more like an elitist, even collectivist, who thinks she knows better than the billions of transactions that make up the markets.

Where Mr. Martin had insisted that dictating interest rates was “inconsistent with… a private enterprise system,” Ms. Yellen saw no inconsistency at all.

Where Mr. Martin saw the need in a great emergency – World War II – to depart from market-set interest rates, Ms. Yellen is ready to leave the market behind at the drop of the Dow.

And where Mr. Martin and Mr. Volcker both went resolutely about their work, Ms. Yellen seems unsure.

A year ago, she said she would normalize rates “only gradually”… and that, although she had the “macro-prudential regulatory and supervisory tools” to do the job, investors should not expect miracles.

Nor did they receive any. In the 12 months that have gone by since her speech, only 25 basis points (even sparrows refuse to bend to pick up such trivial morsels) is the total of her niggardly gift to savers.

To borrow an old joke, Mrs. Yellen has two chances to fix this: slim and none.  And slim done left the dance already.  Central bankers might be able to make tiny movements of economies, but they seem to be more capable of stopping inflation by shutting off lending than they are capable of starting growth.  If no one is able to buy because they're in too much debt and can't make the payments, it doesn't matter if the interest rate is low. 

The answer, of course, is that economies live and breath.  They expand and they contract like some sort of breathing.  Looked at that way, the central banks are trying to keep the patient inhaling so their lungs expand forever.  That just can't happen.  Cycles end and new cycles start.  At least at some point in history, we had Fed chairmen who realized that it wasn't possible to prevent those cycles and it wasn't even their job.

William McChesney Martin.

Techy Tuesday - Hands on With the CountyComm GP-5/SSB

I first encountered this interesting little brick of a radio in an article at Brushbeater, linked to by Western Rifle Shooters Association.  The article was on signals intelligence, and using various radios to monitor activities in your area.  I soon came to realize this radio was becoming a prepper's favorite radio; the one radio everyone talked about having for when it has truly hit the fan.  From my perspective, I was interested in it because I just hadn't seen a portable receiver with specifications like this.  The first unusual part is that it receives Single Sideband, and I just haven't seen SSB in a receiver this low in cost before.  The second unusual part is that it has an unusual, modern, design architecture that you just don't typically see in low end radios. 

Single sideband or SSB is a kind of modulation (which just means putting information onto a radio signal) that's used throughout radio. If you tune across an SSB station with an AM radio, the best you can do is get a “Donald Duck” kind of sound that's unintelligible. Virtually everyone in the shortwave spectrum uses SSB except the big broadcasters; that means local hams, marine radios, aviation and more are going to be in SSB.  Any military comms that are "in the open" will be in SSB.  There are two "flavors" of SSB, Upper and Lower sideband (USB/LSB); most of the commercial radios use USB but hams generally use LSB below 14 MHz.  Besides that, it tunes from 150 kHz (Very Low Frequency, VLF, which is more common in other parts of the world than North America) to 30.0 MHz, including the AM broadcast band (BCB) and adds the FM BCB.  

I did some reading on these radios and found that they were reportedly originally left over from a contract that CountyComm had with the US Government, and if you look them up, CountyComm says this is their Government Products Group, and lists their Federal Supplier Cage Code.  The manual says Government Products Group on the cover.  The story is that some agencies wanted SHTF radios for employees in other countries.  Someone in the agencies could program the memories for the users, and if they had to use the radios, everyone would have the same set of frequencies to listen to.  It appears that CountyComm had a special order with Tecsun, who produced a special version of one of their designs for this contract.  The radio uses an architecture called direct conversion with an image reject mixer, and is a low parts count wonder.  

I decided that the $80 price tag wasn't too much, in the interest of science! you know, and got one.  It's an impressive little radio, but it can be hard to use.  I've never seen a radio that cried out for a numeric keypad as much as this one does, but when you first get it in your hands, it seems the only way to get where you want to tune to is by tuning the thumbwheel on the right side.  Potentially, for a long, long time.  Thankfully, they give you a few ways around this.  

The first way around it is what CountyComm calls Easy Tuning Mode, or ETM.  Let's say you turn it on and hit the MW button (for Medium Wave - the AM BCB).  Press ETM and hang on; the radio will scan the entire band and store the frequencies where it heard something.  Now you just turn through those memories with the tuning knob.  Do the same thing with the FM band, and you get a second bank of memories.  Every time you go back to MW or FM, those memories will be there.  Going on vacation?  Just re-scan when you get there and the new stations will be saved.  When you get home, re-scan and it will find your same stations. 

The same basic system works for the SW bands.  The control panel (above) has two buttons for the SW Bands, an up and down arrow.  This will take you through all the allocated SW bands.  You can choose a SW BCB by pressing one of the SW up or down arrows and then hit ETM.  This time you'll have to wait a while, but after a few minutes you'll hear audio again and the radio will be active.  Now you can tune through the ETM memories with the thumbwheel and every SW station it heard will be there.  Note that the ETM memories don't override each other and your SW stations won't replace the AM or FM stations.  There are separate banks for AM, FM and SW ETM, and there are separate banks for other user-entered memories for those three services.  100 for AM, 100 for FM and 250 for SW.  In addition, there's another 100 memories for SSB only stations.  When you press USB/LSB briefly, you turn on that mode, and the next time you hit the up or down arrows, you'll go through the ham bands that tune SSB, not the SW BCBs which are in AM. 

How do you find a specific station?  Someone just told you that Radio Australia is on 9580 kHz in the mornings and you've always wanted to hear them.  You could use the ETM, but you don't know if you can hear them at all.  You could always choose the SW band with the up/down arrows, then start tuning with the wheel.  It can still take a long time to find stations in those bands, though, so I've adopted a trick I learned about in a video about the radio.  I sat down one afternoon and started saving entry points roughly every 100 kHz into these SW bands.  Take the 31 meter shortwave band: the charts say that it starts at 9400 kHz and goes to 9900.  I tuned to 9400, pressed MEM, then tuned the wheel up to 9500, pressed MEM, and so on, stopping at 10,000 kHz instead of 9900 (because 10,000 kHz is the time standard station WWV).  Now if I want to listen to Australia on 9580 kHz, I just hit the VF/VM button to go into memory and tune the thumbwheel up to 9600.  Hit VF/VM to go back into manual tuning, and then tune down to 9580.  Of course, I could have gone to 9500 and tuned upwards, but that's much farther than going to the 9600 and tuning down.   This video is a good overview of all that I've talked about here.

All in all, it's an impressive little receiver.  The SSB performance is acceptable, but has some issues; the receiver AGC (automatic gain control) has some problems with SSB, which is pretty common.  Back in December, I proposed a simple test for how well designed the antenna matching circuits are in little receivers like this: while listening to weak SW signal, touch the antenna: if the signal gets louder, the receiver isn't optimized for its antenna.  You made the antenna bigger when you touched it and that helped it pick up more.  If the signal got weaker, the antenna was well-optimized.  This radio fails that test, but to be honest, it's far easier to do that with a radio that tunes a few discrete bands, like the Kaito WRX-911 I mentioned back in December.  CountyComm is aware that the antenna is usually the weak link in a broadband receiver and do two things for you.  First, they have a clip-on wire (about 20', I think) for the antenna.  A metal clip grabs the antenna, and you stretch out the wire as far and as high as you can.  Secondly, they include an AM and VLF antenna that plugs into a socket on top of the radio.  There is a built in AM antenna, but this one improves performance noticeably. 

As for weak points, while it's an impressive performer and I can mitigate not having a numeric keypad somewhat, it still uses that tuning wheel a LOT, and I suspect it as a part that might wear out first.  It desperately wants either a keypad or a computer control bus, but has neither.  It has a USB B connector on it that is used to charge the board batteries (I put NiMH batteries in it - it takes 3), so I plugged it into my PC hoping to hear the Windoze sound that it found new hardware, but no such luck. 

More Machine Shop Foolery

Or fooling around-ery.

Some years ago, I built a CNC lathe to go with my mill.  I went through trying to make it thread properly, had some success, but then never really used it much.  I had gotten used to using the manual lathe by just walking up to it, chucking up a piece of work and doing what I needed to do.  I told Mrs. Graybeard I'd leave both lathes on the bench for a while and whichever got used more would be the one we keep.  It was the manual lathe.  Some time in the last few garage re-organizations (even before moving into the new shop), a wire pulled out of a contact pin and it needed to be fixed.

Yesterday became a bit of a cleanup day in the shop, so it was a natural thing to try and get it running properly again.  First, though, there were some problems to go into.  The computer I've been using to control the mill has been having issues for a while now.  It wouldn't start up, especially on colder mornings.  (Mind you, this is a Florida cooler morning; maybe 68 or 70 in the shop.  That's Canadian skinny dipping weather.)  It would take up to five power-on attempts for everything to run and the system to boot all the way into Windows, but once it was going it stayed running fine.  I had an equivalent system and thought if it was running well, I'd swap them out.  I turned this backup system on and it worked flawlessly.  To keep from having to re-install all the software, I just swapped hard drives, so it was up and running pretty quickly.  I ran the mill long enough to send some motion commands on all axes, and verified it hadn't gotten messed up during the "brain transplant". 

Now it was on to the lathe.  In this picture, it's on the left, almost out of the frame.  To it's right, and just past the orange calculator, is the manual lathe.  The mill is off to the right, in a plywood box. 

Once I re-crimped the wire and got Mach3Turn running, both of the lathe's axes started moving.  There's a large toolpost on the cross slide that I put there to measure backlashes with.  I noticed that the long axis seems to drop steps, even under no load.  That could be something as simple as a noise pickup, but could be the driver board, too.  I'll need to look at that some more.  

All in all, it's a good option to have back, but I really can't think of many uses for it.  It's easier to cut tapers in a CNC lathe than by hand, but that's about it; it would also be good for making pens, with that power feed.  Threading is probably best accomplished on my big lathe, although I have their threading attachment for the manual Sherline lathe, too.  There are developments on the big CNC mill project, but that will be another story for another day. 

Podcast is Up

At the usual places for the Gun Blog Variety Podcast, episode 84, with part 3 of my overview of receivers, this time focusing on what you can hear with a shortwave and SSB receiver, like the popular CountyComm GP-5/SSB.

Happy Easter!

Looking for the Living One in a Cemetery

24 ^1-3 At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus.

^4-8 They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you when you were still back in Galilee that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on a cross, and in three days rise up?” Then they remembered Jesus’ words.
^9-11 They left the tomb and broke the news of all this to the Eleven and the rest. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them kept telling these things to the apostles, but the apostles didn’t believe a word of it, thought they were making it all up.
¹² But Peter jumped to his feet and ran to the tomb. He stooped to look in and saw a few grave clothes, that’s all. He walked away puzzled, shaking his head.
Luke 24:1-12  Message Translation

If you haven't, I urge you to read "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" at Sense of Events. 

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but only one man in history has been resurrected.  So since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples.  An experienced legal/crime writer, Lee Strobel knew the essence of the question is the resurrection, and independent witnesses are the key.  The gospels talk of Jesus appearing several times, but what about other historians?  Sobel writes:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them.

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!
...
In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

The other religions of the world are about ritual and ultimately about self, about you proving yourself worthy; Christianity is about grace.  Forget earning it yourself; you're not good enough on your best day.  You are saved by grace.  No other religion teaches grace.  Islam teaches that Allah is unknowable.  Christianity teaches that not only is God knowable, he wants us to know him.  Islam doesn't teach salvation, it teaches servitude to a fickle, arbitrary, distant Allah.  Christianity teaches forgiveness by Grace; that you're given a gift by a God who so wants a close personal relationship with us that he gives us a gift we could never possibly deserve.  I like the way the Message translation does this verse (Ephesians 2: 8) explaining the nature of grace: 

It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. 

Evolution vs. creation? I believe people pay way too much attention to this.  There's no mention of evolution in the bible, but there's no mention of the laws of thermodynamics, Avogadro's number, or relativity.  The bible isn't a science book.  Look at it this way: the creation story, how we got here, takes up a page.  The next thousand pages (or more, depending on font size, paper size, and so on) are concerned with how we treat each other while we're here.  Creation is clearly not the emphasis of the book, it just starts out that way.  And saying a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum foam exploded sounds remarkably like nothing springing into something.  If you were trying to explain the standard model of cosmology to people who hadn't developed Algebra, let alone the Calculus yet,  "Let there be light" sounds like as good a picture as I can think of.  Lets see you explain partial differential equations to kindergartners. 

As I always say, enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families.  Hold close the ones you love. 

A Good Metaphor for the Current Election Season

Glenn McCoy for March 3. 

Possible Project?

A couple of things since the start of the year have given me thoughts of making a CNC laser for light duty (pardon the pun).  First, Come and Make It posted about a 40W CO2 laser he was working with.  Then, about 10 days later, while wandering around the Orlando Hamcation, I stumbled across a small business that uses a small CNC laser to produce laser-engraved (burned) wood products as little gifts for hams.  As far as I know, that doesn't require a lot of power, but the prospects of a laser paying for itself (eventually) is appealing.

I've always been the kind of person that can put an idea on a mental back burner and not pay conscious attention to it, but ideas will simmer back there and pop forward into my brain without calling for them.  So this idea went onto a back burner.

Meanwhile, I'd notice things like a laser engraver made from the laser in a DVD writer on YouTube (there are several).  Then the step up in burning power to the blue lasers from a Blu Ray player.

This morning, I ran into this little project on Instructables, while bouncing around in Pinterest. 

MDF "plywood", an arduino controller, and powered by a 1.8 W blue LED.  (More info here) 1.8 W sure isn't going to do what 40W can, but as low-cost, entry drug, it just might do.

The back burner is starting to boil over.  I have an X/Y platform; it's called my CNC Sherline.  I don't have any immediate need to engrave a large plaque, so work area isn't an immediate concern.  But how hard would it be to replace the motor and headstock on my Sherline mill with something to hold one of these "couple of watt" blue laser diodes?  It would take a bit of learning to know how to turn the laser off and on, but learning is what we're here for, right?  A constant-current power supply?  That's home field; I can design those in my sleep (and I think I have).  How hard can it be?  (ooo Right up there with "what could go wrong" or "all you gotta do")  Hey!  I've got a junk DVD writer around here somewhere...

Pic of the Day

From commenter Red Square at the People's Cube.

You need to mispronounce Che's name but it's good.

Je Suis Sick of It

Yet again, the civilized world has to bear the depraved antics of the Muslim murderers.  Yet again, we have to bear the pea-brained apologists telling us, "it's the religion of peace" or "it's just a small minority".  Yet again, we watch the world respond with hashtags, colored light tributes, and other meaningless, feel-good wastes of time.  Yet again, it looks like we're fast approaching the time when the choice of fight, convert or die will be at our doors.

President Community Organizer said there's no way the Islamists can defeat us.  That the most they can do is annoy us or frighten us.  Stuck thinking 1st or 2nd generation warfare, when what's happening is way beyond him.

If John Robb is right in these two posts, we're in for a period that will end in either the financial collapse of the entire west or an almost-complete elimination of any freedoms.  Or both.  The only thing arguing against his point in the first link is that the Islamists don't seem to do that sort of thing.  They seem to only want to kill, not do the things that might get the reaction he talks about. 

I wouldn't dismiss John's ideas, though.  Both of those pieces are worth reading, and are fairly short.